#BUT. that makes it more difficult to share lots on the gallery because fewer people own the same kits especially the more you use

[rockethorse]

Me @ me: Remember - as much as you enjoy building in The Sims 4, you hate actually PLAYING The Sims 4, so there's no point in buying expansion packs based on how fondly you remember the corresponding gameplay from TS2 or TS3 because you'll never actually play with those features enough to justify paying that much, just use CC if you want new build/buy options

Me @ the Sims 4 Black Friday sales: Ok but listen,

[sarita-daniele]

Hi, angel! Hope you're doing alright 💓 (hola ángel! También hablo español :) ) I was wondering if you could give some advices in starting out in an arts career?

Hola amigx, ¡perdón que nunca vi tu mensajito! I’m not on my Tumblr very often and definitely forget to check my messages. Luckily my favorite causita @luthienne told me you’d messaged me! 

I don’t know what arts discipline you’re in, so feel free to let me know if the advice I have doesn’t apply to you (and ignore it!). There are so many ways to build an arts career, but I’m happy to share some things I’ve learned through trial and error along the way. 

(Outrageously long post below break!)

Educate yourself in arts technique, but also study widely. 

Techniques are important in art, but only as important as the concepts behind them. When I was younger, I wowed people by drawing near-photographic portraits, but that technical talent and skill alone couldn’t make me a professional artist. Memorable artwork has not just a how, but a why. It isn’t just the object but the story behind the object, and the meaning of the object in the world. Art is about what interests you, what makes you think, what you most value and want to change in this world. So as you build an arts career, learn the techniques behind drawing, woodworking, casting, writing, music-making, whatever your discipline is, but take time, if you can, to also study history, sociology, anthropology, ecology, linguistics, politics, or whatever else you’re drawn to conceptually. Study as widely as you can. 

The studio art program I went through (a public university in the US) was very technique-forward; we signed up for classes according to technique, like printmaking or small metals, learned those techniques, completed technique-based assignments. Then I did a one-term exchange at arts university in the UK that was very concept-forward. We had no technical courses, just exhibition deadlines, and what mattered in critique was the concept. Both of these schools had their strengths and flaws, but what I learned was that, to be a practicing artist, I needed both technique and concepts that I genuinely cared about and could stand behind. If I could go back and change anything, I would probably take fewer studio courses (after graduating, I couldn’t afford access to a wood shop, metal shop, or expensive casting materials, and lost many of those skills) and more courses in sociology, Latin American studies, linguistics, ecology, anthropology, etc., because my artwork today centers on social justice, racial justice, Latinx stories and histories, educational access and justice, the politics of language, and community ethics. 

And please know that whenever I talk about seeking an education, I’m not talking solely about institutional spaces. College career tracks in the arts (BFA, MFA, etc., much less high-cost conservatory programs) are not accessible to everyone and aren’t the only way to establish an arts career. You can study technique and learn about the world using any educational space accessible to you: nonprofits that offer programming in your community, online resources, Continuing Education programs. And of course, self-education: read as much as you possibly can!

Know the value of your story. 

I come from a Cuban/Peruvian family and grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. My father’s family fled political violence surrounding the Cuban Revolution and came to the U.S. when he was a teenager. My mother was born in Brooklyn to Peruvian parents on work visas and moved back to Lima in her childhood. I grew up with these two cultures present and deeply embedded in our household, in our language, our food, our sense of humor, our sense of history. And yet, some residual assimilation trauma still affected me. I drifted towards the most American things, the whitest things, English authors and Irish music, in part because I enjoyed them but also because those were the things I saw valued in society. I wanted to fit in, wanted to be unique but not different, wanted to prove that I could navigate all spaces. The reality of marginalized identities in America is that our country tells us our identities are only valuable when they can be seen as exotic, while still kept inferior to the dominant, white American narrative (note that this “us” is a general statement, not meant to make assumptions about how you identify or what country you live in). 

But as an artist, all I have is my story, and who I am. I wasn’t willing to look at it directly. For years, I avoided doing so. It turns out, though, that I couldn’t actually begin my career until I reckoned with myself and learned to value everything about myself. To fully acknowledge my story, my history, my cultural reality, my sense of language, and my privileges. So I encourage young artists to look always inward, to ask questions about themselves, their families, and what made them who they are. 

The reason for doing this is to understand the source from which you make art.  Sometimes, however, for marginalized artists, the world warps this introspection into a trap, pigeonholing us into making art only “about” our identities, because that work is capital-I-Important to white audiences who want to tokenize our traumas. This is the white lens, and if anything, I try to understand myself as deeply as I can so that I can make art consciously for my community, not for that assumed white audience. 

Know that your career doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s, or like anything you’ve envisioned up to this point. 

As a high schooler I imagined that a life in the arts meant me in a studio, drawing and making, selling my work, getting exhibitions near and far, and gaining recognition. It was a solitary vision, one with a long history in the arts, rooted in the idea of individual genius. My career ended up completely different. Today, my arts projects involve teaching, collaborating, collecting interviews and oral histories, and creating public installations, rarely in traditional galleries or museums. 

As you work towards an arts career, figure out what does and doesn’t work for you: the kind of art you like and don’t like, the kinds of spaces that feel comfortable and those that don’t. I always thought I wanted to be part of traditional galleries, so I got a job working in a high-end art gallery in Boston during my grad program. Once in that space, however— even though I found the space calming and the work beautiful— I realized that there was something that I deeply disliked about the commodified art world. I didn’t like that we were selling art for over $10,000, that our exhibitions were geared exclusively towards collectors and wealthy art-buyers. The work was often technically masterful, but didn’t move or connect with me on a deeper level, and I realized that was because it wasn’t creating any change in the world. I liked work that shifted the needle, that made the world more inclusive and equitable, that centered marginalized stories (that gallery represented 90% white artists). I liked artwork that people made together, which drew me to collaborative art. I liked artwork that was accessible to everyone, not just the wealthy, which drew me to public art. I liked art exhibited in non-institutional spaces, which led me to community spaces. Since I was in an MFA for Creative Writing, I liked interdisciplinary art that engaged performance, technology, text, that was participatory and not just a 2D or 3D object. Figuring out all of these things led me to apply to my first major arts job: as a teaching artist in a community nonprofit that made art for social change in collaboration with local youth, in a predominantly Latinx neighborhood. 

My career path didn’t look like anything I expected, but I love it. The bulk of my income comes from teaching creative writing and art classes for nonprofits, working as a core member of a public arts nonprofit, and freelance consulting for book manuscripts. I love being an educator and consider it part of my creative practice. I love that I’m constantly collaborating with and talking to other artists. I love working with books and public art every day. I publish poetry, fiction, and literary translations, and exhibit artwork I’ve created in the studio and through funded opportunities. 

Fellow artists tell me often that I’m lucky, that my “day jobs” are all within the arts. But there are downsides to the way I’ve chosen to structure my career. I’m constantly balancing many projects, and my income is unstable. It’s difficult to save and plan towards the future,. I get by, but financial instability isn’t an option for many artists with families and dependents, with debts, medical expenses, and just isn’t the preferred lifestyle for a lot of people. I know artists who worked office jobs for years to support their practice and gain financial stability. I know artists who had entire careers as lawyers or accountants before becoming artists full time. I know artists who teach in public schools or work as substitute teachers. I know artists who are business owners and artists who work in policy and politics. I know artists who work in framing stores and shipping warehouses while being represented by galleries. These are all arts careers, and I admire every one of them. So as you build your career, don’t feel like it has to look like anyone’s else’s, like there’s anything you “should” be doing. Focus on the kind of artwork you want to make and what kind of work-life balance is best for you, then structure your career around that as best you can. 

Any job you use to support yourself can connect to an arts career!  

I get asked often by young people looking for jobs what kinds of jobs will best propel them towards an arts career. I believe that any kind of job can connect to and support an arts career, and I know that some suggestions out there in the arts world (like “get an unpaid internship at an art gallery!” or “become a studio apprentice to a well-known artist!”) assume a certain amount of privilege. So I want to break down how different kinds of jobs can connect to your art career: 

1) Jobs that allow for the flexibility and mental capacity to create. My friends who work restaurant jobs while going to auditions fall into this category. Who work as bartenders in evening so that they can be in the studio by day. Who dog-walk or babysit or nanny because the timing and flexibility allows for arts opportunities. My friends who are Lyft drivers or work in deliveries. These are often jobs outside of a creative field, but they can be beneficial because they don’t drain your creative batteries, so to speak. You still have your creative brain fully charged, and some jobs (like dog-walking) even allow for good mental processing (you can think through creative problems). As long as the job doesn’t drain you to the point where you have no energy at all, these kinds of jobs can be great because they allow time and space for your creative work. 

2) Jobs that place you in arts spaces, arts adjacent spaces, or spaces where you can learn about material/technique. My sculptor friends who work in hardware stores, quarries, foundries, or in construction. My printmaker friend who interned with graphic designers. My writer friends who work in bookstores and libraries, artists who work in art supply stores. My friend who worked with her dad’s painting company and got to improve her precision as a painter, which she then took back to the canvas. My teen students who get paid to work on murals or get stipend payments for making art at the nonprofit I work for. My filmmaker friends who worked on film crews. Friends who worked as theater ushers, in ticket sales, or as janitorial staff at museums. All of these jobs kept these artists adjacent to their artwork, whether through access to tools, materials, supplies, or books, through networking and conversations with other artists, or through skillsets that could enhance their art. 

3) Jobs that deeply engage another interest of yours, that bring you joy or can influence your work in other ways. If there’s a job that has nothing to do with your art but that you would love, do it! First, because I believe that the things we’re passionate about get integrated into our art, and second, because any job that gives you peace of mind and joy creates a positive base from which you can create. My friend who worked at a stable because she got to be around horses. My friends who worked at gyms or coaching sports because it kept them active. My friend who worked in a bike repair shop because he was obsessed with biking. An artist I knew who worked at the children’s science museum because she loved being around kids and planetariums. An artist who worked at a mineral store because rocks made her happy. If you have the opportunity, work doing things you like without worrying about whether it directly feeds your arts career.

Because believe it or not, all jobs you work can intersect in some way with your art. You’re creative— you find those connections! A Nobel-Prize winning poet helped his dad on the potato farm and wrote his best-known poem about it. Successful novelists have written about their time working in hair salons and convenience stores. A great printmaker I know who worked in a flower shop began weaving botanical forms and plant knowledge into her designs. The key in an arts career is to see all your experiences as valuable, to find ways that they can influence your art, and to be constantly thinking about and observing the world around you. 

As for me, I worked as a tennis instructor, a tennis court site supervisor, an academic advisor, an art gallery intern, and a coffee shop barista before and during my work in the arts!

Let go of objective measures of what it means to be good. 

I was always an academic overachiever. Top of my class, merit scholarships, science fair awards, AP credit overload, the whole thing. On the one hand, I grew up in a house where education was valued and celebrated, and my parents emphasized the importance of doing my best in school— not getting good grades, but working hard, doing my personal best, and reading and learning all I could. I loved school. I loved academics. And I’m not saying this to brag, but to lay the groundwork for something I struggled with in the arts.

It is jarring to be an academic overachiever and enter an arts career. I thrived off of objective value systems: study, work hard, get an A. If I worked hard and learned what I was supposed to learn, I earned recognition, validation, and opportunity. 

And then I entered the arts. The arts are entirely subjective. We hear it over and over— great artists get rejected hundreds of times, certain art forms require cutthroat competition, etc. —but it’s hard to understand the subjectivity of the art world (and the entrenched discrimination and commercial interests that affect who gets opportunities and who doesn’t) until you’re trying to live as an artist. That you can work hard on something, give all of your time and physical effort and mental and emotional energy to it, only to have it rejected. That what you think is good isn’t what another person thinks is good. That there is a magical alchemy in the act of creation that can’t be taught, or learned, but must be felt, and that you can be working to find that light while actively others try to extinguish it. That you can be good and work hard, yet still not get chosen for the awards, the exhibitions, the publications. If you chased being “the best” your whole life, you’re now in a world where there is no “best”, where greatness is subjective, where the idea of competitive greatness is actually detrimental to artists supporting each other, and where work that sells or connects to white, cishetero traditions is still the most valued. 

After struggling with this for a long time, I came to the conclusion that the most important thing to me now is making the art I want to make, the art only I can make, whether or not it fits what arts industries are looking for or what’s going to win awards. If I make art I believe in from a healthy mental and emotional place, doors will open, even if they aren’t the doors I expected. So try to let go of any sense that worth comes from external validation. Learn to accept critical feedback when it is given kindly, thoughtfully, and constructively. Surround yourself with friends and artists who who can talk to about your work, who build up your work and help you think through it rather than cutting you down. Don’t believe anyone in the arts world who thinks they get to be the arbiters of what’s “good” and who has “what it takes”. People have probably said things like that to the artists you most admire, and if they’d listened, you wouldn’t have experienced art that changed your life. 

Work to gain skills in basic business, marketing, and finances for artists. 

Many artists (at least where I am in the U.S.) go through an entire arts education without receiving resources or training in the financial side of the arts world. Your arts career will likely involve some degree of self-promotion and marketing, creating project budgets and grant proposals, artist statements and bios, sorting out taxes, and other economic elements. I can’t speak to other countries, but for artists in the U.S., taxes can be extremely complex. If you’re awarded a stipend, grant, fellowship, or employed for gigs or one-time projects, you’ll likely be taxed as an independent contractor and have to deduct your own taxes. Through residencies and exhibitions, you may pull income in multiple states and countries, which can also affect taxation. If you’re an artist who doesn’t have access to resources about finance and taxation in your arts program or who doesn’t independently have expertise in those fields, I recommend finding ways to educate yourself early: online resources, low cost courses, or even just taking your financially-savvy friends out for a coffee!

ANYWAY SORRY FOR THE LONG POST I HOPE SOMETHING IN THIS DIATRIBE WAS HELPFUL I HOPE THERE WEREN’T TOO MANY TYPOS AND I hope you have the most wonderful, fulfilling arts career! <3 

[guylty]

Apart from Michele lobbying for this film in the wake of the horror of Hannibal, I wouldn’t have considered 2014 disaster flick Into The Storm for a rewatch, had ITS not been on Irish free TV at the end of January. That already preempts my verdict to some degree.  You see, I don’t think that it is what we call “ganz großes Kino” in German [great cinema]. To stay with the metaphor, it’s probably more along the lines of “ganz großes Damentennis” [great women’s tennis]. Ok, those are in-jokes for those who can speak German. Very bad form, Guylty, very bad! What it means is: ITS is not a triumph of early 21st century cinema. And this is why:

Recap

It’s an ordinary day in Silverton, Ohio, where single-parent assistant principal Gary Fuller herds his teenage sons Trey and Donnie to school. Trey is documenting the day with his camcorder; Donnie, the elder of the two, is pissed off with his dad. Daddy Gary at the same time is distracted by the preparations for the afternoon’s graduation ceremony. Meanwhile, a motley crew of ‘storm chasers’ have come into the area because they expect a strong hurricane to landfall. And it does – but it’s the mother of all hurricanes, a monster storm that wreaks havoc in Silverton, scatters the graduation, and, worst of all, traps Donnie Fuller together with love interest Kaitlyn in a disused mill where they nearly drown – if it hadn’t been for Daddy Fuller, the quirky brother, and some unexpected help from the storm chasers. But all’s well that ends well: daddy comes to rescue, the youngsters are saved at the last minute, the nasty career-storm chaser gets his comeuppance but simultaneously redeems himself, and the Fuller lads are one happy family again.

So, we’ve got the ingredients for a regular summer blockbuster here: (natural) disaster with opportunity for big time CAD, vaguely topical issue (global warming), family dynamics (dad vs son), small little love story (Donnie & Kat, Gary & meteorologist Allison), nasty slave-driving boss getting what he deserves, single-parent mother separated from her child because of work, two country-bumpkin eejits for light relief, major, nail-biting drama and a happy ending. Maybe some of what is wrong with the film is already visible in that list: There is too much in it, and it doesn’t *quite* know what it wants to be. It takes on too many things, and instead of just being content with being a two-dimensional, silly disaster movie along the lines of Sharknado, it wants to take itself seriously, attempting “issues” in order to attract viewers. The strength of disaster movies is usually the special effects or the computer design of the catastrophe. So why obscure that silly fun with serious issues? Global warming as the cause of intense weather phenomena? Of course, we know that. But do I look to a summer movie to learn more about the effects of climate change? Eh, no! Just as much as I don’t want to get into a subtle subplot about single-parent issues and the strains of having to separate from your child in order to earn money. Just get on the with the disaster, throw around a few 10-ton-trucks and jumbo jets, and I’ll be happy.

Not sure where this gif comes from – credit to the maker

In that sense, the strongest scenes in the movie are the action/disaster sequences. When Gary runs across the street after his car is inadvertently crashed, and a pick-up truck smashes into the pavement about ten feet beside him, then that is great (disaster) cinema. Armitage clinging on to a car door for dear life – and to save met lady Allison from being sucked up into the tornado: predictable but essential ingredient to a disaster movie. And bonus: wet bum shot. Of Armitage! Not the woman! *That* would be sexist! A whole group of helpless humans, huddling in a massive drain for shelter against the storm, being thrown around by mother nature – great both in terms of providing scale as well as giving more opportunity for heroics. But all that sentimental crap about Allison not being with her daughter, Gary and Donnie’s relationship being strained, and Pete the storm chaser pressuring his underlings into risking their lives – unnecessary and not believable.

  Cardboard Cut-outs

Not least because the characters are mere cardboard cut-outs, stereotypes, and as such just a cheap trick to offer a quick n easy way to identify or engage with one of the characters. Yet I found it strangely difficult to get invested because the characters were just too stereotypical: The hard-working father who is trying his best to bring up his sons; elder son has an issue with dad being over-protective. Young son OTOH is happy-go-lucky popular kid. Met lady has small daughter who lives with grandparents because mum has to travel for work: I should’ve latched on to these people immediately because I share one massive characteristic with them – I am a parent. (Happy mother’s day, btw.) But that one facet in a person is not enough for me to connect and engage with a character. I understand that ITS is a film that is basically telling a story in real time. So there is no opportunity for massive insights or for character set-up. Or maybe there would’ve been if the film had concentrated on fewer characters. Apart from Pete the head storm chaser, did we need Allison and the other storm chasing crew? We certainly didn’t need the town eejits, and we probably could also have done without the burgeoning love story between Donnie and Kaitlyn. If Gary Fuller was the main character, then the film should’ve focussed on him – and his heroics. That would’ve done the trick.

As for Armitage in the film: No complaints as such. His performance is solid – as it always is. You can sort of tell that this is basically his first time playing an American character. The accent doesn’t sit well with him – it just doesn’t sound right imo: When he speaks, his whole voice changes. It’s deeper in tone, and not as melodious as usual. Which is a pity, because his voice (and his vocal talents) are always an asset to any show. Otherwise he gets away with portraying the great looking, fit and healthy athletic All American dad, right down to those beautifully regular white and shiny front teeth. I do buy his act as a dad – in fact more so than his act as the vice principal of a small town high school. The man just is too gorgeous for such an existence. Casting fail *grins*.

The effects in the film work well – once you suspend your disbelief, everything is possible, and the fire tornado or the monster hurricane that bounces jumbo jets around as if they were matchbox toys, look reasonably real. The climactic storm scene – with Pete’s (literal) comeuppance – OTOH is designed straight from baroque altar pieces (see right).  Towering clouds fading into white… You almost expect the eye of providence to pop up on top of the screen. And so sickly sweet with its bright clouds and shining light and predictable that it spoils the otherwise hair-raising disaster porn.

For me, the greatest regret of the film is that its concept obviously changed at some point. The initial idea of basing the majority of the film on “found footage” – was actually a great idea, both in terms of aesthetics as well as story telling. But that concept eventually is thrown out of the window even though little brother Trey, who executes the concept at the beginning of the film by shooting a ‘time capsule project’, continues to carry the camera with him. From the middle of the film found footage is not happening anymore – which makes the film strangely asymmetrical. One wonders whether the film was significantly reshot after screen testing? There definitely were reshoots, as can be seen as early as the first scene of the film when Gary’s hair is definitely shorter than a scene later…

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Miraculous hair growth. Well, RA has mentioned before that he has won prizes for growing his beard faster than anyone else… Looks as if the Armitagean follicles are stuff of legend and miracle!

Final verdict

Unfortunately, the second time ‘round, the film doesn’t improve. When I watched it in the cinema – summer evening, teenage son with me, bag of pop corn at the ready – it really did what it set out to do: It was a meaningless summer flick, more aimed at the boys than the girls, easily whiling away 89 minutes with lots of rain, thunder, assorted farm equipment flying through the air and the occasional jumbo jet twirling across the airport concourse. Four and a half years later, the film hasn’t exactly become a cult classic. And it’s easy to see why: It’s neither excruciatingly bad, nor exquisitely good. Maybe the audience wants to see even more extreme effects – or the opposite is true and in light of global warming the audience *doesn’t* want to be reminded of the havoc that the climate can play with us. And without any particularly exciting human interest story in the film, ITS has been laid to rest in the mid-week movie graveyard. That’s not what Richard Armitage deserves – who gives his best as he always does. Maybe all it was for him, was an elaborate screen test. He certainly comes across well. And at least he has ticked another genre off his list.   

What about you? What do you think about the film? Comment below or write a post on your blog and link back to me so we can discuss! 

PS: April is coming! And we need a new re-watch. Suggestions?

Re-Watching Into The Storm – Not Much of a Twist Apart from Michele lobbying for this film in the wake of the horror of Hannibal, I wouldn’t have considered 2014 disaster flick…

[crimeamarches]

here it is.....3000 words of zelgius headcanons

“There was someone on my father’s side who was...who was with a laguz.”  This was many generations ago, and the brand skipped Zelgius’s father.  It isn’t until Zelgius is born that his father learns the truth about their family, so his resentment towards his son becomes twofold: both because of his nature and because of what his birth forced into the light.

---------------------------------

We don’t really know Zelgius’s socioeconomic status.  I don’t think he’s necessarily gentry, but remember that this isn’t Ashnard’s Daein but his father’s. There wasn’t the same kind of “meritocratic” system in place, so Zelgius must have been someone to end up trained by one of the Four Riders.  He was probably some sort of minor nobility, probably new money, rich enough to have a big country manse but unimportant enough that nobody cares what the family does (unless it’s embarrassing enough for gossip).

------------------------------ Baby Zelgius had a wet nurse who was sworn to secrecy.  He then spent his childhood being bounced around Daein’s most conservative monasteries and, eventually, military academies.  Every time he got settled in somewhere, his father would yank him out and start over, terrified that the child would be careless and someone would find out his shameful secret.  Too disgusted to keep his own child in his house, too afraid of shame to disown him and cast him out into the world, too sentimental—or perhaps just not quite evil enough—to just drown the boy and have done with it, no one seemed to know what to do with the child.

Quietly—very quietly, for he was a precocious and shy child even without the extenuating circumstances—Zelgius learned what the strange mark on his back he had to twist and contort in the mirror to see actually meant.  How dirty and tainted it made him.  What his father was saying when, on the rare and desperately treasured occasions he’d walk with his son, he’d bring Zelgius to the gallery full of paintings of slaughtered laguz and speak too loudly of glorious deeds.

Ultimately, Zelgius’s family, and his mother in particular, just wanted to forget he existed altogether.  They had another heir, a boy born five years almost to the day after Zelgius.  The boys look nothing alike.  The brand never manifests in him and, emboldened by this, his parents go on to have several other children.  Clearly, something was just wrong with the first one, if the tainted blood only runs true in him.  Zelgius is kept separate from his siblings.  If they ever think it odd that their oldest brother never writes or comes home for holidays then, well, it’s hard to miss even a sibling if you’ve never even been allowed to meet him.

His grandmother had the brand as well, but she had incredibly difficult pregnancies and all her branded children were stillborn.  Perhaps, unbeknownst to either of them, her husband had a touch of some kind of incompatible laguz blood in him as well?  It’s just such a taboo, particularly in Daein, that neither of them would ever have spoken of it. There, it’s a worse taboo than incest.And even in the wider world it’s so buried and shameful that no one has done any research into it.  Branded blood is supposed to bring bizarre strength and unnaturally long life, so what about this case caused so many stillbirths and miscarriages?  Who knows.

Sharing the same unlucky star did not necessarily endear Zelgius and his grandmother to each other.  In what turned out to be her final years, she was a cold and distant woman, having lived too long in a world that she was all too aware did not want her.  Her brand caused two husbands to leave her, and Zelgius’s birth necessitating the revelation of their family history turned her only child against her as well.  She didn’t hate Zelgius, no, she just…had nothing left to give.  The family never left Zelgius in her care, either, and she died before he was old enough to even want that kind of connection with her or put together what they had in common. He does realize as he grows toward adulthood, though, and always makes sure to put flowers on her grave on her birthday and the anniversary of her death.

Despite his brand manifesting in infancy, Zelgius grows more or less normally as a child. Small for his age, some delayed milestones, but not remarkably so.  His aging doesn’t really slow until late puberty. For the final time, he’s yanked unceremoniously from his current school, only this time he’s not enrolled in another one.  He’s an adult now, technically, no matter how young he looks, and so he’s no longer welcome in his family home.  With nowhere else to go, no graduation, no commission, no money, only a name that barely belongs to him, Zelgius enlists in the military as a grunt.  It’s Daein—they might smirk, but no one will question the age of a lad so eager to sign up, not when there are laguz to hunt and Crimean borders to harass.  He dons the armor they give him.  He won’t take it off in public for a long, long time.

------------------------------------

Does Greil know about the Branded, and if he does, did he at the time he knew Zelgius?

We really never get any indication one way or another.  The best indication is that Greil has given Soren—who several characters mistake for a child as young as Mist or Rolf—a full-time job even as he holds back from giving his seventeen-year-old son any active role in the group, implying that he knows there’s something different about him.

Even then, though, I bet he didn’t know anything about the Branded when he was a Daein general.I don’t think we have any reason to think that Greil was remarkably more liberal or whatever than any other Daein citizen—not any more than, say, Pelleas, who doesn’t have Shinon or Soren’s vitriol but still says Branded like a dirty word and doesn’t shy away from saying “sub-human.”  Pelleas knows what Branded are, indicating that it is sort of general knowledge, but Pelleas is also a spirit charmer, so he’d have had suspicion thrown at him before.I just don’t think laguz issues were anywhere near Greil’s mind until he goes to Gallia, apart for maybe some general disagreement with Daein’s gung-ho prejudice, since Greil’s generally a Respect Life kind of guy even if I don’t think he’s introspective enough to overcome that kind of ingrained prejudice.  Sure you might call it a casualty of narrative, but I’ve always found it fairly damning that at the start of Path of Radiance Ike is out here getting information about laguz and the world from _Shinon _of all people.  One doesn’t retroactively become a saint just because one fathers Our Hero.

In all likelihood, Zelgius just wasn’t that special to Greil.  Or at least not nearly as close as Zelgius’s fixation makes it seem at first glance.  Maybe Greil did see promise in him and teach him one-on-one, but Zelgius almost never showed his face and, I’m sure, balked on the occasion Greil extended an actual hand of mentorship or whatever.  And it takes Greil a while to remember who he is by voice alone.  Some part of Zelgius knows this.  It changes nothing.  A few kind words and rough-and-tumble lessons were enough to make Greil the closest thing to a father Zelgius would ever know, and Zelgius fixated on him because of this. But Greil had A Lot going on with Elena—that’s a whole fucking lot of trust she put into him to tell him about the medallion and flee the country with him, a fucking Rider—and the complete shift in values and perspective that fleeing the country would require, so it’s no surprise that even a favored student would become an afterthought. -----------------------------------------

When it comes to Zelgius’s age, there are few markers to draw it from, even fewer than we have for Micaiah.

For starters, we know that Path of Radiance takes place from 645-46, and the Serenes Massacre happened in 625.  The foundation of my speculation relies on the headcanon that the whole reason Sephiran was even in Daein at the time was because he was the sage that created the blood pact that made Ashnard king.

The flashback has to take place in late 625/early 626—before Daein’s plague starts, before Gawain leaves Daein, but after the Serenes Massacre.  Zelgius says he “would miss studying the sword with [his] master, General Gawain” if he left with Sephiran then.  But Sephiran’s already got ~plans~, which he only began after the Serenes Massacre snapped him.  Zelgius might’ve pushed his luck, might’ve stayed for years more, even, if Gawain hadn’t left.  Hadn’t abandoned him.  And he would see it as an abandonment, even if he knows logically that they weren’t that close, that Zelgius hadn’t allowed any closeness, that Greil hadn’t _wanted him—_anyway.  There’s nothing left in Daein for him.

The “plague” probably killed his parents, honestly.  Maybe even a sibling or two. Zelgius has a hard time feeling sorrow about this when word finally reaches him. The hollowness he feels at the news only furthers his certainty that he is cursed. Evil, intrinsically.  Unable even to grieve for his own mother and father. Despicable.  Detestable.

(Sephiran regrets a lot of things, in the end.  But there are a few lives lost through his actions about which he just can’t summon any feeling but savage satisfaction.)

Pretty much arbitrarily, I headcanon that Zelgius is in his late teens/early twenties in the flashback, just because of his demeanor.  Old enough to have noticeably slowed aging, young enough to still be learning in earnest. Which would have him born no later than about 605.  So yeah, Zelgius is probably in his early 40s by Radiant Dawn. -------------------------------

627. Ashnard becomes king.  Zelgius, bedraggled from the road, at loose ends, lost inside himself, shows up on Sephiran’s doorstep.  It’s a big year for the plan.

Sephiran doesn’t become Prime Minister for 13 more years.  I’m sure he spends the interim staying out of the public eye, moving pieces here and there, sowing discord, helping laguz as an “anonymous benefactor” as Misaha’s acts force change despite the Senate’s best efforts. He maneuvers Zelgius into position to inherit the tiny fief of Cador, which is far enough out of the way that no one will ever question it and close enough to the Daein border to mask the accent Zelgius can never quite kick.  Lineage safely falsified, Zelgius works his way up the ranks of Begnion’s army. Work and ambition take up most of their time, but they both spend a lot of time in Sienne.  Zelgius has stopped aging almost entirely, but he’s at the age where it’s not quite so noticeable, except for the occasional offhand comment about his skin care routine.  Sephiran, of course, also does not age, though he has no mark of his curse that Zelgius can see.  He asks about it once, which gets him only a wry smile.  Sephiran asks how much stock he puts in legends.  He pauses.  He asks how much Zelgius hates his great-great-grandfather, the raven who gave him this “cursed” life.  He pauses again, then laughs the most terrible laugh.  Zelgius doesn’t ask again.

Little by little, Sephiran tells Zelgius the details of The Plan, and Zelgius learns of his true identity.  Sephiran stops always hiding his wings around Zelgius.  It’s not for the reasons Lehran is used to that Zelgius wants to fall to his knees in worship.

Sometime in this interim is also when Sephiran and Zelgius are traveling Crimea and Gallia looking for the medallion and discover what Greil did to the village and Elena.  Ike and Mist are probably, what, six and four in the flashback?  So it probably takes place in like 634.  Just shy of a decade since Zelgius’s master “abandoned” him. Seeing him again, even unconscious and covered in the blood of innocents, at the side of a new master he’s sworn himself to in a thousand different ways, still brings unnamable emotion swirling up inside him.  He’d give anything to stamp it out, to quiet the voices demanding to know what would have been if he had swallowed his fear and accepted the hand extended to him then.

(It would have ended the same, the exact same, except Zelgius would have bellowed in grief and rage when Alondite parted Gawain’s ribs instead of letting the body fall to the forest floor with nothing but a murmur of hollow disappointment.)

It’s then that Zelgius fixates on matching himself against his old master.  Oh, he’s had the thought over the years, idly, in practice, that he wonders how he’s matching up to the best swordsman on the continent.  But it’s not until he sees the destruction Gawain is capable of and the grief he causes that it becomes an obsession.

If he had been there, could he have held his own against Gawain’s rampage? Could he have stopped him, stopped that day of tragedy in its tracks?  Not that he’s under any illusions that he’s some kind of hero, fit to protect a village of innocents from a rampaging madman.  But just to _know.  _Just to know if he’s capable, at all, at any point, in any way, of changing the path of fate.

Lekain says that Sephiran was considered a young upstart at the time he became Prime Minister. He, like Sanaki, was meant to be a figurehead, after all. So Sephiran couldn’t have gotten fully involved in politics until like 638 or so, probably. --------------------------------

640. Sanaki is crowned.  Sephiran is instated.  Zelgius is promoted to Major General, one step away from high office. Zelgius’s further appointment sometime in the next 4 years is the subject of much gossip.  He’s so young, after all, there must’ve been more qualified candidates?  I hear he doesn’t even go to temple all that often.  Well I hear he defeated thirty-two challengers in a single day.  He’s so handsome, does it even matter if he’s any good?  It’s not like anyone’s going to defeat Begnion regardless.  Well, if you heard what I heard about what he and the Prime Minister get up to behind closed doors, well…

Sigrun goes a long way towards helping Zelgius acclimate.  She probably doubts the story that he’s a country lord, but she’s too polite to challenge it, and Zelgius seems like a good enough man.  He’s an ally of the Prime Minister’s, and the Prime Minister is a good and holy man, a pillar of faith and protector to the little Empress second only to Sigrun herself (third, if Sigrun’s wife is in earshot).  She takes the initiative and goes to Zelgius when it becomes clear that he’s the runaway candidate for Grand General and takes the first step towards what will be a long partnership for the two sides of Begnion’s might. --------------------------------

643-44. Ashnard is gathering the strongest warriors from across the continent for his inner circle.  Sephiran hasn’t laid eyes on the medallion in almost ten years, but with giddy certainty he can feel Yune’s first stirrings, even a continent away.  

Zelgius would never refuse an order.  But that doesn’t mean he isn’t tearing apart inside as Sephiran instructs him to return to Daein under the alias of the Black Knight, and gain Ashnard’s favor.  What did he do wrong?  Why is his master discarding him?  His world has tilted on its axis, and he can barely hear Sephiran explaining how vital this is to the plan through the rushing of blood in his ears as his heartbeat tries to burst from his chest.  

Return to Daein.  

Abandoned, again, it might as well be a death sentence, Zelgius wishes it was a death sentence—

Sephiran’s firm, gentle touch forces Zelgius’s clenched fist to open up for Alondite’s hilt and breaks Zelgius out of that drowning spiral.  The abnormal lightness of such a large blade, its perfect balance, the tingle in his fingers and up his arm from the energy pouring from the sword—this strange combination of sensations breaks through the fog.  

Altina’s blades aren’t anything like Excalibur, and nor are they Falchion or Forseti or Tyrfing or Mystletainn.  Wielding them requires no bloodline nor special quality, and it’s only tradition that’s left them gathering dust in Begnion’s treasury.

Zelgius insists that he has never fought with double swords before, that this is too generous a gift, that one is enough, too much even.  

“Please, take both.  I would hardly wish you to be in a place as dangerous as Nevassa and unable to defend yourself.  You may do with them what you wish. Take them for my peace of mind.”

As tightly as Zelgius is gripping Alondite, Sephiran knows that there’s no chance they’ll be mistreated.  He is amused when the mercenary child shows up wielding Ragnell. Zelgius always did have a flair for the dramatic.  Altina would have appreciated that.  She would have appreciated a lot of things about Zelgius—his poise, his moments of shyness, his dogged loyalty.  And she’d never begrudge Lehran taking another lover and had, in fact, encouraged him to do so once or twice in the letters they exchanged in the long years between their separation and her death.  It’s the manipulation she wouldn’t appreciate.  Give him something or set him free, she would command.  She’s right.  

But Sephiran just can’t do it.

[dipulb3]

LG G1 OLED TV review: Tough to improve on near-perfection

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LG G1 OLED TV review: Tough to improve on near-perfection

For years OLED TVs have delivered the best image quality available with display technology that has remained largely unchanged, but LG promised something even better for 2021. The G1 has an all-new panel not available on any other TV LG sells. The company calls it Evo and says it achieves higher brightness and improved color. My verdict? Yes, it’s slightly better than before but even in a side-by-side comparison, it was difficult to tell the difference.

Like

Best picture quality we’ve ever tested

Slightly brighter than previous models

Beautiful slim design perfect for wall-mounting

Don’t Like

Expensive

Image quality improvements over cheaper OLED TVs are minor

I set up the G1 next to the CX, the best TV I reviewed in 2020, measured both and watched a variety of TV shows, movies and games. The G1 was indeed a bit brighter than the CX but color was nearly identical, as were other aspects of picture quality like video processing and uniformity. Both looked spectacular, however, and in most material I really couldn’t say one looked better than the other.

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The main advantage the G1 has over the CX and pretty much every other OLED TV is its unique design. This TV is made to be wall-mounted — quite literally; it doesn’t even come with a stand! If you want to put it on a piece of furniture, as shown in the images in this review, you’ll have to pay $100 extra for LG’s little side legs. And that would be a shame, because something this thin should really be on a wall.

New for 2021 LG has improved its already best-in-class gaming features by adding picture modes especially for games, as well as a convenient menu that shows all gaming info and adjustments in one place. There’s a new remote and a new smart TV homepage, too. The more affordable C1 shares those features with the G1, however.

At this point, the G1 is the best TV I’ve ever tested — by a nose. I have yet to review its competitor from Sony, the A90J, which also promises a brighter panel, or any other high-end TVs like Samsung’s Neo QLED models, so that title might not last. But for people who don’t have money to burn, the extra picture quality of the G1 probably isn’t worth the extra money over mainstream OLED models like the CX or C1.

Get to know the LG G1 series

It comes in three sizes and costs a bundle: 55-inch ($2,200), 65-inch ($3,000) and 77-inch ($4,500). 

It differs from the less expensive C1 series by offering fewer sizes (the C1 has 48-inch and 82-inch options too), that Evo panel and the slimmer, wall-mount-centric Gallery design. The C1 also lacks a far-field mic for hands-free voice and a Next-Gen TV tuner, both relatively minor extras included on the G1.

OLED display technology is fundamentally different from the LED LCD technology used in the vast majority of today’s TVs, including Samsung and TCL’s QLED models.

The best LCD TVs I’ve reviewed so far scored a 9 in image quality, while OLEDs TVs like the G1 have scored a 10. High-end LCDs (especially with HDR) are brighter than OLEDs, but the picture quality on OLED TVs, including that of this G1, is superior overall.

All OLED TVs are more subject to both temporary and permanent image retention, aka burn-in, than LCD TVs. We at CNET don’t consider burn-in a reason for most people to avoid buying an OLED TV, however. Check out our guide to OLED burn-in for more.

Throw it at the wall

A TV doesn’t get any more minimalist than this. Like many sets these days the G1 is pretty much all picture when seen from the front, but it’s the side view that sets it apart. It measures just 0.8 inches deep and is designed for nearly flush wall-mounting. And as I mentioned at the top, it doesn’t even come with a tabletop stand: If you want a stand mount, it will cost $100 extra.

The G1 comes with a wall-mount bracket inset into a cavity on the back for a practically flush mount.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Here’s what it looks like flush against the wall.

Sarah Tew/CNET

This TV’s design is wasted if you don’t wall-mount it. LG includes a custom bracket in the box and instructions that make it easy to slap up yourself if you’re at all handy — although I’m guessing most people in this price bracket will hire somebody to do the job. Thanks to an inset on the back of the TV the wall mount doesn’t add any extra depth, allowing the G1 to hug the wall and present a very slim profile. Channels are built into the TV’s back to run cables through, for a cleaner installation behind the TV. LG recommends using molding to hide cables on the wall itself. Note: I didn’t mount it myself in my test basement, but I’ve mounted plenty of TVs before and this one seems like it would be a simple job.

LG’s redesigned remote still has lots of buttons and motion control.

Sarah Tew/CNET

LG revamped the remote a bit. It kept my favorite features, namely the scroll wheel and motion-tracking, while slimming it down slightly. The biggest difference is the shortcut keys at the bottom: four for streaming services and two more for the built-in voice assistants, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. The former wasn’t yet available on my G1 review sample, but LG says it will be soon. 

The G1 is also equipped with a far-field mic (not available on the C1) so you can simply say the wake word to get the TV to respond, no remote required. It responded just like I’d expect from a smart speaker to my “Alexa” commands.

Based on my experience with the CX, both Google and Alexa can do all the usual assistant stuff, including control smart home devices, answer questions and respond via a voice coming out of the TV’s speakers (yep, both voices). Basics like “What’s the weather?” works as you’d expect, complete with onscreen feedback. The G1 also works with Apple’s AirPlay 2 system, just like many other TVs, allowing my iPhone to share photos and video to the screen from the Photos app and mirror my Mac and phone screens. 

LG’s webOS menu system got a facelift for 2021 — and I’m not a fan. Gone is the small, unobtrusive overlay at the bottom of the screen that lets you keep tabs on what you’re watching. Instead there’s a full-screen homepage, similar to Roku, Fire TV and Android TV. But it has fewer apps and more, well, junk. The top two-thirds of the screen are devoted to the weather, setup tips, a search window and a Trending Now section with a random collection of TV shows and movies. Below that is an app row and, further down, sections devoted to inputs and particular streaming apps. In general it feels like a hodgepodge with too much going on, and most systems are simpler and easier to grasp.

The new homepage takes up the entire screen.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Features galore, state-of-the-art connectivity

LG says its Evo panel, available only on the G1 this year, uses a “new luminous element” for more precise lighting. The construction of the OLED pixel itself is different, with new materials for red and blue and a new green layer, all of which have narrower wavelengths compared to the pixels used on other OLED TVs. 

Key TV features

Display technology OLED LED backlight N/A Resolution 4K HDR compatible HDR10 and Dolby Vision Smart TV Web OS Remote Motion

Otherwise the G1 has the same image quality features as the C1, starting with the new Gen 4 a9 processing chip that adds scene detection and upgraded object enhancement over last year’s version. Both the G1 and C1 also have a 120Hz refresh rate. The entry-level A1 OLEDs, meanwhile, have a more basic a7 processor and 60Hz refresh rate. 

Just like last year, LG’s OLED TVs’ picture settings include a Filmmaker Mode. As promised, it turns off the soap opera effect for film-based content (yay) but so do many other modes in the G1. While plenty accurate, Filmmaker Mode is also relatively dim so I ended up using Cinema and ISF Bright for most critical viewing.

Sarah Tew/CNET

All of LG’s recent OLED models (except the A1) include the latest version of the HDMI standard: 2.1. That means their HDMI ports can handle 4K at 120 frames per second and variable refresh rate (VRR, including NVIDIA G-sync and AMD FreeSync), as well as enhanced audio return channel (eARC) and automatic low latency mode (ALLM, or auto game mode). That means they can take advantage of the latest graphics features available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S. New for 2021 is a Game Optimizer mode that puts all of the TVs’ gaming-related settings in one place; see below for details.

The selection of connections is otherwise top-notch, though it no longer supports analog component video. There’s also a dedicated headphone or analog audio output and another for IR blasters, which could ease some installations.

Four HDMI inputs with HDMI 2.1, HDCP 2.2

Three USB 2.0 ports

Optical digital audio output

Analog audio 3.5mm headphone output

RF (antenna) input

RS-232 port (minijack, for service only)

IR blaster port (minijack)

Ethernet (LAN) port

Sarah Tew/CNET

Picture quality comparisons

With its slightly better picture and a couple of other minor improvements the G1 beat the CX, my previous picture quality champ, in side-by-side comparisons. According to my measurements and eyeballs, however, the brightness difference was minor enough to be invisible at times, and just about every other aspect of picture quality was virtually identical. Both TVs looked a tad better than the less expensive Vizio OLED. 

Dim lighting: The G1 performed like a champ with the lights down low — and so did the other two OLED TVs in my comparison. I checked out The Hobbit, An Unexpected Journey on standard Blu-ray, and they all appeared more or less uniformly excellent: perfect black levels in the letterbox bars and deep shadows of Bilbo’s living room during the dark Dwarven chant (36:58) and plenty of details in the shadows and clothing of Thorin and company. I couldn’t see any real advantage of the G1 with this kind of theatrical situation in standard (non-HDR) material.

Bright lighting: For a TV billed by LG as an improvement in brightness, the G1’s measurements didn’t really stand out. Yes, it did measure brighter than last year’s CX by 129 nits in the most accurate HDR modes, but that’s not a huge leap and proved tough to discern in most program material. I was also surprised that the C9 I reviewed from 2019 was brighter at maximum light output and basically the same in its accurate mode. As usual, any high-end LCD is much brighter. 

Light output in nits

TV Brightest (SDR) Accurate color (SDR) Brightest (HDR) Accurate color (HDR) TCL 65R635 1,114 792 1,292 1,102 Sony XBR-65X900H 841 673 989 795 Vizio P65Q9-H1 768 629 1,305 1,084 Samsung QN65Q80T 664 503 1,243 672 LG OLED65G1 377 334 769 763 LG OLED65CX 377 290 690 634 LG OLED65C9 (2019) 451 339 851 762

I asked LG’s representatives whether my particular review sample’s brightness was typical of other G1’s and they said it was. As always, different sizes and samples can produce variations.

LG OLEDs of recent vintage have a setting called Peak Brightness that boosts the light output for SDR sources in Cinema and Expert modes. The idea is to increase contrast for brighter viewing environments while maintaining the superior color accuracy of those modes. As with most TVs, the brightest mode for HDR and SDR (Vivid on the G1) is horribly inaccurate. For the accurate color columns above on the G1, I used ISF Expert Bright (Peak Brightness: High) for SDR and Cinema mode for HDR — I recommend G1 owners do the same to get good color in bright rooms.

All recent OLED sets are still plenty bright enough for just about any viewing environment. Yes, they do get quite a bit dimmer than LCDs when showing full-screen white — a hockey game, for example — but even in those situations they’re hardly dim. The G1’s screen preserved black levels and reduced reflections very well.

Color accuracy: LG claims better color with the new Evo panel but according to my measurements and eyeballs, it’s tough to spot any difference. Color on the CX was excellent and the G1 was basically the same. An LG rep told me that the G1’s white color could look more pure, like in a hockey match, but I didn’t see or measure any differences in full-field white/gray (ones that weren’t due to very small differences in grayscale after calibration, at least). 

Watching The Hobbit was mostly the same story, although at times greens, like the grass and hillsides of the Shire (12:24), appeared a bit more greenish and less yellowish on the G1. It was a subtle difference at best, and again I didn’t see or measure any difference in green test patterns, but it could be due to the new panel. Maybe.

Color on the G1 was nonetheless extremely accurate both before and after calibration. The warm tones of Bag End’s interior and Bilbo’s skin were inviting and intimate, and outside his hobbit hole the green of the grass and trees in the golden hour sun, and the red and blue circular doorways on Bagshot Row, looked brilliant and natural. The same could be said for the other OLED TVs, however, and none delivered significantly better color than another.

Video processing: LG goes to great lengths to tout the improvement of its processing every year, but watching various material in the best picture settings the CX and G1 looked largely identical to me. 

Motion handling on the G1 is excellent and a touch better than the CX. Under TruMotion, the new Cinematic Movement setting (the default for Cinema mode) served up 24-frame cadence with a very slight hint of smoothing, improving on last year’s too-smooth Cinema Clear setting while preserving 600 lines of motion resolution. 24p purists who want no smoothing at all will opt for the Off position (the default for Filmmaker mode) and suffer the low motion resolution, while tweakers will appreciate the fine granularity of the User De-Judder mode to dial in the right amount of smoothness; anything four or lower introduced some judder to my eye, conveying a sense of film rather than soap opera effect. De-Blur settings of five or higher deliver the full 600 lines of motion resolution.

User also opens up the OLED Motion Pro menu with three levels of black frame insertion that further improve motion resolution, with 800 lines in Low and a full 1200 in Med and High. The latter introduces flicker, unfortunately, and all three are a bit dimmer than Off, but if blur really bugs you then they’re worth experimenting with. One improvement over last year is that engaging OLED Motion Pro no longer totally crushes shadow detail — it’s a bit worse but still very good. Still, I’d choose to leave it off and sacrifice some motion resolution for maximum light output and shadow detail.

Uniformity: Like all OLEDs I’ve tested the G1 was exemplary in this area, with no significant brightness or color variations across the screen and nearly perfect image quality from off-angle. Compared to the CX I did see a bit more color shift toward magenta in extreme angles with full-field mid-bright and brighter test patterns, but it disappeared when I moved closer to on-axis and never affected the image from a normal viewing angle.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Gaming: The G1’s superb image quality carries over to games, and some of its biggest 2021 features upgrades are gaming-related. The new Game Optimizer is the name of both a picture mode and a full menu system. The latter offers all-new tweaks including four game genre modes: Standard, FPS mode (said to boost shadow detail), RPG mode (to boost contrast) and RTS mode (said to enhance mid-grayscale areas). There are also sliders labeled Black Stabilizer (for adjusting dark areas) and White Stabilizer (for bright areas), as well as the OLED Motion Pro setting described above (LG says it’s particularly useful for games) and the Reduce Blue light setting (said to be easier on the eyes).

I started my test in standard mode with settings at their defaults with Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla at 4K/60Hz and HDR running through my distribution amp so I could compare against the other TVs. Conducting a nighttime raid, the G1 looked most similar to the CX and the Vizio in its standard mode and all three TVs looked excellent, with the G1 delivering a touch better shadow detail already. Switching to FPS upped details even further but washed out the image a bit much for this cinematic game — although I can see it being useful in an actual FPS game if you want to reveal lurking enemies, or a very dark HDR game like Ghost of Tsushima. The RTS setting did boost midtones at the expense of some contrast, while RPG looked quite close to standard, if not as impactful to my eye. In any case it’s cool having these extra adjustment options, and I liked that they each get a dedicated menu.

Next I connected my Xbox Series X directly to the G1 to test advanced video features. VRR worked as expected, significantly reducing tearing in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, and I appreciated the prominent toggle and indicator in the Game Optimizer menu that assured me VRR was engaged. Another slider labeled Fine Tune Dark Areas is available to address the issue of VRR looking too dark. I headed deep into a crypt where VRR was crushing shadows a bit — cranking up that setting, as well as the Black Stabilizer, helped. The flipside is that doing so spoiled black levels and washed out the look of the game, so (as a card-carrying contrast fiend) I’d avoid using it unless it really hurts your gameplay.

I also tried 4K/120Hz on Gears 5 and Star Wars: Squadrons, but the extra smoothness and framerate were difficult to discern in most cases. I appreciate that some games, like Ori and the Will of the Wisps, showed a splash screen indicating that 120fps was active, but most did not. I looked for confirmation in LG’s display menu but, unfortunately, it doesn’t have any. Samsung’s new 2021 Game Bar, on the other hand, does indicate 120fps.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Buried within Game Optimizer is another setting labeled “Reduce input delay (input lag)” with two options, Standard and Boost. The former, which is the default for any game, serves up an excellent lag number similar to past LG OLED models: just 13.1ms for both 1080p and 4K HDR sources. Engaging Boost cuts lag even further, to just under 10ms for both. The catch is that Boost is only available for 60Hz sources, so you can’t use it with 120Hz games or VRR. And no, I don’t think many humans would notice the extra 3ms of lag.

HDR and 4K video: It’s with HDR that you’d expect the G1’s brightness advantage to be most visible, but watching the 4K Blu-ray version of The Hobbit, differences were again very slight. Highlights like the sky behind the elven king as he turns away from Thorin (7:59) or the window in Bilbo’s study (9:06) measured slightly brighter on the G1 than on the CX according to my light meter but without measuring it was tough to see the difference by eye, even when compared side by side. Highlights on the Vizio appeared visibly dimmer than either one, for less HDR pop, but the differences were much narrower between the two LGs.

Color was likewise pretty much equally spectacular on the LGs and a step behind on the Vizio, which looked a bit duller in Bilbo’s garden and the blue sky for example (13:25). Any color improvement afforded by the G1’s new panel tech over the CX was less visible with HDR than with SDR.

I also checked out some of the most revealing HDR content around: the montage of images from the Spears and Munsil 4K HDR benchmark. Again the G1 was superb and better by a slight margin than the CX, but the G1 failed to really distance itself. Most scenes looked very similar between all three, from the crashing waves to the sunsets to the flowers to the objects on black backgrounds, and in most cases when I saw a difference it was the Vizio lagging a bit behind the other two. Spot measurements revealed mildly brighter highlights on the G1 but I couldn’t tell the difference without measuring.

The benchmark also has a 4,000 nit montage to test content mastered at that level and; again, both LGs looked very similar. They outclassed the Vizio, which looked somewhat flat in some scenes in comparison.

Picture settings, HDR notes and charts

CNET is no longer publishing advanced picture settings for any TVs we review. Instead, we’ll give more general recommendations to get the best picture without listing the detailed white balance or color management system (CMS) settings we may have used to calibrate the TV. As always, the settings provided are a guidepost, and if you want the most accurate picture you should get a professional calibration.

Before my calibration for this review the Cinema and preset was the most accurate, excellent in terms of grayscale and gamma with just a slight reddish cast (but still within my error target of delta 3). Since I now target a 2.2 gamma for my reviews dark rooms it was closer than ISF Expert Dark or the new Filmmaker modes, which both target gamma 2.4/BT 1886. ISF Bright was basically identical to Cinema, but I reserved that for brighter rooms.

For my calibration I tweaked the two-point grayscale to remove the red cast, reduced light output to my target of 137 nits and increased brightness two pips to help with shadow detail (while still keeping perfect black levels), but otherwise I left well enough alone. The grayscale and color were already so accurate on my LG-provided review sample that I didn’t need to touch the multipoint system or the color management system.

SDR dark room settings:

Picture menu:

Select Mode: Cinema (User)

Aspect Ratio Settings: 16:9 (Just Scan: On)

Additional Settings menu:

Brightness submenu:

OLED Pixel Brightness: 48

Contrast: 85

Screen Brightness: 52

Auto Dynamic Contrast: Off

Peak Brightness: Off

Gamma (Adjust Brightness): 2.2

Black Level: Auto

Motion Eye Care: Off

Color submenu:

Color Depth: 50

Tint: 0

Color Gamut: Auto Detect

Fine Tune menu: 

Color Upgrade: Off (no other adjustments)

White Balance menu:

Color Temperature: Warm 49 (no other adjustments)

Clarity submenu:

Sharpness: 0

Color: 50

Tint: 0

Super Resolution: Off

Noise Reduction, MPEG Noise Reduction: Off [for low-quality sources, some users may prefer to enable noise reduction]

Smooth gradation: Off [for low-quality sources, some users may prefer to enable]

Cinema Screen: On [may be grayed out depending on source]

TruMotion: Cinematic Movement

Reduce Blue Light: Off

SDR bright room setting [all default except for below]:

Picture Mode Settings: ISF Bright Room

Brightness menu:

OLED light: 100

Peak Brightness: High

HDR Notes: HDR Cinema and Filmmaker mode were very similar, following the electro-optical transfer function — how the TV converts data to a specific brightness — quite closely and better than Cinema Home, but Cinema was about 70 nits brighter so it’s my favorite of the three. Game Optimizer is best for gaming thanks to its processing but quite blue; for the best color accuracy for gaming you should adjust the color temperature control (Color > White Balance > Color temperatureW45).

Color checker was slightly more accurate than on the CX from last year but not great, and HDR Color Checker was worse. As usual with OLED the set covered P3 HDR gamut very well. The G1 measured brighter than the CX or the B9 from 2019, but the C9 from 2019 actually measured brighter in its least accurate and basically the same in its most-accurate settings. Once again the TV automatically detected and engaged the “HDMI Ultra HD Deep Color” setting designed for HDR sources.

TV software/firmware version tested: 3.10.29

Geek box

Test Result Score Black luminance (0%) 0.000 Good Peak white luminance (SDR) 377 Average Avg. gamma (10-100%) 2.18 Good Avg. grayscale error (10-100%) 0.40 Good Dark gray error (30%) 0.42 Good Bright gray error (80%) 0.33 Good Avg. color checker error 0.80 Good Avg. saturation sweeps error 0.79 Good Avg. color error 0.94 Good Red error 2.22 Good Green error 0.64 Good Blue error 0.46 Good Cyan error 0.97 Good Magenta error 0.98 Good Yellow error 0.36 Good 1080p/24 Cadence (IAL) Pass Good Motion resolution (max) 1200 Good Motion resolution (dejudder off) 600 Average Input lag (Game mode) 13.10 Good HDR10 Black luminance (0%) 0.000 Good Peak white luminance (10% win) 769 Average Gamut % UHDA/P3 (CIE 1976) 98.91 Good ColorMatch HDR error 5.25 Poor Avg. color checker error 3.29 Average Input lag (Game mode, 4K HDR) 13.10 Good

LG G1 OLED TV CNET review c… by David Katzmaier

Portrait Displays Calman calibration software was used in this review. 

How We Test TVs

[easyfoodnetwork]

The Uncertain Future of Pop-Up Restaurants

Leigh-Ann Martin chats with guests at one of her pop-up dinners. | Dahli Durley

As the restaurant industry faces an ongoing crisis, pop-up chefs confront unique challenges during the pandemic

Three months ago, Omar Tate was serving an $150 eight-course tasting menu out of a penthouse event space in New York’s Financial District. The dinner, featuring such dishes called Notes From a Black Pantry and Cart of Yams, was one of Tate’s Honeysuckle pop-ups, which explore and pay homage to the black experience through food and art. Now, Tate is staying in a spare room at his mom’s house in Philadelphia. With multicourse dinners out of the question during the coronavirus pandemic, he’s cooking in her kitchen, posting a menu on his Instagram, and selling dishes to the public for $10 to $12 each. The setting is dissimilar to that of a New York penthouse, but he plans each menu as thoughtfully as ever, still tracing and celebrating black American foodways. Last week, Tate cooked lamb in a pit, serving the meat — marinated in palm oil and smoky from the oak he’d used as fuel — along with pickled vegetables and tart, lemony potatoes.

“All the things that go into what I make still have that same intentionality,” he says. “It was never about the theater of it all, which is the dining room. It’s not about that.”

“The beauty of a pop-up is that they are malleable. They’re kind of like an amoeba.”

The pop-up model has long been an alternative for cooks who lack access to the capital needed to launch and operate a restaurant, or who are disenfranchised by the culture and structure of traditional kitchens. For women and people of color in the restaurant industry, who are all too often refused the opportunities and resources that their white male counterparts enjoy, the pop-up model serves to democratize the cooking and sharing of food.

In some cities, pop-ups — particularly those in home kitchens — face legal challenges, but in most, they can operate as long as food is prepared in a commissary or restaurant kitchen. This shape-shifting model isn’t just a second choice for would-be restaurant owners. The fluidity and flexibility of the pop-up allows for a certain kind of creativity — blending art, history, performance, and food into a single dinner, for instance — that the constraints of most restaurants don’t allow.

Without brick-and-mortar locations, deep pockets, or much government assistance, pop-up chefs face unique challenges during the pandemic. But as it becomes increasingly unclear what restaurants will look like in a post-pandemic world, these businesses are also uniquely positioned to meet the needs of local communities, and maybe even offer a vision for dining in the future — if they can last that long.

“The beauty of a pop-up — and I’ve only learned this since I’ve been forced out of [restaurant] spaces because of the current situation that we’re in — is that they are malleable,” Tate says. “They’re kind of like an amoeba.”

Haamza Edwards

For a recent pop-up dinner, Tate slow-smoked lamb legs in a pit.

A change of plans

Three years after launching the Vegan Hood Chefs in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood, Ronnishia Johnson and Rheema Calloway were ready to turn their pop-up into a permanent space this year.

“As a minority-owned [business], we were looking to use this year as a way to show that we are profitable, in order to be able to apply for capital to reach our ultimate goal, which is to get a brick-and-mortar [location],” Johnson says. The pair, neither of whom had any restaurant experience before launching, started the Hood Vegan Chefs out of necessity. In their predominantly black San Francisco neighborhood, there were no grocery stores in sight, and Johnson and Calloway were confronted by an unpleasant truth: No one was going to come into their community and create more options for healthy living. Opening a restaurant seemed the most effective way to take matters into their own hands and provide fresh food to their neighbors.

Ronnishia Johnson (left) and Rheema Calloway

The dream of restaurant ownership is off the table, for now at least. Like so many other pop-up restaurant owners across the country, Johnson and Calloway are glad just to be breaking even. But in the face of a crisis that has put restaurants on the brink of permanent closure, many pop-up chefs are questioning whether restaurant ownership is the end goal after all.

“We’re putting the brick and mortar on hold. It may not necessarily be what the community needs right now,” Johnson says. “What they need may be [for us] to keep this pop-up sustainable. And that looks like using the money we would have put down on a brick and mortar to possibly build our team so that we have more individuals who are able to pop up at already existing restaurants, to be able to provide food for the community.” Though the Vegan Hood Chefs doesn’t have the capital to expand in the way Johnson and Calloway had hoped to this year, their fresh vegan offerings are delivered throughout the Bay Area once a week, providing customers with trays of prepared grains, greens, and meat substitutes.

Before the pandemic, a majority of the Vegan Hood Chefs’ revenue was generated through large events, all of which have been canceled. The same is true for many pop-up chefs, who relied on large food events and ticketed dinners to provide the bulk of their income. But with no massive overhead costs, and a business model already designed to be adaptable, pop-ups around the country are adjusting quickly.

Until recently, Salimatu Amabebe traveled state to state hosting their dinner series, Black Feast. Each dinner was informed by and centered around the work of a black artist, the art inspiring the menu. The meal was never just a dinner, nor was it a gallery exhibition. Often, the hardest part of planning the events was finding a space where art and food could coexist.

It has been hard for Amabebe to imagine what such an experiential dinner could look like as a takeout-only operation. On a recent Sunday night in Berkeley, California, they decided to give it a try. After planning what would be the first Black Feast event with no communal dining element, Amabebe became weighed down by videos circulating online of the violence black people are facing during the pandemic. Ordinarily, a Black Feast dinner would serve as a way to bring people together over a meal, a chance to process current events or just relax in the comfort of community. With in-person gatherings out of the question, Amambebe had to find other ways to deliver that same feeling through a takeout window.

“What do people need right now, what does my community need right now?” Amabebe asked themself as they planned the meal. The menu that they came up with was inspired by the work of Oakland-based artist Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, and captured the urgency and frustration of the moment.

Jessa Carter

Salimatu Amabebe (right) poses in front of the takeout window with artist Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo.

Each to-go order was wrapped in a print designed by Lukaza, featuring painted phrases such as “Say her name,” the other side printed with a transcribed interview between Amabebe and Lukaza. Inside the paper wrapping were containers of rich and mellow black-eyed pea and tomato stew, and big slices of ever-so-slightly earthy spinach-vanilla cake with yam buttercream.

With donations from friends and past Black Feast guests around the country, Amabebe was able to give free meals to black customers who came to pick them up. “It was really cool to see that it’s possible to change this model and share food with people, and nourish people in the community. And not all have to come together at the table,” they say.

When Amabebe isn’t planning for the next Black Feast dinner, they sell loaves of bread and jars of Nigerian chai from the takeout window of the building where they’re currently finishing an artist’s residency. As restaurants reopen across the country, and chefs try to work out what cooking for the public again will look like, Amabebe doesn’t really have a plan for the future. “It’s difficult because when you base the model of what you do on community care for others and not on profit, it puts you in a position that is, in some ways, freeing,” Amabebe says. “But also, there isn’t always a specific plan for how things are going to go, and there aren’t a lot of funds to move around. In some ways, it’s easy to shut down: ‘Okay, well, we’re not doing these events.’ But also, what the fuck do we do?”

What comes next

There are fewer barriers to entry for chefs launching pop-ups than for those opening restaurants. There are usually no investors to answer to, fewer overhead costs, and few or no employees to pay. Some of the pop-up chefs I spoke to had not registered their operations with the government, and had — at one point or another — done business under the table, not paying taxes. During a pandemic, the lack of structure that once felt liberating can bring on a sense of uncertainty and anxiousness.

“All of my money was coming from pop-ups, all of it,” Tate says. While peers with investors or savings accounts cushioned by parents or spouses have put money aside, Tate couldn’t plan for a rainy day, let alone an all-out storm. “That was literally my entire financial life and safety net. I was living contract to contract.” Tate applied for a $10,000 Paycheck Protection Program loan, and was granted $1,000. He hasn’t been able to get through to the overwhelmed unemployment application portal.

With no money left in her bank account, Illyanna Maisonet decided to halt her pop-up dinners during the pandemic. The chef and writer (she’s written for Eater on several occasions) ran social media for a popular San Francisco blogger, and in her spare time, she’s hosted Puerto Rican dinners in her small casita — a separate dining space in her Sacramento, California backyard. Maisonet never thought of herself as a brand or a business before the pandemic. Now, it feels like there’s nowhere to turn for help. “I have no hustle because all my side hustles require being outside,” she says. “So [there’s] no money coming in, no income.” The final blow came when Maisonet had to cancel a dinner she had already sold tickets for, and some of her guests refused her offer to deliver meals to their front door. “That was, like, a really good chunk of money... So now I have negative money in my bank account. I haven’t been negative in my bank account since I was in my 20s.”

Ryan Soule

Solomon Johnson prepares for dinner service.

Refunding customers right now could force small pop-ups to shut down for good. When Solomon Johnson, the chef behind the Oakland, California-based pop-up and catering company Omni World Kitchen, had to return $13,000 for canceled events, it felt inevitable that he would have to close his business. “I’m on a shoestring budget,” he says. “So after giving back all those refunds, I was almost convinced that I was going to have to completely shut down.” Solomon managed to secure a loan through the micro-loan organization Kiva, which kept his business just barely afloat, as he watched major restaurant chains receive the same PPP loan he’d been denied.

Johnson isn’t in a rush to start delivering plates of food during quarantine, citing concerns about his own health. While in-person events are on hold, he’s taken his business online, looking for new ways to create income. He’s just finished designing a line of merchandise, and completed edits on his first cookbook. “I really decided to think on my feet,” he says.

Meeting diners where they are

While many pop-up chefs express uncertainty about what the future might bring, others are hopeful they’ll be among the first to get back on their feet. When the time comes for restaurants to reopen in New Jersey, Leigh-Ann Martin has one of the most intimate dining spaces in town: Her kitchen table. Martin’s pop-up, A Table for Four — named for the snug table in her dining room where she serves guests — revolves around Trinidadian dishes cooked in her Union City kitchen.

As diners begin to reenter society, Martin suspects they’ll want a level of intimacy that restaurants in the early phases of reopening won’t be able to provide. “If people are going to feel safe enough to leave their home to come out, I feel like they’re going to want to do more than eat,” Martin says. She hopes to offer them an experience that falls somewhere between restaurant dining and eating at home. She’ll send them packing with recipes from the menu she serves, so they can recreate favorite Trinidadian dishes in their own kitchens, until the next time they brave the outside world.

Though his Oakland pop-up remains closed for now, Solomon Johnson also sees a future for his business when Northern Californians reemerge from the shutdown. “I know people will be excited to go out and eat again,” he says. “But the last thing you want to do is go to a restaurant that feeds 150 people... So I think that having a business model structured around smaller, intimate gatherings will probably be very lucrative after all of this. And that’s what I’ve been doing for almost five years now.”

In some ways, pop-ups have become more and more like traditional restaurants over the years, serving food out of restaurant dining rooms or large event spaces in place of home kitchens and front porches. With restaurants still closed in many states, and event spaces and bars unlikely to welcome pop-ups back any time soon, the model has been stripped down to its simplest form. “The future of pop-ups, now that people are paying attention,” Tate says, “is what they’ve always been: Something that pops up somewhere to feed people. And all that’s required is trust.”

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2TORAOH https://ift.tt/36E2FqW

Leigh-Ann Martin chats with guests at one of her pop-up dinners. | Dahli Durley

As the restaurant industry faces an ongoing crisis, pop-up chefs confront unique challenges during the pandemic

Three months ago, Omar Tate was serving an $150 eight-course tasting menu out of a penthouse event space in New York’s Financial District. The dinner, featuring such dishes called Notes From a Black Pantry and Cart of Yams, was one of Tate’s Honeysuckle pop-ups, which explore and pay homage to the black experience through food and art. Now, Tate is staying in a spare room at his mom’s house in Philadelphia. With multicourse dinners out of the question during the coronavirus pandemic, he’s cooking in her kitchen, posting a menu on his Instagram, and selling dishes to the public for $10 to $12 each. The setting is dissimilar to that of a New York penthouse, but he plans each menu as thoughtfully as ever, still tracing and celebrating black American foodways. Last week, Tate cooked lamb in a pit, serving the meat — marinated in palm oil and smoky from the oak he’d used as fuel �� along with pickled vegetables and tart, lemony potatoes.

“All the things that go into what I make still have that same intentionality,” he says. “It was never about the theater of it all, which is the dining room. It’s not about that.”

“The beauty of a pop-up is that they are malleable. They’re kind of like an amoeba.”

The pop-up model has long been an alternative for cooks who lack access to the capital needed to launch and operate a restaurant, or who are disenfranchised by the culture and structure of traditional kitchens. For women and people of color in the restaurant industry, who are all too often refused the opportunities and resources that their white male counterparts enjoy, the pop-up model serves to democratize the cooking and sharing of food.

In some cities, pop-ups — particularly those in home kitchens — face legal challenges, but in most, they can operate as long as food is prepared in a commissary or restaurant kitchen. This shape-shifting model isn’t just a second choice for would-be restaurant owners. The fluidity and flexibility of the pop-up allows for a certain kind of creativity — blending art, history, performance, and food into a single dinner, for instance — that the constraints of most restaurants don’t allow.

Without brick-and-mortar locations, deep pockets, or much government assistance, pop-up chefs face unique challenges during the pandemic. But as it becomes increasingly unclear what restaurants will look like in a post-pandemic world, these businesses are also uniquely positioned to meet the needs of local communities, and maybe even offer a vision for dining in the future — if they can last that long.

“The beauty of a pop-up — and I’ve only learned this since I’ve been forced out of [restaurant] spaces because of the current situation that we’re in — is that they are malleable,” Tate says. “They’re kind of like an amoeba.”

Haamza Edwards

For a recent pop-up dinner, Tate slow-smoked lamb legs in a pit.

A change of plans

Three years after launching the Vegan Hood Chefs in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood, Ronnishia Johnson and Rheema Calloway were ready to turn their pop-up into a permanent space this year.

“As a minority-owned [business], we were looking to use this year as a way to show that we are profitable, in order to be able to apply for capital to reach our ultimate goal, which is to get a brick-and-mortar [location],” Johnson says. The pair, neither of whom had any restaurant experience before launching, started the Hood Vegan Chefs out of necessity. In their predominantly black San Francisco neighborhood, there were no grocery stores in sight, and Johnson and Calloway were confronted by an unpleasant truth: No one was going to come into their community and create more options for healthy living. Opening a restaurant seemed the most effective way to take matters into their own hands and provide fresh food to their neighbors.

Ronnishia Johnson (left) and Rheema Calloway

The dream of restaurant ownership is off the table, for now at least. Like so many other pop-up restaurant owners across the country, Johnson and Calloway are glad just to be breaking even. But in the face of a crisis that has put restaurants on the brink of permanent closure, many pop-up chefs are questioning whether restaurant ownership is the end goal after all.

“We’re putting the brick and mortar on hold. It may not necessarily be what the community needs right now,” Johnson says. “What they need may be [for us] to keep this pop-up sustainable. And that looks like using the money we would have put down on a brick and mortar to possibly build our team so that we have more individuals who are able to pop up at already existing restaurants, to be able to provide food for the community.” Though the Vegan Hood Chefs doesn’t have the capital to expand in the way Johnson and Calloway had hoped to this year, their fresh vegan offerings are delivered throughout the Bay Area once a week, providing customers with trays of prepared grains, greens, and meat substitutes.

Before the pandemic, a majority of the Vegan Hood Chefs’ revenue was generated through large events, all of which have been canceled. The same is true for many pop-up chefs, who relied on large food events and ticketed dinners to provide the bulk of their income. But with no massive overhead costs, and a business model already designed to be adaptable, pop-ups around the country are adjusting quickly.

Until recently, Salimatu Amabebe traveled state to state hosting their dinner series, Black Feast. Each dinner was informed by and centered around the work of a black artist, the art inspiring the menu. The meal was never just a dinner, nor was it a gallery exhibition. Often, the hardest part of planning the events was finding a space where art and food could coexist.

It has been hard for Amabebe to imagine what such an experiential dinner could look like as a takeout-only operation. On a recent Sunday night in Berkeley, California, they decided to give it a try. After planning what would be the first Black Feast event with no communal dining element, Amabebe became weighed down by videos circulating online of the violence black people are facing during the pandemic. Ordinarily, a Black Feast dinner would serve as a way to bring people together over a meal, a chance to process current events or just relax in the comfort of community. With in-person gatherings out of the question, Amambebe had to find other ways to deliver that same feeling through a takeout window.

“What do people need right now, what does my community need right now?” Amabebe asked themself as they planned the meal. The menu that they came up with was inspired by the work of Oakland-based artist Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, and captured the urgency and frustration of the moment.

Jessa Carter

Salimatu Amabebe (right) poses in front of the takeout window with artist Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo.

Each to-go order was wrapped in a print designed by Lukaza, featuring painted phrases such as “Say her name,” the other side printed with a transcribed interview between Amabebe and Lukaza. Inside the paper wrapping were containers of rich and mellow black-eyed pea and tomato stew, and big slices of ever-so-slightly earthy spinach-vanilla cake with yam buttercream.

With donations from friends and past Black Feast guests around the country, Amabebe was able to give free meals to black customers who came to pick them up. “It was really cool to see that it’s possible to change this model and share food with people, and nourish people in the community. And not all have to come together at the table,” they say.

When Amabebe isn’t planning for the next Black Feast dinner, they sell loaves of bread and jars of Nigerian chai from the takeout window of the building where they’re currently finishing an artist’s residency. As restaurants reopen across the country, and chefs try to work out what cooking for the public again will look like, Amabebe doesn’t really have a plan for the future. “It’s difficult because when you base the model of what you do on community care for others and not on profit, it puts you in a position that is, in some ways, freeing,” Amabebe says. “But also, there isn’t always a specific plan for how things are going to go, and there aren’t a lot of funds to move around. In some ways, it’s easy to shut down: ‘Okay, well, we’re not doing these events.’ But also, what the fuck do we do?”

What comes next

There are fewer barriers to entry for chefs launching pop-ups than for those opening restaurants. There are usually no investors to answer to, fewer overhead costs, and few or no employees to pay. Some of the pop-up chefs I spoke to had not registered their operations with the government, and had — at one point or another — done business under the table, not paying taxes. During a pandemic, the lack of structure that once felt liberating can bring on a sense of uncertainty and anxiousness.

“All of my money was coming from pop-ups, all of it,” Tate says. While peers with investors or savings accounts cushioned by parents or spouses have put money aside, Tate couldn’t plan for a rainy day, let alone an all-out storm. “That was literally my entire financial life and safety net. I was living contract to contract.” Tate applied for a $10,000 Paycheck Protection Program loan, and was granted $1,000. He hasn’t been able to get through to the overwhelmed unemployment application portal.

With no money left in her bank account, Illyanna Maisonet decided to halt her pop-up dinners during the pandemic. The chef and writer (she’s written for Eater on several occasions) ran social media for a popular San Francisco blogger, and in her spare time, she’s hosted Puerto Rican dinners in her small casita — a separate dining space in her Sacramento, California backyard. Maisonet never thought of herself as a brand or a business before the pandemic. Now, it feels like there’s nowhere to turn for help. “I have no hustle because all my side hustles require being outside,” she says. “So [there’s] no money coming in, no income.” The final blow came when Maisonet had to cancel a dinner she had already sold tickets for, and some of her guests refused her offer to deliver meals to their front door. “That was, like, a really good chunk of money... So now I have negative money in my bank account. I haven’t been negative in my bank account since I was in my 20s.”

Ryan Soule

Solomon Johnson prepares for dinner service.

Refunding customers right now could force small pop-ups to shut down for good. When Solomon Johnson, the chef behind the Oakland, California-based pop-up and catering company Omni World Kitchen, had to return $13,000 for canceled events, it felt inevitable that he would have to close his business. “I’m on a shoestring budget,” he says. “So after giving back all those refunds, I was almost convinced that I was going to have to completely shut down.” Solomon managed to secure a loan through the micro-loan organization Kiva, which kept his business just barely afloat, as he watched major restaurant chains receive the same PPP loan he’d been denied.

Johnson isn’t in a rush to start delivering plates of food during quarantine, citing concerns about his own health. While in-person events are on hold, he’s taken his business online, looking for new ways to create income. He’s just finished designing a line of merchandise, and completed edits on his first cookbook. “I really decided to think on my feet,” he says.

Meeting diners where they are

While many pop-up chefs express uncertainty about what the future might bring, others are hopeful they’ll be among the first to get back on their feet. When the time comes for restaurants to reopen in New Jersey, Leigh-Ann Martin has one of the most intimate dining spaces in town: Her kitchen table. Martin’s pop-up, A Table for Four — named for the snug table in her dining room where she serves guests — revolves around Trinidadian dishes cooked in her Union City kitchen.

As diners begin to reenter society, Martin suspects they’ll want a level of intimacy that restaurants in the early phases of reopening won’t be able to provide. “If people are going to feel safe enough to leave their home to come out, I feel like they’re going to want to do more than eat,” Martin says. She hopes to offer them an experience that falls somewhere between restaurant dining and eating at home. She’ll send them packing with recipes from the menu she serves, so they can recreate favorite Trinidadian dishes in their own kitchens, until the next time they brave the outside world.

Though his Oakland pop-up remains closed for now, Solomon Johnson also sees a future for his business when Northern Californians reemerge from the shutdown. “I know people will be excited to go out and eat again,” he says. “But the last thing you want to do is go to a restaurant that feeds 150 people... So I think that having a business model structured around smaller, intimate gatherings will probably be very lucrative after all of this. And that’s what I’ve been doing for almost five years now.”

In some ways, pop-ups have become more and more like traditional restaurants over the years, serving food out of restaurant dining rooms or large event spaces in place of home kitchens and front porches. With restaurants still closed in many states, and event spaces and bars unlikely to welcome pop-ups back any time soon, the model has been stripped down to its simplest form. “The future of pop-ups, now that people are paying attention,” Tate says, “is what they’ve always been: Something that pops up somewhere to feed people. And all that’s required is trust.”

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2TORAOH via Blogger https://ift.tt/2AjtmoM

[emilysn2019-blog]

Racetrack Playa in Death Valley National Park is one of my favorite spots in California. This is the location famous for its mysteriously moving rocks, and in this post, I’ll share photos I’ve taken at Racetrack Playa from the couple of times I’ve camped out there, plus info and tips on reaching this difficult-to-access location.

For starters, Racetrack Playa is a dry lakebed that’s far “off the beaten path” in Death Valley National Park. It’s about 3 miles long and 2 miles wide, and in the scorching heat that makes for a brutal hike as you search for the “best” rocks. Racetrack Playa is also extremely flat, and features playa surrounded by mountains on three sides.

Before the mystery of the moving rocks was solved (it’s an interesting story worth reading), there was a ton of speculation as to why the rocks moved. Previously, I’ve offered my own theory of ancient aliens, and science be damned, I’m sticking to that. Kidding aside, it’s actually quite fascinating, and while it’s a breakthrough that we now know the why of the moving rocks, a part of me enjoyed the mystery.

Aside from the mystique of the moving rocks, Racetrack Playa is just a beautiful and tranquil place. You’re out on the playa–often without anyone else around for miles–surrounded by mountains in all directions. If ever I decide to go “off the grid” so the man can’t track me, I’ll go here. (The man, if you’re reading this, I’m just kidding. I’ll actually be in Arkansas. Look for me there.)

Normally, when a location or phenomenon gains as much attention as Racetrack Playa has, it becomes overwhelmed with people. In the social media age, Yosemite National Park has become crippled by crowds during its annual “Firefall.” During recent Super Blooms, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park has seen an influx of people from Los Angeles posing for glamour shots. Fortunately, Racetrack Playa has not suffered the same fate…

This is likely in large part due to the barrier to entry. Death Valley National Park is itself fairly remote and desolate, located in the middle of nowhere relative to other popular National Parks. On top of that, Racetrack Playa is even more remote than the rest of Death Valley. The road to access Racetrack Playa is of the unpaved washboard variety, requiring a 4×4 high-clearance vehicle, as well as a lot of time and patience.

Very few visitors of the already few visitors to Death Valley National Park will have the time and appropriate vehicle to make it to Racetrack Playa. Hence it being one of the rare well-known, hyped-up-places that also remains unpopular in terms of visitation.

While (I guess?) it’d be nice if more people could experience Racetrack Playa, such obstacles are undoubtedly essential to the location’s unspoiled existence. Racetrack Playa has had its share of (presumably) unintentional damage as people have walked on the playa when the ground has been damp. It has also suffered vandalism, as people have ridden bikes or driven (yes, with actual cars) onto the playa, and moved rocks from their tracks.

The National Park Service warns that damage to the playa can take years to disappear, and I’ve seen some of this damage in person. A greater number of visitors also means a greater number of self-absorbed idiots who would leave behind traces of their visit for years to come. In this regard, it’s for the best that some days the number of visitors to Racetrack Playa numbers in the dozens, rather than the hundreds or thousands. (Both times I’ve camped at Racetrack Playa, I’ve seen fewer than 5 other people.)

In terms of info and tips, Racetrack Playa is in a remote area of Death Valley. From the Furnace Creek Visitor Center, the drive to reach Racetrack Playa is over 83 miles. That may not seem long, especially on straight-away roads that you can do at a decent speed. This is all on Google Maps, so I’m not going to rehash directions here.

However, nearly 30 miles of that are on unpaved, washboard roads. The last stretch of the drive is interminably long and excruciating, but maintaining a slow speed is absolutely necessary if you don’t want a flat tire. Consequently, it takes about 3.5 hours to access Racetrack Playa from the Furnace Creek Visitor Center.

The turn off for Racetrack Valley Road is near the parking lot for Ubehebe Crater. From here, it’s 27 miles to the Racetrack Playa. For the entire stretch of this unpaved gravel road, you’re going to want to keep your speed under 15 miles per hour. Plus, as noted, you’ll need a 4×4 high clearance vehicle.

About 20 miles in, you’ll reach Teakettle Junction (above), which is like an oasis in the dessert. Get out, stretch your legs, thank your lucky stars you don’t have a flat tire (yet), and do whatever else you need to mentally prepare for the final ~7 miles.

There are two parking areas for Racetrack Playa at Death Valley National Park. The first parking area is for the Grandstand. The Grandstand itself is a large rock formation jutting out of the middle of the playa. It’s cool if you’re into that sort of thing, but we’re guessing that you drove all this way for moving rocks.

The Grandstand is not so good for those. Instead, you’ll want to continue driving until you come to the next parking area. This doesn’t have a name (to my knowledge), but it’s pretty easy to spot. Park here, walk straight out about a half-mile, and you’ll start seeing the moving rocks.

In terms of other tips, bring plenty of water and food, a spare tire, and fix-a-flat supplies. The best course of action is to plan as if you’re going to get stuck out at Racetrack Playa…as there’s a decent chance of exactly that happening. You may also not see anyone else out there when you visit, so don’t count on someone else–or cell service–to rescue you.

When I’ve gone out to Racetrack Playa, it’s been part of camping trips at Death Valley National Parks. I’ve always gone out mid-afternoon and stayed overnight at the Racetrack. I know others recommend going first thing in the morning, which is solid advice if you’re not going to camp. I’d avoid the middle of the day. There’s no shade to offer any reprieve from the sun and heat–it’s like the surface of a stove out there.

Racetrack Playa Photography Tips

Late afternoon is one of my favorite times at Racetrack Playa. Even though the heat is brutal, I love the long shadows of the rocks. It makes them look larger than life (and also easier to find!), and also enhances the contours of the playa.

You have to get close to the rock to emphasize it, but you can’t get too close, or you have to focus stack. You don’t want to get too low, or you lose the trail of the rock, which is important to the “story” of the photo. Get too high, and the scene is not as engaging. I’m not even kidding. You’d think taking a picture of a rock would be as simple as showing up and pressing the shutter, but it’s not.

Choosing the best rocks is also a challenge. I’d say 95% of the rocks on Racetrack Playa are duds. Their trail is poorly defined, the playa around them is damaged, there are two rocks inexplicably next to one another, etc. etc.

I’m not wild about the ‘bubbled up’ playa above, as I think it looks like a road block to that rock (maybe I overthink this stuff?), but I really liked the shadow of that rock under the full moon, and thought its positioning was otherwise solid.

My three favorite rocks once again, this time with the Milky Way overhead.

I wish I would’ve spent more time on this, as I think I could’ve done something here to make the rocks more visible. Perhaps some light painting or something.

I love this shot because of a small detail you might not even notice: the cloud of dust kicked up just under the sunburst. These photos might look peaceful and serene, but that cloud of dust is a “nice” reminder that one of these afternoons there was a brutal dust-storm that was so intense it was tough to use a tripod during!

If I were braver, I’d head out to Racetrack Playa during the summer Milky Way season, but I fear getting a flat tire on the road out there, not having cell service to dial for help…and dying of heat exhaustion and/or dehydration.

My three favorites, along with a bunch of other rocks. Another thing that is deceiving about these photos is the prevalence of the rocks.

Before stumbling onto this rock-dense area, we had to walk about a mile and were growing concerned by the total lack of rocks on the playa.

Another shot of the full moon rising over the horizon. This is a (roughly) two-minute exposure, but if you were to glance at it quickly, you might mistake it for a poorly-exposed daytime shot.

The way the full moon illuminated Racetrack Playa on this particular night was surreal. It went from dusk to (briefly) pitch black to dusk again as the moon started to rise, to being so bright I didn’t even need a flashlight.

That’s it for this post. Hopefully you enjoyed this set of rock photos, along with tips for Racetrack Playa at Death Valley National Park. If you’re thinking of visiting Racetrack Playa, I’d encourage you to go, but definitely do the proper planning and pack more supplies than necessary. It’s a bit daunting and requires you to work for the shots, but I think the end result–both in terms of memories and photos–can be well worth it.

If you’re planning a California road trip or vacation, check out my California category of posts for other things to see and do. To get some more Death National Park photo ideas, check out my Death Valley National Park Photo Gallery, which includes additional shots I have taken on my visits there. For photo licensing inquires, please contact me.

Your Thoughts…

Have you been to Racetrack Playa in Death Valley National Park? If so, what did you think of experience? Any additional tips to add that we didn’t cover? Would you do it again, or do you think it was a ‘one and done’? Was it worth your time and effort? Is visiting Racetrack Playa something you’d like to do someday? Hearing feedback about your experiences is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!

The post Racetrack Playa in Death Valley National Park: Photos & Tips appeared first on Travel Caffeine.

[realestate63141]

SEO for Small Business – The Topics, Tactics &amp; Tools

SEO for Small Business – The Topics, Tactics & Tools

So you’ve decided to play the long-game that is SEO. Fantastic! Depending on your familiarity with search engines, perhaps you’ve told your team or your boss “we’ll work to show up in the number one spot for the one thing that everyone searches in our industry.” [Long, long pause.]

It’s a tantalizing thought. But let’s set expectations for the folks who are newer to this: SEO is really hard when you’re a new or small business. Moreover, this kind of “straight through the front door” approach to try and rank for that one thing is extremely difficult, even for massive businesses who own giant market-share.

Success in SEO takes a serious and sustained commitment to creating and sharing quality information through your site. It requires taking a totally honest look at your business to define where your business is suited to compete, who you’re up against, and what niche you can realistically attack as a result.

But there are absolutely things you can do to stack the SEO deck in favor of your small business, right now. This post will walk you through the things you control from Day One, how these things send signals of quality and value to search engines and prospective customers, and how you can continuously improve on them.

Where to begin with SEO for a small business

Google looks at a long list of factors when determining where to rank you in its all-important search results page (SERP). To make things really fun: it’s not always clear what those factors are (Google tries to keep a lot of this secret), but thanks to a lot of research, experimentation, and observation, you can tell that the SEO industry has a very good idea of the most important elements.

Of the many factors Google looks at, this article focuses on the pieces that fall under the umbrella of “on-site SEO”. Meaning all the elements within your website that Google looks at to determine if your site and/or a specific page is relevant to a search query.

Most of the factors we’ll discuss and tactics we recommend boil down to a fundamental goal:

Google wants your site to be useful and significant to users before you’ll earn your way up the rankings.

It’s up to you make it clear to Google and to users that the value and relevance of your site are unassailable.

Let’s dive into some of the factors Google and other search engines look at.

Title Tags

Title tags are a major ranking factor for search engines. Having clear and informative title tags helps both a search engine and a prospective customer understand what a page is all about. They carry a lot of weight from a UX perspective because they’re often the first thing people see when viewing your page or as they’re deciding whether to click through from the SERP to your site. These are hugely important moments, so get your title tags right from the get-go.

Meta Descriptions

Similar to title tags, meta descriptions are among the big first impressions for your site’s pages. They’re presented as the summary paragraph in the SERP to provide a little more detail on what a page is all about.

While it might be tempting to be completely blunt, or even underhanded with this or any other easy-to-edit page element, Google is beyond-wise to this trick. Here’s a little more information on what it means to “write for SEO” in 2018.

Because this page element was so abused by bad actors for so long, Google has been clear that they are not a direct ranking factor. But their influence over people’s decision to click (or not) does have an impact on your business. A well written and descriptive meta description will increase your click through rate, traffic to the site, and ultimately, ranking in the SERP.

Bottom line, take the time to write solid copy for this placement, just like you would for any other opportunity to get noticed. Don’t over-promise or seek to fool anyone; you won’t. Instead, promise value in the form of thoughtful & relevant answers, deliver on that promise with your page content, and do it consistently. If you want to check the length of your meta descriptions in the context of a search engine results page (“SERP”) check out the Portent SERP preview tool.

Image Alt Attributes

Image alt attributes aka “alternate text” or “alternate attributes” describe the contents of an image on your site. This has a few purposes, including making your site more accessible for the visually impaired. It also allows Google to better understand what is pictured in the images throughout your site. Because of this, image alt attributes can have a big impact on your rank for a particular topic.

Writing alt text doesn’t need to be a complicated project. You’re just helping people and search engines with what’s already there, right?

If your site is about volunteer opportunities, and an image contains the words “Volunteer”, the alt text should absolutely include the word “Volunteer”. If the image is of a children’s baking class, the alt text should be “Children’s baking class”. Easy.

Another benefit of descriptive alt text is that using it helps your images show up in Google Image Search. Great for businesses that benefit from people thumbing through their images without additional context, whether you’re running a photography gallery, or you just happen to have lots of great high-res images of what you do.

XML Sitemap

A sitemap is a list of all the pages on your site in XML format, a format that’s easy for Google to crawl and process quickly. Keeping a current sitemap is a great way to ensure your site is crawled thoroughly and that new pages you add to your site get indexed quickly.

Usually your content management system (CMS) will create a sitemap for you automatically. If your site is built on WordPress, one of the most popular platforms, you can use a plugin like Yoast to do this. No matter how you produce the sitemap, make sure you submit it to Google and Bing via Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools account.

User Experience (“UX”)

Disclaimer: the topic of user experience is so big and so important you could write a stack of books and still not be done. But it has a major impact on SEO, so we’ll skim it here.

UX and SEO are growing more and more intertwined as Google gets better at determining if a site is ultimately useful for users (or not).

Many SEO ranking factors are directly related to user experience including site speed (how quickly your site and your pages load), and user time on site.

Simply put, if the experience offered on your site would annoy a user, Google can tell.

For instance, you could get thousands of visitors per day to your site, but if none of them are sticking around, search engines will adjust accordingly. Meaning their algorithm will try to show users a similar site where users are actually stopping to read, clicking into other related pages, and showing other signs of engagement.

So what can you do?

Take the time to complete tasks you want users to complete yourself on desktop and mobile.

Are there any roadblocks that might cause someone to abandon their task and leave?

Is it easy for users to navigate your site and find what they’re looking for?

Are there relevant next steps for visitors to take on each page?

Tools like Hotjar, which we’ll cover in more depth later in this post, will allow you to visualize how users are interacting with pages on your site and help you find even more ideas for improving user experience and conversion rates.

Schema Markup

Schema markup helps search engines understand not only what the words on a page say, but what they mean. It adds context to any jumble of letters and numbers on a page, but it’s also helpful in adding nuanced context to text that’s already pretty readable.

Beyond helping search engines generally understand that your page content would be useful for specific queries, some types of schema like Review and Product schema can even result in rich snippets in search results making your link stand out from the rest.

You’ve seen these before as the gold star ratings and price listings on product pages in search results.

The applications for schema are endless but the most common and generally useful cases include providing reviews, product information, company information, recipes, and local business information.

If you’re getting help with schema markup from an agency or a consultant, we’ve also written some guidance for setting up schema using JSON-LD which is a fantastic way to manage lots of schema markup for more complex sites.

External Links

It’s no secret that external links are important for SEO. Links from other websites, especially those in your industry are like votes for your site’s usefulness and significance. Businesses with more links from a range of authoritative sites will rank better than the same site with fewer quality links. Again, this is the only time in this post where we’ll talk about “off-site SEO.”

So what can you do?

Link outreach, the process of identifying linking opportunities and reaching out to webmasters and news sites to offer your site as a resource, is a time-consuming task that doesn’t always provide the best return on the time and money you invest in it. If you’re determined to put in this work (good for you) check out this instructographic on how to do link outreach the right way.

The easiest way to earn links is through being a valuable part of the conversation in your industry and answering the questions your customers have. Sound familiar? Research and create useful content that your users will enjoy and share, and you’ll be able to naturally grow your backlinks over time.

Internal Links

Internal links are simply those links within your site which point to one of your other pages. That’s everything from your site navigation to an in-line link in a blog post, like this related Portent post about leveraging internal linking for SEO. (See what we did there?)

They’re also a major signal to Google about what the most important pages of your site are, and which pages naturally cluster together around a particular topic. Naturally, an important service page will have more internal pages linking to it than a blog post you wrote in 2009. The goal here isn’t to create a spaghetti-monster of internal links.

So what can you do?

At a bare minimum, you should ensure that all top-level category pages on your site are linked in your global navigation and that any secondary content related to those pages are linking back to the most relevant category.

For example, if you sell bridesmaid dresses on your site and you have a resource on how to choose mismatched bridesmaid dresses for your wedding, that resource should link back to the bridesmaid dress category page somewhere in the copy. It’s useful for users and it helps search engines understand how content on your site is related. Simple, right?

Pro-Tip: At Portent we’ve been talking about the value of “hub pages” for nearly ten years. If you want to really elevate your internal-linking and SEO game overall, read up on hub pages and the power of grouping relevant content together on your site.

Site Speed

We touched on site speed earlier under UX, but it’s so important that it merits its own section.

The speed with which pages on your site load is a direct ranking factor and also affects user experience and conversion rates on your site.

Several studies including our own direct research prove that site speed is directly correlated with revenue and conversions.

So what can you do? And does it matter whether you have a large dev team?

You can do a lot to improve site speed by yourself. And you can also get professional help if you’ve maxed out the easy stuff and this is still a major problem opportunity for your growing business.

The easiest way to see how your site is performing on Page Speed is to use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. This will give you a quick score and immediately recommend some changes to improve your score. These recommendations can range from easy things like image compression to more involved projects like reducing render blocking scripts. It’s important to note that these scores are on a page by page basis. Make sure you test different pages and sections of your site beyond the home page. Think about things like product detail pages, category pages, and blog pages as well.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of the most important strategic aspects of SEO and all search engine marketing. Having a strong understanding of what people are actually searching for on Google or Bing and tailoring your site content to best addresses those queries are what make your website great.

Here’s a deeper dive on getting started with keyword research.

A word of caution: use tools to avoid guessing which keywords will best suit your business. There are a ton of SEO tools out there specifically designed to help you find keywords and prioritize them based on actual search volume and competitive landscape, rather than intuition. Check out the tools section below for more.

Site Content

It’s almost painful to put site content last in a post about SEO, but here we are. This is another topic that has a litany of books, an untold number of blog posts (with the catchphrase “content is king” shoved somewhere in the title), videos, interactive guides, etc. It’s important.

As a matter of fact, the content that makes up your website is the most important aspect of your website. Having good content (text, images, videos, products, etc.) is so fundamental to the quality and value of your site that there’s no way to do it justice here.

Google looks to the content on your site with a few key questions in its metaphorical “mind.” Most notably:

Is the content of your site useful and significant (as mentioned at the beginning)?

Does it fulfill a need that people have?

If it does, can people find it easily?

Is it linkable? Have others actually linked to it?

Bottom line, if your site or a specific page fills a need and people can access it easily it’s probably good content.

Intuitively and conversely, things like putting very little substance on a particular page (thin content) and re-using content from your site or even worse, reusing others’ (duplicate content) can have a seriously negative effect on your site.

Free Tools for SEO

The right tool makes any job easier. Even better than the right tools are free tools. Here is a short list of some tools to consider as you dive into SEO strategy.

And if you want to go really crazy, here’s our massive list of SEO tools, organized by category.

Google Analytics

Aka the absolute bare minimum, and also one of the best digital marketing tools in history. If you don’t have this set up, do not wait.

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that allows you to track user engagement on your website. Once you install a small snippet of code on your site, you’ll collect valuable information about your site that should influence business decisions. This is arguably the most important tool for any and every online marketer, no matter the business size or industry.

Google Search Console

Search Console is a free dashboard provided by Google and is a great resource to see how your site is doing in search results, as well as to identify and troubleshoot issues. If you’re not using it, you should be.

Search Console can do things like help you identify broken external links, find opportunities to improve title tags and meta descriptions, and tell you what sites are linking to you. That should sound familiar from earlier in this post.

This is also where you’ll want to submit your sitemap and make sure pages on your site are crawlable. All you need to get started is a Gmail account.

Moz

If you haven’t followed any of the in-line links in this post yet, Moz is both a great informational resource, and they offer fantastic, user-friendly inbound marketing tools. Some of the freemium tools built into the Moz suite are:

Open Site Explorer: A backlink analysis tool.

Moz Local

These tools help you see and manage your businesses local listings on major directories. This is the first place you should go as you begin to tackle local SEO for a new site.

Mozbar

MozBar is an SEO toolbar that lets you see Moz’s key features and analysis for any..

https://ift.tt/2JCcwBX

[thereviewsarein]

The highly anticipated self-titled debut album from new country supergroup The Highwomen is here, and we’re here for it!

Maren Morris, Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, and Amanda Shires have joined forces and voices to create a 12-track album that we’ve been excited about since its announcement. And when we heard Redesigning Women, we started to count the days until the full album was available.

The record is a whole lot of things. As covered widely, the entire project came together in a search for female representation in country music. That alone is something worth keying in on and fighting for. But there’s a lot more to this album than that statement. From top to bottom this thing is packed with fantastic songwriting, magnificent harmonies, and powerful performances that take every expectation we had for The Highwomen and blows them out of the water.

Starting with Highwomen at the top of the album, there’s a depth and willingness in the tracklist to tell hard stories in a way that country music does best. It’s slow and it’s upbeat too. It’s fun and it’s deep and full of feelings. It’s balanced and complete.

Note: The group has also recorded and released a wonderful rendition of the Fleetwood Mac classic, The Chain for The Kitchen movie soundtrack. We wish it was included on the album, but we’re really just happy that it exists.

For years we’ve been writing and talking about the lack of women being played on country radio or being booked at country music festivals. We watched as women like Maren Morris finally get to #1 on the charts with  and are celebrated for breaking through, and wondered aloud why we can’t just celebrate her for releasing great music instead of her success being a novelty. We aren’t alone in thinking or saying those things. But still we look around and see women getting fewer spins than men, fewer chances to play big stages, and while they may earn critical acclaim and build dedicated fanbases, they are all well aware of the steeper hill they have to climb to get to the top. The Highwomen should challenge all of that very quickly.

Related: Why Maren Morris Hitting Number One Matters, And Why It Shouldn’t

Redesigning Women should rise up the charts when it hits radio. Heaven Is A Honky Tonk could do the same. And if stations (especially in the Bible Belt) can gather the strength to stand up to homophobic pushback, If She Ever Leaves Me could be a hit too.

That’s a big if though. And if you’re asking what’s likely to happen with If She Ever Leaves Me, the safe money (based on history) is on little to no radio play, hateful remarks and attacks online, and threats from fundamentalist groups to boycott whatever they think will protect their homophobic views. And all of that should make people fucking angry. I hope I’m wrong.

BUT, more importantly, and most importantly, If She Ever Leaves Me is the representation that the LGBTQ+ community doesn’t get in mainstream country music. It is a song about a lesbian relationship and it matters. There’s love coming in already on Twitter for the song from those who are hearing their story or feeling represented. We hope that continues and drowns out whatever negativity pops up.

In social media posts celebrating and sharing the release of the album, the band says…

“We are The Highwomen. We hope these stories find you when you need them most.”

Track by track, The Highwomen is a big win. Depending on your mood at any given time there are songs that are going to work for you. And if you just love great female voices singing quality country music, you can hit play on track one and listen to the full 42-minute album.

It’s difficult not to let the significance and weight of this album as a statement overshadow the quality of the songs. You shouldn’t look at this as an album that four women put together just to ruffle some feathers and further their cause. We hope it does that, but we also hope that listeners allow Old Soul and My Only Child and Cocktail And A Song and My Name Can’t Be Mama and Don’t Call Me to sit with them and earn their way onto playlists with repeat listens in mind. We hope the songwriting and singing resonate purely based on a love of country music.

Sometimes, expectations for art can hurt its reception when it arrives. Words like supergroup can do that. Stories in the New York Times and Rolling Stone can do that. Fans and industry members talking to each other about how excited they are can do that. But sometimes, like this one, the weight of the expectations is shrugged off and the art shines as intended.

The bottom line is this: The Highwomen have released a full album of really good country songs that are important because of both their quality and what they represent.

We recommend that you listen to the whole thing now, and then start picking which songs belong on which of your playlists for easy access anytime.

The Highwomen Tracklist

1. Highwomen 2. Redesigning Women 3. Loose Change 4. Crowded Table 5. My Name Can’t Be Mama 6. If She Ever Leaves Me 7. Old Soul 8. Don’t Call Me 9. My Only Child 10. Heaven Is A Honky Tonk 11. Cocktail And A Song 12. Wheels Of Laredo



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The Highwomen Album Review The highly anticipated self-titled debut album from new country supergroup The Highwomen is here, and we're here for it!

[terabitweb]

Original Post from Google Security Author: Eugene Liderman

Posted by Rene Mayrhofer and Xiaowen Xin, Android Security & Privacy Team

[Cross-posted from the Android Developers Blog]

With every new version of Android, one of our top priorities is raising the bar for security. Over the last few years, these improvements have led to measurable progress across the ecosystem, and 2018 was no different.

In the 4th quarter of 2018, we had 84% more devices receiving a security update than in the same quarter the prior year. At the same time, no critical security vulnerabilities affecting the Android platform were publicly disclosed without a security update or mitigation available in 2018, and we saw a 20% year-over-year decline in the proportion of devices that installed a Potentially Harmful App. In the spirit of transparency, we released this data and more in our Android Security & Privacy 2018 Year In Review.

But now you may be asking, what’s next?

Today at Google I/O we lifted the curtain on all the new security features being integrated into Android Q. We plan to go deeper on each feature in the coming weeks and months, but first wanted to share a quick summary of all the security goodness we’re adding to the platform.

Encryption

Storage encryption is one of the most fundamental (and effective) security technologies, but current encryption standards require devices have cryptographic acceleration hardware. Because of this requirement many devices are not capable of using storage encryption. The launch of Adiantum changes that in the Android Q release. We announced Adiantum in February. Adiantum is designed to run efficiently without specialized hardware, and can work across everything from smart watches to internet-connected medical devices.

Our commitment to the importance of encryption continues with the Android Q release. All compatible Android devices newly launching with Android Q are required to encrypt user data, with no exceptions. This includes phones, tablets, televisions, and automotive devices. This will ensure the next generation of devices are more secure than their predecessors, and allow the next billion people coming online for the first time to do so safely.

However, storage encryption is just one half of the picture, which is why we are also enabling TLS 1.3 support by default in Android Q. TLS 1.3 is a major revision to the TLS standard finalized by the IETF in August 2018. It is faster, more secure, and more private. TLS 1.3 can often complete the handshake in fewer roundtrips, making the connection time up to 40% faster for those sessions. From a security perspective, TLS 1.3 removes support for weaker cryptographic algorithms, as well as some insecure or obsolete features. It uses a newly-designed handshake which fixes several weaknesses in TLS 1.2. The new protocol is cleaner, less error prone, and more resilient to key compromise. Finally, from a privacy perspective, TLS 1.3 encrypts more of the handshake to better protect the identities of the participating parties.

Platform Hardening

Android utilizes a strategy of defense-in-depth to ensure that individual implementation bugs are insufficient for bypassing our security systems. We apply process isolation, attack surface reduction, architectural decomposition, and exploit mitigations to render vulnerabilities more difficult or impossible to exploit, and to increase the number of vulnerabilities needed by an attacker to achieve their goals.

In Android Q, we have applied these strategies to security critical areas such as media, Bluetooth, and the kernel. We describe these improvements more extensively in a separate blog post, but some highlights include:

A constrained sandbox for software codecs.

Increased production use of sanitizers to mitigate entire classes of vulnerabilities in components that process untrusted content.

Shadow Call Stack, which provides backward-edge Control Flow Integrity (CFI) and complements the forward-edge protection provided by LLVM’s CFI.

Protecting Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) against leaks using eXecute-Only Memory (XOM).

Introduction of Scudo hardened allocator which makes a number of heap related vulnerabilities more difficult to exploit.

Authentication

Android Pie introduced the BiometricPrompt API to help apps utilize biometrics, including face, fingerprint, and iris. Since the launch, we’ve seen a lot of apps embrace the new API, and now with Android Q, we’ve updated the underlying framework with robust support for face and fingerprint. Additionally, we expanded the API to support additional use-cases, including both implicit and explicit authentication.

In the explicit flow, the user must perform an action to proceed, such as tap their finger to the fingerprint sensor. If they’re using face or iris to authenticate, then the user must click an additional button to proceed. The explicit flow is the default flow and should be used for all high-value transactions such as payments.

Implicit flow does not require an additional user action. It is used to provide a lighter-weight, more seamless experience for transactions that are readily and easily reversible, such as sign-in and autofill.

Another handy new feature in BiometricPrompt is the ability to check if a device supports biometric authentication prior to invoking BiometricPrompt. This is useful when the app wants to show an “enable biometric sign-in” or similar item in their sign-in page or in-app settings menu. To support this, we’ve added a new BiometricManager class. You can now call the canAuthenticate() method in it to determine whether the device supports biometric authentication and whether the user is enrolled.

What’s Next?

Beyond Android Q, we are looking to add Electronic ID support for mobile apps, so that your phone can be used as an ID, such as a driver’s license. Apps such as these have a lot of security requirements and involves integration between the client application on the holder’s mobile phone, a reader/verifier device, and issuing authority backend systems used for license issuance, updates, and revocation.

This initiative requires expertise around cryptography and standardization from the ISO and is being led by the Android Security and Privacy team. We will be providing APIs and a reference implementation of HALs for Android devices in order to ensure the platform provides the building blocks for similar security and privacy sensitive applications. You can expect to hear more updates from us on Electronic ID support in the near future.

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Go to Source Author: Eugene Liderman What’s New in Android Q Security Original Post from Google Security Author: Eugene Liderman Posted by Rene Mayrhofer and Xiaowen Xin, Android Security & Privacy Team…

[easyfoodnetwork]

Leigh-Ann Martin chats with guests at one of her pop-up dinners. | Dahli Durley As the restaurant industry faces an ongoing crisis, pop-up chefs confront unique challenges during the pandemic Three months ago, Omar Tate was serving an $150 eight-course tasting menu out of a penthouse event space in New York’s Financial District. The dinner, featuring such dishes called Notes From a Black Pantry and Cart of Yams, was one of Tate’s Honeysuckle pop-ups, which explore and pay homage to the black experience through food and art. Now, Tate is staying in a spare room at his mom’s house in Philadelphia. With multicourse dinners out of the question during the coronavirus pandemic, he’s cooking in her kitchen, posting a menu on his Instagram, and selling dishes to the public for $10 to $12 each. The setting is dissimilar to that of a New York penthouse, but he plans each menu as thoughtfully as ever, still tracing and celebrating black American foodways. Last week, Tate cooked lamb in a pit, serving the meat — marinated in palm oil and smoky from the oak he’d used as fuel — along with pickled vegetables and tart, lemony potatoes. “All the things that go into what I make still have that same intentionality,” he says. “It was never about the theater of it all, which is the dining room. It’s not about that.” “The beauty of a pop-up is that they are malleable. They’re kind of like an amoeba.” The pop-up model has long been an alternative for cooks who lack access to the capital needed to launch and operate a restaurant, or who are disenfranchised by the culture and structure of traditional kitchens. For women and people of color in the restaurant industry, who are all too often refused the opportunities and resources that their white male counterparts enjoy, the pop-up model serves to democratize the cooking and sharing of food. In some cities, pop-ups — particularly those in home kitchens — face legal challenges, but in most, they can operate as long as food is prepared in a commissary or restaurant kitchen. This shape-shifting model isn’t just a second choice for would-be restaurant owners. The fluidity and flexibility of the pop-up allows for a certain kind of creativity — blending art, history, performance, and food into a single dinner, for instance — that the constraints of most restaurants don’t allow. Without brick-and-mortar locations, deep pockets, or much government assistance, pop-up chefs face unique challenges during the pandemic. But as it becomes increasingly unclear what restaurants will look like in a post-pandemic world, these businesses are also uniquely positioned to meet the needs of local communities, and maybe even offer a vision for dining in the future — if they can last that long. “The beauty of a pop-up — and I’ve only learned this since I’ve been forced out of [restaurant] spaces because of the current situation that we’re in — is that they are malleable,” Tate says. “They’re kind of like an amoeba.” Haamza Edwards For a recent pop-up dinner, Tate slow-smoked lamb legs in a pit. A change of plans Three years after launching the Vegan Hood Chefs in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood, Ronnishia Johnson and Rheema Calloway were ready to turn their pop-up into a permanent space this year. “As a minority-owned [business], we were looking to use this year as a way to show that we are profitable, in order to be able to apply for capital to reach our ultimate goal, which is to get a brick-and-mortar [location],” Johnson says. The pair, neither of whom had any restaurant experience before launching, started the Hood Vegan Chefs out of necessity. In their predominantly black San Francisco neighborhood, there were no grocery stores in sight, and Johnson and Calloway were confronted by an unpleasant truth: No one was going to come into their community and create more options for healthy living. Opening a restaurant seemed the most effective way to take matters into their own hands and provide fresh food to their neighbors. Ronnishia Johnson (left) and Rheema Calloway The dream of restaurant ownership is off the table, for now at least. Like so many other pop-up restaurant owners across the country, Johnson and Calloway are glad just to be breaking even. But in the face of a crisis that has put restaurants on the brink of permanent closure, many pop-up chefs are questioning whether restaurant ownership is the end goal after all. “We’re putting the brick and mortar on hold. It may not necessarily be what the community needs right now,” Johnson says. “What they need may be [for us] to keep this pop-up sustainable. And that looks like using the money we would have put down on a brick and mortar to possibly build our team so that we have more individuals who are able to pop up at already existing restaurants, to be able to provide food for the community.” Though the Vegan Hood Chefs doesn’t have the capital to expand in the way Johnson and Calloway had hoped to this year, their fresh vegan offerings are delivered throughout the Bay Area once a week, providing customers with trays of prepared grains, greens, and meat substitutes. Before the pandemic, a majority of the Vegan Hood Chefs’ revenue was generated through large events, all of which have been canceled. The same is true for many pop-up chefs, who relied on large food events and ticketed dinners to provide the bulk of their income. But with no massive overhead costs, and a business model already designed to be adaptable, pop-ups around the country are adjusting quickly. Until recently, Salimatu Amabebe traveled state to state hosting their dinner series, Black Feast. Each dinner was informed by and centered around the work of a black artist, the art inspiring the menu. The meal was never just a dinner, nor was it a gallery exhibition. Often, the hardest part of planning the events was finding a space where art and food could coexist. It has been hard for Amabebe to imagine what such an experiential dinner could look like as a takeout-only operation. On a recent Sunday night in Berkeley, California, they decided to give it a try. After planning what would be the first Black Feast event with no communal dining element, Amabebe became weighed down by videos circulating online of the violence black people are facing during the pandemic. Ordinarily, a Black Feast dinner would serve as a way to bring people together over a meal, a chance to process current events or just relax in the comfort of community. With in-person gatherings out of the question, Amambebe had to find other ways to deliver that same feeling through a takeout window. “What do people need right now, what does my community need right now?” Amabebe asked themself as they planned the meal. The menu that they came up with was inspired by the work of Oakland-based artist Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, and captured the urgency and frustration of the moment. Jessa Carter Salimatu Amabebe (right) poses in front of the takeout window with artist Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo. Each to-go order was wrapped in a print designed by Lukaza, featuring painted phrases such as “Say her name,” the other side printed with a transcribed interview between Amabebe and Lukaza. Inside the paper wrapping were containers of rich and mellow black-eyed pea and tomato stew, and big slices of ever-so-slightly earthy spinach-vanilla cake with yam buttercream. With donations from friends and past Black Feast guests around the country, Amabebe was able to give free meals to black customers who came to pick them up. “It was really cool to see that it’s possible to change this model and share food with people, and nourish people in the community. And not all have to come together at the table,” they say. When Amabebe isn’t planning for the next Black Feast dinner, they sell loaves of bread and jars of Nigerian chai from the takeout window of the building where they’re currently finishing an artist’s residency. As restaurants reopen across the country, and chefs try to work out what cooking for the public again will look like, Amabebe doesn’t really have a plan for the future. “It’s difficult because when you base the model of what you do on community care for others and not on profit, it puts you in a position that is, in some ways, freeing,” Amabebe says. “But also, there isn’t always a specific plan for how things are going to go, and there aren’t a lot of funds to move around. In some ways, it’s easy to shut down: ‘Okay, well, we’re not doing these events.’ But also, what the fuck do we do?” What comes next There are fewer barriers to entry for chefs launching pop-ups than for those opening restaurants. There are usually no investors to answer to, fewer overhead costs, and few or no employees to pay. Some of the pop-up chefs I spoke to had not registered their operations with the government, and had — at one point or another — done business under the table, not paying taxes. During a pandemic, the lack of structure that once felt liberating can bring on a sense of uncertainty and anxiousness. “All of my money was coming from pop-ups, all of it,” Tate says. While peers with investors or savings accounts cushioned by parents or spouses have put money aside, Tate couldn’t plan for a rainy day, let alone an all-out storm. “That was literally my entire financial life and safety net. I was living contract to contract.” Tate applied for a $10,000 Paycheck Protection Program loan, and was granted $1,000. He hasn’t been able to get through to the overwhelmed unemployment application portal. With no money left in her bank account, Illyanna Maisonet decided to halt her pop-up dinners during the pandemic. The chef and writer (she’s written for Eater on several occasions) ran social media for a popular San Francisco blogger, and in her spare time, she’s hosted Puerto Rican dinners in her small casita — a separate dining space in her Sacramento, California backyard. Maisonet never thought of herself as a brand or a business before the pandemic. Now, it feels like there’s nowhere to turn for help. “I have no hustle because all my side hustles require being outside,” she says. “So [there’s] no money coming in, no income.” The final blow came when Maisonet had to cancel a dinner she had already sold tickets for, and some of her guests refused her offer to deliver meals to their front door. “That was, like, a really good chunk of money... So now I have negative money in my bank account. I haven’t been negative in my bank account since I was in my 20s.” Ryan Soule Solomon Johnson prepares for dinner service. Refunding customers right now could force small pop-ups to shut down for good. When Solomon Johnson, the chef behind the Oakland, California-based pop-up and catering company Omni World Kitchen, had to return $13,000 for canceled events, it felt inevitable that he would have to close his business. “I’m on a shoestring budget,” he says. “So after giving back all those refunds, I was almost convinced that I was going to have to completely shut down.” Solomon managed to secure a loan through the micro-loan organization Kiva, which kept his business just barely afloat, as he watched major restaurant chains receive the same PPP loan he’d been denied. Johnson isn’t in a rush to start delivering plates of food during quarantine, citing concerns about his own health. While in-person events are on hold, he’s taken his business online, looking for new ways to create income. He’s just finished designing a line of merchandise, and completed edits on his first cookbook. “I really decided to think on my feet,” he says. Meeting diners where they are While many pop-up chefs express uncertainty about what the future might bring, others are hopeful they’ll be among the first to get back on their feet. When the time comes for restaurants to reopen in New Jersey, Leigh-Ann Martin has one of the most intimate dining spaces in town: Her kitchen table. Martin’s pop-up, A Table for Four — named for the snug table in her dining room where she serves guests — revolves around Trinidadian dishes cooked in her Union City kitchen. As diners begin to reenter society, Martin suspects they’ll want a level of intimacy that restaurants in the early phases of reopening won’t be able to provide. “If people are going to feel safe enough to leave their home to come out, I feel like they’re going to want to do more than eat,” Martin says. She hopes to offer them an experience that falls somewhere between restaurant dining and eating at home. She’ll send them packing with recipes from the menu she serves, so they can recreate favorite Trinidadian dishes in their own kitchens, until the next time they brave the outside world. Though his Oakland pop-up remains closed for now, Solomon Johnson also sees a future for his business when Northern Californians reemerge from the shutdown. “I know people will be excited to go out and eat again,” he says. “But the last thing you want to do is go to a restaurant that feeds 150 people... So I think that having a business model structured around smaller, intimate gatherings will probably be very lucrative after all of this. And that’s what I’ve been doing for almost five years now.” In some ways, pop-ups have become more and more like traditional restaurants over the years, serving food out of restaurant dining rooms or large event spaces in place of home kitchens and front porches. With restaurants still closed in many states, and event spaces and bars unlikely to welcome pop-ups back any time soon, the model has been stripped down to its simplest form. “The future of pop-ups, now that people are paying attention,” Tate says, “is what they’ve always been: Something that pops up somewhere to feed people. And all that’s required is trust.” from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2TORAOH

http://easyfoodnetwork.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-uncertain-future-of-pop-up.html

[biofunmy]

Netflix’s “Our Planet” And Our Personal Responsibility To Combat Climate Change

A couple weeks ago, I made the mistake of watching Netflix’s new documentary series Our Planet after hitting a friend’s weed pen. Even though I knew that famed naturalist David Attenborough’s latest project aimed to explicitly address the effects of climate change, I was still expecting to (mostly) enjoy a big, splashy nature doc, letting myself become fully immersed in the overwhelming beauty and vastness of life on Earth — especially since, someday all too soon, many of these glorious scenes will be lost to us.

What I didn’t expect were the horrors awaiting me at the (now-infamous) end of Episode 2. A huge group of walruses congregate on a tiny stretch of land because they can’t gather on swaths of Arctic sea ice that no longer exist. Forced to find space from the crowd, some of the poorly sighted animals climb up steep cliffs — then, sensing other walruses below, fling their bodies off the edge. Somehow I’d missed all the coverage of Netflix’s warnings to animal lovers about this particular moment. Even if I had, I don’t think anything could have prepared me to see these gentle, gigantic animals tumble to their deaths. I started to weep; I think being stoned could only partially account for my spiral.

Piles of walrus bodies, smashed and bloody, will now join the morbid climate change gallery I keep on shuffle in my brain when I’m, say, trying to go to sleep or otherwise enjoy my life: the endangered orangutan trying to stop a bulldozer and save its home, or the polar bear mother and cubs crowding onto a tiny block of ice in the environmental advocacy commercials that used to play, over and over again, in my childhood. Even worse: I picture the growing number of human climate refugees, driven from their homes by droughts, flash floods, and fires, a tableau of mounting apocalypse on a near-biblical scale.

Walruses aside, some critics don’t think that Our Planet goes far enough. Yes, we see a fair bit of animal death, in addition to ghostly forests of dead coral and crumbling glaciers; but “the camera still captures life on a grand scale: Wildebeest herds are enormous, penguin colonies stretch as far as the eye can see, millions upon millions of ants inhabit jungle floors,” writes Brian Resnick at Vox. He wishes that Our Planet had fewer Planet Earth– and Blue Planet–style scenes of grandeur and more moments that convey “a visceral sense of loss.”

I appreciate that criticism. But there was also a part of me (maybe a horribly naive one) that was glad Our Planet took the time to capture the world’s still-thriving habitats — especially since it focuses on a number of areas and species that have been recently rehabilitated by human efforts to curb deforestation, overfishing, and the effects of climate change. Siberian tigers are slowly crawling back from the brink; blue and humpback whales have seen dramatic recoveries thanks to international efforts to save them. Maybe, if we act in time, not all of this will be lost. Do we dare to dream?

Like the producers of Our Planet, who had to balance making an entertaining program with warning its hundreds of thousands of viewers about oncoming global peril, I struggle in my daily life to juggle my hopefulness and my despair — and my culpability. How am I supposed to weigh my overwhelming fear and guilt and anger and sense of powerlessness about climate change against the hope that, through aggressive collective action, we can demand a better future for ourselves, for future generations, and for a planet’s worth of precious species?

As the world continues to burn, I think a lot about a Supreme Court case that made a big impact on me when I first learned about it in a constitutional law class in college. Before their case made it to the Supreme Court in 1992, the Defenders of Wildlife and other environmental organizations rallied against new regulations applied to the Endangered Species Act of 1973, which required federal agencies to consult with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to ensure their actions aren’t likely to threaten imperiled species and their habitats in the US or at sea. Organizations committed to conservation filed an action against the secretary of the interior, hoping that the new regulations could be discarded in favor of the original interpretation of the ESA, which hadn’t involved such a limited geographic scope.

The main question the court would be answering in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife: Did environmental organizations, made up of people with a vested interest in keeping endangered species outside the US alive, have standing to sue for the right to protect them? Put differently — do we, everyday American citizens, have the right to some legal assurance that, somewhere very far away, endangered animals and their precious habitats aren’t being annihilated with the support of taxpayer dollars?

Turns out, we don’t.

The plaintiffs tried to propose that anyone part of a “contiguous ecosystem” who would be adversely affected by a federal agency’s actions has standing to sue, a theory the court rejected. Even if the court assumed that federal agency–funded projects might pose a threat to an endangered species, the justices saw no proof that those projects would produce a “factual showing of perceptible harm” to the members of environmental groups, who might wish to one day visit other parts of the world and find the wildlife there unsullied by the tireless and maniacal reach of American industry.

I’ve always found this question to be a philosophically fascinating one, almost poetic. Do I have the right to the knowledge that the incredible biodiversity of our planet is going to keep existing out there in the big wide world — particularly without being fucked over by the people representing me in our federal government? It’s a different question than whether these endangered species deserve to survive on a habitable planet in the first place, one that’s intertwined with the other most pressing questions of our time: whether Americans have the right to prevent our government from furthering climate catastrophe for the globe’s most impoverished communities, who have contributed the least to climate change but most keenly feel its effects; or whether we have the right to demand our government take action to ensure that we Americans too might survive current and forthcoming climate catastrophes.

Still, it’s a question I keep finding myself coming back to: Do I have the right to feel comforted by the existence of a natural world that, however indirectly, I’ve helped to destroy?

For the past few years, I’ve seesawed between feeling compelled to drastically reduce my carbon footprint and throwing up my hands in defeat. What does it matter anyway? I eat meat, though lately less of it. Jury’s still out on children. I fly too often — sometimes for work, but most of the time to escape my urban environment and vacation in the great outdoors, grimly and guiltily aware that, to enjoy the natural world, I’m contributing to its demise.

Last winter, my partner and I took our most ambitious trip yet: a week to visit family in South Africa, then another week of game drives and boat rides in the national parks of Botswana and Zambia. It’s been a dream of ours, to see elephants and other incredible creatures in the wild.

One evening, during golden hour, we were bobbing with our guide on the banks of the Zambezi river while a herd of elephants swam-stepped across the water in front of us — using their trunks as snorkels — before they clambered onto the shore, rising mud-slicked behemoths. A crocodile lazed in a sunny spot a few feet away from us, its mouth disconcertingly open to regulate its body heat. And in the distance, on a stretch of grasslands only revealed during the low season, hippos and their babies lumbered lazily in the setting sun while a gust of birds in every color streamed by overhead. I’d probably never seen anything so beautiful in my life. Perhaps I never will again.

But our moment of rapture came at a cost. We’d taken jumbo jets for nearly 24 hours to reach the continent, then a car, a ferry, and a terrifying little biplane to bury ourselves this deep in the wild. Our massive carbon footprints trailed along behind us like a shameful veil.

That night, sleeping in a tent on a raised platform in the woods, we woke to the sound of something inconceivably huge moving just beyond our tented walls in the darkness. Tree boughs snapped; the platform beneath our bed shifted. We went still and held each other while my heart rattled around in my ribcage. At the time, I was petrified, but in the morning, when we poked around outside for evidence of what turned out to be an elephant or a rhinoceros getting comfortable for its few hours of sleep right beside us, I felt humbled and awed. Nothing else has better reminded me that I share the earth with giants.

Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife was on my mind again when I was watching Our Planet. Nature documentaries in general bestow a precious knowledge, which is that all around the world, every single day, remarkable things are happening. And documentaries give us these reminders without actually having to go and see for ourselves. I love to travel, but I also have to come to terms with the fact that my lifestyle isn’t compatible with sustaining life on earth. In a future where (hopefully) carbon taxes make air travel more costly and difficult, I’ll be grateful for the existence of programs that can give me a decent, high-definition dose of reverence without the high environmental price tag attached.

I remember being particularly tickled by the flamingos in 2016’s Planet Earth II, which (like Our Planet) was narrated by Attenborough, whose soothing British accent has accompanied many of the most stunning nature documentaries ever made. Thousands of feet high in the Andes mountains, a huge flock of flamingos takes shelter in a remote lake that freezes overnight, trapping them there by their long legs. In the morning, warmed by the sun, the birds slowly defrost and break themselves free of the melting ice, after which they march in a giant goofy group back and forth across the water, in a mating march intended to get them all “in the mood.”

It fascinates and delights me to think that as I’m puttering around New York City, each day filled with the small joys and dumb frustrations of my ordinary life, there’s this wild group of flamingos being constantly frozen and unfrozen in a remote corner of the planet, surviving in a comically inhospitable climate. I find it soothing, these windows into the goings-on of a diverse range of extraordinary animals, all of them ignorant and uncaring of our silly human foibles.

Of course, the natural world isn’t all sunshine and roses, and hasn’t been for a long time. Nature documentaries in particular have allowed us access to our planet’s natural wonders without forcing us to reckon with the fact that human actions — particularly the actions of humans in the industrialized world — are contributing to the quickening death and destruction of these wonders. (You wouldn’t know it from Planet Earth II, but those Andean flamingos are currently listed as a vulnerable species.) Our Planet, finally, aims to correct that legacy.

“I find it hard to exaggerate the peril,” the 92-year-old Attenborough recently said. “This is the new extinction and we are halfway through it. We are in terrible, terrible trouble and the longer we wait to do something about it the worse it is going to get.”

But what’s one little human on this giant earth supposed to do? Even scientists are divided on questions about personal responsibility in the face of climate change. Having fewer children, cutting down on car and air travel, and abstaining from meat won’t really change all that much on a global scale — but making these choices can also be a way to cope, to inspire hopefulness, to feel like you’re making the world the tiniest bit of a better place. I can’t say I’m going to stop traveling to visit some of the earth’s most beautiful places while there’s still time — how much, really, would that help? — but I can say I’ll vote to make those trips as difficult and costly as possible, so that they’ll become as rare and as precious as they should be.

In an excellent recent story for the New Yorker about “the other kind of climate denialism,” Rachel Riederer spoke with a number of environmental scientists, psychologists, and reporters about how to inspire action in a public that has generally moved from one unhelpful extreme to the other: “uncertainty and denial” about climate change to “similarly paralyzing feelings of panic, anxiety, and resignation.” Some experts, like the conservation psychologist John Fraser, believes in going beyond terrorizing people with tales of disaster: “What we need to promote is hope,” he says. “The first step to a healthy response is feeling that the problem is solvable.” Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist and founder of a climate advocacy organization, believes the opposite — that fear can help inspire people to take action. “It’s important to feel afraid of things that will kill us — that is healthy and good,” she says.

Lately I’ve been energized by the prospect of the 2020 primaries; incredibly early as we still are in the process, I believe that political and community action, not just at the federal level but all the way down to the local level, are our best chance at survival. I send long, rambling emails and texts to my relatives who, I worry, aren’t quite freaked out enough yet. I write and share articles like this one.

I’ve also been trying to hold competing stories in my head at once. I refuse to look away from scenes of climate destruction and terror. But I’ve not yet allowed myself to let go of the overwhelming feelings of peace and calm that can wash over me when I experience or even just think about the pockets of the earth still bursting, against humanity’s best efforts, with liveliness and splendor.

I think, often, of Mary Oliver’s famous poem “Wild Geese,” in which she assures us that we don’t have to be good: “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” It’s a lovely comfort, despite everything that has happened, everything that will happen: to be but a speck in a teeming ecosystem, just one among many in the family of things, all of us just doing our best. All of us just trying to survive. ●

Sahred From Source link Science

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[bildungohnealtersgrenze]

Here is the deal, I am sure we all feel the same about the fast changing world and all the exciting things happening around us. I am not saying that everything we see is great or event horrible. It might be just the perspective on how we see things. Are you familiar with Ritzer? Ritzer was a sociologist who lived in ….. and talked about the changes in society due to a phanomen called McDonaldisierung. What does this really mean? Here we go, I think McDonaldisierung is a process of fast movement. Fast movement due to companies telling you how lucky you are to get this great deal. In the beginning of McDonald, they had to sell you how lucky you are to pay less if you agree to clean up your own food in the restaurant (McDonald, Starbucks and all other fast food restaurants we really know). In real, Mc Donald figured out a system to make money by getting into your head by selling you a different experience in partaking your food. Slightly cheaper than in a Restaurant were the waiter is serving you. Mc Donald sold you the comfort of eating out at his place. Bringing your garbage to the bin, and cleaning up after you. It does not bother any of us since you are made to feel home. The kids can eat like at home and even play in the dinning hall. In real, the company saves a tone of money through this business model. Now guess why so many companies followed this model and changed the way we live today? Got it? I don’t think it happened because they care much about you or your family, but they do care about your money. The result of a few decades of fast food business models is obesity, unhealthy ways of eating, fewer family meals and so on. Even at home, we live their business model of calculation, predictively and efficiency. It´s totally implemented in our society and lives at home.

A quick story for you: My child´s group is going to china next year and in return, we are getting a child from china for a week. I am very excited and looking forward to our little visitor. One mother told a story of a child they once hosted, the child is of course the only child at home since China has the one child policy. The children face many expectations back home; early getting up, school, short breaks, more school, tutoring, music lessons, dinner and more school until late at night. No time for family life. During the one week with his host family, he experienced for the first-time what family life can really look like. They played games, eat dinners together and so one. The child was so grateful for this experience and asked the family to repeat it night for night. To be honest, that´s how we are going to live, if we don’t put a stop to it.

Back to more theories about our changing society. In the working environment, our lovely cooperation’s, we call it flexible capitalism. Working in a cooperation, we accept to live with low loyalty und little identifications, short term employment or a change of roles every few years. Due to those changes, high competition between teams, colleagues, partners, leaders and so on. What are the result of such an environment we have to face day by day. Little social connections, fewer social relationships, loneliness and much more. Cooperation’s handing out short term contracts with very little protections to their employee´s. I grew up in Germany. A contract with an employer was always based on an unlimited stay unless you did something really wrong. You identified yourself with the company and became very loyal, if not you looked for another company, a better match. Today, you have to create a profile like a company would do to sell his product. In sociology, we speak of a product, you as a working person are the product (you produce by getting education and lots of certificates and experiences), you as a product can only produce money as long as you are healthy and as long as you keep up with the standards of a good product (always a little more to difference you). The world is full of products – can you see the competition? McDonald is telling us how much he loves us, we are family and wants to serve us, we are family! Can you see how much it has changed the way we live and operate or better are operated??? It is all about money and more money and you have the right to go with the flow of create your life the way you want to life. Remember, money is an important exchange, but how much do you need, will always to be determined on your desired life style. Which sacrifice are you willing to take. Will it be worth it at the end? Is it maybe time to slow down and think about the giving options out there once more and our wants?

Changes are great of course. Living during the time before the industrialisations, no way, we really don’t want to go back there. Looking at Karl Marx’s and his believes that the new political economic theory that he was espousing – scientific socialism – needed to be built on the base of a thoroughly developed materialistic view of the world. He believed that our social class determines our social life, he also only differentiated between two classes, the bourgeoisie (the one who have money and products to work with and the proletariat (the ones who have only their hands to work with and of course their brain power to support their family). It is much easier today, thanks to people who started to fight for changes and improvement, thanks for advanced technology and education for all.  (I realize that we can discuss and go much deeper, but I will leave it as rather a brought idea and let you look up the ideas your selves a little more. Social changes have been important for us but how far is it bringing us and why are we still so unhappy as a society? We have political, world leaders, who are simply bored with what they do and looking for fights and conflicts. Those leaders around the world, the ones who are bored looking at more power and trying to take it from you. Watch out! This does happen in some countries around the world and I will let you determine which countries are heading this way.  Really, do we really still need to fight for land and power? Can we not just be happy with what we got and share with the ones who missed the boat or otherwise challenged. Can you imagine how easy life would be in many emotional ways as well as in materialistic ways. People would feel secured and supported. I am not sure if cooperation´s want you to feel this way, because that would not trigger the buying power. We only buy staff if we really, really need something and to fulfil out wants. Go to TJ Max … do the people in there because the winter coat does not fit anymore (in some cases that is the case) or do people (including me) buy stuff there because it gives us quick satisfaction and that feels like a quick hug.

I feel like, as older I get, that I am not willing to be as controlled as I am, but I realize that my chances are limited since a cooperation is anonymous -to who do you talk to if you want less control. Hard to get to a person … because there is no one person responsible anymore.

Power – control is upon all of us – it is difficult to find the person in charge. In a Ted Talk, Eric Liu once said, “The right thinks democracy comes from the power of the government. The left believes power resides only with cooperation’s. The blind thinks good things just happen and the cynical thinks bad thinks just happens because it just does.” He invites us to take control and not to believe that power is something “big people” can only use, getting your idea across is very important, especially in a changing society like ours.  Find your way, find your voice in your own community even if it´s your own family  you want to guide and inform. Beginning by collecting the right facts, the work should not stop you since knowledge and the right information and sources are the power big cooperation’s and the media is using. Just like that. Power is confidence and believes.

The power of the big wide web … but more later.

(All images in this gallery were provided NASA / NSSDC) and

(https://pixabay.com/en/chess-strategy-chess-board-316658/)

Here is the deal, I am sure we all feel the same about the fast changing world and all the exciting things happening around us.

[makeitwithmike]

3 Essential Facebook Ad Targeting Tips for B2C Businesses

By Ana Gotter

The first time you went to create a Facebook ads campaign and got to the targeting section, what was your first thought? Mine was “Wow, this is incredible, you can target anyone.” And then I was immediately overwhelmed because there were so many options and I had no idea how to use them.

There an endless number of combinations you can use to target your audience. You could zero in on female B2B decision-makers who live in Colorado and like art galleries, if you want to. In theory, this is fantastic, but in reality most businesses end up getting stuck because they don’t know who to target when.

There’s plenty of great strategies out there that you can use to target specific audiences on Facebook, but not all are created equal. So, we took the time to gather advice from a number of Facebook ad experts. Here are their strategies.

1. Start with the audience you already have

It can be difficult—if not impossible—to build a relevant audience starting with Facebook’s two billion users. In many cases, it’s more effective to start with the audience you already have.

This advice was shared by all our experts. When you use custom audiences, you know who you’re targeting and what their relationship is with your business—a huge advantage. This allows you to create highly-targeted campaigns with messages geared for specific audiences.

Facebook ad expert Aaron Orendorff, founder of iconiContent, says:

“The most often overlooked targets are your existing Facebook fans—people who have liked your Page, interacted with your posts, or watched your videos. Marketers and merchants get so caught up in the euphoria of new customers they forget to go after the customers or followers they already have. By targeting people who have already shown an interest in your content or product, you take advantage of momentum.

Facebook’s custom audience dashboard makes this incredibly easy through their ‘Engagement’ setting. You can even create an overlapping audience from your Instagram engagements, where sales and conversions are notoriously low, and feature ads to that same audience on Facebook, where sales and conversions shine.”

2. Create lookalike audiences based on high-converting custom audiences

Ideally, when running campaigns with your custom audiences, you should be split testing your ads to see what really works.

Paul Fairbrother from AdEspresso says:

“On your custom audience campaigns, you should always A/B test two headlines, two ad texts and two graphics (or videos) in each campaign so that you can see what features and benefits your audience prefers. Test significantly different ad creative so that you get significantly different results—don’t just change one word. Wherever possible wait three or four days before picking the winning creative and then turn off the underperforming ones to save money and increase performance. Once you do this, you’ll have a firm understanding of what works for your custom audiences and apply this to lookalike audiences with cold audience members for better results.”

Once you’ve figured out what works for your custom audiences, you can create lookalike audiences off those custom audiences and show them similar campaigns and offers.

Jacob Baadsgaard, CEO of Disruptive Advertising, says:

“Stop assuming people are on Facebook to buy your products or services! Most businesses fail to successfully advertise to consumers on Facebook because they assume people are further along in the buying cycle than they really are. Start with the low hanging fruit by retargeting your existing site traffic on Facebook and cross-selling customers who have bought from you before by uploading them into Facebook. From there you can create lookalike audiences and test your way into additional hyper-targeted audiences that are more likely to buy.”

Logan Young, vice president of BlitzMetrics, says:

“If you have an existing business that is generating traffic and conversions, then your primary focus should be amplifying what’s already working. That means your targeting efforts should be on creating multiple custom audiences (web, email, app, page engagement, offline) and then creating lookalikes off the best of these custom audiences.

In other words, let Facebook do the work for you. Let their algorithm do the heavy lifting to figure out who will become a lead, who will buy, and who will come to your store. So the best thing you can do is feed in the cleanest signal by having your digital plumbing in place. That means your Facebook and Google pixels set up properly inside a tag manager, your email audiences segmented by value and funnel stage, and many video remarketing audiences—people who have viewed your videos at least 10 seconds.”

3. Use your momentum

There’s another big benefit to starting your overall ads strategy with custom audiences: it gives you powerful momentum. Facebook will automatically start to get a better idea of what types of users respond to your ads. Their algorithms are smart, and once you get them going, they’ll do the hard work for you.

After a few highly-targeted campaigns on custom audiences, you can run simpler campaigns with large lookalike audiences and let Facebook’s algorithm step in.

Dennis Yu, CFO of BlitzMetrics and Adweek contributor, says:

“Create fewer, simpler campaigns. Instead of multiplying out hundreds of ad sets with complex targets, find a couple winners that rely upon large lookalike audiences. If you have at least 20 conversions a week per ad set and have chosen your true business objective, Facebook’s algorithm will now do most of the heavy lifting for you.

I used to spend days creating new campaigns, meticulously crafting micro-targeted audiences I was so proud of. But now, we rely upon optimized CP—bidding by business objective—on larger audiences of just a dozen ad sets. Then there are less exclusion audiences to manage, more data per ad set for the system to optimize from, and way less work for me.

Done the way Facebook now recommends, an ad campaign for a B2C brand should take less than 30 minutes a day to manage and optimize. What will cost you time is procuring new content, teaching other team members, and preparing reports—stuff other than actually tweaking campaigns.”

Logan Young, vice president of BlitzMetrics, says:

“We see a lot of ‘sophisticated’ B2C companies go crazy creating tons of audiences, only to find a few months later that ‘their garden has weeds’—stale audiences that aren’t being used, were used just once, are no longer relevant, or weren’t producing.

Because Facebook has improved their optimization so much in the last six months, we find that having fewer audiences is a smarter strategy, as it gives Facebook more room to learn, getting to the 20 conversions per ad set per week threshold necessary to tune.”

Facebook’s custom audience feature is an incredible asset that many businesses new to B2C sales often underestimate. It’s easy to be wowed with interest and behavior targeting (both of which work in their own right), and to forget that custom and lookalike audiences can be extremely powerful targeting tools when used correctly.

Get the most out of your Facebook ad budget with AdEspresso by Hootsuite. The powerful tool makes it easy to create, manage, and optimize Facebook ad campaigns.

Learn More

The post 3 Essential Facebook Ad Targeting Tips for B2C Businesses appeared first on Hootsuite Social Media Management.

The post 3 Essential Facebook Ad Targeting Tips for B2C Businesses appeared first on Make It With Michael.

from 3 Essential Facebook Ad Targeting Tips for B2C Businesses

[bizmediaweb]

3 Essential Facebook Ad Targeting Tips for B2C Businesses

The first time you went to create a Facebook ads campaign and got to the targeting section, what was your first thought? Mine was “Wow, this is incredible, you can target anyone.” And then I was immediately overwhelmed because there were so many options and I had no idea how to use them.

There an endless number of combinations you can use to target your audience. You could zero in on female B2B decision-makers who live in Colorado and like art galleries, if you want to. In theory, this is fantastic, but in reality most businesses end up getting stuck because they don’t know who to target when.

There’s plenty of great strategies out there that you can use to target specific audiences on Facebook, but not all are created equal. So, we took the time to gather advice from a number of Facebook ad experts. Here are their strategies.

1. Start with the audience you already have

It can be difficult—if not impossible—to build a relevant audience starting with Facebook’s two billion users. In many cases, it’s more effective to start with the audience you already have.

This advice was shared by all our experts. When you use custom audiences, you know who you’re targeting and what their relationship is with your business—a huge advantage. This allows you to create highly-targeted campaigns with messages geared for specific audiences.

Facebook ad expert Aaron Orendorff, founder of iconiContent, says:

“The most often overlooked targets are your existing Facebook fans—people who have liked your Page, interacted with your posts, or watched your videos. Marketers and merchants get so caught up in the euphoria of new customers they forget to go after the customers or followers they already have. By targeting people who have already shown an interest in your content or product, you take advantage of momentum.

Facebook’s custom audience dashboard makes this incredibly easy through their ‘Engagement’ setting. You can even create an overlapping audience from your Instagram engagements, where sales and conversions are notoriously low, and feature ads to that same audience on Facebook, where sales and conversions shine.”

2. Create lookalike audiences based on high-converting custom audiences

Ideally, when running campaigns with your custom audiences, you should be split testing your ads to see what really works.

Paul Fairbrother from AdEspresso says:

“On your custom audience campaigns, you should always A/B test two headlines, two ad texts and two graphics (or videos) in each campaign so that you can see what features and benefits your audience prefers. Test significantly different ad creative so that you get significantly different results—don’t just change one word. Wherever possible wait three or four days before picking the winning creative and then turn off the underperforming ones to save money and increase performance. Once you do this, you’ll have a firm understanding of what works for your custom audiences and apply this to lookalike audiences with cold audience members for better results.”

Once you’ve figured out what works for your custom audiences, you can create lookalike audiences off those custom audiences and show them similar campaigns and offers.

Jacob Baadsgaard, CEO of Disruptive Advertising, says:

“Stop assuming people are on Facebook to buy your products or services! Most businesses fail to successfully advertise to consumers on Facebook because they assume people are further along in the buying cycle than they really are. Start with the low hanging fruit by retargeting your existing site traffic on Facebook and cross-selling customers who have bought from you before by uploading them into Facebook. From there you can create lookalike audiences and test your way into additional hyper-targeted audiences that are more likely to buy.”

Logan Young, vice president of BlitzMetrics, says:

“If you have an existing business that is generating traffic and conversions, then your primary focus should be amplifying what’s already working. That means your targeting efforts should be on creating multiple custom audiences (web, email, app, page engagement, offline) and then creating lookalikes off the best of these custom audiences.

In other words, let Facebook do the work for you. Let their algorithm do the heavy lifting to figure out who will become a lead, who will buy, and who will come to your store. So the best thing you can do is feed in the cleanest signal by having your digital plumbing in place. That means your Facebook and Google pixels set up properly inside a tag manager, your email audiences segmented by value and funnel stage, and many video remarketing audiences—people who have viewed your videos at least 10 seconds.”

3. Use your momentum

There’s another big benefit to starting your overall ads strategy with custom audiences: it gives you powerful momentum. Facebook will automatically start to get a better idea of what types of users respond to your ads. Their algorithms are smart, and once you get them going, they’ll do the hard work for you.

After a few highly-targeted campaigns on custom audiences, you can run simpler campaigns with large lookalike audiences and let Facebook’s algorithm step in.

Dennis Yu, CFO of BlitzMetrics and Adweek contributor, says:

“Create fewer, simpler campaigns. Instead of multiplying out hundreds of ad sets with complex targets, find a couple winners that rely upon large lookalike audiences. If you have at least 20 conversions a week per ad set and have chosen your true business objective, Facebook’s algorithm will now do most of the heavy lifting for you.

I used to spend days creating new campaigns, meticulously crafting micro-targeted audiences I was so proud of. But now, we rely upon optimized CP—bidding by business objective—on larger audiences of just a dozen ad sets. Then there are less exclusion audiences to manage, more data per ad set for the system to optimize from, and way less work for me.

Done the way Facebook now recommends, an ad campaign for a B2C brand should take less than 30 minutes a day to manage and optimize. What will cost you time is procuring new content, teaching other team members, and preparing reports—stuff other than actually tweaking campaigns.”

Logan Young, vice president of BlitzMetrics, says:

“We see a lot of ‘sophisticated’ B2C companies go crazy creating tons of audiences, only to find a few months later that ‘their garden has weeds’—stale audiences that aren’t being used, were used just once, are no longer relevant, or weren’t producing.

Because Facebook has improved their optimization so much in the last six months, we find that having fewer audiences is a smarter strategy, as it gives Facebook more room to learn, getting to the 20 conversions per ad set per week threshold necessary to tune.”

Facebook’s custom audience feature is an incredible asset that many businesses new to B2C sales often underestimate. It’s easy to be wowed with interest and behavior targeting (both of which work in their own right), and to forget that custom and lookalike audiences can be extremely powerful targeting tools when used correctly.

Get the most out of your Facebook ad budget with AdEspresso by Hootsuite. The powerful tool makes it easy to create, manage, and optimize Facebook ad campaigns.

Learn More

The post 3 Essential Facebook Ad Targeting Tips for B2C Businesses appeared first on Hootsuite Social Media Management.

3 Essential Facebook Ad Targeting Tips for B2C Businesses published first on http://ift.tt/2u73Z29

[unifiedsocialblog]

3 Essential Facebook Ad Targeting Tips for B2C Businesses

The first time you went to create a Facebook ads campaign and got to the targeting section, what was your first thought? Mine was “Wow, this is incredible, you can target anyone.” And then I was immediately overwhelmed because there were so many options and I had no idea how to use them.

There an endless number of combinations you can use to target your audience. You could zero in on female B2B decision-makers who live in Colorado and like art galleries, if you want to. In theory, this is fantastic, but in reality most businesses end up getting stuck because they don’t know who to target when.

There’s plenty of great strategies out there that you can use to target specific audiences on Facebook, but not all are created equal. So, we took the time to gather advice from a number of Facebook ad experts. Here are their strategies.

1. Start with the audience you already have

It can be difficult—if not impossible—to build a relevant audience starting with Facebook’s two billion users. In many cases, it’s more effective to start with the audience you already have.

This advice was shared by all our experts. When you use custom audiences, you know who you’re targeting and what their relationship is with your business—a huge advantage. This allows you to create highly-targeted campaigns with messages geared for specific audiences.

Facebook ad expert Aaron Orendorff, founder of iconiContent, says:

“The most often overlooked targets are your existing Facebook fans—people who have liked your Page, interacted with your posts, or watched your videos. Marketers and merchants get so caught up in the euphoria of new customers they forget to go after the customers or followers they already have. By targeting people who have already shown an interest in your content or product, you take advantage of momentum.

Facebook’s custom audience dashboard makes this incredibly easy through their ‘Engagement’ setting. You can even create an overlapping audience from your Instagram engagements, where sales and conversions are notoriously low, and feature ads to that same audience on Facebook, where sales and conversions shine.”

2. Create lookalike audiences based on high-converting custom audiences

Ideally, when running campaigns with your custom audiences, you should be split testing your ads to see what really works.

Paul Fairbrother from AdEspresso says:

“On your custom audience campaigns, you should always A/B test two headlines, two ad texts and two graphics (or videos) in each campaign so that you can see what features and benefits your audience prefers. Test significantly different ad creative so that you get significantly different results—don’t just change one word. Wherever possible wait three or four days before picking the winning creative and then turn off the underperforming ones to save money and increase performance. Once you do this, you’ll have a firm understanding of what works for your custom audiences and apply this to lookalike audiences with cold audience members for better results.”

Once you’ve figured out what works for your custom audiences, you can create lookalike audiences off those custom audiences and show them similar campaigns and offers.

Jacob Baadsgaard, CEO of Disruptive Advertising, says:

“Stop assuming people are on Facebook to buy your products or services! Most businesses fail to successfully advertise to consumers on Facebook because they assume people are further along in the buying cycle than they really are. Start with the low hanging fruit by retargeting your existing site traffic on Facebook and cross-selling customers who have bought from you before by uploading them into Facebook. From there you can create lookalike audiences and test your way into additional hyper-targeted audiences that are more likely to buy.”

Logan Young, vice president of BlitzMetrics, says:

“If you have an existing business that is generating traffic and conversions, then your primary focus should be amplifying what’s already working. That means your targeting efforts should be on creating multiple custom audiences (web, email, app, page engagement, offline) and then creating lookalikes off the best of these custom audiences.

In other words, let Facebook do the work for you. Let their algorithm do the heavy lifting to figure out who will become a lead, who will buy, and who will come to your store. So the best thing you can do is feed in the cleanest signal by having your digital plumbing in place. That means your Facebook and Google pixels set up properly inside a tag manager, your email audiences segmented by value and funnel stage, and many video remarketing audiences—people who have viewed your videos at least 10 seconds.”

3. Use your momentum

There’s another big benefit to starting your overall ads strategy with custom audiences: it gives you powerful momentum. Facebook will automatically start to get a better idea of what types of users respond to your ads. Their algorithms are smart, and once you get them going, they’ll do the hard work for you.

After a few highly-targeted campaigns on custom audiences, you can run simpler campaigns with large lookalike audiences and let Facebook’s algorithm step in.

Dennis Yu, CFO of BlitzMetrics and Adweek contributor, says:

“Create fewer, simpler campaigns. Instead of multiplying out hundreds of ad sets with complex targets, find a couple winners that rely upon large lookalike audiences. If you have at least 20 conversions a week per ad set and have chosen your true business objective, Facebook’s algorithm will now do most of the heavy lifting for you.

I used to spend days creating new campaigns, meticulously crafting micro-targeted audiences I was so proud of. But now, we rely upon optimized CP—bidding by business objective—on larger audiences of just a dozen ad sets. Then there are less exclusion audiences to manage, more data per ad set for the system to optimize from, and way less work for me.

Done the way Facebook now recommends, an ad campaign for a B2C brand should take less than 30 minutes a day to manage and optimize. What will cost you time is procuring new content, teaching other team members, and preparing reports—stuff other than actually tweaking campaigns.”

Logan Young, vice president of BlitzMetrics, says:

“We see a lot of ‘sophisticated’ B2C companies go crazy creating tons of audiences, only to find a few months later that ‘their garden has weeds’—stale audiences that aren’t being used, were used just once, are no longer relevant, or weren’t producing.

Because Facebook has improved their optimization so much in the last six months, we find that having fewer audiences is a smarter strategy, as it gives Facebook more room to learn, getting to the 20 conversions per ad set per week threshold necessary to tune.”

Facebook’s custom audience feature is an incredible asset that many businesses new to B2C sales often underestimate. It’s easy to be wowed with interest and behavior targeting (both of which work in their own right), and to forget that custom and lookalike audiences can be extremely powerful targeting tools when used correctly.

Get the most out of your Facebook ad budget with AdEspresso by Hootsuite. The powerful tool makes it easy to create, manage, and optimize Facebook ad campaigns.

Learn More

The post 3 Essential Facebook Ad Targeting Tips for B2C Businesses appeared first on Hootsuite Social Media Management.

3 Essential Facebook Ad Targeting Tips for B2C Businesses published first on http://ift.tt/2rEvyAw