#I mean like vertically cracked partially in half

[ejacutastic]

broke another tooth apparently

[tparker48]

Request for preyslave

"Hello ladies and gentlemen of the internet! Welcome back to your lovely broadcast of our favorite games, Can. You. Take. It! Today we have a very special guest for you tonight. Allow us to introduce you to our lucky volunteer that we flew across to be here today. Give it up for.." A panel would open open from the floor as pole lifted up from. At the top of it, you would be tied to the to its side as a blind fold covered over your eyes. "This little guy!" nothing but the sound of cheering welcomed your senses as your legs dangled in the air.

"Grg!...ghh!...ghg!"

"Ah ah ah, don't go and hurt yourself little one. They may be props, but that strings is a real stinker. Begin of stinkers, let's bring in our contestants. Tim, Lyan, come on down to the stage!" the two would make their way down as they came in nothing but there briefs. Tim was a very lean figure. A little skinny when it comes to size but more tone muscled. Lyan was more broader of the two as he had a little more muscle compared to ryan. But only slightly shorter as his head reached Tim's shoulders. "There they are, quite the contestants am I right folks? Now, here's the deal gents. The game of the goal is make this little guy tap out from your smells alone. The one who wins, they get a very special prize!"

"There is no way im participating in your games" you yelled into the open air

"Well then my little friend, you'd be missing out on your grand prize to"

"Prize?"

"Yes indeed. for your participation, you'll recieve your own pass to a jacuzzi all to yourself. A courtesy on being a volunteer" the announcer bellowed into the mic. He soon covered it over with a hand as he whispered over to the contestants.

"A jacuzzi huh?...mmm...fine, i'll play your game. But could you at least remove the blindfold off!"

"Why of course" he plucked the strap along the side of your head as before lifting it upward. The lights blinded your eyes, but soon adjusted themselves as they were my by the two contestants looming overhead. "Oh ho...they are...massive" you looked up nervously.

"Alright contestants, ready your positions. First round will be judged by...belches!" The pole would shift as you found yourself between their torso. The pole would soon rise you more into the air as the tip stopped along their lips. "The rules are simple, make him tap, and you win the match. Lyan, you're up first".

"Ho ho, i've been meanin to let's some air out of this tank" Lyan gasped in some air into his mouth as he forced it down to his stomach. A light groan followed along as his belly extended slightly towards. Taking in a couple of more, his belly bulge into the pole as he lightly pushed into your form. "Yeah, i'd that's enough.." He flexed his stomach more into you as you pushed into it. Its surface was squishy, but his abdomen stopped you hands from sinking further.

He soon leaned down partially, just enough for your upper half to be aligned with his lips before he opened his mouth. Only a rumble came from back of the throat, as you stared into his gullet and seen the muscles inside tighten and then loosen in its place. The rumble would sound return. But this time, a rush of air came from his mouth and onto the pole. The scent was warm as you breath washed over you.

"Oh what a mighty belch folks! Let's get a close in view of the little guy huh?"

The camera screen zoomed into you as you rocked your head from side to side. "Ooh I think my head is spinning.." You say as try to take a breath of fresh air.

"My my folks, the little one seems to be in a daze. How much points shall we give him.." The crowd shuffled through their cards before holding up a panel of 7's. "Perfect sevens? Now that's a pretty good start of the round. Give him a round of applause!" The announcer said as the crowd cheered behind him.

"Sorry, little dude. Body tends to do that to people" he pushed his belly against you as its girth squished into the pole. "One you'll learn eventually..." With a shift he made his belly slide off the pole. As he made his way to the sidelines

"What do you mean by tha-"

"Alright folks! Next up in the round we have Tim! Think he can out belch Lyan? Let's find out" the announced said. A shadow would then cast over you as the tall figure looked down below. His chin partial visible, but his eyes peered into you as he lowered himself down.

"I may not have the muscle work as the other guy, but I got my tricks" he took in an a couple of breath as he swallowed it down to his stomach. Its form would swell behinds his six pack as it tucked its surface into sides of his arms. There was a brief moment of silence as you both stared at each other. The sounds of his stomach churning up was silently there, but soon its presence grew louder as his neck began to flex. He opened his mouth and release the air from within. His neck would tighten before a rocky rumble came out. It was more softer compared to the one lyan gave you, but it's scent was more sour as the air flow into you like a breeze. You nostrils would flare as you shifted it from left to right, but no matter where you turned, the hot breath still lingered.

"Gah that wreaks! What did you even eat!" You say doing your best to clear your nostrils.

"Heh, had some veggies before I came here. By the look on your face, that seem to do the trick huh squirt" he tapped a finger on you as he ruffled your hair. Returning back to his side aa he waited for the results.

"Now that's what I call a soft but fierce approach am I right folks? What do you think we should give for his fine performance?" He announced. The crowd whispered to themselves for a bit before drawing onto their boards. As they held them up, 8 would be on all their boards.

"Well well, a perfect eight! Looks like Tim's the winner in this round! Give him a hand folks!" The crowd cheered as the music played along the side of the stage. They would soon quiet down as the announcer rose up a hand. "And now, onto the round two. Hope the little guy's nose is fit for the job, cause this next round is based off of....butt sniffing!" The pole would lower down slightly as it shrunk to half to half to half height. A rotater would appear below the pole as wheels attached to the bottom. "Since we gave lyan the first start, let's say we give Tim the honors to go first. Show the crowd whatcha got!"

Tim would make his way to the pole as he stood in front of you. Appearing even taller than before at your current height, he placed his hands along his sides as he winked down at you. He turned around as he pulled down his briefs and spread spread them apart to reveal as slightly hairy crack in between. "Better brace yourself little one".

"Oh dear.."

"Alright Tim, when ever you are ready" the announcer ushered. Tim would would only reply with a nod as he leaned down wedged the tip of of the pole vertically into his crack. Ass hairs would fill your vision, and the fresh musk would fill your nostrils as you shuffled your upper half in between them. The wheels beginning to rotate as the. As it lifted you deeply into the crack and lowered you down. With each press, it pressed you harder into the hairs as the sphincter puckered just on the other side. Eventually, after about a minute, the wheels would cease as a bell rang to end Tim's turn. Still holding onto his cheeks, he would lift himself off the pole as his ass hairs caressed your face on its depart.

"My, that was the quite the hairy embrace folks. Let's take a look at the little guy" the camera would zoom in as focused on you. You had a furrowed look on your face as the as your puffed air through your nose. "Looks like the little guy was unfazed on that one, high spirited in fact. Well folks, what should give our contestant Tim here?.." The crowd would shuffle their cards for before as they conversed with each other. They soon drawed out a six as they held it in the air. "A six huh? A pretty good number for your performance Tim. And now, we have Lyan next up to the plate" Lyan would would stand in front of you as he gave out a smirk. Turning around, he pulled down his pants as his ass came into view. Its form starting bulging out as it wobbled in place. He pulled both cheeks apart as you have a clear view his crack further within. The walls were less hairy compared to Tim as slightly sweat made the muscled form glisten.

"Show us what you got Lyan!"

"Let's see how long that expression of yours lasts little dude" he pulled his cheeks past the pole as it eased between his crack. Your body would rest against the sphincter, but the cheeks would continue to wedge you deeper as they morphed the pole into them. As he let them go, his cheeks submerged the tip of the pole between them as the pole started to rotate.

Liquid would drench you close as the sphincter winked into you. The slick skin mushing into you as the wheel lifted the pole to drive you deeper. With each press, your face would squish between his sphincter as it clenched and relax.

"That's way too much...grgh!..sweat!" You muffled between.

"And That's not the only thing you're dealing with" Lyan said squeezing his cheeks together. The sounds of gurgles would linger behind the hole as its form would push into you. It soon rumbled his and released gas from deep inside its ripe smell sent your nose in rage. On the inside, your body would now ve struggling to get a chance of fresh air. But on the outside, only the mounds of ass could be seen as they hid your struggling form from sight. The crowd would listen to the farts Lyan sent out as they pondered what you were enduring deeper inside. Eventually, they got there chance to see as the bell finally rang. "Aww darn, looks like my times up" Lyan adjusted his legs before pulling his ass off the pole. From a slow ascent from the asscrack, you gasped for air as sweat covered your entire body.

"What a swell performance folks. I could smell that from all the way over here. What do ya say we give?" The crowd would raise up 10 as they shined it through the air. "What do ya know, a perfect 10. Looks like you hyped up the crowd on that one Lyan. A swell job".

"Never again...never again" you mumbled to yourself.

"And now, it looks like we've reached the end of the show. From the points we've gathered from the two contestants, we have concluded that...Lyan is the winner of todays show"

"Yes!"

"Aw well, there's always next time" Tim shrugged.

"Congratulations Mr Lyan. You've truly deserve it. You both do. Speaking of deserve" the announcer goes and retrieve you from the pole. "It's time for your reward little one. As promised, your pass to tour own private jacuzzi.

"Yes! Finally i get to relax from all this!"

"Indeed. for a special time only, enjoy your time at the luxury jacuzzi...lyan's belly"

"Hehe, that's a good one. But seriously where is it? Is it behind"

"You could say that.." Lyan would toss you into the air as he opened his mouth wide.

"No no, wait! That's not what i agreed to-**gulp**" Lyan's throat would take you in before you felt the throat muscles drag you into his body. A bulge residing along his neck before disappearing into his collar Bone. There wasn't a bulge to signify you, but Lyan could feel every move you'd make as he gave his belly a firm pat.

"Enjoy your time little one" the announcer spike to Lyan's stomach. "Speaking of time, thank you all for tuning in on tonights broadcast. Without you, this show wouldn't be any special without the lovely cheers from you my lovely. Catch ya next time on, Can. You. Take. It!" The announcer said before ending the show.

Meanwhile in Lyan's stomach, younwould be slouched along a side of his belly's wall as the sound of churns echoes around. "Knew i should've gotten that deal in writing. This always happens whi I don't" you groaned. "Well, least it's empty. Pfft, jacuzzi my ass" the opening of the stomach above would soon open as the chamber began to fill up with liquid. "Son of a..."

[captaincravatthecapricious]

Here’s a sickfic I might finish but I should probably just post here now in case I never do

Uhhhhhh cw nausea and vomiting mention

I’m gonna @celosiaa because you are the only reason I am posting this at all.  And maybe you can nudge me to finish this at some point.  

Jon isn’t sure where he thought he’d wake up.  Possibly at his desk?  Or in his bed?  (Unlikely).  Does he even still have a bed?  The institute floor if he was unlucky?  The break room couch or the cot if he was considerably more lucky.  The point is, he feels like shit and he didn’t remember going to sleep.  Which probably wasn’t a good sign.  He lets himself drift for a while longer.  

Jon wakes in fits and starts.  

One moment he’s mostly aware the next he’s snapping back awake thus leading him to the conclusion that he wasn’t before.  A cycle that he is stuck in for several minutes.  He is not aware enough to properly examine where he might actually be.  

He’s too dizzy to think and his eyes feel gummy and puffy, and everything hurts.  

Sick?  Is he sick?  Not statement sick, but properly sick?  

Yes that tracks.  Sore throat.  Queasy.  Headache.  

Ugh.  

He lays there for a while longer.  And promptly drops back off.  

~~~~~~~

Jon stirs in Tim’s lap.  Be blinks a  few times and groans.  Jon has been all but passed out in Tim’s lap for hours.  

He isn’t even sure why he bothered.  

Tim sighs.  He knows Jon is awake now, and he very much needs Jon to have some liquids.  And some fever reducers.  “Jon?”  He asks softly.  He doesn’t want to frighten Jon.  

Jon’s shaky breathing catches in what Tim very much fears is a sob.  What the hell is he supposed to say to a crying Jon?  “Tim?”  Jon’s response is quavering and damp.  He still hasn’t really moved.  Tim is more than a little worried that Jon doesn’t seem to have the energy to even shift position.  

“Back with me?”  Christ, Tim hopes Jon is.  

Jon spent most of the car ride to Tim’s flat crying, apologizing, gibbering about god knows what, and looking more than a little like he was going to be very ill (something Tim would have worried about if he wasn’t reasonably sure Jon had already expelled everything in him before Tim managed to half carry him out of the Archives).  (He debated A&E, but ultimately decided Jon might accidentally compel the staff and cause a lot of problems.  But if Tim couldn’t get his fever down, or get him to keep down liquids, then he’d take him in.)  Tim tried to find it irritating, but honestly it had just made his heart hurt.  

Jon just whimpers.  

Tim gently cards his fingers through Jon’s hair.  Jon shivers a little.  This flu has been going around the Archives but even though Jon has been the last to catch it, he seems to have it the worst.  Tim doesn’t think he was ever this far gone.  (Martin would probably be the one here if he wasn’t still sleeping off the last of his fight with this.)

Jon blinks a few more times, swallows drily, and asks, “Tim….?  Wha’ you doing?  Thought you were out today?”

“First day back.  Found you passed out in the loo.”  Tim hasn’t decided if he wants to be nice.  (A bit late to not be, considering he drove Jon to his (Tim’s) flat and is letting Jon cuddle him even though Jon is kind of disgusting at this point and is going to share the leftovers of the soup and medicine and lucozade he stocked up on the moment he knew he was coming down with something.)

Jon squirms a bit so he’s looking up at Tim.  His face going from confusion, to embarrassment, to dawning realization when he (presumably) he notices he’s partially in Tim’s lap.  “You hate me.”  It’s a question, but not a question of if Tim hates him.  

Jon’s slurring.  Which can’t possibly be good.  Tim takes in his puzzled look and takes that to mean ‘Hey Tim, I’m too much of an arsehole to thank you for letting me use you as a well toned body pillow let’s jump right into the boo hoo I’m a victim of the universe and I’ll take everyone down with me and I know this so why could someone I’ve so terribly wronged be being nice to me.’  No.  That’s not right.  And that’s not fair.  Tim does want to blame Jon for everything.  But that would make him a hypocrite.  Sure Tim didn’t stalk his coworkers after the Prentiss thing, but where Jon got paranoid, he got angry.  They both pushed each other away.  Not to mention…. he did accuse Jon of murder…. which is what he was angry at Jon for accusing him of…. It is Jon’s fault that he is stuck in the archives, but Jon’s just as stuck as he is.  And it’s not Jon’s fault that Sasha...  He’s not a heartless dick, he couldn’t just leave Jon to possibly drown himself in the toilet.  

“Debatable.”  Tim can’t really explain it any better than that for now.  He blames Jon, yeah.  Sure.  Easy.  Of course he blames Jon.  …But he knows it isn’t Jon’s fault, and as much as he wants to forget that.  He can’t.  And he can’t forget the years of friendship before all this.  Maybe they weren’t as close as he presumes he and Sasha were… but they were close.  

Jon looks even more confused.  And then he looks rather nauseous.  He closes his eyes again.  

“I need you to drink something before you pass out again.”  He should probably try to be nicer, because Jon flinches at his tone, and tries to make himself even smaller.  

This isn’t news.  Jon has flinched because of Tim a lot.  He knows he shouldn’t be proud of this, but he is.  

“And don’t puke on my couch.”

Jon just whines.  

Tim gets impatient and mostly carefully leavers Jon up enough that he can press a  Lucozade into his hands.  

Jon’s eyes flick open slowly.  He blinks a few times as he tries to comprehend what he’s holding.  

“You’re supposed to drink that,” Tim says helpfully.  

“Thought you wanted me not to puke.”

Tim is reasonable sure that was supposed to be a joke, but Jon’s eyes squeeze tight against dizziness, so Tim nudges the bin he preset nearer.  

“Drink the goddamn thing or I’ll have to take you to A&E and I’ll really be fucking pissed.”  There isn’t any real heat to Tim’s words.  But that doesn’t stop Jon for fumbling with the lid.  

Christ he looks so pathetic.  His hands are shaking almost too badly to get it to his mouth and he would not be vertical if Tim let go.  And sad.  Was he just stuck with those damn puppy dog eyes?  

But could Tim really blame him?  Enough people have kicked the shit out of Jon that he really can’t blame Jon for looking like a kicked puppy.  

Jon drinks cautiously.  He looks mildly surprised when nothing bad happens.  

Tim props him up against the back of the couch so he can pass Jon some more fever reducers.  Jon carefully takes those as well.  He shakily closes the still half full sports drink and closes his eyes again.  He’s listing sideways.   

It’s dark out when Jon wakes up again. He can’t quite recall what time of day it was when he was last conscious.  He thinks he might be slightly more aware.  Possibly.  

He’s still shivering and he still feels like death.  Grand.  

Something shifts under him and he starts.  

Oh.  Right.  Tim.  

“Jon, you awake?”

Since when does Tim talk to him like a person?  Like he hadn’t fucked up that badly.  

“Jon?”

Right.  Yes.  He’s supposed to answer.  He swallows.  His throat feels like sandpaper.  “Ngk.”  Well.  Not quite a word, but close enough, right?  It is enough to start him coughing in any case.

“Jesus Christ, Jon!”

Jon is hoisted into a sitting position fast enough to make his head swim.  He closes his eyes tightly to try to stop the room from spinning, but he’s still coughing and now he’s queasy again.  

By the time he catches his breath, tears are streaming down his face and he can feel someone (Tim) rubbing his back.  It feels…. Jon isn’t sure how it feels, but a lot and it makes his skin prickle not unpleasantly.  

“Jesus Fuck Jon.”

Jon doesn’t have the air to answer.  He feels himself sway.  He is lowered back down and a straw pushed into his mouth.  He cracks one eye open and sees a very blurry Tim (shit where have his glasses gone?) holding the same sports drink, this time with an addition of a .... is that a margarita straw?   The Eye helpfully informs him that it is.  Jon takes some careful sips until his throat feels a little less awful.  

He can see Tim’s mouth moving.   He hears his voice but he’s a little too far gone to make out words.   

Tim has been keeping up what he hopes is comforting, soothing one sided conversation.  He hopes.  He hopes it might help Jon, but Jon seems pretty far from aware right right now.  

“You’d probably rather have water or tea right now but I’m not Martin, and well... I think you need the salt and sugar...”

Jon only manages a few sips before the straw drops from his mouth.   

“Come on, Jon.  There’s no way you aren’t dehydrated.  I don’t want to take you to A&E.  You don’t want to go to A&E.  You really don’t want me to take you to A&E.”

“Sorry...”. Christ his voice is weak.  

“Stop apologizing.  You have done that to death today.  Maybe try again when you’re conscious.  Maybe I’ll even accept it.”

“Sorry.”

Tim sighs.  Obviously that’s not going to get through to Jon right now.  “Come on.  You’ve got to drink more.  You lost a fuck ton of liquids.  I know you did.  You haven’t even begun to make up for that.”

Jon whines.  Tim checks once again that there’s a bin within easy reach.  He still presses the straw to Jon’s mouth.  

Jon drinks.  

It takes a painfully long time, but he keeps it down.  Tim waits a wile to make sure that continues to be the case before he nudges Jon.  “You up for some soup?”  

Jon considers for a very long moment.  He’s having trouble concentrating on the question and honestly he’s hoping Tim will come up with an answer for him.  

“Jon?”  

“Maybe?”  It’s hardly a whisper.  

“Let’s try sitting you up first, okay?”

[canyouhearthelight]

The Miys, Ch. 32

As promised, this chapter is 4400 words - much longer than usual, and definitely longer than the last one.

If you cried at the last chapter, you’ll cry at this one. Content Warnings for PTSD episode, mood swings, mentions of large scale violence.

I woke up to a low growl vibrating in my ear.  Startled, I tried to sit up – when did I lay down? – only to feel something tightening around my waist.  Conor, I remembered vaguely.  I had fallen asleep tucked into his lap, exhausted after everything caught up with me.  We must have lain down at some point in the night, probably his doing when he started to get tired, too.  I could feel my face heating up with embarrassment at the idea of him tucking me into bed like a child.  The low noise started again, and I slowly cracked an eye open to see what on earth he was growling at.

Tyche. Of course she would find me like this. And she will never let me live it down.

Trying to preserve some vague shred of dignity, I gently nudged the man behind me.  “Cut it out, killer.” I was pretty proud of how calm I sounded. “That’s my sister.”

“So was she.” How did he manage to both mutter and spit the words out like they offended him?  It was pretty impressive, if I was being honest.

“Yeah, but the worst Tyche ever did was bust my lip when I was fifteen.  Stop growling. Better yet, why are you growling?” I carefully rolled onto my back so I could look at him.

“Keep you safe,” he mumbled. Now that I could clearly see him, I realized he wasn’t even fully awake.  Which meant he was threatening an intruder in his sleep.  Good to know, I guess?

A glance at my sister showed she was all wide eyes and smothered mirth.  Yep, not living this down.  Gently but firmly, I moved the arm restraining me so that I could sit up; it turned out to be an exercise in futility, because as soon as I was vertical and trying to smooth down my hair, his arm manifested again and pulled me back against him.  I took the conditional victory against the over-protective cuddle monster – I was at least sitting up.

“Everything seems to have gone well after we left,” Tyche managed to choke out through her suppressed laughter.

I just rolled my eyes and leaned far enough to the side that she could see Conor had his shirt and coveralls on still.  “I fell asleep after crying all over him,” I explained quietly. “He feels guilty, blames himself for what happened.” I gestured at my face for emphasis.  Hujylsogox medical technology could get rid of bruising, but that was only if the damage was in the skin.  With all the broken bones in my face, I was still a nifty shade of purple with olive highlights. “I managed to explain it’s not his fault, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be a while before he actually believes that.  I begged him for a hug, he gave me one, and then I just fell apart.”

She nodded. “Yeah, I saw that part.  Grabbed my stuff and scooted, made sure everyone left y’all alone.  I know how you get when people catch you like that, and apparently you needed it.”

My face flushed again and I huffed with embarrassment.  She wasn’t exaggerating: I despised people seeing me rattled, especially crying about it. I just felt weak when it happened.  “Apparently,” I cleared my throat.  “Anyway, eventually I calmed down and realized I needed to go to bed. When I told him, he just grabbed my blanket, wrapped it around both of us, and promised he’d keep me safe while I slept.”  I shrugged and glanced down at the now-snoring Irishman.  “Honestly, it’s probably the best sleep I’ve gotten since I first woke up on the Ark.”

“Given how he reacted in his sleep to me even being in the room, I’m not surprised,” she giggled.  “I mean, obviously you feel safe around him – you don’t even break down like that in front of me.” When I opened my mouth to protest, she waved her hand to cut me off. “I’m not offended, don’t get me wrong.  I know you subconsciously see me as someone to protect, you’re my big sister, blah blah blah.  He, however, is two meters and two hundred pounds, and has never needed you to protect him.  Feed him, absolutely.  Save him? Nope.”

I couldn’t argue with that, but didn’t want to analyze it any further, either.  Instead, I cleared my throat again to change the subject. “So, what brought you here so early, anyway?”

“Right,” she looked up at the ceiling before looking back down at me. “I did actually come to check on you after yesterday, at least partially.  But yeah, I’m also on official business.  Arantxa’s trial is today, and Xiomara wants you there.”

“They haven’t tried her yet?” I furrowed my brows, confused. “I thought she was caught in the act?” The act of bashing my brains out in the shower, a distant voice screamed in my mind.

“She was, but the Council has decided to abide by Galactic Law on this.  Begin as we intend to proceed and all that.  Anyway, Galactic Law requires that the accused be allowed to present a statement at the first opportunity after arrest.  No lawyers, thankfully, but she still gets to say her piece.”

“But she was arrested weeks ago?” I was confused. “Shouldn’t they have done that part, already.”

“Two things,” Tyche held up her fingers. “One, we had to be sure you would pull through, or she would have an additional charge against her.” I swallowed thickly, understanding exactly what she meant. “Two, she had to, uh… recover? From some injuries? Before she could actually make her statement?”

I remembered someone telling me Derek had attacked her.  “What kind of injuries?” I asked, my voice shaking slightly.

“Derek may have – okay, yeah. Derek broke her jaw to stop her from hurting you any further, and then broke several of her fingers trying to get her hands out of your hair, because she wouldn’t let go.”

Whoa.  While I had known in a theoretical sense what Derek had done in the past in defense of himself and Sam, actually knowing it for a fact was a strange experience.  I rubbed the back of my head, feeling the shorn, fuzzy length where it had been shaved.  Several fingers.  Plural. “Is he in trouble?” I finally asked.

She shook her head. “It was determined to be done in defense of you, so no charges can be brought under the law.  Let’s hear it for the aliens – the logic is that people will not come to defense of each other if they have to fear retributive criminal charges as a result.”

At least there was that. One concern dealt with, I sighed. Definitely not looking forward to facing my former friend. “Where does Xio need me, and when?”

“In the Council Chamber, in about an hour and half so you have time to prepare before the trial starts,” she told me with an apologetic tone.  “I brought you clean clothes, and your Council pendant. I know you had spare clothes in your office, but I – I had them destroyed.” She whispered the last part, and I couldn’t blame her. I, personally, had never kept spare clothes in my office. Arantxa did, in case I needed them at short notice.  If Tyche hadn’t destroyed the clothes, I probably would have, just to get rid of the reminder.

Reaching slightly behind me with a groan, I shook Conor’s shoulder.  “Hey, you gotta wake up.”

“No,” he grumbled, pulling me tighter against him. “Sleep.”

You have got to be kidding me. “Dude, I’m not your teddy bear. Besides I have to go see Xiomara.” Telling him that Arantxa’s trial was in a couple hours did not seem like a great idea.

“She can come here,” he yawned, not budging an inch.

Time to pull out the Big Guns, I decided. “Please, Conor, I really have to pee,” I begged.  Like magic, his arm pulled a disappearing act and I saw free.

“How did you know that would work?” Tyche asked suspiciously.

“It’s worked on literally every single person I’ve ever shared a bed with,” I smirked.  “No one wants to get peed on.”

“Huh.” She actually looked impressed. “Neat. All right, time to stuff you into a bath and get you dressed before the trial.”

Shit, I groaned internally.  Suddenly, the living part of the bed sat bolt upright, wide awake. “The fuck do you mean, trial?” he asked, no sign that he had been fast asleep three seconds prior.  “Sophie, you can’t seriously think you’re doing this?”

“Are you telling me I’m not?” I challenged, arching a brow in question.

“You know I can’t do that,” he scowled before clarifying. “You were really going to try to go down there, by yourself, and face the…person… who tried to kill you?”

I scoffed. “Of course not. Tyche’s going with me, and the entire Council will be there.”

“I’m going.”

“Say what?  Conor, you can’t.  This is a criminal trial.”

“She’s right,” my sister interrupted before it could turn into an argument. “Plus, Arantxa will be restrained the entire time.” Conor and I both winced at the name, but she carried on. “Soph is going to give what amounts to a victim impact statement, Arantxa will give her statement, all witness statements will be given and verified, and then she’ll be sentenced.  From what I’ve been told, it’s pretty cut and dried.  She either did it or did not, and in the event she did, there’s exactly one sentence.  No lawyers arguing, no twisting the situation for sympathy.”

“How will they know the witnesses are telling the truth?” Conor tried to argue. “She could still get out of this!”

“Uh, hello?” Tyche started at him incredulously. “We are on a ship full of living lie detectors, genius. You know, twelve foot tall scary-looking mushrooms who can practically read our thoughts when they’re in the same room?”  A grumble issued from the ceiling.  Noah was clearly listening, and clearly not happy being called a mushroom.  “Even back on Earth, we had the technology to detect pheromone changes when people were lying.  Do you really believe a species whose communication depends on pheromones can’t tell if we’re being honest?” She scoffed at the idea.

When Conor looked like he was going to keep arguing, I held up both hands. “Stop. Everyone just stop. We don’t have time for this, so let’s compromise.  Conor, you can escort us until we go into the Council Chamber, and you can wait until the trial is over if you want.  I really don’t have the energy to argue against someone wanting to make sure I’m safe, but you have got to promise you won’t start treating me like I’m made of glass, okay?”  He agreed reluctantly.  “Tyche, that good with you?”  She nodded with a little more enthusiasm.  “Okay. Great. Let’s get this dog and pony show on the road.  I need a shower, and I hate to ask, but to prevent any further arguing, Tyche can you sit in the room with me and keep an eye on me.  If I have a panic attack or something, I’d rather you be in there to cover me up before this dork,” I hooked a thumb at Conor, “barges in to save me from drowning or something equally ridiculous.”  The man in question at least had the decency to turn bright crimson and turn his head away.

“Fiiiiiiine,” she let out an exaggerated groan.  “You need me to do something about your hair anyway, so that works.  Follow me.”

She led me to the door, which I had been under the impression led to the corridor in a similar manner to the original room I had been in upon arriving on the Ark.  To my surprise, however, this time it led to a vestibule with five other doors.  My sister pointed to three doors off to one side. “Other medbays,” she explained before pointing at the door closest to my room. “Corridor, and this is the bathroom and shower facilities,” she finished, leading me through the final door.

To my relief, the facilities on the other side looked nothing like the hygiene facilities set up on Level One.  Where those had been boxy and efficient, clearly human construction, this room matched the typical Hujylsogox design evident throughout the Ark.  Four partially closed in, cylindrical showers were set into one wall, with a curtain available for modesty. Closer inspection showed that the water descended in a small waterfall rather than the typical spray.

“Their medbay has a freaking spa,” I murmured in amazement.

When I turned to my sister, she was nodding enthusiastically. “They’re also equipped with sonic cleansers, in the event of hydrophobic species. I tried it, feels like a weird massage.  But it works.”

“Should I try that first?” I asked nervously. Even though I didn’t remember any of what happened, there was still a primitive part of my brain that was slightly off-kilter at the thought of taking a shower.

“You can’t.” She sounded distraught.  “I know why you would want to, but with your head still broken, Noah was adamant that you only use the water option, and even then, it can’t fall directly on your face. Trickling down is okay.”

I took a deep breath, attempting to steady myself. “Big girl panties, got it.” After another breath, I decided to get it over with and stepped under the cascade. “So far, so good,” I reported with a broken laugh.

“Just keep talking,” Tyche advised.

Dutifully, I kept up a stream of chatter, even if it wasn’t directly about how I was feeling.  It was distracting, which was nice.  I tried to focus on how luxurious the shower was; the water was the perfect temperature, just the right flow rate.  The sound of the falling water was incredibly relaxing, and combined with the swooping design of the shower, it gave the feeling of washing off under a stream falling into a cavern.  All of the soaps felt and smelled nice, and reminded me of herbal tea in a way I couldn’t quite explain.  I mused out loud where Noah learned about Terran soap, and was told that someone on board actually made them and programmed the recipe into the consoles.

Finally, I couldn’t put off the part I had been dreading: washing my hair.  With a shaky breath, I started lathering what had been left behind after my impromptu haircut, and was surprised to find I was fine.  I even managed to close my eyes and enjoy it – I had always loved washing my hair.

Suddenly, my fingers caught in a tangle and pulled.  All the air left my lungs in a rush, and I distantly heard a thud as I fell to my knees.  Tears were rolling down my face as I desperately rinsed my hands. “Tyche,” I gulped back a sob. “I can’t.  I can’t do this.  I was okay until I started washing my hair, and then it pulled and – “  The shower curtain was yanked back and I looked up at my sister, so consumed by panic that I couldn’t even bother being embarrassed that I had fallen down crying while doing something as mundane as washing my fucking hair.  We don’t have time for this, I berated myself.

She didn’t even bat an eye. “We need to rinse it somehow,” she rubbed the bottom half of her face. Snapping her fingers, she seemed to have an idea. “Be right back,” she said, pulling the curtain closed. It jerked back again briefly. “I’m not leaving the room, stay in there, okay?” Not waiting for response, she snapped the curtain closed again.

While she was gone, I tried to take several steadying breaths, and even managed a couple that didn’t shake.  As I adjusted so I was sitting on the floor, knees pulled to my chest, I heard her talking to someone. “Grab me a bucket…No, a clean one!  No, she isn’t about to puke. For fuck sake, just get me a damned bucket!”  A couple minutes later, an arm holding a bucket poked around the curtain. “Here’s our solution!” she proclaimed proudly before her head joined her arm. “Turn around, grab your knees, head back.”

I did as she instructed. Without further ado, she filled the bucket before turning the water off, and gently started pouring the water over my soapy hair.  Instead of running her fingers through it, she lifted the ends toward my scalp and gently bounced my hair to ensure the water got all the soap out. Once she was finished, she asked if I would be okay drying my hair.

My throat closed at the thought. Unable to speak, I shook my head in response. Not showing the slightest bit of inconvenience, she grabbed a towel and gently wrapped my entire head in it to soak up as much water as possible.  Once she removed the towel, she sprayed something in my hair that made me sneeze. “Sorry,” she said distractedly. “Gel.”  Once again, she started scrunching my hair toward the scalp.

Finally, she declared me done.  “That’s as good as we’ll get without a blow dryer.   We may have to limit you to sponge baths with me washing your hair until your face finishes healing.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, so embarrassed at this point that I didn’t even want to stand up.  I had just fallen apart, like a fucking child. It was so weak, even more so than falling apart on Conor the night before. I couldn’t even take a shower without being afraid to wash what was left my hair.

“Soph, stop,” Tyche commanded in a voice that usually made grown men shake slightly.  Through sheer practice, I ignored her. It was to no avail, apparently, because she kept talking. “There is nothing wrong with you. You were assaulted, damnit!  There’s nothing weak about wanting to avoid the place you were, or the things you were doing when it happened!  It’s the most normal thing in the world. Which means you aren’t some freak, or some failure, you’re just depressingly, heartbreakingly normal for once in our fucked-up lives.  It’s okay to be scared, or depressed.”

Part of me knew she was right, but another part just wanted to skip ahead to the part of my story where my hair had grown back and I could wash it again.  Or just rewind and have none of this happen. No matter how many times I tried to tell myself what happened and who was behind it, my brain refused to acknowledge that Arantxa did this. It could comprehend the assault well enough to force me into panic attacks just from snagging my pinky on a knot in my hair, but refused to admit who was responsible.

I didn’t even realize I had been talking out loud until a voice responded from the ceiling. “As your sister has kindly explained to me, Wisdom, human brains are not meant to handle such trauma.  The – psyche? – psyche breaks.  Eventually, I understand it will heal, just like your bones do.”

The absurdity of Noah trying to reassure me in their clumsy way forced a small smile on my face. “Thank you, Noah. Maybe today will help, with the trial and all.”  There was a slice of my mind that tried to hold on to that hope, or at least to the idea that I would finally be able to accept who was responsible for the attempt on my life. It would at least be a step in the right direction.  Pulling myself together – despite the fact that Tyche had told me repeatedly in the past that she hated watching me ‘switch modes’, as she put it – I managed to stand without wobbling – point to me – and ask my sister for some clothes.  Shakily, I was able to dress myself without help, although I did have to sit down once I had my pants on.  I drew the line at shoes, however.

“Soph, you’re going to be a witness at a criminal trial,” my sister explained in a frustrated tone, pinching the bridge of her nose. “You can’t go barefoot.”

“I don’t like wearing shoes, to begin with, and you know it,” I countered.  “Even on the best of days, I kick them off constantly, and this is far from the best of days.  Besides, you said this will be in the Council Chamber, right?” She nodded. “Okay, well, you know as well as I do: that room is most certainly not large enough to walk around in unless you have to. Even if I stand up to testify, no one will see my feet, so it really doesn’t matter.”

She scowled at me. “You still have to walk there,” she admonished.

“So?” I shrugged. “I’m pretty sure they’ll be less concerned with my bare feet than they will be with this.” I gestured to my head.  The scowl intensified, but she gave up on making me wear shoes, at least.

Feeling at least a little triumphant, we exited the bathroom and collected Conor. “Your hair looks good like that,” he ventured in a tentative tone.

I waved it off.  “It’s okay, Conor, I’m not terribly concerned with my hair.  The only reason it was as long as it was is because I couldn’t be assed to cut it. Thank you, though. I’m glad it looks okay.”  He stood straighter in visible relief, and I couldn’t blame him, honestly.  Even I knew that women in general could be notoriously touchy about our hair; I just wasn’t one of them.

The journey to the Council Chambers took long enough that I was relieved that the episode with the shower hadn’t taken any longer than it did.  Not because of my bare feet, like my sister constantly tried to argue on the way there – the entire ship was temperature controlled, so the deck plating really was not cold on my feet – but because we were really pushing the hour and a half window Xiomara had given us.  As I reminded Conor that he could not enter the room, Tyche signaled our arrival.

Conor had just taken a reluctant seat next to the door when it slid open to reveal my fellow Councillor, more frazzled than I had ever seen her.  Brushing past my sister, she grabbed my shoulders firmly and turned me side to side, examining me.  Releasing her breath in a whoosh, she collapsed slightly in what seemed to be relief. “Part of me could not believe you were alive,” she admitted. “I had to make sure you were really here.”  She squeezed my arms gently, the closest she ever came to a hug in my experience.

Just how bad was it? I wondered in trepidation.  Instead, I asked out loud “Why am I here so far ahead of the actual trial?”

“I want to go over everything with you so you’re prepared and don’t get blindsided,” she explained, glancing at my sister.  When I turned to glance her direction, Tyche ducked her head and turned away.

Seeing that, I threw both hands in front me of me, palms out. “Hang on. What the actual fuck is going on here?”

”Language,” two voices scolded from the ceiling.  Right. I was in the corridor.  Had to be somewhat professional, apparently, despite nearly dying.

I tried again through clenched teeth. “What is going on? I thought this was just a trial charging her with assault and sabotage of the ship.” I looked between my sister and Xiomara again.  Conor, at least, looked as confused as I was.

Taking a deep breath, Xiomara spoke. “Yes, she is being charged with sabotage of the ship, and with attempted murder, not assault.  Even then, those are only two of the charges.” She paused and looked up, rubbing her mouth and jaw with one hand. Was she bracing herself? “Arantxa Bidarte is also being charged with two additional crimes. One is conspiracy to commit murder – “

“Wait,” I interrupted. “She’s already being charged with trying to kill me. Why conspiracy?”

“Conspiracy to kill Noah,” she clarified. “The sensor damaged was intended to destroy the ship, or at least delay it until they could figure out a way to destroy it. That would kill Noah, entirely, so ‘murder’.”

I nodded in understanding despite the sudden need to vomit. They planned to destroy the ship? “What about everyone else on board?” I asked in confusion.

“That’s the fourth charge,” was the grim reply. “I ordered your sister not to disclose this any sooner, because I wanted you to recuperate as much as possible prior to today.”

I stared at my sister, incredulous.  Without looking at me, she closed her eyes and nodded, jaw set in such a way that I could tell she was clenching her teeth, too. “She still outranks me, unfortunately,” she told me drily.

“What is the fourth charge?” I demanded.  If she ordered my sister to keep a secret from me – not asked, ordered – there had better be a damned good reason.

“Genocide,” Xiomara whispered.  My eyes grew so wide it was actually painful, and every breath of air rushed from my lungs. “If they had succeeded, it would have wiped out what’s left of humanity. Galactic Law or Terran, wiping out an entire race is genocide.”

“What – “ I sputtered. “That’s – what do you even do for something like that?” My brain was still trying to comprehend what I was hearing.  Genocide? I could vaguely remember reading about war criminals being found guilty back on Earth about fifty years ago, most being sentenced to life imprisonment.  Where would we even imprison someone –

“We didn’t know when we decided to charge her under Galactic Law,” Xiomara choked out. “You have to believe that. There’s only one punishment for genocide or conspiracy to commit it.”

“You’re shitting me,” Tyche gasped, realizing something I didn’t.  It wasn’t any wonder: she had been given days or weeks longer to process all this, while my brain was still trying to catch up to ‘genocide’ to begin with.

Xiomara, though, shook her head grimly at my sister. “I’m not.  If she and any of her conspirators are found guilty of – that – they are to be sentenced to immediate execution.”

<< Prev  Masterlist  Next >>

[beyondmistland]

“May your heart be your guiding key” (Full thoughts on Kingdom Hearts III below!)

Graphics:

Ø  The game is bloody gorgeous, which helps mitigate the long and frequent cutscenes

Ø  The lip-syncing rarely fails

Music:

Ø  The new remixes are awesome and the brand-new tracks don't disappoint either

Ø  What does though is the actual audio mixing:

More often than not I struggled to hear the music over the sound effects during gameplay and the voiceovers during cutscenes

Ranking the Worlds:

Ø  #1: Corona: The world is huge, with varied terrain and a kick-ass final boss

Ø  #2 Olympus: The sheer scale and scope of the world took my breath away, plus we (finally!) get to fight all four titans

Ø  #3 The Caribbean: Assassin's Creed IV meets Kingdom Hearts, what's not to like

Ø  #4 Monstropolis: While not as eye-catching as some of the other worlds the way it intersects with the broader KH lore is really neat and the final cutscene was a delight in that it averts the Disney characters being useless when dealing with the original KH villains, on top of which its straightforward design is a nice change of pace, my only complaint is that there are only four types of Unversed

Ø  #5 San Fransokyo: The story is surprisingly short, which means you don't really get the chance to explore the environment, which sucks because the verticality and day/night cycle are awesome, plus there are a number of memorable boss fights

Ø  #6 Twilight Town: If it had been fully recreated based off the KH2 version the world would be much higher on my list but despite how small it is I love the liveliness, not to mention how peaceful it is in comparison to the other worlds, the same can be said for Hundred Acre Wood

Ø  #7 Keyblade Graveyard + Final World + Scala Ad Caelum: Though jaw-dropping in terms of visuals and audio they're not fully realized worlds, the same can be said for Dark World

Ø  #8 Toy Box: I loved the final boss as well as how the story tied into the larger plot of the game and I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy exploring Andy's room while "You have a friend in me" played in the background

Why then is Toy Box so far down on my list, world design

Even with endgame stats (LV40-45) the Gigas are tough to take down and as a result they come off as gimmicky in the worst sense of the word, beyond that the fact that the majority of the world is set in Galaxy Toys made me feel constrained and claustrophobic, which could have been partially alleviated if we'd been allowed to make our way through the parking lot outside, finally, the story kind of got repetitive with the backtracking whenever the characters were about to leave because "someone went missing yet again"

Ø  #9 Arrendelle: Though it has one of the best final bosses in the game along with Corona there is so much wrong with this world that I wonder if it's less Square Enix's fault and more Disney placing an insane amount of red tape on their favorite cash-cow:

1) Elsa does not become a party member even after you beat the world

2) You do not get to explore the city or the ice palace despite the latter being fully rendered on the map

3) Larxene, a lightning-based character, randomly traps you in an ice labyrinth when that would have made a lot more sense both logically and thematically if it had been Elsa

4) Speaking of Larxene, she does practically nothing the whole time you're there unlike Marluxia and Luxord, who are at least semi-active

5) You climb a mountain and get knocked off of it so many times that even Sora gets fed up

6) The bloody minigame where you have to find Olaf's body parts

7) Forcing us to watch the entire "Let it go" sequence and then having "Do you want to build a snowman" play over Anna's voice as she's explaining herself to Sora

8) So much of the story is excised that you have little clue as to what's going on to the point Hans appears for all of five minutes, doesn't say any lines, and isn't even named when it would have been cool, not to mention, just plain better, if he had started off as a guest member of your party

9) As a result of #8 Sora, Donald, and Goofy's presence feels like even more of an afterthought than usual in the sense that them not being there wouldn't have changed anything at all apart from Hans' Heartless then having no one to defeat it which can be seen by the fact that when they leave no one tells them goodbye unlike in every other world

10) The visual design was bland and tiresome after a while

11) The world's gimmick was uninspired to say the least

12) Fighting alongside a giant snowman (AKA Marshmallow) was awesome and in terms of pure gameplay the labyrinth was actually quite fun

Story Pros:

Ø  Master Xehanort's new voice actor is good but after hearing Leonard Nimoy's voice for the past couple of games the change is a bit jarring

Ø  The way previous games are referenced and tied together is a nice way of bringing new players into the fold while also setting up the finale's resolutions

Ø  The game has a better sense of humor than previous installments

Ø  Sora is more like his KH2 self than the bland caricature we saw in 3D and quite a few characters display some degree of genre-savviness

Ø  Master Yen Sid gets out of his chair to lend a hand for once

Ø  Donald Duck is the most powerful mage in Square Enix canon (and I am not making that up)

Gameplay Pros:

Ø  Being able to switch between different save points in the same world is a welcome addition

Ø  The secondary ability of all shotlocks to airstep is ingenious

Ø  You can have more than two party members finally!

Ø  The secret ending isn't too hard to unlock

Ø  You can upgrade your Keyblades, which means older ones aren't automatically relegated to redundancy

Ø  Donald and Goofy are useful again after being nerfed into uselessness in KH2

Ø  Towns and cities are actually populated by fully-voiced NPCs!

Ø  Cutscenes in Theater Mode are unlocked after completing each world rather than after beating the game

Ø  I never tried the Classic Kingdom minigames but the cooking one with Remy was a nice break from the normal gameplay (I suck at the egg-cracking one though)

Ø  The camera doesn't get in the way like it infamously did in KH1

Ø  I like the new main menu design (Feel free to disagree though)

Ø  The Gummi Ship is entirely optional outside of a few mandatory boss battles

Ø  Moogle Tickets are a nice way of giving players a second chance during difficult encounters (I do wish they didn’t activate so quickly though) 

Gameplay Cons:

Ø  The game never once tells you that you can switch between Situation Commands using L2

Ø  The game never once tells you that you keep all your lower-tier magic (Fire, Fira for example) and that your shortcuts don't automatically update to include the higher-tier version of whatever magic you have equipped

Ø  There's no real incentive to switch between Keyblades (That being said, my favorites are Wheel of Fate, Nano Arms, and Happy Gear/Ever After)

Ø  Attractions lose their charm quickly and completely ruin the flow of combat

Ø  Summons aren't too big of a deal since I only ever ended up using them once and even then it was by accident

Ø  Donald still heals you at the wrong time more often than not

Ø  Even on Proud Mode the game is way too easy for the most part (Apparently Critical Mode addresses this but I can't confirm that)

Ø  There is a lack of sidequests and post-game content that contributes to the feeling Square & Disney gave us half a game (For example, there is only one secret boss, said secret boss has a generic design, no ties to the story, and can be defeated at LV40 on your first attempt)

Ø  Hollow Bastion, Mysterious Tower, and Destiny Islands are not playable

Ø  The parkour from 3D has been nerfed too much in terms of distance to actually be useful

Story Cons:

Ø  Nomura fridged Kairi and he worfed almost everyone the first time you arrive at the Keyblade Graveyard!

Ø  The wrapping up of plot points and character arcs from prior entries was a little too nice and neat for me

Ø  The out-of-nowhere introduction of Subject X

Ø  Pete and Maleficent do literally nothing the whole damn game

Ø  The pacing is awful:

Almost all of the game's resolution is held back until after you've beaten the last Disney world

Ø  There are two important cutscenes in the Final World that you can accidentally miss because for some reason they are optional

Ø  We don't get to see what happened to Lingering Will, which also means we don't get any more insight into the third aspect of being (AKA the soul)

Ø  There are no Final Fantasy characters in the game, not even Sephiroth!

Ø  What happened to Demyx?

Ø  Master Eraqus has absolutely nothing to do with Terra’s restoration

Changes I’d make:

Ø  Require us to go through the Disney worlds a second time like in KH2

Ø  Have Aqua and Ven be saved halfway through the game instead of at the end, they could then spend the second half of the game resting or join you on one of the Disney worlds to refresh themselves

Ø  Have Lea and Kairi join you on one of the Disney worlds to get practical experience

Ø  Make the Keyblade Graveyard sequence be a series of one/two/three-on one battles so that members of Organization XIII can use their full arsenal of attacks from previous games

Ø  Let us play the second battle between Lingering Will and Terra-Xehanort

Ø  Speaking of Terra-Xehanort, we should have fought him alongside the Guardian Heartless

Ø  Have us explore Scala Ad Caelum while hunting down the individual replicas before then making us fight all of them in a boss battle

DLC

Ø  The presence of it says a lot about the game and not in a good way

Final Score

Ø  7/10-8/10

[tyranttortoise]

Fell Underwater

Soooo, for Day 9, I wrote something that I’ve wanted to write for a while!  It’s a small one-shot drabble of me doing some world-building on an AU I’ve had on the backburner for a while.  It’s pretty much Oceanfell, I suppose, but mine doesn’t really follow any of my standard Oceantale headcanons, so maybe Fell Underwater?  Or Ty’s Oceanfell?

-shrug-

Either way, it’s got pirate skeletons.  

I did quite a bit of world-building before I got to the smut, so I’m going to post all the SFW bits here, with a link to continue reading on Ao3 at the bottom.  Hope you guys enjoy!  It’s the first thing I’ve written with a legitimate AU and AU Sans that’s mine.  

You’d always had terrible luck.

If something could go wrong, it couldn’t just go wrong for you; no, it’d be a disaster.

That’s why you saw it coming. The Raffle occurred every seven years, after all. When you came of age to be put into it, you tried to run – to move away from the coastal city you despised – but they dragged you back, kicking and screaming. Your name had been entered thrice as punishment, but somehow, you miraculously didn’t get pulled.

You knew your luck wouldn’t last, however. You knew it, and yet, you weren’t able to leave the city, your infraction pushing back your request until after the next Raffle. And when they called your name that time, along with six others, you weren’t surprised in the slightest. When they forced you to stand along the coastline, dressed in your best attire, you didn’t wail or whine like the others. No, you impassively stood there, glaring at the crashing waves and cursing the fact that you’d been born beneath a terrible omen.

When the pirate ship rose from the depths of the murky water, sporting a Jolly Roger sail and a skull with flashing red eyes affixed to the bow like a demon rising from hell, you sucked in a breath and put on a brave face. When literal skeleton pirates disembarked from their vessel and began examining the sacrifices, trying to pick out which one had the strongest SOUL to power their barrier, you concentrated on keeping your breathing even. One by one, they Confronted the others, calling forth their SOULs despite their frightened cries. You kept staring straight ahead, though you saw flickers of greens and purples and light blues from your peripherals.

And then the shorter of the two skeletons stopped directly in front of you. You defiantly stared at a point just past his shoulder, and you could see his smirk widen, the sharp golden tooth glinting. Skeletal phalanges gripped your chin and tilted it back, forcing you to look up and meet his single crimson eyelight. The opposite socket was concealed beneath an eyepatch, a jagged crack vertically running through his orbit and disappearing beneath his feathered hat. Despite the grandeur of his attire, his appearance was slovenly, the dark jacket too big for his frame, a rusted shackle clasped around his neck, and his ivory, button-up shirt mostly undone and halfway untucked.

“well, well…” the monster drawled, tilting his head as he regarded you with amusement. “ye look like a lass that gives no quarter. i wonder if that’s the tale yer soul’ll be singin’.”

A shiver ran up your spine; you could smell smoke and must on his breath from his close proximity, and you had to avert your eyes. He chuckled, and the tips of his fingers dug into your chin. In the next moment, you felt something grip within your chest, squeezing the very breath from your lungs. The feeling forcibly ripped something from within you, and you gasped, the world suddenly draining of color.

All except for the bright orange glow of the little heart floating before you.

Your SOUL.

The stout monster’s bone brow raised, and the light seemed to draw the attention of the taller one. You barely registered the other’s lankier, more jagged appearance; everything seemed muffled, like their voices were coming from underwater.

When they both smirked at you, you finally allowed yourself to feel fear.

A month has passed since that day, and yet… you’re still alive.

Your SOUL hasn’t been harvested for the barrier, and the skeleton brothers (you discovered they were brothers the second day, when you realized just how comical their nagging, back-and-forth banter could be–under other circumstances) have kept you fed and well. Their boat descended beneath the water, to some part of the ocean that felt much colder than you expected, but… you were actually able to breathe and see just fine underwater. They amused themselves in watching you struggle that first day, desperately holding your breath and clawing at the porthole of your cabin.

“FOR SUCH A COURAGEOUS LASS, SHE’S RATHER DAFT,” the taller one (Papyrus, you later discovered his name was) rasped as he passively observed your struggles.

“breathe, bucko,” his brother (Sans, the one with the golden tooth and promiscuous winks) instructed, chortling over your display. When you actually gave in and were forced to take a breath, you were surprised when water didn’t fill your lungs. You turned your wide-eyed stare to your captors, and they both started laughing all over again.

“did'ja really think we’re such monsters that we’d drown ya first thing? underwater’s full o’ magic, lassie. an’ magic can do all sorts o’ things.”

You’d hated them at first. Their mocking smirks, their probing questions… you avoided talking to them, but also flailed your arms out whenever they got too close. If you were going to die by two monsters much stronger than you, then fine. The world was cruel, but you accepted the impossibility of your situation. But that didn’t mean you were going to just roll over and let it happen. No, you were going to fight for your life until the bitter end.

As time stretched, however… you began to wonder what was taking so long.

You had full run of the lower decks of the ship, though most of the wood was rotted and riddled with holes that you could easily slip through if you wanted. The first time you attempted that, however, a monster with jagged teeth and fins almost immediately devoured you. Sans had been there to save you; he’d apparently been lazily tailing you the entire time. He didn’t force you back to the ship, but he warned you of the dangers lurking beneath the ocean. It confirmed every horrifying myth you’d ever heard growing up.

You tried to swim to the surface, but your arms and legs got so tired that you actually passed out. When you woke up, you were back in your cabin, with monster food left on the nightstand. Sometimes, it was disgusting… sometimes, it was actually delicious. It depended on which brother brought you the food.

One night, when Sans was in your room, kicked back in a chair with his feet propped up (one of his legs was a peg leg, you’d discovered) and his hat tilted over his face, you finally spoke.

“W…why?”

Your voice was hoarse, and cracked with disuse, but the sound was enough to rouse Sans immediately. When he tipped his hat back, surprise was clear on his face, though he quickly amended it with his usual smirk. “ahhh, so she finally speaks! i was beginnin’ to wonder if ye were mute, lassie.”

You ignored the comment and pressed on, “Why am I here?”

He shrugged with nonchalance, crossing his boot over his peg leg. “ye got a fool’s luck an’ one o’ the strongest souls i’ve ever laid eyesocket upon.”

“But if you were going to use my SOUL for the barrier… why haven’t you done it yet?”

He’s silent. After a few moments, he starts to snore.

UGH, did he seriously fall asleep in the middle of an important conversation?

More time passes, and you’re still alive.

You begin speaking to Sans whenever he comes by to loiter in your cabin, and you also begin eating meals at the table with both brothers at night. They’re growing on you, despite your best efforts.

There’s even a moment where Sans falls asleep on the couch in your cabin, and you end up moving to lie down on the cushions beside him. You don’t know if it’s Stockholm Syndrome, or the fact that these brothers have been much nicer to you than any human has on the Surface, but… you just wanted to be close to him.

He slings his arm around you, and you fall asleep with your cheek pressed into the ribs exposed from his sloppily-buttoned shirt.

When you awaken, you’re back in your bed and wondering if it was all just a dream.

Whenever you ask Sans why you’re still alive, he either hedges the query or Papyrus decides to choose that very moment to interrupt.

“SANS! YOU BILGE RAT, I SWEAR YOU’RE ALWAYS SLACKING OFF! IF YOU DON’T COME HERE AND FINISH YOUR WORK INSTEAD OF CONSTANTLY GALLAVANTING WITH YOUR WENCH, I SWEAR YOU’RE IN FOR SOME KEELHAULING!”

Sans rolls his eyelight. “aye, cap'n!” he calls, dead-pan and irritated. Then he gets up and moves to leave. “we’ll continue the conversation later, lassie.”

Yet he continues to avoid it until weeks later.

You’ve both had too much grog–which you’ve discovered is apparently a more tolerable version of rum.

Sans has had a rough day, evident by his drinking. You’ve come to be able to pick up on his moods, but he always plays it off when you attempt to pry. Your inhibitions are down enough that innocent joking and flirtatious smiles turn into touches–teasing and light at first, but then bolder, more exploratory.

“careful, lass…” he warns, his voice a low growl. His forehead is against yours, his usual hat now tipped back on your head. You’ve managed to completely unbutton his shirt, and your fingers are gingerly moving along his ribs, feeling over the grooves and ossifications from countless partially-healed fractures.

“What? Am I going to ‘awaken the kraken’?” you tease with a smirk, and you catch him off-guard enough that he makes a strangled choking sound before he starts chuckling.

“ok, that was a good one. yer jus’ full o’ surprises, ain'tcha?” His eyelight is much brighter than usual, his socket half-lidded as he hums when you hook your fingers around his sternum and start rubbing along the underside. “ye'know, ye got too many buttons still in-place. let ol’ sans take care o’ that.”

“What a gentleman,” you continue to tease as he reaches out with both hands and abruptly tugs your shirt apart. The buttons pop off, jettisoning through the water. It’s his shirt you’re wearing (his slacks, too), so you don’t mind the fact that he just ruined it. If anything, you find it to be a turn-on.

“aye, but i prefer the term ‘swashbuckler.’ in this case, i’m ‘bout to swash yer buckle aside.”

*continue reading on Ao3

[blackdogfl-blog]

3 Common Reasons Why Your Decorative Concrete Sealant Isn't Working (And How To Fix It)

Adding a concrete sealer in your driveway usually means that you're going to tremendously prolong the lifetime of the driveway and so you should consider it like a very good, smart expenditure.

Your session is about to timeout because of inactivity. Simply click OK to extend your time and effort for an additional half-hour.

Concrete is a popular building materials in many garages and driveways since it seems desirable and is long-Long lasting. Even so, concrete can fade and begin to chip with no appropriate routine maintenance. In case you are searhing for the best concrete sealer in your driveway, here are some possibilities you need to look at.

To prevent your concrete driveway from increasing and cracking you will have to make use of a concrete sealant to protect it from dampness. There are plenty of diverse merchandise in the marketplace so we’ve taken the task to think about the best and overview them for you personally.

Polyurethanes -They're substantial abrasion and scratch resistance, and offer exterior longevity. These are typically a action over water based acrylics but demand 2 factors (Section A & B) that need specific measuring and enough Mixing right before application.

LIMITATIONS: Not suited to use in excess of asphalt surfaces. This item is suitable for use on horizontal or vertical surfaces. Will not use on underneath-quality surfaces which have been issue to severe hydrostatic pressures.

A: This is essentially dependant on the sort of sealer that you simply use in your driveway and the sort of concrete that needs to be sealed. Generally speaking the epoxy based concrete driveway sealers are likely to provide a far more slippery area when soaked.

The environmentally safe strippers typically take more time to work, but are safer to implement. Defend and cover anything you don't want to strip or get rid of (plants & grass) and generally study and Adhere to the manufactures technical specs for best benefits. Here is the chemical stripper I use for my business enterprise

We like that it’s simple to operate also and generates a good even coat when you utilize slender levels and permit to dry for days among.

With about 250,000 customers and counting, this resource is sort of Lively, so each week we highlight one of many discussions that could just allow you to with that future Do-it-yourself project.

Would be the concrete sealer the appropriate item? It does not checklist normal concrete on use record. My generate is stricken by mildew, and tannin stains. I the Solvent foundation a more resilient item? "set":null,"record":null Reply Share We are going to reply towards your remark shortly. opwdecks · 05/07/2015 max:

I only use environmentally Risk-free products and solutions but even All those from time to time are sturdy and offensive. I covered a 20X40 enclosed building while you instructed with Trojan And that i didn't even have the slightest headache. Thanks.

Brick & Paver Sealer - Trojan can densify the brick or paver, thus rising its energy and foreseeable future longevity. As It's not necessarily a topical sealant, Trojan will not be slippery nor alter the seem from the area, still forever defend against water or oil/contaminants from absorbing. 

That is a partial list of a number of the problems that take place with newer VOC-compliant sealers. Even the best product can become a challenge when placed in the wrong fingers.

[batterymonster2021]

How I climbed a 3,000-foot vertical cliff -- without ropes | Alex Honnold

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/how-i-climbed-a-3000-foot-vertical-cliff-without-ropes-alex-honnold-4/

How I climbed a 3,000-foot vertical cliff -- without ropes | Alex Honnold

Hello. I would like to show you guys 30 seconds of the first-class day of my life. (Applause) in order that used to be El Capitan in California’s Yosemite countrywide Park, and if you happen to couldn’t tell, I was mountaineering by myself without a rope, a type of a climbing often called free soloing. That was the fruits of a just about decade-long dream, and within the video i am over 2,500 feet off the ground. Seems horrifying? Yeah, it’s, which is why I spent so decades dreaming about soloing El Cap and no longer surely doing it. But on the day that that video was once taken, it failed to feel horrifying at all. It felt as comfy and ordinary as a walk in the park, which is what most folks had been doing in Yosemite that day. Today i’d prefer to speak about how I used to be competent to suppose so cozy and the way I overcame my worry.I’ll with an awfully transient variation of how I grew to become a climber, and then tell the story of my two most big free solos. They were both positive, which is why i am here. (Laughter) but the first felt largely unsatisfying, whereas the 2nd, El Cap, was with the aid of some distance probably the most enjoyable day of my life. Via these two climbs, you can see my method for managing worry. So I began mountaineering in a fitness center when I was once around 10 years historic, which means that that my existence has been centered on mountain climbing for more than 20 years. After nearly a decade of climbing regularly indoors, I made the transition to the outside and steadily began free soloing. I built up my comfort over time and slowly took on higher and more challenging partitions. And there have been many free soloists before me, so I had plenty of idea to draw from. However by using 2008, i’d repeated most of their previous solos in Yosemite and was establishing to think breaking into new terrain.The apparent first option was once half Dome, an iconic 2,000-foot wall that lords over the east finish of the valley. The main issue, although also the attract, was that it was once too massive. I failed to really know easy methods to put together for a competencies free solo. So I determined to bypass the preparations and simply go up there and have an adventure. I figured i would upward thrust to the social gathering, which, unsurprisingly, used to be not the satisfactory strategy. I did as a minimum climb the route roped up with a buddy two days before simply to be certain that I knew roughly the place to move and that I could bodily do it. But when I came again on my own two days later, I made up our minds that I did not want to go that means.I knew that there was a 300-foot version that circled around one of the crucial hardest materials of the climb. I instantly made up our minds to pass the tough phase and take the variation, although i would on no account climbed it before, but I instantly started to doubt myself. Think being by means of your self within the lifeless core of a 2,000-foot face, wondering if you’re misplaced. (Laughter) thankfully, it was ordinarilly the proper method and that i circled back to the route. I used to be moderately rattled, I was lovely rattled, however i attempted not to let it bother me too much considering that I knew that the entire hardest climbing used to be up on the high. I needed to stay composed. It was a beautiful September morning, and as I climbed bigger, I could hear the sounds of visitors chatting and laughing on the summit. They’d all hiked up the typical trail on the back, which I was once planning on utilising for my descent.But between me and the summit lay a blank slab of granite. There have been no cracks or edges to maintain on to, just small ripples of texture up a relatively not up to vertical wall. I had to trust my lifestyles to the friction between my climbing footwear and the smooth granite. I cautiously balanced my means upward, moving my weight backward and forward between the small smears. But then I reached a foothold that I failed to relatively trust. Two days ago, i would have simply stepped proper up on it, but that will had been with a rope on.Now it felt too small and too slippery. I doubted that my foot would keep on if I weighted it. I viewed a foot extra to the part, which appeared worse. I switched my ft and tried a foot additional out. It gave the impression even worse. I started to panic. I could hear folks laughing on the summit simply above me. I wanted to be at any place but on that slab. My intellect was racing in each path. I knew what I had to do, but I was once too afraid to do it. I just had to get up on my proper foot. And so after what felt like an eternity, I approved what I needed to do and i stood up on the proper foot, and it didn’t slip, and so I failed to die, and that transfer marked the end of the toughest climbing. And so I charged from there toward the summit. And so by and large when you summit half of Dome, you have a rope and a bunch of mountain climbing gear on you, and vacationers gasp and so they flock round you for images.This time I popped over the edge shirtless, panting, jacked. I was once amped, but no one batted an eye. (Laughter) I gave the look of a misplaced hiker that used to be too virtually the edge. I was surrounded with the aid of persons speaking on cellphone phones and having picnics. I felt like I used to be in a mall. (Laughter) I took off my tight climbing sneakers and began mountaineering backpedal, and that’s when folks stopped me. "you are mountain climbing barefoot? That’s so tough-core." (Laughter) I failed to bother to explain, but that night time in my mountain climbing journal, I duly famous my free solo of half of Dome, however I incorporated a frowny face and a comment, "Do higher?" i would succeeded within the solo and it was celebrated as a giant first in mountain climbing. Some neighbors later made a movie about it. However I was unhappy. I was upset in my performance, considering the fact that I knew that I had gotten away with anything. I failed to need to be a lucky climber. I wanted to be a first-rate climber.I genuinely took the following yr or so off from free soloing, due to the fact I knew that I mustn’t make a addiction of relying on luck. But even though I wasn’t soloing very much, i might already began to consider about El Cap. It was consistently at the back of my mind because the obvious crown jewel of solos. It is the most putting wall on the earth. Every yr, for the next seven years, i’d consider, "that is the 12 months that i’m going to solo El Cap." and then i would force into Yosemite, seem up at the wall, and think, "No frickin’ approach." (Laughter) it’s too colossal and too frightening. However finally I came to be given that I desired to scan myself in opposition to El Cap. It represented genuine mastery, but I needed it to consider distinct. I didn’t wish to get away with something or barely squeak with the aid of. This time I wanted to do it right. The thing that makes El Cap so intimidating is the sheer scale of the wall.Most climbers take three to 5 days to ascend the 3,000 toes of vertical granite. The idea of surroundings out up a wall of that size with nothing but sneakers and a chalk bag appeared not possible. Three,000 toes of climbing represents 1000’s of distinctive hand and foot actions, which is loads to don’t forget. The various moves I knew via sheer repetition. I would climbed El Cap perhaps 50 times over the previous decade with a rope. However this image suggests my preferred system of rehearsing the moves. I’m on the summit, about to rappel down the face with over a thousand ft of rope to spend the day practicing. When I determined sequences that felt secure and repeatable, I needed to memorize them. I needed to be certain that they have been so deeply ingrained within me that there was once no probability of error. I didn’t wish to be questioning if I was going the proper means or using the satisfactory holds.I needed the whole thing to believe automated. Mountaineering with a rope is a largely physical effort. You just have got to be robust adequate to maintain on and make the movements upward. However free soloing plays out more in the mind. The physical effort is essentially the identical. Your body continues to be hiking the equal wall. But staying calm and acting at your exceptional whilst you be aware of that any mistake could mean death requires a special style of mindset. (Laughter) that is now not purported to be humorous, but if it is, it is. (Laughter) I worked to domesticate that mindset via visualization, which basically simply means imagining the whole experience of soloing the wall. Partially, that was to help me recall the entire holds, but probably visualization was about feeling the texture of each preserve in my hand and imagining the sensation of my leg accomplishing out and putting my foot just so. I would suppose it all like a choreographed dance hundreds and hundreds of toes up. Probably the most problematic a part of the whole route was referred to as the Boulder concern. It was about 2,000 toes off the ground and consisted of the toughest bodily strikes regularly route: lengthy pulls between poor handholds with very small, slippery ft.That is what I mean with the aid of a negative handhold: an side smaller than the width of a pencil however dealing with downward that I needed to press up into with my thumb. But that wasn’t even the hardest part. The crux culminated in a karate kick with my left foot over to the within of an adjoining nook, a maneuver that required a high measure of precision and adaptability, adequate in order that i would been doing a nightly stretching routine for a full year forward of time to be certain that I would conveniently make the attain with my leg. As I practiced the moves, my visualization became to the emotional factor of a talents solo. Essentially, what if I obtained up there and it was too scary? What if I was too tired? What if i could not really make the kick? I needed to keep in mind each likelihood while I was safely on the bottom, so that once the time got here and i was once virtually making the strikes with no rope, there was no room for doubt to creep in. Doubt is the precursor to worry, and that i knew that i could not expertise my superb second if I was once afraid.I had to imagine and rehearse sufficient to take away all doubt. But past that, I additionally visualized how it will feel if it by no means seemed plausible. What if, after so much work, I was once afraid to check out? What if I was losing my time and i’d certainly not think at ease in such an exposed role? There were no effortless solutions, however El Cap meant enough to me that i might put within the work and find out. Some of my preparations have been extra mundane. This can be a image of my pal Conrad Anker mountain climbing up the backside of El Cap with an empty backpack. We spent the day mountain climbing together to a special crack within the center of the wall that was jam-packed with loose rocks that made that section complicated and potentially harmful, on the grounds that any ignored step could knock a rock to the ground and kill a passing climber or hiker. So we carefully removed the rocks, loaded them into the p.C. And rappelled back off. Take a 2nd to think how ridiculous it feels to climb 1,500 feet up a wall just to fill a backpack filled with rocks.(Laughter) it can be certainly not that convenient to carry a p.C. Filled with rocks around. It can be even harder on the side of a cliff. It’s going to have felt silly, nevertheless it still had to get finished. I needed everything to consider superb if I was once ever going to climb the route without a rope. After two seasons of working specifically toward a potential free solo of El Cap, I subsequently finished all my preparations. I knew each handhold and foothold normally route, and i knew exactly what to do. Clearly, I was once competent. It was time to solo El Cap. On June 3, 2017, I woke up early, ate my natural breakfast of muesli and fruit and made it to the base of the wall before dawn.I felt positive as I looked up the wall. I felt even better as I started climbing. About 500 toes up, I reached a slab similar to the person who had given me a lot crisis on 1/2 Dome, however this time was different. I’d scouted each option, including hundreds and hundreds of ft of wall to both facet. I knew precisely what to do and the way to do it. I had no doubts. I just climbed proper by way of. Even the intricate and strenuous sections handed by simply. I used to be flawlessly executing my routine. I rested for a moment under the Boulder challenge and then climbed it simply as I had practiced so frequently with the rope on. My foot shot throughout to the wall on the left with out hesitation, and that i knew that I had carried out it. Mountain climbing half Dome had been a tremendous purpose and i did it, however I failed to get what I quite wanted. I didn’t gain mastery. I was hesitant and afraid, and it wasn’t the experience that I desired.However El Cap used to be distinctive. With 600 feet to head, I felt like the mountain was delivering me a victory lap. I climbed with a tender precision and loved the sounds of the birds swooping across the cliff. It all felt like a social gathering. And then I reached the summit after three hours and 56 minutes of wonderful climbing. It was once the climb that I wanted, and it felt like mastery. Thank you. (Applause) .

[shadowedgarden]

From the Hunters, Among the Hunted

Chapter 2: The Desolate City 

 Hi! Yes it's been a bit over a year, sorry about that, when I say I'm bad at updating I do not kid.  At all. On the plus side, chapter 2 and 3 are going up at the same time, as I didn't know where to split it when I was writing it. A thank you to @insanityisnotfun for his input and help, and anyone else that helped in the past year(sorry again, it's been awhile so my memory isn't that good for this). Isp: this comic. Feedback is always appreciated, hope you enjoy! 

Ch.1: Welcome, Please Try Not to Die ||  Ch.3: Let the Fun Begin!

 You stare at the contraption for what feels like an eternity before you dare touch a thing.  It's approximately the size of your hand, maybe a bit smaller, the exterior being made of some hard material.  Its shape is reminiscent of a box, and once you pry it open the thinner half starts to emit light, making the cracks over top of it look even weirder.  The thicker half is covered in a flexible material, shaped into a grid with each square covered in nearly worn off numbers and letters.  Some spots are obviously patched in some way.  When you finally manage to hesitantly poke it, it makes a beep that startles you enough to jump, and stalling progress for a few minutes until you regain enough curiosity or confidence to continue.  Eventually, you manage to press another button, and a soft ringing starts emanating from it.  Nearly instantaneously it's on the ground, though whether you placed it there or dropped it is impossible to tell, and you are behind a partially crumbled pillar.  The ringing stops and a voice, which sound similar to Toriel's, takes it place.  You will ask her about that later.  The voice stops, and you creep over and delicately put it into your backpack, then start off in the direction she left in. 

The next room has oddly large piles of red leaves everywhere, and there is another one of the gently pulsing yellow stars beside the pile nearest you.  You flop down on said pile, and the leaves crunch underneath your weight, those not directly underneath you whispering instead.  Your eyes widen, a grin breaking out across your face as you pick up your arm and flop it down again, resulting in another crunch that sets your childish heart soaring.  You turn around and tackle the leaves, becoming immersed as they fall on you.  Because an abandoned crumbling shell of a city just screams play to you, doesn't it.  Sitting up, you blow some especially friendly leaves, as well as a strand of your dark tangled hair, out of your face and dive back in.  Congratulations, you just completely defeated the purpose of that action.  Eventually, your hand touches the star, determination swirling into your happiness as you Save.  You lie back, giggling, and gaze up at the stars.   

After a minute of resting you stand up, your urge to play temporarily sated.  A shadowy archway covered in silvery cobwebs swiftly grabs your eye and snags your curiosity, drawing you in.  As luck would have it, there is a hole in the wall of webs low down near the ground, neat enough that it almost seems like it has been used as an entrance before.  Inside you find it is a stunningly intact room.  Fresh water runs through, sparkling in the moonlight, moss grows thickly along the corners in an inviting manner, and in the center of the room sits a bowl , slightly raised off the floor with the words "For those in need of healing" painted neatly on the side.  Vines encase the room and hold it together, the ceiling still mostly intact with only a single hole in it, which manages to half flood the room in moonlight.  Glittering cobwebs are draped around the upper corners of the room.  It's a perfect refuge.  Realizing how thirsty you are, you fill up your water-bottle at the stream, and grab a spider cider and a spider doughnut from the bowl.  You lie back on the moss for a rest.  After a minute or so of dozing, the spiders begin growing restless.  You will not be able to stay much longer.  After one last glance at this dream-like room, you leave, ignoring the leaf-piles.  

You are only a few strides out before the floor abruptly disappears from beneath you.  A cry forces its way up through your throat, arms flailing desperately for something to grab, some way to stop your fall, but it is too late and you fall into shadows.  A pile of leaves cushions your landing.  You spend the next few minutes attempting to calm your racing heart, control your shaky breathing, and blink back tears.  You decide you need to be more careful.  Much more careful.  Once you calm down and make sure nothing, particularly yourself or the phone, is broken, you look around.  The only notable thing is two decent sized holes built into the wall, as well as the skylight you made with your fall.  Upon closer examination you find that the holes in the wall are really tunnels.  Actually, shafts would probably describe them better, as they are vertical.  You test one of the shaft's strength then begin to climb, finding that there are plenty of handholds.  Your pack trails behind you, dangling from your foot so you can fit.  As you climb over the bend at the top, the bag catches a little, and you tug on it.  When that doesn't work you pull harder.  It comes free with only a split-second's warning and you tumble out, unprepared for the sudden give, falling right on top of an unsuspecting Whimsum.  Whimsums are flighty and nervous, always feeling guilty due to a complication in their past, and their ghost-like and twiggy appearance does little to convince anyone otherwise.  This one is gone the instant you open your mouth, even though you bring apologies and promises that you mean no harm.  You can do no more than stare after it.  Putting the encounter out of your mind the best you can, you realize you are on the other side of the falling tiles, and back on track.  On track to where, you have no idea, unless you count exploration as a location, but back on track none the less.  

The next room where you have to do something other then just pick your way cautiously around rocks and vines and the remains of unrecognizable things gains your attention by having a lack of said objects.  Instead the ground is made entirely of that scratched stone that you know from prior inspection is only supported by flimsy twigs.  It will break under your weight instantly.  Pity that you saw no other way around, and trying to go back would only lead to more.  Heart nagging you, you let out a sigh and step out, staying near the wall in the foolish hope that, despite your knowledge, it might not collapse and send you falling to the hard floor beneath.  You get no such luck, promptly having your world drop, your heart jump into your mouth, and your breathing hitch.  You are lucky enough to miss some of the worn, battered, and bent spikes that still managed to exist, and land instead on a pile of dust and leaves.  After a few shaky breaths and a cough or two, you see an oddly clear path that goes all the way to the end of the room.  You head over to the tunnel for this area, beginning to climb.  This one is a bit more smoothed than the first one and you nearly slip, but you manage to make it and slide out, and try again to cross, attempting to walk where the path was below.  Somehow, the sticks are strong enough to support you here, and while the stone tiles tip up a bit as you walk, you don't fall.  You carefully follow the path, however, your memory is not exactly perfect, and you fall and have to start again, earning yourself a small bruise.  

On your next try, your foot goes over the edge, but you manage to pull it back in time and correct yourself.  You relax as you exit, forgetting about the rocks that litter this place and tripping, your arm hitting something sharp, and making you wince.  Your blood drips on the ground.  It was an arrowhead.  You sit up, grimacing at the sting and quietly cursing lightly under your breath.  The room has some bigger boulders in it, as well as several more arrowheads, and some long dried blood.  The rocks were scratched in some places, and at the far end a brisk stream ran through, with nearly destroyed spikes half submerged in the centre.  You wonder why Toriel would ever watch over such a place.  You pick your way through carefully, not wanting to disturb anything.  You leave the room with a feeling of dread starting to form in your mind.  A mouse distracts you, and the "no matter what" part of your promise surfaces from your memories.  You touch the star, trying to ignore the nagging in your mind and letting determination wash over you.  Some hope returns to you.  If the mouse can make it here, so can you.  The ghost that disappears the instant you see each other, on the other hand, certainly doesn't help with your apprehension, or the haunted atmosphere.  You sigh, taking a few steps forward and kicking at a small pebble.  It skips through a doorway and is stopped by a spearhead embedded in the ground, causing you to look up and then out into the space beyond.  

The walls of that room and the next few beside it have been mostly destroyed and reduced to rubble.  Rocks cover the ground so thickly you can hardly see it.  The moon shines brightly, bathing the place in silver light and revealing everything.  Spears and swords and other weapons from your village are scattered across the landscape, all of them broken beyond repair.  There are a few spatters of blood, old and dried, and the larger rocks are scorched on occasion.  You have no idea how long any of it has been here.  A thin crust of dust coats most of what you can see, even with some patches being slowly eroded and carried off in little wisps by the wind, which sounds a fair amount like echoing screams and moans as it crescendos and diminuendos.  A chill runs through you, causing you to shudder.  It is hard to fathom why anyone would come or stay anywhere near this place.  You walk through the doorway on your left, pausing to take a sip of water, and are debating on whether you want to eat one of the spider doughnuts or something else when a muffled ringing interrupts you, originating from inside your pack.  Despite how quiet it is, it still sounds a bit too loud in this place.  The entire city is submerged in an eerie sort of silence, honestly, if you discount the wind crying in the background.  The phone rings for a bit while you figure out how to answer.  When you pick up, Toriel's voice comes through, sounding worn with a vaguely strained cheerfulness, the slightest bit more prominent then when you first met her, though it could easily be your imagination. 

 "Greetings, my child, this is Toriel.  I hope you have not encountered too much difficulty since we parted.  I still have one or two things I must attend to, so if you could head to the house at the base of the mountain I would greatly appreciate it.  Do you think you can manage that?  If you have any doubts at all I will come guide you." 

You tell her you can.  

"Excellent, I will meet you there.  Be good, will you?"  The phone beeps once, leaving you with a place to be.  

Ch. 3: Let the fun Begin!

[airoasis]

How I climbed a 3,000-foot vertical cliff -- without ropes | Alex Honnold

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/how-i-climbed-a-3000-foot-vertical-cliff-without-ropes-alex-honnold/

How I climbed a 3,000-foot vertical cliff -- without ropes | Alex Honnold

Hiya. I’d like to show you guys 30 seconds of the excellent day of my life. (Applause) in order that used to be El Capitan in California’s Yosemite country wide Park, and if you couldn’t tell, I was once hiking on my own without a rope, a variety of a climbing often called free soloing. That was once the end result of a close to decade-lengthy dream, and in the video i’m over 2,500 ft off the bottom. Seems scary? Yeah, it is, which is why I spent so a long time dreaming about soloing El Cap and no longer really doing it.But on the day that that video was once taken, it did not suppose horrifying at all. It felt as relaxed and traditional as a stroll within the park, which is what most men and women had been doing in Yosemite that day. At present i would like to talk about how I was once capable to feel so at ease and how I overcame my worry. I will begin with a very transient version of how I grew to be a climber, after which inform the story of my two most big free solos. They were each effective, which is why i am here.(Laughter) however the first felt mostly unsatisfying, whereas the 2d, El Cap, used to be via some distance the most satisfying day of my existence. Via these two climbs, you can see my method for managing worry. So I started mountaineering in a gymnasium after I used to be around 10 years old, which means that that my life has been centered on mountain climbing for more than 20 years. After nearly a decade of mountain climbing more commonly indoors, I made the transition to the outside and steadily began free soloing. I built up my alleviation over time and slowly took on better and tougher partitions. And there had been many free soloists before me, so I had a lot of concept to attract from. But with the aid of 2008, i might repeated most of their earlier solos in Yosemite and was opening to assume breaking into new terrain. The obvious first option was half Dome, an iconic 2,000-foot wall that lords over the east finish of the valley. The situation, although also the attract, was once that it used to be too significant.I did not particularly be aware of put together for a expertise free solo. So I determined to skip the preparations and just go up there and have an adventure. I figured i’d upward push to the occasion, which, unsurprisingly, was now not the first-rate method. I did as a minimum climb the route roped up with a buddy two days before simply to make certain that I knew roughly the place to go and that I might bodily do it. But after I came back by myself two days later, I decided that I failed to want to go that means. I knew that there was a 300-foot variation that circled around one of the vital hardest ingredients of the climb. I all of the sudden decided to pass the tough phase and take the version, despite the fact that i’d certainly not climbed it earlier than, however I immediately started to doubt myself.Imagine being by using yourself within the useless center of a 2,000-foot face, wondering if you’re lost. (Laughter) fortunately, it used to be in general the right approach and that i circled back to the route. I was fairly rattled, I was once lovely rattled, however i tried not to let it trouble me too much given that I knew that all of the hardest mountain climbing used to be up at the top. I wanted to stay composed. It was a gorgeous September morning, and as I climbed higher, I could hear the sounds of tourists chatting and laughing on the summit. They’d all hiked up the average path on the back, which I was planning on utilizing for my descent. But between me and the summit lay a blank slab of granite. There were no cracks or edges to maintain on to, simply small ripples of texture up a moderately less than vertical wall.I had to trust my existence to the friction between my mountaineering shoes and the gentle granite. I carefully balanced my method upward, shifting my weight back and forth between the small smears. However then I reached a foothold that I didn’t quite believe. Two days in the past, i’d have just stepped correct up on it, but that may were with a rope on. Now it felt too small and too slippery. I doubted that my foot would stay on if I weighted it. I considered a foot further to the aspect, which seemed worse. I switched my toes and tried a foot extra out. It gave the impression even worse. I began to panic. I might hear folks laughing on the summit simply above me.I desired to be at any place however on that slab. My intellect used to be racing in every direction. I knew what I needed to do, however I was once too afraid to do it. I simply needed to arise on my right foot. And so after what felt like an eternity, I authorized what I had to do and i stood up on the correct foot, and it didn’t slip, and so I didn’t die, and that transfer marked the end of the hardest hiking. And so I charged from there towards the summit. And so most likely when you summit half Dome, you have a rope and a bunch of mountain climbing gear on you, and vacationers gasp they usually flock round you for portraits. This time I popped over the edge shirtless, panting, jacked. I was once amped, however nobody batted an eye fixed. (Laughter) I gave the look of a misplaced hiker that was too close to the threshold. I was surrounded via folks speaking on cell phones and having picnics.I felt like I was once in a mall. (Laughter) I took off my tight mountain climbing shoes and began mountain climbing go into reverse, and that’s when persons stopped me. "you’re mountaineering barefoot? That’s so rough-core." (Laughter) I failed to hassle to provide an explanation for, however that night in my climbing journal, I duly famous my free solo of 1/2 Dome, however I included a frowny face and a comment, "Do better?" i’d succeeded within the solo and it was celebrated as a big first in mountain climbing. Some buddies later made a film about it. However I used to be unsatisfied.I was once dissatisfied in my performance, for the reason that I knew that I had gotten away with some thing. I didn’t need to be a fortunate climber. I desired to be a first-class climber. I surely took the next 12 months or so off from free soloing, when you consider that I knew that I should not make a habit of counting on success. But even though I wasn’t soloing very so much, i would already started to suppose about El Cap.It was once normally in the back of my mind as the obvious crown jewel of solos. It’s essentially the most hanging wall in the world. Each and every yr, for the next seven years, i’d think, "this is the year that i am going to solo El Cap." after which i’d drive into Yosemite, appear up on the wall, and suppose, "No frickin’ means." (Laughter) it can be too big and too scary. However ultimately I came to be given that I desired to experiment myself towards El Cap. It represented proper mastery, however I needed it to consider distinctive. I did not wish to get away with some thing or barely squeak with the aid of. This time I desired to do it right. The object that makes El Cap so intimidating is the sheer scale of the wall. Most climbers take three to 5 days to ascend the three,000 toes of vertical granite. The inspiration of setting out up a wall of that measurement with nothing but footwear and a chalk bag gave the impression impossible. 3,000 toes of climbing represents countless numbers of certain hand and foot movements, which is quite a bit to consider. The various moves I knew via sheer repetition. I would climbed El Cap perhaps 50 instances over the previous decade with a rope.But this snapshot suggests my favored system of rehearsing the strikes. I’m on the summit, about to rappel down the face with over a thousand ft of rope to spend the day practising. When I found sequences that felt relaxed and repeatable, I had to memorize them. I needed to make certain that they were so deeply ingrained inside me that there was no probability of error. I failed to need to be wondering if I used to be going the right approach or utilising the nice holds. I wanted the whole thing to think automated. Mountaineering with a rope is a generally physical effort. You just ought to be powerful adequate to preserve on and make the movements upward. However free soloing plays out extra in the intellect. The physical effort is essentially the identical. Your physique is still hiking the same wall. But staying calm and acting at your first-rate while you recognize that any mistake would imply demise requires a specific sort of mind-set.(Laughter) that is no longer supposed to be funny, but whether it is, it’s. (Laughter) I worked to domesticate that mind-set by means of visualization, which truly just way imagining the whole expertise of soloing the wall. Partially, that used to be to support me take into account all the holds, however most often visualization was once about feeling the texture of every hold in my hand and imagining the feeling of my leg reaching out and inserting my foot just so. I’d suppose it all like a choreographed dance 1000s of feet up. The most difficult part of the entire route used to be called the Boulder obstacle. It was once about 2,000 ft off the ground and consisted of the toughest bodily strikes most commonly route: lengthy pulls between bad handholds with very small, slippery ft.That is what I imply by a negative handhold: an aspect smaller than the width of a pencil but going through downward that I had to press up into with my thumb. But that wasn’t even the hardest phase. The crux culminated in a karate kick with my left foot over to the within of an adjoining corner, a maneuver that required a high degree of precision and suppleness, sufficient in order that i might been doing a nightly stretching routine for a full yr forward of time to be certain that I might with ease make the reach with my leg. As I practiced the strikes, my visualization became to the emotional component of a advantage solo. Clearly, what if I obtained up there and it was once too frightening? What if I used to be too tired? What if i couldn’t rather make the kick? I needed to consider each likelihood at the same time I was once safely on the bottom, so that after the time got here and that i was truely making the moves with out a rope, there was no room for doubt to creep in.Doubt is the precursor to worry, and that i knew that i couldn’t experience my superb second if I used to be afraid. I had to visualize and rehearse enough to cast off all doubt. But past that, I additionally visualized how it might suppose if it never appeared attainable. What if, after a lot work, I was afraid to check out? What if I was losing my time and i’d in no way suppose secure in such an exposed function? There were no effortless solutions, but El Cap intended sufficient to me that i would put within the work and find out. Some of my preparations were extra mundane. This can be a photo of my pal Conrad Anker climbing up the bottom of El Cap with an empty backpack.We spent the day climbing collectively to a distinct crack in the core of the wall that used to be packed with free rocks that made that part difficult and probably dangerous, considering the fact that any ignored step could knock a rock to the bottom and kill a passing climber or hiker. So we carefully eliminated the rocks, loaded them into the percent and rappelled backtrack. Take a 2nd to imagine how ridiculous it feels to climb 1,500 ft up a wall simply to fill a backpack full of rocks. (Laughter) it’s in no way that convenient to carry a % stuffed with rocks round. It’s even tougher on the side of a cliff. It may have felt foolish, but it still needed to get completed. I wanted the whole thing to believe perfect if I was ever going to climb the route with no rope. After two seasons of working mainly toward a skills free solo of El Cap, I sooner or later completed all my preparations. I knew each handhold and foothold commonly route, and that i knew exactly what to do. Truly, I used to be able. It was once time to solo El Cap. On June 3, 2017, I woke up early, ate my average breakfast of muesli and fruit and made it to the bottom of the wall before dawn.I felt optimistic as I looked up the wall. I felt even higher as I began hiking. About 500 feet up, I reached a slab similar to the person who had given me so much difficulty on half of Dome, however this time was special. I would scouted every choice, including hundreds of thousands of toes of wall to either side. I knew exactly what to do and how you can do it. I had no doubts. I simply climbed correct by means of. Even the complex and strenuous sections passed through without problems. I was once perfectly executing my routine. I rested for a second under the Boulder situation and then climbed it simply as I had practiced so commonly with the rope on. My foot shot across to the wall on the left without hesitation, and i knew that I had done it. Climbing 1/2 Dome had been a huge intention and that i did it, however I didn’t get what I relatively desired. I failed to acquire mastery. I was hesitant and afraid, and it wasn’t the experience that I desired.However El Cap was specific. With 600 ft to head, I felt just like the mountain was once delivering me a victory lap. I climbed with a delicate precision and enjoyed the sounds of the birds swooping around the cliff. All of it felt like a social gathering. And then I reached the summit after three hours and 56 minutes of glorious climbing. It was once the climb that I wanted, and it felt like mastery. Thanks. (Applause) .

[onlinemarketingcourses]

Google Florida 2.0 Algorithm Update: Early Observations

It has been a while since Google has had a major algorithm update.

They recently announced one which began on the 12th of March.

This week, we released a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see these tweets for more about that:https://t.co/uPlEdSLHoXhttps://t.co/tmfQkhdjPL— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 13, 2019

What changed?

It appears multiple things did.

When Google rolled out the original version of Penguin on April 24, 2012 (primarily focused on link spam) they also rolled out an update to an on-page spam classifier for misdirection.

And, over time, it was quite common for Panda & Penguin updates to be sandwiched together.

If you were Google & had the ability to look under the hood to see why things changed, you would probably want to obfuscate any major update by changing multiple things at once to make reverse engineering the change much harder.

Anyone who operates a single website (& lacks the ability to look under the hood) will have almost no clue about what changed or how to adjust with the algorithms.

In the most recent algorithm update some sites which were penalized in prior “quality” updates have recovered.

Though many of those recoveries are only partial.

Many SEO blogs will publish articles about how they cracked the code on the latest update by publishing charts like the first one without publishing that second chart showing the broader context.

The first penalty any website receives might be the first of a series of penalties.

If Google smokes your site & it does not cause a PR incident & nobody really cares that you are gone, then there is a very good chance things will go from bad to worse to worser to worsterest, technically speaking.

“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.” – Abraham Lincoln

Absent effort & investment to evolve FASTER than the broader web, sites which are hit with one penalty will often further accumulate other penalties. It is like compound interest working in reverse – a pile of algorithmic debt which must be dug out of before the bleeding stops.

Further, many recoveries may be nothing more than a fleeting invitation to false hope. To pour more resources into a site that is struggling in an apparent death loop.

The above site which had its first positive algorithmic response in a couple years achieved that in part by heavily de-monetizing. After the algorithm updates already demonetized the website over 90%, what harm was there in removing 90% of what remained to see how it would react? So now it will get more traffic (at least for a while) but then what exactly is the traffic worth to a site that has no revenue engine tied to it?

That is ultimately the hard part. Obtaining a stable stream of traffic while monetizing at a decent yield, without the monetizing efforts leading to the traffic disappearing.

A buddy who owns the above site was working on link cleanup & content improvement on & off for about a half year with no results. Each month was a little worse than the prior month. It was only after I told him to remove the aggressive ads a few months back that he likely had any chance of seeing any sort of traffic recovery. Now he at least has a pulse of traffic & can look into lighter touch means of monetization.

If a site is consistently penalized then the problem might not be an algorithmic false positive, but rather the business model of the site.

The more something looks like eHow the more fickle Google’s algorithmic with receive it.

Google does not like websites that sit at the end of the value chain & extract profits without having to bear far greater risk & expense earlier into the cycle.

Thin rewrites, largely speaking, don’t add value to the ecosystem. Doorway pages don’t either. And something that was propped up by a bunch of keyword-rich low-quality links is (in most cases) probably genuinely lacking in some other aspect.

Generally speaking, Google would like themselves to be the entity at the end of the value chain extracting excess profits from markets.

RIP Quora!!! Q&A On Google – Showing Questions That Need Answers In Search https://t.co/mejXUDwGhT pic.twitter.com/8Cv1iKjDh2— John Shehata (@JShehata) March 18, 2019

This is the purpose of the knowledge graph & featured snippets. To allow the results to answer the most basic queries without third party publishers getting anything. The knowledge graph serve as a floating vertical that eat an increasing share of the value chain & force publishers to move higher up the funnel & publish more differentiated content.

As Google adds features to the search results (flight price trends, a hotel booking service on the day AirBNB announced they acquired HotelTonight, ecommerce product purchase on Google, shoppable image ads just ahead of the Pinterest IPO, etc.) it forces other players in the value chain to consolidate (Expedia owns Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire & a bunch of other sites) or add greater value to remain a differentiated & sought after destination (travel review site TripAdvisor was crushed by the shift to mobile & the inability to monetize mobile traffic, so they eventually had to shift away from being exclusively a reviews site to offer event & hotel booking features to remain relevant).

It is never easy changing a successful & profitable business model, but it is even harder to intentionally reduce revenues further or spend aggressively to improve quality AFTER income has fallen 50% or more.

Some people do the opposite & make up for a revenue shortfall by publishing more lower end content at an ever faster rate and/or increasing ad load. Either of which typically makes their user engagement metrics worse while making their site less differentiated & more likely to receive additional bonus penalties to drive traffic even lower.

In some ways I think the ability for a site to survive & remain though a penalty is itself a quality signal for Google.

Some sites which are overly reliant on search & have no external sources of traffic are ultimately sites which tried to behave too similarly to the monopoly that ultimately displaced them. And over time the tech monopolies are growing more powerful as the ecosystem around them burns down:

If you had to choose a date for when the internet died, it would be in the year 2014. Before then, traffic to websites came from many sources, and the web was a lively ecosystem. But beginning in 2014, more than half of all traffic began coming from just two sources: Facebook and Google. Today, over 70 percent of traffic is dominated by those two platforms.

Businesses which have sustainable profit margins & slack (in terms of management time & resources to deploy) can better cope with algorithmic changes & change with the market.

Over the past half decade or so there have been multiple changes that drastically shifted the online publishing landscape:

the shift to mobile, which both offers publishers lower ad yields while making the central ad networks more ad heavy in a way that reduces traffic to third party sites

the rise of the knowledge graph & featured snippets which often mean publishers remain uncompensated for their work

higher ad loads which also lower organic reach (on both search & social channels)

the rise of programmatic advertising, which further gutted display ad CPMs

the rise of ad blockers

increasing algorithmic uncertainty & a higher barrier to entry

Each one of the above could take a double digit percent out of a site’s revenues, particularly if a site was reliant on display ads. Add them together and a website which was not even algorithmically penalized could still see a 60%+ decline in revenues. Mix in a penalty and that decline can chop a zero or two off the total revenues.

Businesses with lower margins can try to offset declines with increased ad spending, but that only works if you are not in a market with 2 & 20 VC fueled competition:

Startups spend almost 40 cents of every VC dollar on Google, Facebook, and Amazon. We don’t necessarily know which channels they will choose or the particularities of how they will spend money on user acquisition, but we do know more or less what’s going to happen. Advertising spend in tech has become an arms race: fresh tactics go stale in months, and customer acquisition costs keep rising. In a world where only one company thinks this way, or where one business is executing at a level above everyone else – like Facebook in its time – this tactic is extremely effective. However, when everyone is acting this way, the industry collectively becomes an accelerating treadmill. Ad impressions and click-throughs get bid up to outrageous prices by startups flush with venture money, and prospective users demand more and more subsidized products to gain their initial attention. The dynamics we’ve entered is, in many ways, creating a dangerous, high stakes Ponzi scheme.

And sometimes the platform claws back a second or third bite of the apple. Amazon.com charges merchants for fulfillment, warehousing, transaction based fees, etc. And they’ve pushed hard into launching hundreds of private label brands which pollute the interface & force brands to buy ads even on their own branded keyword terms.

They’ve recently jumped the shark by adding a bonus feature where even when a brand paid Amazon to send traffic to their listing, Amazon would insert a spam popover offering a cheaper private label branded product:

Amazon.com tested a pop-up feature on its app that in some instances pitched its private-label goods on rivals’ product pages, an experiment that shows the e-commerce giant’s aggressiveness in hawking lower-priced products including its own house brands. The recent experiment, conducted in Amazon’s mobile app, went a step further than the display ads that commonly appear within search results and product pages. This test pushed pop-up windows that took over much of a product page, forcing customers to either click through to the lower-cost Amazon products or dismiss them before continuing to shop. … When a customer using Amazon’s mobile app searched for “AAA batteries,” for example, the first link was a sponsored listing from Energizer Holdings Inc. After clicking on the listing, a pop-up window appeared, offering less expensive AmazonBasics AAA batteries.”

Buying those Amazon ads was quite literally subsidizing a direct competitor pushing you into irrelevance.

And while Amazon is destroying brand equity, AWS is doing investor relations matchmaking for startups. Anything to keep the current bubble going ahead of the Uber IPO that will likely mark the top in the stock market.

Some thoughts on Silicon Valley’s endgame. We have long said the biggest risk to the bull market is an Uber IPO. That is now upon us.— Jawad Mian (@jsmian) March 16, 2019

As the market caps of big tech companies climb they need to be more predatious to grow into the valuations & retain employees with stock options at an ever-increasing strike price.

They’ve created bubbles in their own backyards where each raise requires another. Teachers either drive hours to work or live in houses subsidized by loans from the tech monopolies that get a piece of the upside (provided they can keep their own bubbles inflated).

“It is an uncommon arrangement — employer as landlord — that is starting to catch on elsewhere as school employees say they cannot afford to live comfortably in regions awash in tech dollars. … Holly Gonzalez, 34, a kindergarten teacher in East San Jose, and her husband, Daniel, a school district I.T. specialist, were able to buy a three-bedroom apartment for $610,000 this summer with help from their parents and from Landed. When they sell the home, they will owe Landed 25 percent of any gain in its value. The company is financed partly by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable arm.”

The above sort of dynamics have some claiming peak California:

The cycle further benefits from the Alchian-Allen effect: agglomerating industries have higher productivity, which raises the cost of living and prices out other industries, raising concentration over time. … Since startups raise the variance within whatever industry they’re started in, the natural constituency for them is someone who doesn’t have capital deployed in the industry. If you’re an asset owner, you want low volatility. … Historically, startups have created a constant supply of volatility for tech companies; the next generation is always cannibalizing the previous one. So chip companies in the 1970s created the PC companies of the 80s, but PC companies sourced cheaper and cheaper chips, commoditizing the product until Intel managed to fight back. Meanwhile, the OS turned PCs into a commodity, then search engines and social media turned the OS into a commodity, and presumably this process will continue indefinitely. … As long as higher rents raise the cost of starting a pre-revenue company, fewer people will join them, so more people will join established companies, where they’ll earn market salaries and continue to push up rents. And one of the things they’ll do there is optimize ad loads, which places another tax on startups. More dangerously, this is an incremental tax on growth rather than a fixed tax on headcount, so it puts pressure on out-year valuations, not just upfront cash flow.

If you live hundreds of miles away the tech companies may have no impact on your rental or purchase price, but you can’t really control the algorithms or the ecosystem.

All you can really control is your mindset & ensuring you have optionality baked into your business model.

If you are debt-levered you have little to no optionality. Savings give you optionality. Savings allow you to run at a loss for a period of time while also investing in improving your site and perhaps having a few other sites in other markets.

If you operate a single website that is heavily reliant on a third party for distribution then you have little to no optionality. If you have multiple projects that enables you to shift your attention toward working on whatever is going up and to the right while letting anything that is failing pass time without becoming overly reliant on something you can’t change. This is why it often makes sense for a brand merchant to operate their own ecommerce website even if 90% of their sales come from Amazon. It gives you optionality should the tech monopoly become abusive or otherwise harm you (even if the intent was benign rather than outright misanthropic).

As the update ensues Google will collect more data with how users interact with the result set & determine how to weight different signals, along with re-scoring sites that recovered based on the new engagement data.

Recently a Bing engineer named Frédéric Dubut described how they score relevancy signals used in updates

As early as 2005, we used neural networks to power our search engine and you can still find rare pictures of Satya Nadella, VP of Search and Advertising at the time, showcasing our web ranking advances. … The “training” process of a machine learning model is generally iterative (and all automated). At each step, the model is tweaking the weight of each feature in the direction where it expects to decrease the error the most. After each step, the algorithm remeasures the rating of all the SERPs (based on the known URL/query pair ratings) to evaluate how it’s doing. Rinse and repeat.

That same process is ongoing with Google now & in the coming weeks there’ll be the next phase of the current update.

So far it looks like some quality-based re-scoring was done & some sites which were overly reliant on anchor text got clipped. On the back end of the update there’ll be another quality-based re-scoring, but the sites that were hit for excessive manipulation of anchor text via link building efforts will likely remain penalized for a good chunk of time.

Source link

[evasalinasrest]

Google Florida 2.0 Algorithm Update: Early Observations

It has been a while since Google has had a major algorithm update.

They recently announced one which began on the 12th of March.

This week, we released a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see these tweets for more about that:https://t.co/uPlEdSLHoXhttps://t.co/tmfQkhdjPL— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 13, 2019

What changed?

It appears multiple things did.

When Google rolled out the original version of Penguin on April 24, 2012 (primarily focused on link spam) they also rolled out an update to an on-page spam classifier for misdirection.

And, over time, it was quite common for Panda & Penguin updates to be sandwiched together.

If you were Google & had the ability to look under the hood to see why things changed, you would probably want to obfuscate any major update by changing multiple things at once to make reverse engineering the change much harder.

Anyone who operates a single website (& lacks the ability to look under the hood) will have almost no clue about what changed or how to adjust with the algorithms.

In the most recent algorithm update some sites which were penalized in prior “quality” updates have recovered.

Though many of those recoveries are only partial.

Many SEO blogs will publish articles about how they cracked the code on the latest update by publishing charts like the first one without publishing that second chart showing the broader context.

The first penalty any website receives might be the first of a series of penalties.

If Google smokes your site & it does not cause a PR incident & nobody really cares that you are gone, then there is a very good chance things will go from bad to worse to worser to worsterest, technically speaking.

“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.” – Abraham Lincoln

Absent effort & investment to evolve FASTER than the broader web, sites which are hit with one penalty will often further accumulate other penalties. It is like compound interest working in reverse – a pile of algorithmic debt which must be dug out of before the bleeding stops.

Further, many recoveries may be nothing more than a fleeting invitation to false hope. To pour more resources into a site that is struggling in an apparent death loop.

The above site which had its first positive algorithmic response in a couple years achieved that in part by heavily de-monetizing. After the algorithm updates already demonetized the website over 90%, what harm was there in removing 90% of what remained to see how it would react? So now it will get more traffic (at least for a while) but then what exactly is the traffic worth to a site that has no revenue engine tied to it?

That is ultimately the hard part. Obtaining a stable stream of traffic while monetizing at a decent yield, without the monetizing efforts leading to the traffic disappearing.

A buddy who owns the above site was working on link cleanup & content improvement on & off for about a half year with no results. Each month was a little worse than the prior month. It was only after I told him to remove the aggressive ads a few months back that he likely had any chance of seeing any sort of traffic recovery. Now he at least has a pulse of traffic & can look into lighter touch means of monetization.

If a site is consistently penalized then the problem might not be an algorithmic false positive, but rather the business model of the site.

The more something looks like eHow the more fickle Google’s algorithmic with receive it.

Google does not like websites that sit at the end of the value chain & extract profits without having to bear far greater risk & expense earlier into the cycle.

Thin rewrites, largely speaking, don’t add value to the ecosystem. Doorway pages don’t either. And something that was propped up by a bunch of keyword-rich low-quality links is (in most cases) probably genuinely lacking in some other aspect.

Generally speaking, Google would like themselves to be the entity at the end of the value chain extracting excess profits from markets.

This is the purpose of the knowledge graph & featured snippets. To allow the results to answer the most basic queries without third party publishers getting anything. The knowledge graph serve as a floating vertical that eat an increasing share of the value chain & force publishers to move higher up the funnel & publish more differentiated content.

As Google adds features to the search results (flight price trends, a hotel booking service on the day AirBNB announced they acquired HotelTonight, ecommerce product purchase on Google, shoppable image ads just ahead of the Pinterest IPO, etc.) it forces other players in the value chain to consolidate (Expedia owns Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire & a bunch of other sites) or add greater value to remain a differentiated & sought after destination (travel review site TripAdvisor was crushed by the shift to mobile & the inability to monetize mobile traffic, so they eventually had to shift away from being exclusively a reviews site to offer event & hotel booking features to remain relevant).

It is never easy changing a successful & profitable business model, but it is even harder to intentionally reduce revenues further or spend aggressively to improve quality AFTER income has fallen 50% or more.

Some people do the opposite & make up for a revenue shortfall by publishing more lower end content at an ever faster rate and/or increasing ad load. Either of which typically makes their user engagement metrics worse while making their site less differentiated & more likely to receive additional bonus penalties to drive traffic even lower.

In some ways I think the ability for a site to survive & remain though a penalty is itself a quality signal for Google.

Some sites which are overly reliant on search & have no external sources of traffic are ultimately sites which tried to behave too similarly to the monopoly that ultimately displaced them. And over time the tech monopolies are growing more powerful as the ecosystem around them burns down:

If you had to choose a date for when the internet died, it would be in the year 2014. Before then, traffic to websites came from many sources, and the web was a lively ecosystem. But beginning in 2014, more than half of all traffic began coming from just two sources: Facebook and Google. Today, over 70 percent of traffic is dominated by those two platforms.

Businesses which have sustainable profit margins & slack (in terms of management time & resources to deploy) can better cope with algorithmic changes & change with the market.

Over the past half decade or so there have been multiple changes that drastically shifted the online publishing landscape:

the shift to mobile, which both offers publishers lower ad yields while making the central ad networks more ad heavy in a way that reduces traffic to third party sites the rise of the knowledge graph & featured snippets which often mean publishers remain uncompensated for their work higher ad loads which also lower organic reach (on both search & social channels) the rise of programmatic advertising, which further gutted display ad CPMs the rise of ad blockers increasing algorithmic uncertainty & a higher barrier to entry Each one of the above could take a double digit percent out of a site’s revenues, particularly if a site was reliant on display ads. Add them together and a website which was not even algorithmically penalized could still see a 60%+ decline in revenues. Mix in a penalty and that decline can chop a zero or two off the total revenues.

Businesses with lower margins can try to offset declines with increased ad spending, but that only works if you are not in a market with 2 & 20 VC fueled competition:

Startups spend almost 40 cents of every VC dollar on Google, Facebook, and Amazon. We don’t necessarily know which channels they will choose or the particularities of how they will spend money on user acquisition, but we do know more or less what’s going to happen. Advertising spend in tech has become an arms race: fresh tactics go stale in months, and customer acquisition costs keep rising. In a world where only one company thinks this way, or where one business is executing at a level above everyone else – like Facebook in its time – this tactic is extremely effective. However, when everyone is acting this way, the industry collectively becomes an accelerating treadmill. Ad impressions and click-throughs get bid up to outrageous prices by startups flush with venture money, and prospective users demand more and more subsidized products to gain their initial attention. The dynamics we’ve entered is, in many ways, creating a dangerous, high stakes Ponzi scheme.

And sometimes the platform claws back a second or third bite of the apple. Amazon.com charges merchants for fulfillment, warehousing, transaction based fees, etc. And they’ve pushed hard into launching hundreds of private label brands which pollute the interface & force brands to buy ads even on their own branded keyword terms.

They’ve recently jumped the shark by adding a bonus feature where even when a brand paid Amazon to send traffic to their listing, Amazon would insert a spam popover offering a cheaper private label branded product:

Amazon.com tested a pop-up feature on its app that in some instances pitched its private-label goods on rivals’ product pages, an experiment that shows the e-commerce giant’s aggressiveness in hawking lower-priced products including its own house brands. The recent experiment, conducted in Amazon’s mobile app, went a step further than the display ads that commonly appear within search results and product pages. This test pushed pop-up windows that took over much of a product page, forcing customers to either click through to the lower-cost Amazon products or dismiss them before continuing to shop. … When a customer using Amazon’s mobile app searched for “AAA batteries,” for example, the first link was a sponsored listing from Energizer Holdings Inc. After clicking on the listing, a pop-up window appeared, offering less expensive AmazonBasics AAA batteries.“

Buying those Amazon ads was quite literally subsidizing a direct competitor pushing you into irrelevance.

As the market caps of big tech companies climb they need to be more predatious to grow into the valuations & retain employees with stock options at an ever-increasing price.

They’ve created bubbles in their own backyards where each raise requires another. Teachers either drive hours to work or live in houses subsidized by loans from the tech monopolies that get a piece of the upside (provided they can keep their own bubbles inflated).

“It is an uncommon arrangement — employer as landlord — that is starting to catch on elsewhere as school employees say they cannot afford to live comfortably in regions awash in tech dollars. … Holly Gonzalez, 34, a kindergarten teacher in East San Jose, and her husband, Daniel, a school district I.T. specialist, were able to buy a three-bedroom apartment for $610,000 this summer with help from their parents and from Landed. When they sell the home, they will owe Landed 25 percent of any gain in its value. The company is financed partly by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable arm.”

The above sort of dynamics have some claiming peak California:

The cycle further benefits from the Alchian-Allen effect: agglomerating industries have higher productivity, which raises the cost of living and prices out other industries, raising concentration over time. … Since startups raise the variance within whatever industry they’re started in, the natural constituency for them is someone who doesn’t have capital deployed in the industry. If you’re an asset owner, you want low volatility. … Historically, startups have created a constant supply of volatility for tech companies; the next generation is always cannibalizing the previous one. So chip companies in the 1970s created the PC companies of the 80s, but PC companies sourced cheaper and cheaper chips, commoditizing the product until Intel managed to fight back. Meanwhile, the OS turned PCs into a commodity, then search engines and social media turned the OS into a commodity, and presumably this process will continue indefinitely. … As long as higher rents raise the cost of starting a pre-revenue company, fewer people will join them, so more people will join established companies, where they’ll earn market salaries and continue to push up rents. And one of the things they’ll do there is optimize ad loads, which places another tax on startups. More dangerously, this is an incremental tax on growth rather than a fixed tax on headcount, so it puts pressure on out-year valuations, not just upfront cash flow.

If you live hundreds of miles away the tech companies may have no impact on your rental or purchase price, but you can’t really control the algorithms or the ecosystem.

All you can really control is your mindset & ensuring you have optionality baked into your business model.

If you are debt-levered you have little to no optionality. Savings give you optionality. Savings allow you to run at a loss for a period of time while also investing in improving your site and perhaps having a few other sites in other markets. If you operate a single website that is heavily reliant on a third party for distribution then you have little to no optionality. If you have multiple projects that enables you to shift your attention toward working on whatever is going up and to the right while letting anything that is failing pass time without becoming overly reliant on something you can’t change. This is why it often makes sense for a brand merchant to operate their own ecommerce website even if 90% of their sales come from Amazon. It gives you optionality should the tech monopoly become abusive or otherwise harm you (even if the intent was rather than outright misanthropic). As the update ensues Google will collect more data with how users interact with the result set & determine how to weight different signals, along with re-scoring sites that recovered based on the new engagement data.

Recently a Bing engineer named Frédéric Dubut described how they score relevancy signals used in updates

As early as 2005, we used neural networks to power our search engine and you can still find rare pictures of Satya Nadella, VP of Search and Advertising at the time, showcasing our web ranking advances. … The “training” process of a machine learning model is generally iterative (and all automated). At each step, the model is tweaking the weight of each feature in the direction where it expects to decrease the error the most. After each step, the algorithm remeasures the rating of all the SERPs (based on the known URL/query pair ratings) to evaluate how it’s doing. Rinse and repeat.

That same process is ongoing with Google now & in the coming weeks there’ll be the next phase of the current update.

So far it looks like some quality-based re-scoring was done & some sites which were overly reliant on anchor text got clipped. On the back end of the update there’ll be another quality-based re-scoring, but the sites that were hit for excessive manipulation of anchor text via link building efforts will likely remain penalized for a good chunk of time.

Categories: google

from SEO Book http://www.seobook.com/google-florida-20-algorithm-update-early-observations

via IFTTT from Tumblr http://localseoguru.tumblr.com/post/183538448058/google-florida-20-algorithm-update-early via IFTTT

from Local SEO Guru https://localseogurublog.wordpress.com/2019/03/18/google-florida-2-0-algorithm-update-early-observations/ via IFTTT

from WordPress https://evasalinasrest.wordpress.com/2019/03/18/google-florida-2-0-algorithm-update-early-observations/ via IFTTT

[kellykperez]

Google Florida 2.0 Algorithm Update: Early Observations

It has been a while since Google has had a major algorithm update.

They recently announced one which began on the 12th of March.

This week, we released a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see these tweets for more about that:https://t.co/uPlEdSLHoXhttps://t.co/tmfQkhdjPL— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 13, 2019

What changed?

It appears multiple things did.

When Google rolled out the original version of Penguin on April 24, 2012 (primarily focused on link spam) they also rolled out an update to an on-page spam classifier for misdirection.

And, over time, it was quite common for Panda & Penguin updates to be sandwiched together.

If you were Google & had the ability to look under the hood to see why things changed, you would probably want to obfuscate any major update by changing multiple things at once to make reverse engineering the change much harder.

Anyone who operates a single website (& lacks the ability to look under the hood) will have almost no clue about what changed or how to adjust with the algorithms.

In the most recent algorithm update some sites which were penalized in prior "quality" updates have recovered.

Though many of those recoveries are only partial.

Many SEO blogs will publish articles about how they cracked the code on the latest update by publishing charts like the first one without publishing that second chart showing the broader context.

The first penalty any website receives might be the first of a series of penalties.

If Google smokes your site & it does not cause a PR incident & nobody really cares that you are gone, then there is a very good chance things will go from bad to worse to worser to worsterest, technically speaking.

“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.” - Abraham Lincoln

Absent effort & investment to evolve FASTER than the broader web, sites which are hit with one penalty will often further accumulate other penalties. It is like compound interest working in reverse - a pile of algorithmic debt which must be dug out of before the bleeding stops.

Further, many recoveries may be nothing more than a fleeting invitation to false hope. To pour more resources into a site that is struggling in an apparent death loop.

The above site which had its first positive algorithmic response in a couple years achieved that in part by heavily de-monetizing. After the algorithm updates already demonetized the website over 90%, what harm was there in removing 90% of what remained to see how it would react? So now it will get more traffic (at least for a while) but then what exactly is the traffic worth to a site that has no revenue engine tied to it?

That is ultimately the hard part. Obtaining a stable stream of traffic while monetizing at a decent yield, without the monetizing efforts leading to the traffic disappearing.

A buddy who owns the above site was working on link cleanup & content improvement on & off for about a half year with no results. Each month was a little worse than the prior month. It was only after I told him to remove the aggressive ads a few months back that he likely had any chance of seeing any sort of traffic recovery. Now he at least has a pulse of traffic & can look into lighter touch means of monetization.

If a site is consistently penalized then the problem might not be an algorithmic false positive, but rather the business model of the site.

The more something looks like eHow the more fickle Google's algorithmic with receive it.

Google does not like websites that sit at the end of the value chain & extract profits without having to bear far greater risk & expense earlier into the cycle.

Thin rewrites, largely speaking, don't add value to the ecosystem. Doorway pages don't either. And something that was propped up by a bunch of keyword-rich low-quality links is (in most cases) probably genuinely lacking in some other aspect.

Generally speaking, Google would like themselves to be the entity at the end of the value chain extracting excess profits from markets.

This is the purpose of the knowledge graph & featured snippets. To allow the results to answer the most basic queries without third party publishers getting anything. The knowledge graph serve as a floating vertical that eat an increasing share of the value chain & force publishers to move higher up the funnel & publish more differentiated content.

As Google adds features to the search results (flight price trends, a hotel booking service on the day AirBNB announced they acquired HotelTonight, ecommerce product purchase on Google, shoppable image ads just ahead of the Pinterest IPO, etc.) it forces other players in the value chain to consolidate (Expedia owns Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire & a bunch of other sites) or add greater value to remain a differentiated & sought after destination (travel review site TripAdvisor was crushed by the shift to mobile & the inability to monetize mobile traffic, so they eventually had to shift away from being exclusively a reviews site to offer event & hotel booking features to remain relevant).

It is never easy changing a successful & profitable business model, but it is even harder to intentionally reduce revenues further or spend aggressively to improve quality AFTER income has fallen 50% or more.

Some people do the opposite & make up for a revenue shortfall by publishing more lower end content at an ever faster rate and/or increasing ad load. Either of which typically makes their user engagement metrics worse while making their site less differentiated & more likely to receive additional bonus penalties to drive traffic even lower.

In some ways I think the ability for a site to survive & remain though a penalty is itself a quality signal for Google.

Some sites which are overly reliant on search & have no external sources of traffic are ultimately sites which tried to behave too similarly to the monopoly that ultimately displaced them. And over time the tech monopolies are growing more powerful as the ecosystem around them burns down:

If you had to choose a date for when the internet died, it would be in the year 2014. Before then, traffic to websites came from many sources, and the web was a lively ecosystem. But beginning in 2014, more than half of all traffic began coming from just two sources: Facebook and Google. Today, over 70 percent of traffic is dominated by those two platforms.

Businesses which have sustainable profit margins & slack (in terms of management time & resources to deploy) can better cope with algorithmic changes & change with the market.

Over the past half decade or so there have been multiple changes that drastically shifted the online publishing landscape:

the shift to mobile, which both offers publishers lower ad yields while making the central ad networks more ad heavy in a way that reduces traffic to third party sites

the rise of the knowledge graph & featured snippets which often mean publishers remain uncompensated for their work

higher ad loads which also lower organic reach (on both search & social channels)

the rise of programmatic advertising, which further gutted display ad CPMs

the rise of ad blockers

increasing algorithmic uncertainty & a higher barrier to entry

Each one of the above could take a double digit percent out of a site's revenues, particularly if a site was reliant on display ads. Add them together and a website which was not even algorithmically penalized could still see a 60%+ decline in revenues. Mix in a penalty and that decline can chop a zero or two off the total revenues.

Businesses with lower margins can try to offset declines with increased ad spending, but that only works if you are not in a market with 2 & 20 VC fueled competition:

Startups spend almost 40 cents of every VC dollar on Google, Facebook, and Amazon. We don’t necessarily know which channels they will choose or the particularities of how they will spend money on user acquisition, but we do know more or less what’s going to happen. Advertising spend in tech has become an arms race: fresh tactics go stale in months, and customer acquisition costs keep rising. In a world where only one company thinks this way, or where one business is executing at a level above everyone else - like Facebook in its time - this tactic is extremely effective. However, when everyone is acting this way, the industry collectively becomes an accelerating treadmill. Ad impressions and click-throughs get bid up to outrageous prices by startups flush with venture money, and prospective users demand more and more subsidized products to gain their initial attention. The dynamics we’ve entered is, in many ways, creating a dangerous, high stakes Ponzi scheme.

And sometimes the platform claws back a second or third bite of the apple. Amazon.com charges merchants for fulfillment, warehousing, transaction based fees, etc. And they've pushed hard into launching hundreds of private label brands which pollute the interface & force brands to buy ads even on their own branded keyword terms.

They've recently jumped the shark by adding a bonus feature where even when a brand paid Amazon to send traffic to their listing, Amazon would insert a spam popover offering a cheaper private label branded product:

Amazon.com tested a pop-up feature on its app that in some instances pitched its private-label goods on rivals’ product pages, an experiment that shows the e-commerce giant’s aggressiveness in hawking lower-priced products including its own house brands. The recent experiment, conducted in Amazon’s mobile app, went a step further than the display ads that commonly appear within search results and product pages. This test pushed pop-up windows that took over much of a product page, forcing customers to either click through to the lower-cost Amazon products or dismiss them before continuing to shop. ... When a customer using Amazon’s mobile app searched for “AAA batteries,” for example, the first link was a sponsored listing from Energizer Holdings Inc. After clicking on the listing, a pop-up window appeared, offering less expensive AmazonBasics AAA batteries."

Buying those Amazon ads was quite literally subsidizing a direct competitor pushing you into irrelevance.

As the market caps of big tech companies climb they need to be more predatious to grow into the valuations & retain employees with stock options at an ever-increasing price.

They've created bubbles in their own backyards where each raise requires another. Teachers either drive hours to work or live in houses subsidized by loans from the tech monopolies that get a piece of the upside (provided they can keep their own bubbles inflated).

"It is an uncommon arrangement — employer as landlord — that is starting to catch on elsewhere as school employees say they cannot afford to live comfortably in regions awash in tech dollars. ... Holly Gonzalez, 34, a kindergarten teacher in East San Jose, and her husband, Daniel, a school district I.T. specialist, were able to buy a three-bedroom apartment for $610,000 this summer with help from their parents and from Landed. When they sell the home, they will owe Landed 25 percent of any gain in its value. The company is financed partly by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable arm."

The above sort of dynamics have some claiming peak California:

The cycle further benefits from the Alchian-Allen effect: agglomerating industries have higher productivity, which raises the cost of living and prices out other industries, raising concentration over time. ... Since startups raise the variance within whatever industry they’re started in, the natural constituency for them is someone who doesn’t have capital deployed in the industry. If you’re an asset owner, you want low volatility. ... Historically, startups have created a constant supply of volatility for tech companies; the next generation is always cannibalizing the previous one. So chip companies in the 1970s created the PC companies of the 80s, but PC companies sourced cheaper and cheaper chips, commoditizing the product until Intel managed to fight back. Meanwhile, the OS turned PCs into a commodity, then search engines and social media turned the OS into a commodity, and presumably this process will continue indefinitely. ... As long as higher rents raise the cost of starting a pre-revenue company, fewer people will join them, so more people will join established companies, where they’ll earn market salaries and continue to push up rents. And one of the things they’ll do there is optimize ad loads, which places another tax on startups. More dangerously, this is an incremental tax on growth rather than a fixed tax on headcount, so it puts pressure on out-year valuations, not just upfront cash flow.

If you live hundreds of miles away the tech companies may have no impact on your rental or purchase price, but you can't really control the algorithms or the ecosystem.

All you can really control is your mindset & ensuring you have optionality baked into your business model.

If you are debt-levered you have little to no optionality. Savings give you optionality. Savings allow you to run at a loss for a period of time while also investing in improving your site and perhaps having a few other sites in other markets.

If you operate a single website that is heavily reliant on a third party for distribution then you have little to no optionality. If you have multiple projects that enables you to shift your attention toward working on whatever is going up and to the right while letting anything that is failing pass time without becoming overly reliant on something you can't change. This is why it often makes sense for a brand merchant to operate their own ecommerce website even if 90% of their sales come from Amazon. It gives you optionality should the tech monopoly become abusive or otherwise harm you (even if the intent was rather than outright misanthropic).

As the update ensues Google will collect more data with how users interact with the result set & determine how to weight different signals, along with re-scoring sites that recovered based on the new engagement data.

Recently a Bing engineer named Frédéric Dubut described how they score relevancy signals used in updates

As early as 2005, we used neural networks to power our search engine and you can still find rare pictures of Satya Nadella, VP of Search and Advertising at the time, showcasing our web ranking advances. ... The “training” process of a machine learning model is generally iterative (and all automated). At each step, the model is tweaking the weight of each feature in the direction where it expects to decrease the error the most. After each step, the algorithm remeasures the rating of all the SERPs (based on the known URL/query pair ratings) to evaluate how it’s doing. Rinse and repeat.

That same process is ongoing with Google now & in the coming weeks there'll be the next phase of the current update.

So far it looks like some quality-based re-scoring was done & some sites which were overly reliant on anchor text got clipped. On the back end of the update there'll be another quality-based re-scoring, but the sites that were hit for excessive manipulation of anchor text via link building efforts will likely remain penalized for a good chunk of time.

Categories: 

google

source http://www.seobook.com/google-florida-20-algorithm-update-early-observations from Rising Phoenix SEO http://risingphoenixseo.blogspot.com/2019/03/google-florida-20-algorithm-update.html

[alanajacksontx]

Google Florida 2.0 Algorithm Update: Early Observations

It has been a while since Google has had a major algorithm update.

They recently announced one which began on the 12th of March.

This week, we released a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see these tweets for more about that:https://t.co/uPlEdSLHoXhttps://t.co/tmfQkhdjPL— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 13, 2019

What changed?

It appears multiple things did.

When Google rolled out the original version of Penguin on April 24, 2012 (primarily focused on link spam) they also rolled out an update to an on-page spam classifier for misdirection.

And, over time, it was quite common for Panda & Penguin updates to be sandwiched together.

If you were Google & had the ability to look under the hood to see why things changed, you would probably want to obfuscate any major update by changing multiple things at once to make reverse engineering the change much harder.

Anyone who operates a single website (& lacks the ability to look under the hood) will have almost no clue about what changed or how to adjust with the algorithms.

In the most recent algorithm update some sites which were penalized in prior “quality” updates have recovered.

Though many of those recoveries are only partial.

Many SEO blogs will publish articles about how they cracked the code on the latest update by publishing charts like the first one without publishing that second chart showing the broader context.

The first penalty any website receives might be the first of a series of penalties.

If Google smokes your site & it does not cause a PR incident & nobody really cares that you are gone, then there is a very good chance things will go from bad to worse to worser to worsterest, technically speaking.

“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.” - Abraham Lincoln

Absent effort & investment to evolve FASTER than the broader web, sites which are hit with one penalty will often further accumulate other penalties. It is like compound interest working in reverse - a pile of algorithmic debt which must be dug out of before the bleeding stops.

Further, many recoveries may be nothing more than a fleeting invitation to false hope. To pour more resources into a site that is struggling in an apparent death loop.

The above site which had its first positive algorithmic response in a couple years achieved that in part by heavily de-monetizing. After the algorithm updates already demonetized the website over 90%, what harm was there in removing 90% of what remained to see how it would react? So now it will get more traffic (at least for a while) but then what exactly is the traffic worth to a site that has no revenue engine tied to it?

That is ultimately the hard part. Obtaining a stable stream of traffic while monetizing at a decent yield, without the monetizing efforts leading to the traffic disappearing.

A buddy who owns the above site was working on link cleanup & content improvement on & off for about a half year with no results. Each month was a little worse than the prior month. It was only after I told him to remove the aggressive ads a few months back that he likely had any chance of seeing any sort of traffic recovery. Now he at least has a pulse of traffic & can look into lighter touch means of monetization.

If a site is consistently penalized then the problem might not be an algorithmic false positive, but rather the business model of the site.

The more something looks like eHow the more fickle Google’s algorithmic with receive it.

Google does not like websites that sit at the end of the value chain & extract profits without having to bear far greater risk & expense earlier into the cycle.

Thin rewrites, largely speaking, don’t add value to the ecosystem. Doorway pages don’t either. And something that was propped up by a bunch of keyword-rich low-quality links is (in most cases) probably genuinely lacking in some other aspect.

Generally speaking, Google would like themselves to be the entity at the end of the value chain extracting excess profits from markets.

This is the purpose of the knowledge graph & featured snippets. To allow the results to answer the most basic queries without third party publishers getting anything. The knowledge graph serve as a floating vertical that eat an increasing share of the value chain & force publishers to move higher up the funnel & publish more differentiated content.

As Google adds features to the search results (flight price trends, a hotel booking service on the day AirBNB announced they acquired HotelTonight, ecommerce product purchase on Google, shoppable image ads just ahead of the Pinterest IPO, etc.) it forces other players in the value chain to consolidate (Expedia owns Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire & a bunch of other sites) or add greater value to remain a differentiated & sought after destination (travel review site TripAdvisor was crushed by the shift to mobile & the inability to monetize mobile traffic, so they eventually had to shift away from being exclusively a reviews site to offer event & hotel booking features to remain relevant).

It is never easy changing a successful & profitable business model, but it is even harder to intentionally reduce revenues further or spend aggressively to improve quality AFTER income has fallen 50% or more.

Some people do the opposite & make up for a revenue shortfall by publishing more lower end content at an ever faster rate and/or increasing ad load. Either of which typically makes their user engagement metrics worse while making their site less differentiated & more likely to receive additional bonus penalties to drive traffic even lower.

In some ways I think the ability for a site to survive & remain though a penalty is itself a quality signal for Google.

Some sites which are overly reliant on search & have no external sources of traffic are ultimately sites which tried to behave too similarly to the monopoly that ultimately displaced them. And over time the tech monopolies are growing more powerful as the ecosystem around them burns down:

If you had to choose a date for when the internet died, it would be in the year 2014. Before then, traffic to websites came from many sources, and the web was a lively ecosystem. But beginning in 2014, more than half of all traffic began coming from just two sources: Facebook and Google. Today, over 70 percent of traffic is dominated by those two platforms.

Businesses which have sustainable profit margins & slack (in terms of management time & resources to deploy) can better cope with algorithmic changes & change with the market.

Over the past half decade or so there have been multiple changes that drastically shifted the online publishing landscape:

the shift to mobile, which both offers publishers lower ad yields while making the central ad networks more ad heavy in a way that reduces traffic to third party sites

the rise of the knowledge graph & featured snippets which often mean publishers remain uncompensated for their work

higher ad loads which also lower organic reach (on both search & social channels)

the rise of programmatic advertising, which further gutted display ad CPMs

the rise of ad blockers

increasing algorithmic uncertainty & a higher barrier to entry

Each one of the above could take a double digit percent out of a site’s revenues, particularly if a site was reliant on display ads. Add them together and a website which was not even algorithmically penalized could still see a 60%+ decline in revenues. Mix in a penalty and that decline can chop a zero or two off the total revenues.

Businesses with lower margins can try to offset declines with increased ad spending, but that only works if you are not in a market with 2 & 20 VC fueled competition:

Startups spend almost 40 cents of every VC dollar on Google, Facebook, and Amazon. We don’t necessarily know which channels they will choose or the particularities of how they will spend money on user acquisition, but we do know more or less what��s going to happen. Advertising spend in tech has become an arms race: fresh tactics go stale in months, and customer acquisition costs keep rising. In a world where only one company thinks this way, or where one business is executing at a level above everyone else - like Facebook in its time - this tactic is extremely effective. However, when everyone is acting this way, the industry collectively becomes an accelerating treadmill. Ad impressions and click-throughs get bid up to outrageous prices by startups flush with venture money, and prospective users demand more and more subsidized products to gain their initial attention. The dynamics we’ve entered is, in many ways, creating a dangerous, high stakes Ponzi scheme.

And sometimes the platform claws back a second or third bite of the apple. Amazon.com charges merchants for fulfillment, warehousing, transaction based fees, etc. And they’ve pushed hard into launching hundreds of private label brands which pollute the interface & force brands to buy ads even on their own branded keyword terms.

They’ve recently jumped the shark by adding a bonus feature where even when a brand paid Amazon to send traffic to their listing, Amazon would insert a spam popover offering a cheaper private label branded product:

Amazon.com tested a pop-up feature on its app that in some instances pitched its private-label goods on rivals’ product pages, an experiment that shows the e-commerce giant’s aggressiveness in hawking lower-priced products including its own house brands. The recent experiment, conducted in Amazon’s mobile app, went a step further than the display ads that commonly appear within search results and product pages. This test pushed pop-up windows that took over much of a product page, forcing customers to either click through to the lower-cost Amazon products or dismiss them before continuing to shop. … When a customer using Amazon’s mobile app searched for “AAA batteries,” for example, the first link was a sponsored listing from Energizer Holdings Inc. After clicking on the listing, a pop-up window appeared, offering less expensive AmazonBasics AAA batteries.“

Buying those Amazon ads was quite literally subsidizing a direct competitor pushing you into irrelevance.

As the market caps of big tech companies climb they need to be more predatious to grow into the valuations & retain employees with stock options at an ever-increasing price.

They’ve created bubbles in their own backyards where each raise requires another. Teachers either drive hours to work or live in houses subsidized by loans from the tech monopolies that get a piece of the upside (provided they can keep their own bubbles inflated).

"It is an uncommon arrangement — employer as landlord — that is starting to catch on elsewhere as school employees say they cannot afford to live comfortably in regions awash in tech dollars. … Holly Gonzalez, 34, a kindergarten teacher in East San Jose, and her husband, Daniel, a school district I.T. specialist, were able to buy a three-bedroom apartment for $610,000 this summer with help from their parents and from Landed. When they sell the home, they will owe Landed 25 percent of any gain in its value. The company is financed partly by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable arm.”

The above sort of dynamics have some claiming peak California:

The cycle further benefits from the Alchian-Allen effect: agglomerating industries have higher productivity, which raises the cost of living and prices out other industries, raising concentration over time. … Since startups raise the variance within whatever industry they’re started in, the natural constituency for them is someone who doesn’t have capital deployed in the industry. If you’re an asset owner, you want low volatility. … Historically, startups have created a constant supply of volatility for tech companies; the next generation is always cannibalizing the previous one. So chip companies in the 1970s created the PC companies of the 80s, but PC companies sourced cheaper and cheaper chips, commoditizing the product until Intel managed to fight back. Meanwhile, the OS turned PCs into a commodity, then search engines and social media turned the OS into a commodity, and presumably this process will continue indefinitely. … As long as higher rents raise the cost of starting a pre-revenue company, fewer people will join them, so more people will join established companies, where they’ll earn market salaries and continue to push up rents. And one of the things they’ll do there is optimize ad loads, which places another tax on startups. More dangerously, this is an incremental tax on growth rather than a fixed tax on headcount, so it puts pressure on out-year valuations, not just upfront cash flow.

If you live hundreds of miles away the tech companies may have no impact on your rental or purchase price, but you can’t really control the algorithms or the ecosystem.

All you can really control is your mindset & ensuring you have optionality baked into your business model.

If you are debt-levered you have little to no optionality. Savings give you optionality. Savings allow you to run at a loss for a period of time while also investing in improving your site and perhaps having a few other sites in other markets.

If you operate a single website that is heavily reliant on a third party for distribution then you have little to no optionality. If you have multiple projects that enables you to shift your attention toward working on whatever is going up and to the right while letting anything that is failing pass time without becoming overly reliant on something you can’t change. This is why it often makes sense for a brand merchant to operate their own ecommerce website even if 90% of their sales come from Amazon. It gives you optionality should the tech monopoly become abusive or otherwise harm you (even if the intent was rather than outright misanthropic).

As the update ensues Google will collect more data with how users interact with the result set & determine how to weight different signals, along with re-scoring sites that recovered based on the new engagement data.

Recently a Bing engineer named Frédéric Dubut described how they score relevancy signals used in updates

As early as 2005, we used neural networks to power our search engine and you can still find rare pictures of Satya Nadella, VP of Search and Advertising at the time, showcasing our web ranking advances. … The “training” process of a machine learning model is generally iterative (and all automated). At each step, the model is tweaking the weight of each feature in the direction where it expects to decrease the error the most. After each step, the algorithm remeasures the rating of all the SERPs (based on the known URL/query pair ratings) to evaluate how it’s doing. Rinse and repeat.

That same process is ongoing with Google now & in the coming weeks there’ll be the next phase of the current update.

So far it looks like some quality-based re-scoring was done & some sites which were overly reliant on anchor text got clipped. On the back end of the update there’ll be another quality-based re-scoring, but the sites that were hit for excessive manipulation of anchor text via link building efforts will likely remain penalized for a good chunk of time.

Categories: 

google

from IM Tips And Tricks http://www.seobook.com/google-florida-20-algorithm-update-early-observations from Rising Phoenix SEO https://risingphxseo.tumblr.com/post/183538642115

[evaaguilaus]

Google Florida 2.0 Algorithm Update: Early Observations

It has been a while since Google has had a major algorithm update.

They recently announced one which began on the 12th of March.

This week, we released a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see these tweets for more about that:https://t.co/uPlEdSLHoXhttps://t.co/tmfQkhdjPL— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 13, 2019

What changed?

It appears multiple things did.

When Google rolled out the original version of Penguin on April 24, 2012 (primarily focused on link spam) they also rolled out an update to an on-page spam classifier for misdirection.

And, over time, it was quite common for Panda & Penguin updates to be sandwiched together.

If you were Google & had the ability to look under the hood to see why things changed, you would probably want to obfuscate any major update by changing multiple things at once to make reverse engineering the change much harder.

Anyone who operates a single website (& lacks the ability to look under the hood) will have almost no clue about what changed or how to adjust with the algorithms.

In the most recent algorithm update some sites which were penalized in prior "quality" updates have recovered.

Though many of those recoveries are only partial.

Many SEO blogs will publish articles about how they cracked the code on the latest update by publishing charts like the first one without publishing that second chart showing the broader context.

The first penalty any website receives might be the first of a series of penalties.

If Google smokes your site & it does not cause a PR incident & nobody really cares that you are gone, then there is a very good chance things will go from bad to worse to worser to worsterest, technically speaking.

“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.” - Abraham Lincoln

Absent effort & investment to evolve FASTER than the broader web, sites which are hit with one penalty will often further accumulate other penalties. It is like compound interest working in reverse - a pile of algorithmic debt which must be dug out of before the bleeding stops.

Further, many recoveries may be nothing more than a fleeting invitation to false hope. To pour more resources into a site that is struggling in an apparent death loop.

The above site which had its first positive algorithmic response in a couple years achieved that in part by heavily de-monetizing. After the algorithm updates already demonetized the website over 90%, what harm was there in removing 90% of what remained to see how it would react? So now it will get more traffic (at least for a while) but then what exactly is the traffic worth to a site that has no revenue engine tied to it?

That is ultimately the hard part. Obtaining a stable stream of traffic while monetizing at a decent yield, without the monetizing efforts leading to the traffic disappearing.

A buddy who owns the above site was working on link cleanup & content improvement on & off for about a half year with no results. Each month was a little worse than the prior month. It was only after I told him to remove the aggressive ads a few months back that he likely had any chance of seeing any sort of traffic recovery. Now he at least has a pulse of traffic & can look into lighter touch means of monetization.

If a site is consistently penalized then the problem might not be an algorithmic false positive, but rather the business model of the site.

The more something looks like eHow the more fickle Google's algorithmic with receive it.

Google does not like websites that sit at the end of the value chain & extract profits without having to bear far greater risk & expense earlier into the cycle.

Thin rewrites, largely speaking, don't add value to the ecosystem. Doorway pages don't either. And something that was propped up by a bunch of keyword-rich low-quality links is (in most cases) probably genuinely lacking in some other aspect.

Generally speaking, Google would like themselves to be the entity at the end of the value chain extracting excess profits from markets.

This is the purpose of the knowledge graph & featured snippets. To allow the results to answer the most basic queries without third party publishers getting anything. The knowledge graph serve as a floating vertical that eat an increasing share of the value chain & force publishers to move higher up the funnel & publish more differentiated content.

As Google adds features to the search results (flight price trends, a hotel booking service on the day AirBNB announced they acquired HotelTonight, ecommerce product purchase on Google, shoppable image ads just ahead of the Pinterest IPO, etc.) it forces other players in the value chain to consolidate (Expedia owns Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire & a bunch of other sites) or add greater value to remain a differentiated & sought after destination (travel review site TripAdvisor was crushed by the shift to mobile & the inability to monetize mobile traffic, so they eventually had to shift away from being exclusively a reviews site to offer event & hotel booking features to remain relevant).

It is never easy changing a successful & profitable business model, but it is even harder to intentionally reduce revenues further or spend aggressively to improve quality AFTER income has fallen 50% or more.

Some people do the opposite & make up for a revenue shortfall by publishing more lower end content at an ever faster rate and/or increasing ad load. Either of which typically makes their user engagement metrics worse while making their site less differentiated & more likely to receive additional bonus penalties to drive traffic even lower.

In some ways I think the ability for a site to survive & remain though a penalty is itself a quality signal for Google.

Some sites which are overly reliant on search & have no external sources of traffic are ultimately sites which tried to behave too similarly to the monopoly that ultimately displaced them. And over time the tech monopolies are growing more powerful as the ecosystem around them burns down:

If you had to choose a date for when the internet died, it would be in the year 2014. Before then, traffic to websites came from many sources, and the web was a lively ecosystem. But beginning in 2014, more than half of all traffic began coming from just two sources: Facebook and Google. Today, over 70 percent of traffic is dominated by those two platforms.

Businesses which have sustainable profit margins & slack (in terms of management time & resources to deploy) can better cope with algorithmic changes & change with the market.

Over the past half decade or so there have been multiple changes that drastically shifted the online publishing landscape:

the shift to mobile, which both offers publishers lower ad yields while making the central ad networks more ad heavy in a way that reduces traffic to third party sites

the rise of the knowledge graph & featured snippets which often mean publishers remain uncompensated for their work

higher ad loads which also lower organic reach (on both search & social channels)

the rise of programmatic advertising, which further gutted display ad CPMs

the rise of ad blockers

increasing algorithmic uncertainty & a higher barrier to entry

Each one of the above could take a double digit percent out of a site's revenues, particularly if a site was reliant on display ads. Add them together and a website which was not even algorithmically penalized could still see a 60%+ decline in revenues. Mix in a penalty and that decline can chop a zero or two off the total revenues.

Businesses with lower margins can try to offset declines with increased ad spending, but that only works if you are not in a market with 2 & 20 VC fueled competition:

Startups spend almost 40 cents of every VC dollar on Google, Facebook, and Amazon. We don’t necessarily know which channels they will choose or the particularities of how they will spend money on user acquisition, but we do know more or less what’s going to happen. Advertising spend in tech has become an arms race: fresh tactics go stale in months, and customer acquisition costs keep rising. In a world where only one company thinks this way, or where one business is executing at a level above everyone else - like Facebook in its time - this tactic is extremely effective. However, when everyone is acting this way, the industry collectively becomes an accelerating treadmill. Ad impressions and click-throughs get bid up to outrageous prices by startups flush with venture money, and prospective users demand more and more subsidized products to gain their initial attention. The dynamics we’ve entered is, in many ways, creating a dangerous, high stakes Ponzi scheme.

And sometimes the platform claws back a second or third bite of the apple. Amazon.com charges merchants for fulfillment, warehousing, transaction based fees, etc. And they've pushed hard into launching hundreds of private label brands which pollute the interface & force brands to buy ads even on their own branded keyword terms.

They've recently jumped the shark by adding a bonus feature where even when a brand paid Amazon to send traffic to their listing, Amazon would insert a spam popover offering a cheaper private label branded product:

Amazon.com tested a pop-up feature on its app that in some instances pitched its private-label goods on rivals’ product pages, an experiment that shows the e-commerce giant’s aggressiveness in hawking lower-priced products including its own house brands. The recent experiment, conducted in Amazon’s mobile app, went a step further than the display ads that commonly appear within search results and product pages. This test pushed pop-up windows that took over much of a product page, forcing customers to either click through to the lower-cost Amazon products or dismiss them before continuing to shop. ... When a customer using Amazon’s mobile app searched for “AAA batteries,” for example, the first link was a sponsored listing from Energizer Holdings Inc. After clicking on the listing, a pop-up window appeared, offering less expensive AmazonBasics AAA batteries."

Buying those Amazon ads was quite literally subsidizing a direct competitor pushing you into irrelevance.

As the market caps of big tech companies climb they need to be more predatious to grow into the valuations & retain employees with stock options at an ever-increasing price.

They've created bubbles in their own backyards where each raise requires another. Teachers either drive hours to work or live in houses subsidized by loans from the tech monopolies that get a piece of the upside (provided they can keep their own bubbles inflated).

"It is an uncommon arrangement — employer as landlord — that is starting to catch on elsewhere as school employees say they cannot afford to live comfortably in regions awash in tech dollars. ... Holly Gonzalez, 34, a kindergarten teacher in East San Jose, and her husband, Daniel, a school district I.T. specialist, were able to buy a three-bedroom apartment for $610,000 this summer with help from their parents and from Landed. When they sell the home, they will owe Landed 25 percent of any gain in its value. The company is financed partly by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable arm."

The above sort of dynamics have some claiming peak California:

The cycle further benefits from the Alchian-Allen effect: agglomerating industries have higher productivity, which raises the cost of living and prices out other industries, raising concentration over time. ... Since startups raise the variance within whatever industry they’re started in, the natural constituency for them is someone who doesn’t have capital deployed in the industry. If you’re an asset owner, you want low volatility. ... Historically, startups have created a constant supply of volatility for tech companies; the next generation is always cannibalizing the previous one. So chip companies in the 1970s created the PC companies of the 80s, but PC companies sourced cheaper and cheaper chips, commoditizing the product until Intel managed to fight back. Meanwhile, the OS turned PCs into a commodity, then search engines and social media turned the OS into a commodity, and presumably this process will continue indefinitely. ... As long as higher rents raise the cost of starting a pre-revenue company, fewer people will join them, so more people will join established companies, where they’ll earn market salaries and continue to push up rents. And one of the things they’ll do there is optimize ad loads, which places another tax on startups. More dangerously, this is an incremental tax on growth rather than a fixed tax on headcount, so it puts pressure on out-year valuations, not just upfront cash flow.

If you live hundreds of miles away the tech companies may have no impact on your rental or purchase price, but you can't really control the algorithms or the ecosystem.

All you can really control is your mindset & ensuring you have optionality baked into your business model.

If you are debt-levered you have little to no optionality. Savings give you optionality. Savings allow you to run at a loss for a period of time while also investing in improving your site and perhaps having a few other sites in other markets.

If you operate a single website that is heavily reliant on a third party for distribution then you have little to no optionality. If you have multiple projects that enables you to shift your attention toward working on whatever is going up and to the right while letting anything that is failing pass time without becoming overly reliant on something you can't change. This is why it often makes sense for a brand merchant to operate their own ecommerce website even if 90% of their sales come from Amazon. It gives you optionality should the tech monopoly become abusive or otherwise harm you (even if the intent was rather than outright misanthropic).

As the update ensues Google will collect more data with how users interact with the result set & determine how to weight different signals, along with re-scoring sites that recovered based on the new engagement data.

Recently a Bing engineer named Frédéric Dubut described how they score relevancy signals used in updates

As early as 2005, we used neural networks to power our search engine and you can still find rare pictures of Satya Nadella, VP of Search and Advertising at the time, showcasing our web ranking advances. ... The “training” process of a machine learning model is generally iterative (and all automated). At each step, the model is tweaking the weight of each feature in the direction where it expects to decrease the error the most. After each step, the algorithm remeasures the rating of all the SERPs (based on the known URL/query pair ratings) to evaluate how it’s doing. Rinse and repeat.

That same process is ongoing with Google now & in the coming weeks there'll be the next phase of the current update.

So far it looks like some quality-based re-scoring was done & some sites which were overly reliant on anchor text got clipped. On the back end of the update there'll be another quality-based re-scoring, but the sites that were hit for excessive manipulation of anchor text via link building efforts will likely remain penalized for a good chunk of time.

Categories: 

google

from Digtal Marketing News http://www.seobook.com/google-florida-20-algorithm-update-early-observations

[srasamua]

Google Florida 2.0 Algorithm Update: Early Observations

It has been a while since Google has had a major algorithm update.

They recently announced one which began on the 12th of March.

This week, we released a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see these tweets for more about that:https://t.co/uPlEdSLHoXhttps://t.co/tmfQkhdjPL— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 13, 2019

What changed?

It appears multiple things did.

When Google rolled out the original version of Penguin on April 24, 2012 (primarily focused on link spam) they also rolled out an update to an on-page spam classifier for misdirection.

And, over time, it was quite common for Panda & Penguin updates to be sandwiched together.

If you were Google & had the ability to look under the hood to see why things changed, you would probably want to obfuscate any major update by changing multiple things at once to make reverse engineering the change much harder.

Anyone who operates a single website (& lacks the ability to look under the hood) will have almost no clue about what changed or how to adjust with the algorithms.

In the most recent algorithm update some sites which were penalized in prior "quality" updates have recovered.

Though many of those recoveries are only partial.

Many SEO blogs will publish articles about how they cracked the code on the latest update by publishing charts like the first one without publishing that second chart showing the broader context.

The first penalty any website receives might be the first of a series of penalties.

If Google smokes your site & it does not cause a PR incident & nobody really cares that you are gone, then there is a very good chance things will go from bad to worse to worser to worsterest, technically speaking.

“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.” - Abraham Lincoln

Absent effort & investment to evolve FASTER than the broader web, sites which are hit with one penalty will often further accumulate other penalties. It is like compound interest working in reverse - a pile of algorithmic debt which must be dug out of before the bleeding stops.

Further, many recoveries may be nothing more than a fleeting invitation to false hope. To pour more resources into a site that is struggling in an apparent death loop.

The above site which had its first positive algorithmic response in a couple years achieved that in part by heavily de-monetizing. After the algorithm updates already demonetized the website over 90%, what harm was there in removing 90% of what remained to see how it would react? So now it will get more traffic (at least for a while) but then what exactly is the traffic worth to a site that has no revenue engine tied to it?

That is ultimately the hard part. Obtaining a stable stream of traffic while monetizing at a decent yield, without the monetizing efforts leading to the traffic disappearing.

A buddy who owns the above site was working on link cleanup & content improvement on & off for about a half year with no results. Each month was a little worse than the prior month. It was only after I told him to remove the aggressive ads a few months back that he likely had any chance of seeing any sort of traffic recovery. Now he at least has a pulse of traffic & can look into lighter touch means of monetization.

If a site is consistently penalized then the problem might not be an algorithmic false positive, but rather the business model of the site.

The more something looks like eHow the more fickle Google's algorithmic with receive it.

Google does not like websites that sit at the end of the value chain & extract profits without having to bear far greater risk & expense earlier into the cycle.

Thin rewrites, largely speaking, don't add value to the ecosystem. Doorway pages don't either. And something that was propped up by a bunch of keyword-rich low-quality links is (in most cases) probably genuinely lacking in some other aspect.

Generally speaking, Google would like themselves to be the entity at the end of the value chain extracting excess profits from markets.

This is the purpose of the knowledge graph & featured snippets. To allow the results to answer the most basic queries without third party publishers getting anything. The knowledge graph serve as a floating vertical that eat an increasing share of the value chain & force publishers to move higher up the funnel & publish more differentiated content.

As Google adds features to the search results (flight price trends, a hotel booking service on the day AirBNB announced they acquired HotelTonight, ecommerce product purchase on Google, shoppable image ads just ahead of the Pinterest IPO, etc.) it forces other players in the value chain to consolidate (Expedia owns Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire & a bunch of other sites) or add greater value to remain a differentiated & sought after destination (travel review site TripAdvisor was crushed by the shift to mobile & the inability to monetize mobile traffic, so they eventually had to shift away from being exclusively a reviews site to offer event & hotel booking features to remain relevant).

It is never easy changing a successful & profitable business model, but it is even harder to intentionally reduce revenues further or spend aggressively to improve quality AFTER income has fallen 50% or more.

Some people do the opposite & make up for a revenue shortfall by publishing more lower end content at an ever faster rate and/or increasing ad load. Either of which typically makes their user engagement metrics worse while making their site less differentiated & more likely to receive additional bonus penalties to drive traffic even lower.

In some ways I think the ability for a site to survive & remain though a penalty is itself a quality signal for Google.

Some sites which are overly reliant on search & have no external sources of traffic are ultimately sites which tried to behave too similarly to the monopoly that ultimately displaced them. And over time the tech monopolies are growing more powerful as the ecosystem around them burns down:

If you had to choose a date for when the internet died, it would be in the year 2014. Before then, traffic to websites came from many sources, and the web was a lively ecosystem. But beginning in 2014, more than half of all traffic began coming from just two sources: Facebook and Google. Today, over 70 percent of traffic is dominated by those two platforms.

Businesses which have sustainable profit margins & slack (in terms of management time & resources to deploy) can better cope with algorithmic changes & change with the market.

Over the past half decade or so there have been multiple changes that drastically shifted the online publishing landscape:

the shift to mobile, which both offers publishers lower ad yields while making the central ad networks more ad heavy in a way that reduces traffic to third party sites

the rise of the knowledge graph & featured snippets which often mean publishers remain uncompensated for their work

higher ad loads which also lower organic reach (on both search & social channels)

the rise of programmatic advertising, which further gutted display ad CPMs

the rise of ad blockers

increasing algorithmic uncertainty & a higher barrier to entry

Each one of the above could take a double digit percent out of a site's revenues, particularly if a site was reliant on display ads. Add them together and a website which was not even algorithmically penalized could still see a 60%+ decline in revenues. Mix in a penalty and that decline can chop a zero or two off the total revenues.

Businesses with lower margins can try to offset declines with increased ad spending, but that only works if you are not in a market with 2 & 20 VC fueled competition:

Startups spend almost 40 cents of every VC dollar on Google, Facebook, and Amazon. We don’t necessarily know which channels they will choose or the particularities of how they will spend money on user acquisition, but we do know more or less what’s going to happen. Advertising spend in tech has become an arms race: fresh tactics go stale in months, and customer acquisition costs keep rising. In a world where only one company thinks this way, or where one business is executing at a level above everyone else - like Facebook in its time - this tactic is extremely effective. However, when everyone is acting this way, the industry collectively becomes an accelerating treadmill. Ad impressions and click-throughs get bid up to outrageous prices by startups flush with venture money, and prospective users demand more and more subsidized products to gain their initial attention. The dynamics we’ve entered is, in many ways, creating a dangerous, high stakes Ponzi scheme.

And sometimes the platform claws back a second or third bite of the apple. Amazon.com charges merchants for fulfillment, warehousing, transaction based fees, etc. And they've pushed hard into launching hundreds of private label brands which pollute the interface & force brands to buy ads even on their own branded keyword terms.

They've recently jumped the shark by adding a bonus feature where even when a brand paid Amazon to send traffic to their listing, Amazon would insert a spam popover offering a cheaper private label branded product:

Amazon.com tested a pop-up feature on its app that in some instances pitched its private-label goods on rivals’ product pages, an experiment that shows the e-commerce giant’s aggressiveness in hawking lower-priced products including its own house brands. The recent experiment, conducted in Amazon’s mobile app, went a step further than the display ads that commonly appear within search results and product pages. This test pushed pop-up windows that took over much of a product page, forcing customers to either click through to the lower-cost Amazon products or dismiss them before continuing to shop. ... When a customer using Amazon’s mobile app searched for “AAA batteries,” for example, the first link was a sponsored listing from Energizer Holdings Inc. After clicking on the listing, a pop-up window appeared, offering less expensive AmazonBasics AAA batteries."

Buying those Amazon ads was quite literally subsidizing a direct competitor pushing you into irrelevance.

As the market caps of big tech companies climb they need to be more predatious to grow into the valuations & retain employees with stock options at an ever-increasing price.

They've created bubbles in their own backyards where each raise requires another. Teachers either drive hours to work or live in houses subsidized by loans from the tech monopolies that get a piece of the upside (provided they can keep their own bubbles inflated).

"It is an uncommon arrangement — employer as landlord — that is starting to catch on elsewhere as school employees say they cannot afford to live comfortably in regions awash in tech dollars. ... Holly Gonzalez, 34, a kindergarten teacher in East San Jose, and her husband, Daniel, a school district I.T. specialist, were able to buy a three-bedroom apartment for $610,000 this summer with help from their parents and from Landed. When they sell the home, they will owe Landed 25 percent of any gain in its value. The company is financed partly by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable arm."

The above sort of dynamics have some claiming peak California:

The cycle further benefits from the Alchian-Allen effect: agglomerating industries have higher productivity, which raises the cost of living and prices out other industries, raising concentration over time. ... Since startups raise the variance within whatever industry they’re started in, the natural constituency for them is someone who doesn’t have capital deployed in the industry. If you’re an asset owner, you want low volatility. ... Historically, startups have created a constant supply of volatility for tech companies; the next generation is always cannibalizing the previous one. So chip companies in the 1970s created the PC companies of the 80s, but PC companies sourced cheaper and cheaper chips, commoditizing the product until Intel managed to fight back. Meanwhile, the OS turned PCs into a commodity, then search engines and social media turned the OS into a commodity, and presumably this process will continue indefinitely. ... As long as higher rents raise the cost of starting a pre-revenue company, fewer people will join them, so more people will join established companies, where they’ll earn market salaries and continue to push up rents. And one of the things they’ll do there is optimize ad loads, which places another tax on startups. More dangerously, this is an incremental tax on growth rather than a fixed tax on headcount, so it puts pressure on out-year valuations, not just upfront cash flow.

If you live hundreds of miles away the tech companies may have no impact on your rental or purchase price, but you can't really control the algorithms or the ecosystem.

All you can really control is your mindset & ensuring you have optionality baked into your business model.

If you are debt-levered you have little to no optionality. Savings give you optionality. Savings allow you to run at a loss for a period of time while also investing in improving your site and perhaps having a few other sites in other markets.

If you operate a single website that is heavily reliant on a third party for distribution then you have little to no optionality. If you have multiple projects that enables you to shift your attention toward working on whatever is going up and to the right while letting anything that is failing pass time without becoming overly reliant on something you can't change. This is why it often makes sense for a brand merchant to operate their own ecommerce website even if 90% of their sales come from Amazon. It gives you optionality should the tech monopoly become abusive or otherwise harm you (even if the intent was rather than outright misanthropic).

As the update ensues Google will collect more data with how users interact with the result set & determine how to weight different signals, along with re-scoring sites that recovered based on the new engagement data.

Recently a Bing engineer named Frédéric Dubut described how they score relevancy signals used in updates

As early as 2005, we used neural networks to power our search engine and you can still find rare pictures of Satya Nadella, VP of Search and Advertising at the time, showcasing our web ranking advances. ... The “training” process of a machine learning model is generally iterative (and all automated). At each step, the model is tweaking the weight of each feature in the direction where it expects to decrease the error the most. After each step, the algorithm remeasures the rating of all the SERPs (based on the known URL/query pair ratings) to evaluate how it’s doing. Rinse and repeat.

That same process is ongoing with Google now & in the coming weeks there'll be the next phase of the current update.

So far it looks like some quality-based re-scoring was done & some sites which were overly reliant on anchor text got clipped. On the back end of the update there'll be another quality-based re-scoring, but the sites that were hit for excessive manipulation of anchor text via link building efforts will likely remain penalized for a good chunk of time.

Categories: 

google

from Digtal Marketing News http://www.seobook.com/google-florida-20-algorithm-update-early-observations