#a million times more than a lazy regurgitation

[mercutiotakethewheel]

everytime i rewatch black sails, i find myself like vane more and more ngl. the first season really tries hard to trick you into thinking he’s just unnecessarily, banally, and uncompellingly an asshole (in the overwhelmingly compelling asshole show), whose one redeeming feature is that he’s kinda pathetic too. but geez s2 really nails home everytime that hes the best and the coolest and the most honest (maybe even most compassionate) of the mcs up until this point, barring anne of course. and on top of that i actually kind of think he has the best pre-s3 speeches. like obvs s4 flint is yknow s4 flint. and s3 max is so insane i actually cant handle it. but oh my god charles vane’s letter and his fuck your legitimacy eleanor speech and his hanging speech are so good. and fuck what i said earlier isnt even true. bc his s1 speech while hes looking in the eyes of the little boy he used to be is actually like the bestest. like fuck ok. charles vane is the best actually. #1 anarchist boy. 10/10 would want him in my commune. hed point blank refuse to help with the dishes tho so 😬.

[theindescribable1]

This is for @regurgitated-memes and @happysheik and for anyone else who cares for a better understanding of how I feel.

Hey guys, this'll probably be a long post, and maybe emotional. I'd like to talk about my childhood experience, the reason for a lot of my depression. So as of right now, I have mental illnesses, in which I'd like to talk about. Let's start from the beginning of my trauma. I was probably very young, but I remember when I was just a little dumb annoying toddler, just trying to explain a situation with my dad. Honestly my dad is probably the biggest problem. I probably got in trouble over an accident, instead of calmly talking out the situation and/or giving a gentle warning, my dad would scream at me, never let me talk, never gave me an accident pass. I remember one moment when my dad grabbed my by the neck and I was slammed against a drawer. If I remember correctly...my dad got so angry at me trying to make him stop yelling at me that he slammed me, poor child me, into a drawer while temporarily choking me. Almost every day throughout my childhood, I got yelled at, screamed at, ignored, hurt, etc, to the point that to this day I still can't forgive or forget what my parents have said. Of course there was the discipline of time-out and the other...punishment... but it was always worse for me, because I was often just "beat for punishment" rather than "for discipline" and a lot of the time, I did nothing wrong. Being the youngest child, its said that they are the favorite and get more love than the oldest and middle, stereotypically. I'm here to say that its completely false. My sister is 2 years older than me and she is treated so perfectly, she never gets in trouble or has to do any chores, still to this day she is so spoiled. She doesn't even go to real school, she does this online crap in which she mutes the teacher and watches Tv! I'm stuck getting blamed, getting in trouble, crying alone unable to confess how I feel. I keep my emotions bottled up, since I was little. I wasn't even allowed to talk in some conversations. I was completely ignored sometimes, neglected and just thought of as a house keeper! I had to do so many chores to the point that I felt like a restless child in the Industrial era of child labor. And some kids get paid, or at least a thank you, I got nothing. Never got anything. To this day I'm still waiting to hear my parents say they are proud of me. I do everything for my family. Chores, emotional support, favors, complements, everything! But apparently when I don't immediately do what they say in 0.5 seconds, its always; "You never listen, you're always on that phone" Its crazy to think about the amount of times I have been insulted by my parents, or have been called lazy/useless. It hurts, I do so much to make them happy or proud, all I get is; "You half-assed" "You never do anything" "your best isn't good enough" "stop being a little shit!" Mind you, my dad swore at me everyday since I was a little child! Just a kid! That is ridiculous, and I'm always told "Oh, where did you learn that word? That's a mean word" Are you serious?! My parents never NEVER seemed to care about what I had to say, or any of my friends. One time I was talking to my friend about something my friend Viola said, and he so kindly replied with; "I don't give a damn what your little friend has to say, I really don't." Worst part about this growing depression, I can't talk it out with my family. The last time I tried to tell my mom how I felt, she immediately got mad and said; "You always talk about how sad and depressed you are, oh, and how hard you have it! Are you kidding me!? Look around, look at all you have!" I had to stop her by saying that I was kidding and she just said; "Well stop telling these jokes, they hurt my feelings" ARE YOU SERIOUS!? I make HER sad... I can't talk about it, they worsen my depression and I'm too scared to say a word to them, they don't even notice the millions of times I have ran away in tears? They neglect my feelings and only make things worse! I'm going to do a pt. 2 on this, this is taking a pretty long while.

[theodorejack04]

The 8 Best Vintage Self-Improvement Books

Almost twenty million self-help books were sold last year.

But the popularity of self-help literature is hardly a modern phenomenon.

Some of the writings of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers arguably fall into the personal development category. So do pieces of literature that were written every century after their time.

In a way, this can seem like a very depressing fact. After all, if the purpose of self-improvement books is to offer advice capable of solving people’s problems, then the fact that new entries have continuously been added to the genre for millennia means that none of the tips they espouse actually work.

But that is not the real value of self-improvement literature. The problems of being human — laziness, selfishness, awkwardness, distractibility — are not fixable; they are intractable. The best that self-help books can do for us is to take the principles attendant to living the good life — which really never change — and refresh and solidify them anew. The worth of reading self-help literature is in the way it can move values and ideas that tend to drift to the back of consciousness up to the forefront. The more we can keep our ideals at the top of our minds, the more they can influence our choices and behavior, and help us prevent, mitigate, and sand off the roughest edges of our perennial problems.

Not all self-improvement books perform this function equally well, and we would argue that old self-help literature does it best.

If the value of personal improvement books lies in their ability to activate your higher, but-all-too-often latent impulses, the more novel, and thus stimulating, their content, the better. This is where vintage self-help lit proves superior to modern fare. No matter how original a contemporary author is, he or she is still filtering their ideas through the dominant paradigms and language of the present day. Even when a modern self-improvement book offers ideas that are fairly fresh, the overall tone inevitably feels very familiar. It doesn’t do much to wake up the mind.

Books from decades or a century back, however, feel quite a bit different. They come at things from different angles, use different idioms, strike a different tone. Whereas modern self-help literature tends to use analogies that compare human nature with technology (e.g., our brains are “hardwired”), old books use metaphors drawn from nature; whereas modern self-help lit often rests on insights from academic research (cue up the marshmallow study!), old books employ examples from the biographies of eminent individuals. Older books evince a different ethos as well: more sincere, more earnest, more concerned about overall character than simply becoming a worldly success.

Older self-help books deal with all the very same personal problems we have in our day, but without the diversions into evolutionary psychology and neuroscience (one wonders if knowing which area of the brain lights up when you act like a bonehead has ever prevented a single case of acting like a bonehead); without all the talk of anxiety and burnout and self-care; without all the endlessly regurgitated frameworks and shopworn buzzwords that may point to important issues, but which many people, ourselves included, feel so, so tired of hearing about.

This isn’t to say that all modern self-improvement literature is devoid of value; some worthwhile gems are still published from time to time. It’s just to say that if you want self-improvement books to improve you, you need to delve into literature that effectively shifts your mental models, and thus your behavior. And you’re more likely to find these sparks of inspiration in older books than in newer ones.

Below we suggest eight excellent places to start digging into the vast library of vintage self-improvement books. We’ve read a lot of them over the years, and these are the ones we most enjoyed and got the most from. As far as how we’re defining the “vintage” category here, we’ve arbitrarily set the parameters around books that were published from the 19th century up through the mid-20th. Books in this timeframe were written close enough to our own day to exhibit the style/format/content we now associate with self-improvement literature, while being far enough back in time to feel distinctly different.

These eight books have indirectly influenced our thinking, and directly inspired some of our work. In fact, we’ve published excerpts from many of these entries here on the blog, and turned distillations of the best nuggets from a couple of them into original books available in our store. But the source books are worth reading in their entirety too. Some of them are available in the public domain and can be read for free on sites like archive.org and Google Books. If you like hardback books, as we do, you can often find vintage copies on eBay and modern reprinted versions on Amazon (though be aware that such reprintings vary in the quality of their formatting).

Pushing to the Front by Orison Swett Marden (1894)

Orison Swett Marden was arguably the most influential forefather of modern self-help literature. Orphaned as a young boy, he credited reading a self-help book by Samuel Smiles with allowing him to keep his head above water and rise in the world. After becoming a successful hotelier, he added his own entry to the self-help canon — and helped create the future template for it — by penning Pushing to the Front. The book would be praised by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison and went through 250 printings in the 30 years after its publication.

While Marden would go on to pen 50 more books and booklets, his original outing is his best. Pushing to the Front is not our favorite on this list — it can be too over-the-top and bombastic with its exhortations. But the book is wonderfully bracing. It stirs you to work harder and lengthen your stride. Reading Pushing to the Front is like listening to a great coach give a rousing locker room speech. Simply for introducing us to the concept of “possibilities in spare moments” — an idea we continue to think about today — it’ll ever hold a place in our hearts.

Original Article Link to read more

[yourladyem]

Walt Disney

One lesson you can learn from studying the life of Walt Disney is your actions and your words are what make up your integrity. How you act and what you say can either help or hinder your testimony to others. Walt Disney was a man of integrity and humility. He set up the chairs for his own private screening of Fantasia. He gave money out of his own wallet to any cast member who went the extra mile for a customer. He and Roy would forgo a paycheck at times in order to pay their staff when they were first starting out broke and creating Micky Mouse cartoons. He rode his own Park attractions in full disguise and timed his rides with a stopwatch to see if the employees were cheating his customers out of the full allotted time for each ride. He worked until the early hours of the morning painting the "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" attraction the night before the grand opening of Disneyland.

Walt Disney was also a brilliant man ahead of his time. He sold over 3 million Mickey Mouse watches in 1935 in the middle of the Great Depression thanks to the genius of his marketing team. He invented animatronics and created Stereo sound when he made Fantasia with a multi-track sound system that made the audience feel as if they were at a live concert. It was called Fantasound.

The man who created one of the largest empires in the world, never cared about making money. In Pat Williams’ biography "How to Be Like Walt", Walt himself stated, “I’ve always been bored with the idea of just making money. I’ve wanted to do things, I wanted to build things. Get something going. People look at me in different ways. Some of them say ‘The guy has no regard for money.’ That’s not true. I have had regard for money. But I’m not like some people who worship money as something you’ve got to have piled up somewhere. I’ve only thought of money in one way, and that is to do something with it, you see?”

He disliked dealing with the financial side of the growing empire and left that to his CFO and brother, Roy. Walt hated it so much that after endless failed attempts, Roy finally convinced his younger brother to attend a stockholders meeting.

Two good things came out of that meeting. The first came when Walt saw the stone faces of the businessmen in their perfect expensive suits. He just found his inspiration for the bank bosses for his future film, Mary Poppins.

The second good thing came after he boldly read a simple letter from a man in Florida who owned a couple of shares telling Walt Disney, “I don’t care if I ever get any dividends. You just keep up the good work and keep making good pictures.” After reading the letter, Walt focused his attention back to the room and stated, “I wish this company had more shareholders like that one. He understands what Disney is all about. Now, it’s been very nice to see all of you, but if you don’t mind, I’ve got a studio to run.” and left the room. Roy never asked him to attend another meeting ever again.

Walt struggled to convince Roy to back the idea of Disneyland. Many of the famous classic films we know today including Alice in Wonderland, Fantasia, and Pinocchio bombed at the box office. Constantly in debt after so many failures, no matter how many awards the studio won over the years including setting records for a single nominee. It looked like the dream of Disneyland was going to be delayed even longer.

Instead of reaching out to rich friends in Hollywood or begging the stockholders, the people he turned to for the financial backing for Disneyland were his own employees. They believed in his dreams as much as he did. He wasn’t too confident in asking his own people for money and the first person he asked was the studio’s nurse, Hazel George. She not only donated to the cause but also spearheaded the in-house charity group Disneyland Backers and Boosters.

Another prominent woman at the Disney studios was Harriet Burns, the first female Imagineer who helped design and build the Disneyland attractions. And before she became the future Mrs. Disney, Lillian Bounds, was a young inker and painter at the Disney Brothers Studio (later renamed the Walt Disney Studios) along with her friend Kathleen. Two of Walt’s very first employees at the start up studio were women doing the hard jobs and not just errand girls who simply looked pretty and got coffee for the bosses.

Most of the staff loved Walt. He never discriminated or thought lowly of anyone no matter their race, background, religion, or anything else. Neal Gabler’s biography "Walt Disney: A Triumph of the American Imagination", suggests the slander and lies of him being Anti-Semite most likely came about from Anti-Semite Ben Sharpsteen who worked for the studio and Walt was “guilty by association.”

Pat Williams states, after consulting many Disney scholars, another likely reason for the rumors was because of a smear campaign against Disney during a strike in 1941. Union chief, Herb Sorrell once told Walt “I will smear you and I will make a dust bowl out of your studio.” Sorrell stayed true his word of tarnishing the Disney name. For nearly 80 years those rumors have circulated but nothing to back up those ridiculous claims. Firsthand accounts including other Jewish employees who hated Walt because he didn’t agree with their political stances, never accused Walt of being an Anti-Semite.

Kathleen and Richard Greene also addressed the question of Anti-Semitism in the Disney family in their book, “Inside the Dream: The Personal Story of Walt Disney”. They discussed the relationship a former Jewish neighbor of Roy and Walt’s childhood neighborhood in Kansas named Meyer Menda saying she never experienced any sort of Anti-Semitism from the Disney family. As well as Walt’s daughter Sharon dated a Jewish man at one time with no family objections.

Also, if Walt Disney was an Anti-Semite, he never would have hired the famous Sherman Brothers who wrote the music for "The Jungle Book", "Mary Poppins", "Aristocats", "Bedknobs and Broomsticks", and the song "It’s A Small World" for the attraction. Robert Sherman recalls in "How to Be Like Walt", the time Walt defended the Brothers and fired one of his own lawyers who hated minorities and who called the Sherman Brothers the “Jewish boys.”

In the biography by Pat Williams, "How to Be Like Walt", Joe Grant, a Jewish animator for Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and the only animator to animate both Fantasia films, said, “Some of the most influential people at the studio were Jewish.”

Neal Gabler’s biography, "Walt Disney: The Triumph of The American Imagination", mentions production manager Harry Tytle and Kay Kamen stated the Walt Disney studios had more Jews than the Book of Leviticus. Harry Tytle had changed his last name from Teitelbaum to hide his Jewish background but when he told Walt Disney he was half Jewish, Walt replied if he were all Jewish, he’d be better.

Pat Williams and Neal Gabler also report firsthand testimonies of Walt’s love for the Jewish community. Including, how Walt donated money to Jewish charities and even had a Protestant preacher, a Catholic priest, and a Jewish rabbi at the opening ceremony of Disneyland to bless the event. Pat Williams’ biography also states that in 1955 the B’Nai B’rith chapter of Beverly Hills cited Walt Disney as their man of the year.

Walt was never a racist, sexist, nor hated minorities of any kind. If he did, he never would have hired them for spotlighted high-profile positions and certainly never would have made the “It’s a Small World” attraction that not only celebrates the cultures of the world but also showing the world we aren’t that different from each other outside of customs and languages.

Pat Williams mentions the time Walt told Billy Graham on private tour of the Park “Billy, look around you. Look at all the people, representing all nationalities, all colors, all languages. And they are all smiling, all having fun together. Billy this is the real world. The fantasy is outside.”

One of his story artists was an African American named, Floyd Norman. He also testified saying, “I never felt any prejudice from Walt.” A statement found in Neal Gabler’s book.

Walt Disney loved all people no matter status, age, race, religion, or gender. Everyone was equal in his eyes and deserved the same amount of respect no matter what. He never even allowed his employees to call him Mr. Disney. Everyone was on a first name basis. He believed everyone deserved a fair and equal chance at life and he did his best in words and actions to shows that.

So why have the rumors lasted so long? The slander and lies sadly have continued to spur on because many people choose to simply regurgitate rumors out of laziness instead of researching the information themselves. Hollywood does it, college professors do it, and even biographers. Research information yourselves and never take rumors for fact without backing them up with real facts. Especially firsthand accounts and eyewitnesses. These testimonies were firsthand accounts of people who knew him and worked for him and the real Walt Disney was a kindhearted, loving, brilliant man ahead of his time who loved people, loved by his people, and wanted to create a utopia of his own for everyone to enjoy.

Sources:

How to Be Like Walt by Pat Williams

Walt Disney: The Triumph of The American Imagination by Neal Gabler

Inside the Dream: The Personal Story of Walt Disney by Kathleen and Richard Greene

Highly recommend these biographies! You might want highlighters and pens with you when you read them.

[rcbinpenn]

hey hey hey!! i’m jay (he/him), and i’m here live to bring robin penn to the scene. he’s your run of the mill uber progressive film bro whose interests include whole foods, organically-rolled joints, and being the wokest person in the room. more info below the cut, and feel free to message me if you wanna plot :))

( avan jogia, cis male, he/him ). hey, isn’t that [ ROBIN PENN ] walking down bennington street? i think the [ 25 ] YEAR OLD [ FILMMAKER ] is from [ CHERRY HILLS VILLAGE, CO ]. i’ve heard some rumors down at ginger’s, saying that they're [ SELF-RIGHTEOUS AND GUARDED ], but then again they’re known to be [ CHARMING AND INNOVATIVE ].  either way, they seem to be interesting, hope they’ll stick around.

stats ; 

full name: robin chatura penn

place and dob: cherry hills village, co on november 23rd, 1994 (did i do that math right oh god) 

sexuality: pansexual

zodiac sign: sagittarius

hogwarts house: gryffindor

parallels: kyle scheible (lady bird), vanessa abrams (gossip girl), elliot alderson (mr. robot), miss grotke (recess), tyler durden (fight club), kate stratford (10 things i hate about you), diane nguyen (bojack horseman), jay gatsby (the great gatsby) 

background ; 

okay so! first thing to know about robin is that he’s hella disingenous about his background, so even though this is like ~ the truth ~ he’s definitely told your character something different (although he tries to mention his past as little as possible, mostly just sprinkles tidbits that he knows he can keep up) when they ask 

but with that being said !!! robin penn grows up in upper class suburbia and it’s the thing he hates the most about himself. he’s the third of five kids so he’s got huge middle child syndrome, but also since his parents had like four other kids to show off they were kind of content with him doing his own thing? so he becomes the black sheep of the penn family easily, and is also kind of the outcast of his entire neighborhood? but i mean, they looked down on him and at the same time he looked down on them from his high horse of progressivism, so it was all very mutual

but growing up without any tangible people to relate to isn’t all bad, because it’s how he discovers movies! he watched every classic there is pretty quickly and moved onto niche foreign films, which is why he’s now so well-versed in like absurdist french films from the late 80′s when nobody else gives a fuck

he makes his first film at fifteen and uploads it to youtube, where it does fairly well!! it by now means makes him a viral sensation or anything, but it’s successful enough to make him a god amongst the outcasts and artsy types at his high school. this is where a lot of his ego and confidence and “i’m woker than you” complex gets super intensified, because the kids he was surrounded by were all entitled rich preps who were like ~wow you know about the war in iran~ and loved to put him on a pedastal of knowing so much about the world and being such an activist when he’s really just another left-leaning anarcho-socialist

his parents try for like .2 secs to convince him that the film industry is unreliable and not the best to go into, but he obviously doesn’t listen so they cough up some money and send him off to usc

and finally!! he is free from his upbringing!! he can be whoever he wants!! so that’s exactly what he does. i’ll just insert this portion of my app in bc i think it encapsulates it pretty well: and this is where robin 2.0 begins. it’s not that he’s ashamed of where he comes from - except that, well, yes he is. he hates the idea of making all these pictures about oppression and class struggle only to come from the dictionary definition of affluent privilege. so he doesn’t lie, necessarily, but he does borrow some storylines from the thousands of movies he’s seen in his life. at freshman orientation he comes from a poor village in east india; at a party downtown he’s from the wrong side of the tracks in the bronx; and at a local art gallery, where he first meets raphael brooks, he’s from a broken home on the outskirts of san francisco. he is the writer of his own life, able to keep each storyline perfectly separate, and he doesn’t say a word to anyone when he goes back to his million-dollar estate in the hills of colorado

he does well at film school, he makes some pretty decent films and because of his charming and magnetic nature he gets a good bit of job offers that would have him staying in la BUT he’s like “fuck that, la is superficial and pretentious and i’m gonna go to new york and make REAL art”

so he does, kind of? i’m literally so tired asfjkaslj i’m sorry i’m just gonna copy and paste more from my app, fuck original wording all my homies hate original wording: new york is everything he imagined it to be and yet nothing like it at all. he’s a stranger in this city all over again, and while that excites him as far as being able to craft a new character for himself, it also means he’s starting from scratch. and while everyone in california is obsessed with the glitz and glamour of movies, it feels like robin’s style of grit and provocativeness is the status quo amongst new york filmmakers. he finds himself resorting back to that rich boy attitude buried deep within him, wanting to be worshipped for his artistry and originality without wanting to put in any of the work. it’s been months now since he’s been able to beat this lazy streak and start on a new project, and it’s left him relying on asking his parents for rent money while telling everyone he’s just raking in an income from old and new projects alike. still, now that he’s in this rut, he can’t help but pass the days and wonder: is this it for him? is he a one-hit wonder only capable of regurgitating what everyone around him has already produced, or is there still a story inside of him to tell?

that’s it, i think !! i’m sorry i’m functioning on so little sleep, feel free to message me with any questions or concerns or complaints or PLOTS very excited to get started, xoxoxo

[eng2100]

blog 08 - neuromancer

So as an introductory note, I’m actually quite a big fan of cyberpunk. I’m a hobbyist DnD player and the first campaign that I’ve Dungeon-Mastered for was actually a simplified version of Shadowrun that I wrote all the backstory and lore for. It’s in what I would call a “sequel” right now that I’m very much enjoying. So bla bla bla I was excited to get to Neuromancer this whole time because I’m a genre fan.

a brief primer to cyberpunk

So western Cyberpunk owes its roots largely to the detective fiction genre-- most notably the hardboiled detective archetype, a darker western interpretation of your Sherlock Holmes type who is usually a jaded antihero that works for money, but still has a sense of justice deep down. You see this more reflected in Blade Runner than you see it in Neuromancer’s Case, but there are still a number of correlations (Funnily enough, Neuromancer and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep both end on nearly the same line-- “He never saw Molly again.” and “...and I never saw her again.” respectively.) Interestingly enough, Case kind of spawns his own kind of cyberpunk hero trope-- the rebellious hacker, seen in Neo. 

If detective fiction owes itself to the inescapable aura of The Great Depression, then cyberpunk owes itself to the Reagan administration. Cyberpunk’s whole thing, at least in the west, springs forward from the fear of unregulated corporate growth in tandem with the rise of technology, and what the mixture of the two might bode for humanity at large. Both Neuromancer and Blade Runner owe their entire aesthetics to the vision of a world taken over by neon advertisements, bereft of nature, replaced by plasticity. 

Now, why the primer? Well, I think it’s important to preface the discussion of this novel with the idea that cyberpunk is a deeply political genre in a way that not many other genres inherently are. (All fiction is, of course, inherently political, whether intentional or not, but most genres don’t regularly feature as much political charge as cyberpunk, is what I mean.) Neuromancer is politics from an era before most of us in this class were born, and as such, atop being a seminal work of genre fiction, it’s a lurid look into what the landscape looked like in the 80s. We are living now in the times that 80s Cyberpunk once called “the future”-- and, well, what does it look like for us? Are we living in the Urban Sprawl?

not quite

Our dystopian future is significantly more...mundane than coffin hotels and the television sky over Chiba. You might say we got all the corporate deregulation and none of the glimmering aesthetic slickness of cyberpunk-- we really are living in the worst timeline. If i’m going to have to labor under capitalism for the rest of my short life, couldn’t I at least have a slick pair of mirrorshades?

the text

There’s a lot about Neuromancer to like. It earned its reputation wholeheartedly-- it is definitely the legendary cyberpunk novel that it is well-known for being. Its writing style can often be abstract at the same time that it’s luridly detailed, and it uses strange and interesting words to create vivid images in the reader’s mind of this foreign landscape of the Sprawl. It uses a lot of “old world” associations to lend deeper weight to its descriptions (the Tank War Europa game comes to mind in tandem with the Screaming Fist operation that looms over the plot). 

The book doesn’t shy away from the visceral nature of its own plot and setting-- drug binges and cramped love affairs in coffin hotels, fear and violence are all described in visceral detail that grounds the book hard in its reality while simultaneously indulging in a sort of dream-like surreality. I really admire the ways in which Gibson writes physical sensation whether it comes to the sex or the pain or the weirdness of cyberspace. The introduction of the novel sort of failed to catch me until Gibson went into detail about Case’s harrowing journey after losing his ability to jack into cyberspace and the intense, surreal affair with Linda Lee. Perhaps my biggest issue with the writing of Neuromancer is, however, Gibson’s tendency to throw a lot of world-building terminology at you really fast. Nothing bogs down a fictional story more than having to pause to wonder what certain words mean.

Describing cyberspace during a time in which VR wasn’t even a thing yet had to have been a challenge and a half, but Gibson found interesting ways to visualize the experience, and coined interesting terminology for it (ice and icebreakers, most notably). The Sense/Net bits are also pretty cool, but I’m also biased because anything that gives Molly Millions more screentime is just the best thing.

Did I mention Molly is my favorite character? I just can’t get over her. It sucks that her and Case break up in the epilogue, but it also feels fitting in a weird way. She really struck me as a standout character for a woman in a cyberpunk novel-- she’s an active player in her own sexuality, she’s violent and the stronger of the two between herself and Case. She has a sort of unapologetic way about her that feels very fresh even today. The first time Case uses Sense/Net to see through her eyes, I was hit in an unexpectedly hard way by the description of people in a crowd moving out of the way for her-- for most girls in real life, that’s a fairly unheard of experience, and to me, as a female reader, it did a lot to establish to me just how powerful she is.

That being said, this is a good place to segue into the conversation you know my Obnoxious Feminist Ass has been waiting to bring up.

cyberpunk vs women

You can tell a lot about a person’s base assumptions about the world by the way they talk about people in their works of fiction. Now when I say “base assumptions” I don’t mean their political leanings, I mean something that’s on a deeper, more subconscious level-- in this way, base assumptions are inherently neutral in a way, they’re incapable of being truly malicious, even if they’re harmful, because they’re just the base coding of how a person regards things inherently.

What I’m getting at is that at the time of writing this book, I don’t think Gibson had much of a regard for women at all. When the first mention of women in your novel is calling them whores, I’m going to be forced to assume both that you don’t like women very much and that women are primarily sex objects to you-- or at the very least that women factor into your view of the world in a very marginal way that is largely informed by porn culture. Now, let’s suppose that maybe it’s actually the POV character Case that’s just a raging sexist-- that theory might hold water if this were a character trait that is brought up as a flaw, or indeed, if it were really brought up at all in his personality, but it’s not.

To my great frustration, in the Neuromancer world, it seems like “whore” is about the only job available for women! Who knew the job market would shrink in such a way? Now, perhaps you could argue that Gibson was actually trying to make a point about the way in which porn culture commodifies women into sexy leg lamps for male consumption, and I won’t claim to know his intent, but to me, it doesn’t really seem that deep. It seems like to me that, to Gibson, women being mostly vapid sex workers in his dystopia is a foregone conclusion-- he didn’t think about it that hard, that’s just his stereotypical image of what women in an criminal underbelly do.

This problem of a lack of regard for female perspectives in cyberpunk narratives that largely concern themselves with themes of objectification and oppression under capitalist systems and the regurgitation of harmful sexist tropes certainly isn’t exclusive to Neuromancer. Cyberpunk is a economic-political type of genre, so oppression in the genre tends to fall upon class lines rather than race or gender lines-- and perhaps, this could occur in a far flung future in which capital manages to supersede bias, however, I can’t help but feel that this is a lazy way to write a political narrative. Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, and The Matrix all have distinct problems with addressing the idea of intersectionality when it comes to the ways in which ones gender and race plays into their role in a capitalist system. 

Cyberpunk, for all its shining successes as interesting fiction and pointed political commentary, totally fails in the regard that it co-opts the struggle of lower-classes and applies the romanticized aesthetic to white male characters completely unironically. (You can read a pretty good take on Dystopias and post-racialism here.)

east versus west

So, when I went over the primer to the rise of Cyberpunk earlier, I left something out (on purpose!). During the 80s, there was another prime ingredient to the mix of the nascent genre’s formation: the rise of Japan as a technological leader in the global market. Before World War 2, and indeed, during it, American’s conceptualization of the future, was, well, American. They viewed themselves as the originator of innovation within the world and the blueprint from which the rest of the world should be based. However, this all changed in the post-war era as Japan began to participate in the market, leaving behind their isolationist ways-- suddenly, Japan was what the vision of the future looked like in American imagination-- the Tokyo urban sprawl.

The imagery of Japan is ubiquitous in western Cyberpunk, whether hardcore or or softcore or simply an incidental portrayal of futurism. Disney’s Big Hero 6 features San Fransokyo, San Franciso and Tokyo jammed together complete with neon signs in Japanese letters. During the 90s, Marvel launched Rampage 2099 and Spider-man 2099, both set in glittering neon cityscapes. The series Firefly featured a strange universe in which everyone seems to speak Chinese pidgins (but there’s no Chinese people in the show, funnily). MTV had Aeon Flux, a U.S. take on anime. Even movies like Total Recall borrowed the bright neon flavor. Video games such as Deus Ex and Cyberpunk 2077 feature these influences heavily, with less-bold-but-still-there influence being seen in games like Remember Me and Detroit: Become Human.

There’s an interesting cultural exchange going on between the east and west when it comes to Cyberpunk, as the 90s were rife with cyberpunk fiction in both places-- The U.S. saw The Matrix (which was inspired by Ghost in the Shell, as admitted by the Wachowskis in a phrasing that I find really annoying as an animator: “We want to make that but for real”.), while Japan had the seminal Ghost in the Shell and Akira. It’s interesting to note the stark contrast between western and eastern Cyberpunk-- eastern Cyberpunk misses entirely western Cyberpunk’s detective fiction roots, for one. For two, eastern Cyberpunk tends to concern itself more with philosophical questions about the nature of the soul in relation to technology and deep-seated cultural fears about weapons of mass destruction and government.

Neuromancer is deeply entrenched in eastern aesthetics-- many Japanese brands are brought up explicitly by name within the model (Mitsubishi, Sony, etc.). Gibson cites the “Kowloon Walled City” of Hong Kong as something that haunted him after he was told about it, and the idea of Coffin Hotels owes quite a lot to it. Gibson is quoted as saying:

“Modern Japan simply was cyberpunk. The Japanese themselves knew it and delighted in it. I remember my first glimpse of Shibuya, when one of the young Tokyo journalists who had taken me there, his face drenched with the light of a thousand media-suns - all that towering, animated crawl of commercial information - said, ‘You see? You see? It is Blade Runner town.' And it was. It so evidently was.“

One of Neuromancer’s primary settings is The Night City, a supposedly gaijin district of Tokyo on the bay-- this...sort of explains why there don’t seem to be a lot of Asian people in Asia, but the issue still stands. This isn’t a game-breakingly “I wouldn’t recommend this book” bad case, but it is something that I felt I should point out. Neuromancer is a foundational work to the genre, which means that not only are its successes carried over, but many of its flaws as well. Now, I don’t want this cricitism to sound like I think William Gibson is a raging bigot or anything-- I really don’t! I follow him on twitter and he’s a perfectly likable guy, actually. Problems aside, I really enjoy his work.

conclusions

Going into the future, I don’t think Cyberpunk is going away anytime soon, and certainly much of it owes its roots to Neuromancer. With shows like Altered Carbon and games like Cyberpunk 2077 on the horizon, I’m interested to see the ways in which our current economic political climate may effect what our vision of a technological dystopia may look like. Cyberpunk is easily one of the most interesting genres of fiction, and if you haven’t looked into it deeply, I highly recommend checking it out.

[jwgammuto]

Go Home Smackdown Live for WrestleMania 35 Review 4/2/19

Last stop on the Road to Wrestlemania for the Blue Brand. SD Live has been the better show for almost the entirety of 2019, let’s find out if that trend continues on the go home show with a little of The Good, The Bad, and the WTF: Potato Face Edition.

The Good: Daniel Bryan continues his absolutely perfect heel work at the contract signing. Kofi’s stoicism and then flipped switch to emotion was also kind of fun but DB is the real star here playing with the crowd and flat out ignoring them when necessary. This was a significantly better send off to Mania for a big title match than Lesnar and Rollins gave us. If I have a complaint, it’s how irritatingly goofy Big E insists on constantly being. He basically gyrated his junk and made cocaine faces for the entirety of this segment and while I get that his deal is he’s a fun goof, it distracted from a solid segment that didn’t really need him or Woods.

The KO Show. Sure there’s about 100 ways they could be making better use of such a talented guy but these segments tend to be a million times better than Moment of Bliss so for this I am thankful. AJ and Orton continued the trade digs here in what has been a pretty good WWE Vet vs Indie Darling angle. I do question what the hell they can do at WM now that they’ve blown the whole Forearm into RKO bit but I’m pretty sure this match will still be good.

Samoa Joe gets back on track with a win over Ali. Much as I like Ali, this was absolutely necessary. Joe has been losing too much lately and he needed to look dominant here and did.

Otis. Basically everything he does on tv will go in this column for the foreseeable future.

Sanity makes a TV appearance, albeit to job in a handicap match to the Miz. Shane continues to be ok, not great, as a heel McMahon. This match build has been awkward but certainly not terrible. Looking forward to Shane’s insanity Sunday.

The Bad: Lazy booking in the form of an 18 person inter gender tag match that eventually devolved into a battle royal preview. This wasn’t without highlights such as Otis courting Mandy, Rose and Benjamin’s hi-five, Nikki Cross being a nut, and Asuka standing tall after Jeff Hardy foolishly turned his back on her, but ultimately this was a forced way to highlight the WM battle royals that no one cares about and felt unnecessary in a show that should be focusing on promoting consistent interest in a show that will be as long as a work day.

Becky Lynch’s rare weak promo. Basically a recap of what happened on Monday night, which was slightly lackluster to me anyway. I didn’t need anything quite so dramatic and overdone as Raw’s segment, but something more effective than Lynch standing on a desk regurgitating the same old schlock she’s been feeding us for two months felt lazy and weak.

The IIconics cut a promo ahead of the fatal four way title match at ‘Mania. Pretty boilerplate stuff from Peyton and Billie. Not that it’s horrible, it’s what they do, it just didn’t do much to convince me that they can win. So mildly pointless?

The WTF: The Twist of Fate. Riddle me this. Why do different performers sell it different and why is only when Jeff does the move? EC3 sells it last night as a half assed stunner, as many do. This move used to be a variation on the diamond cutter and it looked awesome. Some people still sell it this way, particularly when Matt does it, but when Jeff does the exact same move, about 2/3 of the time, the opponent sells it as a weird shitty version of the stunner. I want an explanation. Can I get some continuity anywhere with this product anymore?

The Smackdown Tag Title Picture and Alexa Bliss booking matches. The USOs are great. Them having the titles, while not 100% ideal due to the number of times they’ve had them already, is fine. What isn’t fine is no feud built to the biggest show of the year for these guys. They never seem to get a fair shake this time of year and WM 35 is no exception. Another freakin Fatal Four Way is inexplicably booked after we just watched the exact same match by the host of Wrestlemania, Alexa Bliss. She refers to the no no Jimmy and Jey had last week when the forfeited their gauntlet match in the name of KofiMania. This would have been far better served if it had come straight from Vince. He’s become a bit of a half assed authority and Bliss is the host of a show, not the GM. Why is she passing this message or making the match? It just feels dumb.

Finally, on to Aleister Black and Ricochet. How many title opportunities are these guys going to get in 30 days? Let’s count em up. Two against the Revival, both lost. This will be number 2 for the SD titles, one already lost. And they get a shot against the War Raiders on Friday night. That’s a fiver. It’s not that I don’t like these two guys. It just doesn’t make a ton of sense why they’re a team in the first place and despite losing every major title chance they get, they continue to get chances. I can’t imagine they beat the War Raiders at TakeOver. Maybe they win at Mania, which honestly I prefer over them winning the Raw titles from The Revival at any point. But what if they don’t? Then what? Some direction would be nice.

Certainly not awful but definitely lacked a real holy shit moment that made WM must see. The contract signing was good but not so good that I’m desperate to see Bryan and Kofi. There’s whispers that Mysterio might be hurt and out for the US title match so the Joe squashing Ali makes sense. God help us if Cena replaces Rey. How about Andrade? Or Ali in a rematch? Or even the triumphant return of the United States of Truth! Or.....OTIS! Similarly to Raw, there was stuff to like, other to not. Unbalanced, not amazing go home show gets 3.5 big Hogan Belt Whips because it did do a couple of things very well and there was little face palming. Stay tuned for One Chance in Hell this week, my fantasy booking for the Showcase of the Immortals. Top Guy.....out.

[scribblechill]

On Thundercats Roar, the Calarts Style, and ‘Toxic Masculinity’

Okey, I know I rarely, rarely make blog posts. If I have something to say about cartoons or the animation sphere I would probably make a video on my channel. But I believe that this matter is not a suitable topic for a potential video, and also I’m still kind of on my Youtube hiatus. Anyways...

There is a reason why Thundercats is hated so much, and it’s because of the plight of the ‘Calarts style’. A lot of people, especially those who grew up with cartoons from the 80′s and 90′s, criticised the show for repeating the art style repeated in modern 2010′s cartoons such as Steven Universe and Gravity Falls, and that the Thundercats reboot is no more than an epiphany for the ‘lazy’ style in all contemporary cartoons. 

But is this true?

The modern ‘calarts’ style is constructed from drawing a circle, and drawing a bracket, representing the lower jaw, that protrudes out, as seen in this image:

As an artist who has emulated and utilised this style, I can say that this is perfectly true. But now let’s look at the other side, the 80′s- The 80′s style is primarily based on realistic human anatomy and proportions, with accurately depicted muscles. 

But here’s the catch. The education process of an animator within an art school is rigourous- students are required to attend mandatory figure drawing classes, where their skills when it comes to anatomy and perspective are drilled to perfection. The artists who animate with the calarts style, and the artists who made the original Thundercats have no doubt gone through this process- with all that intense training, one could probably regurgitate a human figure as easy as...well, drawing a circle with a jaw below it. 

Image credits: Reiq from Deviantart

I do agree that there is more effort that is placed into defining emotions and muscular features in the original Thundercats and many 80′s cartoons. However, the fact that they regurgitated the real life anatomy does not make them any more, or less, creative than contemporary cartoons. 

Look at Lion-O for a start, he is supposed to be a human-cat-alien. However, all the character designers did is illustrate a normal, muscular person, change the eye size to match a cat, and made the skin orange. It’s practically one or two cat features stuck to a perfectly standard rendition of a male figure that the artist could have drawn a million times during anatomy class in animation school. 

And hence, like how the ‘Calarts’ style is based off a regurgitated circle and a bracket, the 80′s cartoon style is based of a regurgitation of standard human anatomy that is commonly understood by all artists- including modern animators in Calarts. Anime uses a regurgitated style, so as comic books. But how about this image?

So are 80′s cartoons a pile of shit too?

No, the creator of this image has obviously nitpicked the characters from contemporary animation. But it does tell the point that the ‘repetitious, lazy style’ argument could work both ways, and it could be true with exceptions at the same time. The point is- each era of animation have a stylistic/anatomical thing that is repeated, and that’s fine! Because in the cartoon industry a lot of artists work between shows, and this result in their style being intertwined between many dominating shows within the industry. Both style has their beauty- the 80′s, muscly, realistic style is a celebration of how life-like and realistic you could make a series of moving pictures to be. And the Calart style looks fluid, lively, and well, cute. 

Though the design from Thundercats Roar might have been too much of a generic copycat (ba dum tss) of the Calarts style, let’s remember there are many amazing cartoons that are animated in the same style, but are beloved and are appreciated for their artistic beauty. For a start- Wonder Over Yonder, created by Craig McCracken, who surprise, came from Calarts himself. We should appreciate each era of cartoons- past, present or future, and of course, be free to criticise it too. And we should not allow one bad fruit in the basket to ruin it all for everyone. 

But there is one last thing about this whole Thundercats thing I want to address. I think this comment left by a fellow on Youtube highlights this problem I want to talk about best. 

‘When I see this style (Calarts), I don’t think ‘cutesy’. I think racist bigoted, vindictive, far left authoritarian. This drawing style is a huge warning sign that you’re dealing with the someone who’s really into violence and revenge, but deluded enough to think they’re childlike and fun.’ -anon

This is one of the biggest problem with the whole issue- people politicising the Thundercats reboot and the Calarts style. 

Basically the consensus is- the Calarts style and the Thundercats reboot itself is an attempt from leftists and SJW’s to stifle ‘toxic masculinity’, otherwise known as ‘the war on boys’. As we have all noticed- the original Thundercats is very masculine, while the reboot looks cutesy and non-threatening. Many people believe that this reboot is a small part of the agenda from the liberals imposing feminine standards on young boys at school, in the media they consume and in society, instead of allowing them to have rough and tumble play. 

Let me get this straight first- I do believe that this is an issue with the western education system in many western countries, especially Sweden. But I’m not here to talk about politics, I’m here for animation. 

The modern cartoon style portraying their characters as more cutesy instead of more masculine is not a large social engineering project, but it’s instead a mix of the change in writing style and economics. 

First of all, large corporations like Cartoon Network has no intention on manipulating kids to be more feminine. They just market, greenlight, and promote what sells. It’s called business. The cutesy style is trendy nowadays- so networks today promote it. The muscle-man, masculine style is trendy back in the 80′s, so networks promoted it before. Welcome to the free market. 

Second of all- the writing style. The entire Calarts style started with the ‘cartoon renaissance’ of the 2010′s- catalysed by shows like Adventure Time and Gravity Falls. These shows not only brought a new art style, but they also brought something back that has been mostly eroded in the previous decade- story and character development. The imperative part of character development is relatability, and this would mean the rejection of ‘Mary Sues’, or perfect flawless characters. 

It lies in the visual narrative- a worked up person with large muscles- as portrayed in Thundercats, does not seem as ‘relatable’ as maybe a more bubbly, cutesy, character, because the fact is that the majority of us do not look, and more importantly, feel like that. But unlike the Thundercats reboot, this bubbly Calarts character design in many good contemporary cartoons juxtaposes with the character’s surrounding world, which is often illustrated to be much darker, and included more physical and emotional challenges they have to face. They are more appealing because the audience, whether they are kids are adults, realise that someone meek and not very insignificant like themselves, represented by the ‘cutesy’ style, could fight and fare along in a world that’s dark, complex, and that they can overcome the hurdles in their personal life like family relationships etc (classic examples being Gravity Falls, Steven Universe, Adventure Time, even Gumball, OK KO and Star Vs to some extent) and that they could do so too. They are not more appealing to the audience because the audience is being brainwashed into being more feminine. 

A lot of the people supporting the notion that the Calarts style is representative of the feminisation of society will point out that cartoons today do not show and encourage people to take action on their own flaws, and that the audience is shielded from reality and are replaced with rainbows and sunshine to ‘feminise’ the children, and some of them end up calling artists and animators that utilise the Calarts style as ‘cucks’, ‘soyboys’ (lol) and ‘betas’ and are obsessed with their ideologies and social engineering. When in fact, cartoons today have been promoting the idea of overcoming one’s own flaws all the time, (Maybe not in Thundercats Roar or TTG but in Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Star vs. etc) and are in fact building stronger people in real life, all thanks to the fact that the audience could actually relate increasingly to  more modestly, cutely designed characters.    

Img cred: Know Your Meme

And I have to say, I personally think a lot of them are completely new to the modern cartoon/animation sphere and they just popped in because they saw this Thundercats reboot, and just because of that one reboot they came up with the notion that the Calarts style and the entire cartoon industry is stifling masculinity. No offence to them at all. But like I said earlier, the cutesy style actually creates a sense of reliability and juxtaposition for the audience that a more masculine and strong illustration style like the original Thundercats might not be able to offer. It’s only that Thundercats Roar failed to create this sense of juxtaposition, but it doesn’t mean the rest of the bunch- OK KO, Steven Universe, fail to do so too. 

If you are a big fan of cartoons, may I ask you, will the show lose it’s appeal, at least slightly, because...

- Star from Star vs looks more like Wonderwoman

- Dipper from Gravity Falls is an alpha with gains. 

I’m well aware that this is could be different between person to person. 

The point is, the fact that we are politicising a fucking art style and calling everyone who uses and endorses it as your political opponent, shows how emotionally driven this whole debate is. Fans of the former Thundercats have every right to be mad at the reboot- it is a bastardisation of the original and a disrespect towards the original creator. However, turning this nostalgic rage into political stigmatisation and blanket generalisation of the many hardworking artists and animators that just get along is childish in itself. Sure, some artists might actually believe that masculinity is toxic, whoever designed the characters in the Thundercats reboot might be lazy- but the majority of those people who use the Calarts style, or come from Calarts, want to pursue their passion, make the best animations they could, and put food on the table. 

The political issues implied are very real, but using them to emotionally justify one’s rage against these artists is not right. 

It takes some balls for you to voice out against social change (despite doing it in the wrong place), but it takes a real man to pursue the gruelling yet rewarding art form of animation. 

[not-poignant]

Tumblr is full of writing tips posts. What is the most stupid and horribly wrong writing tip you've seen here? That possibly made you go 'ffc no, you should never do THAT'

Honestly I see so many horrible fucking writing tips that I often don’t know where to start.

But there’s one I see a lot which has persisted over the years on Tumblr, and would have like...genuine writing teachers responding like this:

And that’s any writing advice that suggests about four million other words you should use in place of the miraculous word said.

There was this trend (it’s thankfully on its way out) of posts that got absurdly Thesaurus happy to suggest a billion other words you could use in place of ‘said’ as though you were in a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story where characters would ‘ejaculate’ instead of speaking (yes really: ‘I can’t believe it!’ he ejaculated.)

Said is a marvellous word. It’s really an incredible, wonderful word.

The rule for using words like ‘whispered’ or ‘taunted’ or whatever is (and this is not universal): if you can tell what the character is doing from the dialogue alone - use said. If there is no way you can tell tone from the dialogue, consider using something other than said to indicate tone. If you always have to use something else, your dialogue is probably not very good. And if you constantly use a word other than said because of I don’t know...personal vanity or whatever - that’s awesome man I can be guilty of it too, but sometimes it really means that you’re telling your reader the same thing multiple times in different ways and it can get jarring.

Said is a nice, invisible word. It’s mostly just letting people know who is character A and who is character B and who is speaking when. That’s all its for. Invisible words are great in writing! Why? Because they aid reading flow. The invisible words get your reader’s eye to the most important parts of your story.

Dean Koontz used to do this thing where he did great streams of dialogue and omitted all markers of who was speaking. Almost no one liked it, and almost everyone got confused by it. But it was a personal habit of his and he did it for about a decade before he was like ‘wait people really don’t like this‘ (to be fair he could do it for like three solid pages, like seriously imagine this:)

‘I don’t know’‘What don’t you know’ ‘I’m just saying this horrible thing we’re dealing with...’‘Yeah maybe we could do this to fight it’

FOR THREE PAGES IT GETS CONFUSING. (In short sections it can work). Sometimes how your character talks is not enough to get you through that clusterfuck. Enter the miraculous word ‘said,’ with a name or pronoun in front of it, that just acts as a gentle map for the reader, that goes ‘hey maybe you’re not reading this like it’s an examination for university, and to help you not get lost, here are some words you hardly have to notice to make sure you’re still involved in this story.’

Dean Koontz doesn’t really do this anymore, lol.

Anyway, honestly, I am kind of...against universal writing tips anyway, so any time I see a writing tip post on Tumblr, 9/10 I am usually doing this in response:

And it’s sort of... it’s a few things:

- I think a lot of these posts are written by highschoolers or first year university students who are sort of processing some basic writing rules (that in no way apply universally, culturally or even geographically to all - seriously if an American incorrectly ‘corrects’ my Australian grammar one more time I will reach through the internet and throttle them, we don’t use double quotation marks for our dialogue!) and do that by sort of regurgitating them with their own take and applying them to everyone. It’s awesome they’re learning, but you’re not in their class, and they are not your teacher. A lot of these articles are like post-educational-processing and not actually genuinely helpful writing advice.

- The universality of these tips tends to annoy me. It’s one thing to suggest that most fics on AO3 should have paragraph breaks - that’s basic functionality and accessibility, in the same way that it’s basic to put spaces between words. But it’s quite another to suggest that passive tense is always evil or adverbs are the devil. It’s simply not true. Fucking Pulitzer Prize winners have used both, lol. And they didn’t win in spite of doing these things. It’s one thing to say ‘it can be lazy to rely on this too much’ it’s another thing to say ‘no adverbs! Ever!’

- Sometimes it’s really really really easy to tell when someone has picked up Stephen King’s writing book. Also that book is super fucking ableist. Like most writing books, it’s centred in a whole lot of privilege. Also Chuck Palahniuk’s writing manifesto doesn’t apply to 98% of writers but thumbs up if you’re in the two percent.

- ‘How to write’ is an intensely personal process. Writing tips are like...idk, good to read, but in a light-hearted way. Sample often, discard just as often. Try before you buy (into it). Always think ‘do I know authors who have broken this rule and did I still find them entertaining?’ Almost always the answer is ‘yes.’

- I know a lot of professional writers and editors. Like, that’s my main ‘crew’ online (and in real life, even though I hardly ever see them, but if I see more than four people at once, it’s generally some of the big writing names in Perth and we’re usually bitching about something like how many small publishers can’t stand up to Amazon and not how that one author always uses ‘said’ too much pfft). On Twitter. On Facebook. On Dreamwidth. All I hear about every day is people dropping new books, getting nominated for awards etc. and here’s the thing about professional writers - they rarely share the same kind of writing tips you find on Tumblr, because they’ve learned that a lot of that stuff isn’t universal. 

Most of us are tired of Tumblr articles on how to write (don’t get me wrong, some of them are very very good, and Neil Gaiman has given lovely advice on Tumblr repeatedly - I don’t actually love his writing, but good god, I love him as a giver of writing advice lol since he’s not a homogenising dickbrain about it), most of us are tired of the grammar police, etc.

Anyway I do get impatient about it and it’s one of the few areas - there’s a reason why my ‘on writing’ / ‘pia on writing’ tag tends to feature very specific sorts of writing advice - i.e. focused on encouragement and motivation, over people saying ‘this thing should be universal’ when no, actually, it shouldn’t be.

And my way isn’t the right way either? And that’s why I don’t often share writing tips (though I think I could stand to do it more sometimes, maybe some people want to actually learn to write like me; I don’t recommend it personally lol). Like I break rules because I like the outcome, especially around length and passive tense and long scenes without ‘scene breaks’ and so on. But theoretically Cecilia Dart-Thornton’s The Bitterbynde Trilogy would be trash by some of these writing articles standards and it’s honestly one of the most sumptuous epic fantasy trilogies of all time and the purple prose works and it deserved the awards it won.

So imho, honestly, a lot of those articles can bite me, lol. But especially the ones where people are like ‘hey, have you considered not using ‘said’ and making everything 400 times harder for your reader, just to prove you can use a thesaurus???’

(PS: I talked to Glen about this, who is also a writer (and scriptwriter) and the thing he says he hates the most is: ‘write what you know.’ Totally feel that too.)

[bruno-news]

It’s Joy Time for Bruno Mars

WE’RE JUST CAVEMEN, hitting on rocks,” says Bruno Mars. “It’s no different—you’re a caveman and you got a rock in front of you, you hit it with a stick to get everybody dancing. This is our time to forget about everything, it’s joy time. So who’s the best at hitting that rock? Who’s going to make the village dance the hardest?” 

At a casual glance, you might not know that Mars is one of our superstar cavemen. Pulling up to an upscale Italian restaurant on an anonymous street in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, alone in a relatively modest Cadillac, he parks in back by the dumpsters to slip in quietly. In contrast to the flashy outfits he wears onstage, he’s dressed in a simple collarless bomber jacket, a white Gucci logo T-shirt and camouflage pants. A small crucifix on a thin chain hangs around his neck. 

But at age 31, the singer/songwriter/producer dynamo born Peter Gene Hernandez is unquestionably one of the most highly decorated figures in pop music, with 21 Grammy nominations and 21 Hot 100 hit singles. He has sold over 170 million singles and 26 million albums worldwide and notched his first five No. 1 hits faster than any male artist since Elvis Presley. His third album, 24K Magic, debuted at No. 2 in November; more than two months later, it was still parked in the top five. 

On this drizzly January day, Mars is trying to take care of business before heading to Japan for promotional duties. He’s finalizing plans for the album’s second single, the breezy, drop-top banger “That’s What I Like,” and plotting out his performance for the Grammy Awards. Today, he’s mostly bouncing between meetings and calls to assemble the staging for his massive world tour—already more than 100 dates this year, starting in late March in Antwerp, Belgium, and hitting the U.S. in July. 

“I want the show to be powerful, because people spent some money on a ticket,” he says. “I’ve seen some awesome shows. I’ve seen Prince and Michael Jackson ; those are nights I will remember forever. I’m not doing my job unless I leave a piece of me everywhere I go—if you do the right show, it will stay with people and they’ll tell their kids about it. I hope people can see what I was feeling when I made the records. Then I want to go beyond their expectations and fly.” 

With his old-school dedication to entertaining and his grounding in classic pop and R&B songwriting, Mars stands alongside Adele as one of today’s most universally beloved musicians. “My mum loves Bruno Mars and my son loves Bruno Mars and he’s 5,” says James Corden, host of The Late Late Show—and, recently, the Grammys—in a phone call. “I love how joyful, positive, uplifting his music is. It excludes no one. Everybody is welcome.” 

Mars makes no secret that being onstage comes much easier to him than being in the studio. Almost four full years passed between his quadruple-platinum Unorthodox Jukebox album and the release of 24K Magic. He works so obsessively on each song, he says, that he drew up parameters for himself in order to get the concise, nine-song project finished. “I wanted to make a movie, where each song has its own moment,” he says. “So ‘Versace on the Floor’ is the tender moment, ‘That’s What I Like’ is the fun moment, and the ballad at the end [“Too Good to Say Goodbye”] seals the deal. That’s how I kind of tricked myself into making the album. 

“We were trying really hard to tap into the ’90s R&B music that we grew up with, and it’s a very fine line—it can get tribute-y, it can sound forced,” Mars adds. “But that New Jack Swing sound brought me so much joy as a kid, so we took that on and did our best to try to get that feeling, that effortless fun.” 

His interest in exploring the sounds of the past has sometimes led to accusations that Mars is just a talented copycat. When 24K Magic was released, one publication offered a track-by-track analysis of which artist each song was imitating. Not surprisingly, Mars gets heated about such criticisms. 

“Man, that pisses me off so much!” he says. “It’s so easy to say that, but anyone that does that kind of shit has never written a song in their life. That’s why I’m here, because of musicians before me. 

“Don’t get me wrong—there is plagiarism when you just say ‘Hey, man, what are you doing? I’ve heard that already.’ And I’m not stupid, of course it sounds like [the ’90s]. We’re using these vintage instruments and there is a certain sound, but it’s not just regurgitated. You can tell that we were listening to ’90s R&B. It has that spirit. That’s what we capture, and that’s what I want.” 

Every time I think about it, my whole story is just weird,” says Mars. “Even I don’t get it!” He was born and raised in Honolulu, one of six children—his Filipino-Spanish mother was a singer and dancer; his Jewish–Puerto Rican father was a percussionist. By age 4, young Bruno (the nickname came from his father, who thought the infant Peter resembled wrestler Bruno Sammartino) was performing five days a week in the family band, the Love Notes, singing Michael Jackson and Temptations covers. 

According to his older brother, Eric “E-Panda” Hernandez, when Bruno was just a few years old, his parents dressed him up as Elvis for Halloween. “He was already so in tune with Elvis that he was imitating the moves, the lips, drawing a crowd,” says Hernandez. “I thought, ‘Holy cow, he’s a showstopper already!’ ” “Little Elvis” went on to perform at halftime in the 1990 Aloha Bowl and had a cameo in the 1992 film Honeymoon in Vegas. 

“If you took your kid to school with you every day, and you were studying rocket science, he’d probably be a rocket scientist,” says Mars. “So that’s just it—my dad and mom took me to work every single day, and I got to see what it’s like to entertain an audience. I got to entertain everybody who came to Hawaii—a roomful of people that didn’t speak English, from around the world—and to see what music can do, and how it can bring the world together.” 

Above all, he learned the power of a great song, the fundamentals of writing music that far outlives its creator. Hernandez, who is now the drummer in Mars’s band, recalls Bruno constantly studying music videos—doo-wop, Michael Jackson, Elvis, anything he could get his hands on—in the bedroom they shared. 

“I’ve been singing amazing songs since I was a kid,” Mars says. “They weren’t my songs, but they were classics. So I’ve trained my brain to know what it feels like to sing an amazing song—when you do a lot of covers, you see it; you’ll play a song and you see everybody freak out when you get to that chorus, everyone is singing. It taps into something, whether it’s nostalgia or it just makes people feel a certain way.” 

His father gave him a guitar and started teaching him to play—surf music at first, classics like “Walk Don’t Run” and “Apache.” The influence ran deeper than just the music, as evidenced by the silk-shirt-and-shorts set, white shoes and gold jewelry he sports on the cover of 24K Magic. “The style stuff all comes from watching my dad—the pinkie rings, the pompadour, everything,” Mars says with a big grin. “My dad would take me to school in some big, busted-up Cadillac, and he’d be wearing a rhinestone jacket and have his hair all whipped and greased up, flashy glasses, and I was like, My dad’s not like the other dads at school! I’d try to get out of the car, zoom out. And now I’m the one driving the busted Cadillac, wearing some gaudy shit, and it’s what makes me happy.”

“Bruno is a fashion leader, with a sense of style that is truly his own,” says Tommy Hilfiger, whose clothes Mars sometimes wears onstage. “He is almost chameleonlike—for one concert, he’ll wear an animal-print shirt, then the next, he’ll be in a tuxedo, and it’s all him, he is totally in control of his presence.” 

After graduating from high school, Mars moved to Los Angeles to pursue a musical career. (He now lives in the Hollywood Hills with model/actress Jessica Caban, whom he has dated since 2011.) He was signed by Motown Records in 2004 but then dropped. He kicked around town, signing a publishing deal, playing in cover bands and soaking up all he could from sympathetic, successful songwriters. He wrote songs for K’naan, Brandy and Flo Rida and, in 2009, co-founded a production team, the Smeezingtons. 

His breakthrough came with the hits “Nothin’ on You” by B.o.B. and “Billionaire” by Travie McCoy, both of which featured his voice on the hooks, and then with Cee Lo’s 2010 smash politely known as “Forget You.” Just weeks before that song dropped, Mars released “Just the Way You Are,” the first single from his debut album on Atlantic Records, Doo-Wops and Hooligans. The irresistibly sweet ballad went to No. 1 and topped the adult contemporary chart for a record-breaking 20 weeks. (The next single, “Grenade,” also went to No. 1, and the ukulele-driven trifle “The Lazy Song” cracked the top five.) After a brief tour opening for Maroon 5, he played headlining dates for more than a year, as the album saw sales of more than six million units worldwide and an unbelievable 300-plus weeks on the Billboard Top 200. 

On the road, though, Mars became aware of the limitations of his repertoire. “The first album was so ballad-heavy,” he says, “and when I toured I was like, ‘Man, I need to dance!’ We gotta pick this up, because we can offer more and we’re kinda stuck. And that’s where ‘Locked Out of Heaven’ and ‘Treasure’ and a lot of tunes on the second album came from, because we wanted to push the tempo.” 

With an Anglo-reggae groove reminiscent of the Police (Mars and Sting sang together at the 2013 Grammy Awards), “Locked Out of Heaven” shot Unorthodox Jukebox out of the gate in 2012. The album explored disco and classic soul styles and topped charts around the world. And then, at the end of 2014, Mars was featured on producer Mark Ronson’s earth-quaking, booty-shaking, record-breaking throwback “Uptown Funk.” Certified diamond, for sales over 10 million, the song is only the eighth single in history to spend at least 14 weeks at No. 1. “Uptown Funk” won three Grammys, including record of the year, and for months it was unavoidable—on your TV, in your car or at sporting events. 

Mars says the song emerged only after a long struggle and that they had almost tossed it away. “We went through some trials and tribulations,” he says. “I’m not lying when I tell you that we were fighting—I was on tour and Mark would send me something and I’d be like, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ And I’d send him something back and he’d be like, ‘No, my version is better.’ We were both fighting for the greater good of the song. 

“You press play and it went, ‘This here’s that ice-cold…’ and it was like, ‘Oh, what’s about to happen?!’ But then ‘Oh, man, that’s what you got? Nah, never mind, turn it off.’ And that kept happening for months. 

“Finally the solution was that we just needed to dance—to say, ‘Don’t believe me, just watch,’ and that’s it. Don’t try to write a hook. You don’t need more; that already said everything. But it took us a while to feel that, because the way we were doing it was so unorthodox, piece by piece. When we finally got together and picked up the instruments, we got to feel it. That’s when the superpower comes in.” 

Even after cranking out so many hits—plus collaborations with and writing efforts for everyone from Lil Wayne to Alicia Keys, Adele to Jay Z and Kanye West—Mars has no formula or shortcuts; songwriting remains an instinctive craft. 

“When you’re in the studio, you can feel the energy shift,” he says. “It’s no different from telling a good joke—you can tell when it lights up the room. Or from telling a shitty joke that makes everyone want to leave and you hear the crickets. So you’re always trying to find that magic and then capitalize on it. 

“You find something—‘put your pinkie rings up to the moon’—and everyone’s excited, but now what? What does the bass sound like, or the drums? If ‘24K Magic’ is supposed to sound like I’m having the time of my life, you gotta hear me smiling on the record.”

There’s no bigger stage than the Super Bowl halftime show; Bruno Mars is one of a few performers who have played it twice. In 2014, he played during a rare northern excursion, as the 48th annual game took place in New Jersey. “Rehearsing in the cold sucked,” he says. “We got lucky on the day, it was 50 degrees, but two days before it was -9 or something.” His action-packed performance was the highest-rated halftime show ever (since surpassed by Katy Perry and Lady Gaga) and earned widespread raves, especially considering that his career hadn’t quite reached the spot’s usual mega-A-list status. 

Then last year, on the heels of “Uptown Funk,” Chris Martin of Coldplay invited Mars and Beyoncé to join the group’s halftime set. “I told Chris, ‘This is your Super Bowl performance, you deserve it, go kill ’em,’ ” Mars says. “But he’s such a sweetheart and he kept saying, ‘Bruno, this is a gift I want to give to everybody.’ He talked me into it. He’s a sweet talker, that guy. And she signed up, and all of a sudden I’m in rehearsal dance-battling Beyoncé—what the hell happened?” 

Mars is proud of his work ethic and dedication to every appearance, something Corden can attest to after they filmed a Carpool Karaoke segment last year (the clip has had nearly 40 million views on YouTube since airing in December). “My biggest memory of that day was that the second it ended, I got a little depressed,” says Corden. “Like the last day of vacation, where you’re on the plane home and feel sad that it’s over. It was so euphoric, I just wanted to do it again. There’s a moment at the end of ‘Uptown Funk’ where we’re just sitting there and breathing heavily, and that was real. His commitment was everything—we left it all in the car. 

“I think he’s 100 percent on his way to being one of the greats,” Corden continues. “There are great showmen who get by without always having great songs and great songwriters who aren’t great showmen, but he’s both those things. He has this unquantifiable energy, where you want to watch it and be a part of it somehow.” 

Hernandez notes that his brother works tirelessly, showing up for every sound check, sometimes arriving before the rest of the band. “He sees something lacking in the business, maybe something we were influenced by as kids that’s missing today, and he sticks to his vision,” says Hernandez. “He’s put that work mentality on the rest of the band, where he makes us want to be great.” 

The rain has stopped and as the sun goes down over the Santa Monica Mountains, Mars heads to the restaurant’s back patio for a cigarette. He seems in no great rush to get back into the scramble of preparing for a tour and keeping the business humming. With the long process of an album finally complete, he says that although he’s open to the idea of more new music or another collaboration, he wants to be careful. 

“I just don’t want to feel gross,” he says. “It’s as simple as that. I don’t want to feel gross, I don’t want to regret any decisions. Even if I turn down a sweet check because I don’t want to be on that billboard, hawking some shit to the world—I just don’t need to do that. Because you get one shot at this. 

“I’m not a model. I’m not an ice skater. I’m not a chef. I’m here to do music. And I want to be able to look back and say, ‘Yeah, I did it the way I wanted to do it.’ Whether it triumphs or fails, I can live with that.”

[andreagillmer]

Exciting News with More to Come

Source: Adrian Day for Streetwise Reports   01/15/2018

Money manager Adrian Day provides updates for a handful of companies in his portfolio.

A day late and a dollar (in this case, a penny) short: The day after our last recommendation, Evrim Resources Corp. (EVM:TSX.V, 0.42 x 0.44) opened above our limit and has moved up dramatically ever since, trading as high as 47 cents on Jan. 12. Another respected letter writer listed Evrim as one of his top picks for 2018 on the same day as our recommendation.

Don't forget who actually owns the property!

On Jan. 9, First Majestic Silver Corp. (FR:TSX; AG:NYSE; FMV:FSE), Evrim's partner on its Ermitano project, put out a release discussing the results of its 2017 company-wide exploration. It highlighted some of the drill holes from Ermitano, which had been awaiting release. The information was sketchy; there was not even a map showing where on the property the drill holes were. And for whatever reason, nowhere in the release did it even mention that First Majestic did not in fact actually own the property. They are earning in to the property on certain conditions. A couple of so-called analysts put out their so-called research pieces regurgitating the press release, but whether through ignorance or laziness, also failed to mention that someone else owned the property.

In any event, the results look good; it will be interesting to find out where these drill holes are located. It is definitely positive news for Evrim. Either First Majestic steps up its program and meets the conditions set for earning into the property this time next year. (FM will earn 100% of the property in exchange for some modest payments and a 2% royalty for Evrim); or FM, failing to meet the terms, will make an offer to Evrim, perhaps for all three of its properties near FM's Santa Elena mine (and Evrim will hold the upper hand in any such negotiations); or the property reverts to Evrim. Any one of these outcomes would be positive for Evrim, and we will know a year hence.

What to do?

We will look to revise our recommended limit once things have settled down. We would note that Evrim does have the right to force exercise of their warrants if the stock trades above 35 cents, and a forced exercise can cause some weakness since holders sell stock to raise cash to exercise warrants.

Another equity raise

Miranda Gold Corp. (MAD:TSX.V, 0.05 x 0.055), as expected has announced an equity raise, planning to raise up to $1.5 million. The terms are not overly generous, with the unit priced at 5 1/2 cents (current offer) and warrants exercisable at 12 cents, over twice current market. With potential cash coming in over the next 15 months, on new deals, this should be sufficient until the royalty income on the Lucky Shot mine commences. As discussed, Miranda is bottoming and if plans are executed over next year or more, should recover nicely.

Agreement close

Freeport-McMoRan Inc. (FCX:NYSE, 19.72) is close to an agreement with Indonesia on the future of the Grasberg mine. A multi-party memorandum of understanding is being signed by the parties today, in Indonesia. We await the fine print.

Temporary problem exaggerated in market reaction

Royal Gold Inc. (RGLD:NASDAQ; RGL:TSX, US$84.99) plunged after announcing that the Mt. Milligan mine, its largest royalty asset by asset value and revenue, had ceased mill processing operations temporarily. The move, by operator Centerra, was due to a lack of sufficient water resources (due both to a rain/snow shortfall and extremely cold weather that froze the tailings facility). The company expects milling operations to be partly resumed by the end of the month, and fully resumed following the spring melt.

At worst, the shortfall in production—which will be recorded in the middle quarters of this year—will be a timing issue; the stock price move, down over 10% in two days, was an exaggerated reaction. It reflected the ongoing problems Royal has experienced with Mt. Milligan, I think, more than this specific issue. With the past week's move in gold, the stock has mostly recovered—its low was just over $78—but we think it has much further to go.

Adrian Day, London-born and a graduate of the London School of Economics, heads the money management firm Adrian Day Asset Management, where he manages discretionary accounts in both global and resource areas. Day is also sub-adviser to the EuroPacific Gold Fund (EPGFX). His latest book is "Investing in Resources: How to Profit from the Outsized Potential and Avoid the Risks."

Want to read more Gold Report articles like this? Sign up for our free e-newsletter, and you'll learn when new articles have been published. To see a list of recent articles and interviews with industry analysts and commentators, visit our Streetwise Interviews page.

Disclosure: 1) Adrian Day: I, or members of my immediate household or family, own shares of the following companies mentioned in this article: Evrim Resources, Royal Gold. I personally am, or members of my immediate household or family are, paid by the following companies mentioned in this article: None. My company has a financial relationship with the following companies mentioned in this article: None. Funds controlled by Adrian Day Asset Management hold shares of the following companies mentioned in this article: Evrim Resources, Freeport McMoRan, Miranda Gold and Royal Gold. I determined which companies would be included in this article based on my research and understanding of the sector. 2) The following companies mentioned in this article are billboard sponsors of Streetwise Reports: None. Streetwise Reports does not accept stock in exchange for its services. Click here for important disclosures about sponsor fees. The information provided above is for informational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. 3) Statements and opinions expressed are the opinions of the author and not of Streetwise Reports or its officers. The author is wholly responsible for the validity of the statements. The author was not paid by Streetwise Reports for this article. Streetwise Reports was not paid by the author to publish or syndicate this article. Streetwise Reports requires contributing authors to disclose any shareholdings in, or economic relationships with, companies that they write about. Streetwise Reports relies upon the authors to accurately provide this information and Streetwise Reports has no means of verifying its accuracy. 4) This article does not constitute investment advice. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her individual financial professional and any action a reader takes as a result of information presented here is his or her own responsibility. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports' terms of use and full legal disclaimer. This article is not a solicitation for investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company mentioned on Streetwise Reports. 5) From time to time, Streetwise Reports LLC and its directors, officers, employees or members of their families, as well as persons interviewed for articles and interviews on the site, may have a long or short position in securities mentioned. Directors, officers, employees or members of their immediate families are prohibited from making purchases and/or sales of those securities in the open market or otherwise from the time of the interview or the decision to write an article, until one week after the publication of the interview or article. As of the date of this article, officers and/or employees of Streetwise Reports LLC (including members of their household) own securities of Evrim Resources and Miranda Gold, companies mentioned in this article.

( Companies Mentioned: EVM:TSX.V, FCX:NYSE, MAD:TSX.V, RGLD:NASDAQ; RGL:TSX, )

from The Gold Report - Streetwise Exclusive Articles Full Text http://ift.tt/2Dj6Hd9

[goldcoins0]

Exciting News with More to Come

Source: Adrian Day for Streetwise Reports   01/15/2018

Money manager Adrian Day provides updates for a handful of companies in his portfolio.

A day late and a dollar (in this case, a penny) short: The day after our last recommendation, Evrim Resources Corp. (EVM:TSX.V, 0.42 x 0.44) opened above our limit and has moved up dramatically ever since, trading as high as 47 cents on Jan. 12. Another respected letter writer listed Evrim as one of his top picks for 2018 on the same day as our recommendation.

Don't forget who actually owns the property!

On Jan. 9, First Majestic Silver Corp. (FR:TSX; AG:NYSE; FMV:FSE), Evrim's partner on its Ermitano project, put out a release discussing the results of its 2017 company-wide exploration. It highlighted some of the drill holes from Ermitano, which had been awaiting release. The information was sketchy; there was not even a map showing where on the property the drill holes were. And for whatever reason, nowhere in the release did it even mention that First Majestic did not in fact actually own the property. They are earning in to the property on certain conditions. A couple of so-called analysts put out their so-called research pieces regurgitating the press release, but whether through ignorance or laziness, also failed to mention that someone else owned the property.

In any event, the results look good; it will be interesting to find out where these drill holes are located. It is definitely positive news for Evrim. Either First Majestic steps up its program and meets the conditions set for earning into the property this time next year. (FM will earn 100% of the property in exchange for some modest payments and a 2% royalty for Evrim); or FM, failing to meet the terms, will make an offer to Evrim, perhaps for all three of its properties near FM's Santa Elena mine (and Evrim will hold the upper hand in any such negotiations); or the property reverts to Evrim. Any one of these outcomes would be positive for Evrim, and we will know a year hence.

What to do?

We will look to revise our recommended limit once things have settled down. We would note that Evrim does have the right to force exercise of their warrants if the stock trades above 35 cents, and a forced exercise can cause some weakness since holders sell stock to raise cash to exercise warrants.

Another equity raise

Miranda Gold Corp. (MAD:TSX.V, 0.05 x 0.055), as expected has announced an equity raise, planning to raise up to $1.5 million. The terms are not overly generous, with the unit priced at 5 1/2 cents (current offer) and warrants exercisable at 12 cents, over twice current market. With potential cash coming in over the next 15 months, on new deals, this should be sufficient until the royalty income on the Lucky Shot mine commences. As discussed, Miranda is bottoming and if plans are executed over next year or more, should recover nicely.

Agreement close

Freeport-McMoRan Inc. (FCX:NYSE, 19.72) is close to an agreement with Indonesia on the future of the Grasberg mine. A multi-party memorandum of understanding is being signed by the parties today, in Indonesia. We await the fine print.

Temporary problem exaggerated in market reaction

Royal Gold Inc. (RGLD:NASDAQ; RGL:TSX, US$84.99) plunged after announcing that the Mt. Milligan mine, its largest royalty asset by asset value and revenue, had ceased mill processing operations temporarily. The move, by operator Centerra, was due to a lack of sufficient water resources (due both to a rain/snow shortfall and extremely cold weather that froze the tailings facility). The company expects milling operations to be partly resumed by the end of the month, and fully resumed following the spring melt.

At worst, the shortfall in production—which will be recorded in the middle quarters of this year—will be a timing issue; the stock price move, down over 10% in two days, was an exaggerated reaction. It reflected the ongoing problems Royal has experienced with Mt. Milligan, I think, more than this specific issue. With the past week's move in gold, the stock has mostly recovered—its low was just over $78—but we think it has much further to go.

Adrian Day, London-born and a graduate of the London School of Economics, heads the money management firm Adrian Day Asset Management, where he manages discretionary accounts in both global and resource areas. Day is also sub-adviser to the EuroPacific Gold Fund (EPGFX). His latest book is "Investing in Resources: How to Profit from the Outsized Potential and Avoid the Risks."

Want to read more Gold Report articles like this? Sign up for our free e-newsletter, and you'll learn when new articles have been published. To see a list of recent articles and interviews with industry analysts and commentators, visit our Streetwise Interviews page.

Disclosure: 1) Adrian Day: I, or members of my immediate household or family, own shares of the following companies mentioned in this article: Evrim Resources, Royal Gold. I personally am, or members of my immediate household or family are, paid by the following companies mentioned in this article: None. My company has a financial relationship with the following companies mentioned in this article: None. Funds controlled by Adrian Day Asset Management hold shares of the following companies mentioned in this article: Evrim Resources, Freeport McMoRan, Miranda Gold and Royal Gold. I determined which companies would be included in this article based on my research and understanding of the sector. 2) The following companies mentioned in this article are billboard sponsors of Streetwise Reports: None. Streetwise Reports does not accept stock in exchange for its services. Click here for important disclosures about sponsor fees. The information provided above is for informational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. 3) Statements and opinions expressed are the opinions of the author and not of Streetwise Reports or its officers. The author is wholly responsible for the validity of the statements. The author was not paid by Streetwise Reports for this article. Streetwise Reports was not paid by the author to publish or syndicate this article. Streetwise Reports requires contributing authors to disclose any shareholdings in, or economic relationships with, companies that they write about. Streetwise Reports relies upon the authors to accurately provide this information and Streetwise Reports has no means of verifying its accuracy. 4) This article does not constitute investment advice. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her individual financial professional and any action a reader takes as a result of information presented here is his or her own responsibility. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports' terms of use and full legal disclaimer. This article is not a solicitation for investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company mentioned on Streetwise Reports. 5) From time to time, Streetwise Reports LLC and its directors, officers, employees or members of their families, as well as persons interviewed for articles and interviews on the site, may have a long or short position in securities mentioned. Directors, officers, employees or members of their immediate families are prohibited from making purchases and/or sales of those securities in the open market or otherwise from the time of the interview or the decision to write an article, until one week after the publication of the interview or article. As of the date of this article, officers and/or employees of Streetwise Reports LLC (including members of their household) own securities of Evrim Resources and Miranda Gold, companies mentioned in this article.

( Companies Mentioned: EVM:TSX.V, FCX:NYSE, MAD:TSX.V, RGLD:NASDAQ; RGL:TSX, )

from https://www.streetwisereports.com/article/2018/01/15/exciting-news-with-more-to-come.html

[isearchgoood]

Creating Content With Guest Contributors - Module 2 - Lesson 3 - Content Marketing Unlocked - An Information Blog

Creating Content With Guest Contributors - Module 2 - Lesson 3 - Content Marketing Unlocked

Today is another day of Content Marketing Unlocked. And I'm going to be teaching you alternative content strategies. There's two main strategies I'm going to be teaching you today. RESOURCES & LINKS: ____________________________________________ Ubersuggest: https://ift.tt/2Cs1r2d Hunter: https://hunter.io/ Action Items: https://ift.tt/2YoRC2O Playlist - Content Marketing Unlocked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_rULUbLqE4&list=PLJR61fXkAx134Wp5NgFSP5-nIruNRm033 ____________________________________________ I wanted to ask you is now here, which is what do all these companies have in common? The Google's, the Facebook's, the YouTube's, the Apple's, you know, Android which is technically owned by Google, and even Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Yes, they're all multibillion dollar companies, but they have something else in common. And what they have in common is, they leverage user generated content. They're not creating their own content. They're scaling by leveraging other people's content. And it's a very effective approach or else they wouldn't be these massive multibillion dollar companies. That amount of content that they continually produce, on not just a daily basis, but they do this all year around, has helped him reach millions of visitors a month. So who is a guest contributor? Well, a guest contributor is someone who writes articles or content on another site. This person contributes as a guest and in return gets compensated for writing that content. But there's some rules that you need to follow if you're going to be leveraging guest contributors. First, you don't want people writing regurgitated information on your website. That material needs to be new, fresh, that hasn't been published before. And you don't want that same content to also be on your website, or their website. So where do you acquire these guest contributors? Well you don't really have to pay them or anything, but there's a process that I use. I pretty much look at all my competitor blogs. I do some research to see who's a guest contributor, typically they're labeled as guest contributor, and I see if I like their content, did it get a lot of social shares? Did it get a lot of engagement? If so, maybe I should hit that person up and try to get them to write for me. Another thing is when you hit these people up and you get more contributors, over time, it makes it easier and easier to get more and more. And after a while, they'll start hitting you up so you don't actually have to approach them anymore. They'll just start coming to you. because people will be like, I want exposure, I see so and so got it, I want to be on that site too. Now, another strategy that I wanted to discuss today is Google Search Console, because this can help your website rank really well from a technical standpoint. And the way you end up doing it, is you go to Google Search Console, click on your website, if it's not installed, make sure you install it. The first thing I want you to do is check your Crawl Errors Report, fix any errors. The more errors you have, the worse your rankings are going to be in most cases. So make sure you go and fix them. And once you fix them, click on the Validate Fix, and then Google will crawl it and tell you if it's been fixed or not. Sometimes it takes a bit, but they'll go and crawl. The next thing I want you to do is submit your sitemap. So, you know, usually a sitemap is going to be like yourdomain.com/sitemap.X or XML. You can use the free tool, xml-sitemaps.com to generate a sitemap for your site. Next, I want you to click Links within Google Search Console. This will show you all the people that are linking to your site and the top most linked pages. And once you make these changes to your site or any changes to your site if you're improving it, and you want Google to pick it up and get your rankings faster you can always submit your URL at the very top, within Search Console, submit it and Google will crawl it faster than if you just wait for them to do it all on their own. Another thing to look at is AMP. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. Another thing I love using because speed is an important part of SEO, is Lazy Load. And last but not least, I want you to go check out the Security Issues area within Search Console, make sure there's no security issues. because if you have a lot, Google, won't rank your site in the long run. ► If you need help growing your business check out my ad agency Neil Patel Digital @ https://ift.tt/2Kiwn8k ►Subscribe: https://goo.gl/ScRTwc to learn more secret SEO tips. ►Find me on Facebook: https://ift.tt/2313ZvR ►On Instagram: https://ift.tt/2ZVz8Z1 https://youtu.be/v1WyWFHiWa4 #ContentMarketing #NeilPatel #DigitalMarketing Related Posts Go To Home Page Traffic From Google Without Backlinks August 8, 2020 at 05:00AM via Blogger https://ift.tt/2PBR5VW #blogger #bloggingtips #bloggerlife #bloggersgetsocial #ontheblog #writersofinstagram #writingprompt #instapoetry #writerscommunity #writersofig #writersblock #writerlife #writtenword #instawriters #spilledink #wordgasm #creativewriting #poetsofinstagram #blackoutpoetry #poetsofig

[charlieharry1]

What’s your tale? The way to raise your commercial enterprise through brand storytelling

Welcome to the arena of brand storytelling. As soon as upon a time, storytelling became completed in front of a roaring fireplace; a captivated target market could be gathered round with eyes looking at upwards in keen anticipation, ready to drink in interesting testimonies of heroes and monsters, imagining themselves because the championing  Digital Marketing Company Manchester pressure for the ethical of the story. These days, our target audience are separated from us with the aid of a laptop, cell, or tablet display screen, however our connection with the arena is greater than ever thanks to a powerful on line community that extends throughout the globe in a transnational social community of sharing and engagement. Simply one tweet to a commercial enterprise from a disgruntled patron can prompt a snowball chain of negativity in which customers with similar studies will band collectively in dissatisfied unification. It's far therefore essential to by no means underestimate the power and have an impact on of your patron. Within the advertising global, attractive in your client comes right down to extra than just imparting sporadic discounts and sending out an electronic mail or two to remind them approximately your internet site. The now not-so-secret secret to status out from your competition? Powerful brand storytelling. Don’t get me incorrect, there is lots of competition accessible from manufacturers which includes apple, nike, and dove – the unquestioned giants of their respective industries. The cause why those brands are so loved and without problems identifiable across the globe is because they have got created their personal community of unswerving clients – normal people who've invested both emotionally and financially thanks to extremely effective and particular brand storytelling. Therein lies the crux of the factor – you want to distinguish yourself; exhibit your area of expertise; convince your target audience why they need to care and put money into what you need to offer; sell long-time period dedication rather than short-term gratification. Let’s take a look at the brand storytelling of the 3 powers we stated above and spot what we are able to take from their examples. Nike

Read Also:-  For successful social presence, you need both organic and paid social media marketing

a picture showing mo farah in a nike marketing campaign as a part of their brand storytelling

In a previous blog submit we mentioned how this primary instance have created their own tradition and forged an tremendous logo motion. If you have a body, you're an athlete. This is the questioning from wearing brand nike, who from their famous ‘just do it’ marketing campaign to the ‘make it count number’ marketing campaign encourage people to combat their inner demons of self-doubt and defeatism and accept as true with that we are all capable of greatness. Possibly one of the more well known examples of their ethos – specially for millennials – is the viral youtube video by using casey neistat and max joseph, which indicates their ten day journey internationally thru lovely nations and breaktaking surroundings. With over 20 million perspectives the whole logo storytelling enjoy resonates a poignant message to be energetic and live in the moment. The #makeithappen marketing campaign also brought together athletes of the sector to reveal how much paintings and dedication goes into their sport, each pledging their health desires with nike asking their clients to do the equal. What turned into the stop end result? A kinship of professional sports humans, novices, and those in-between who encourage, guide, and motivate each different of their fitness endeavours. Apple

A image displaying a lovely seashore shot from an iphone 6 as part of their logo storytelling

i don’t even actually need to mention the name, i may want to just display you a photo of the logo and you'll comprehend this organization at once. From the outset of 1997’s ‘suppose different’ marketing campaign, apple have persevered to push the limits of what is feasible in technological advances. Brand storytelling for this tech powerhouse is extra than only a advertising approach, it's far a residing organism this is continuously weaving collectively the promise of larger and higher with the involvement of the individual customer and their normal reviews. The ‘shot on iphone 6’ clips that seemed during our online surfing were sent in with the aid of real iphone customers and reveal our capability for creativeness inside the most spontaneous of moments. Apple directs its attempt on supporting us to seize the ones magic moments, thereby promoting their merchandise as no longer only a commodity but a necessity to enhancing our regular lives. That is no greater glaring than with this year’s announcement that iphone sales had reached the billion mark. Dove

a picture showing the dove real beauty marketing campaign as a part of their brand storytelling

‘splendor isn't just pores and skin deep’: a philosophy that is deeply embedded in the emblem storytelling for dove and its umbrella organization unilever. Dove promote themselves as a driving pressure for positivity and self esteem, with a specialized vanity mission that movements past business incentive and gives lower back to their clients by using emboldening young human beings to love their bodies and themselves for exactly who they may be. For over 12 years the agency have targeted on ‘actual splendor’ with a numerous variety of models appearing in their campaigns and adverts together with ‘real beauty sketches’, another viral marketing campaign that cleverly plays on our emotions to make us realise that we're – and shouldn’t be – our personal worst critics. So what do all of those organizations have in not unusual? It’s that their brand storytelling actions past actually pushing a product. Instead, they continuously engage their target market and construct a basis of agree with and loyalty via a clean and consistent brand imaginative and prescient, imparting solutions to troubles and displaying that they definitely care approximately the impact their products have on their clients. Be clean for your emblem venture

expertise and efficiently conveying your brand voice and ethos is the inspiration upon which your entire logo storytelling will increase. A high-quality springboard for this is the project assertion, with a purpose to pinpoint the essential values of your employer. Let’s imagine you promote food items that use simplest healthful and natural components. Is that this because you want to assist humans stay a purer and more healthy way of life, or are you seeking to improve the environment and fight climate trade thanks to the usage of natural insecticides and fertilisers? It’s all nicely and good having a catchy slogan however if those are just empty phrases designed to cast a few waves out into the patron sphere, your logo received’t have sustainable, long-term impact. Furthermore, you can not simply release a viral video and desire this could be sufficient to carry your message. It desires to work in unison with a regular emblem marketing campaign in preference to fragmented snippets of your commercial enterprise. How did your employer come into being? Why do your personnel need to work for you? What drove you to create that precise product? These are the sorts of questions you must be asking your self. After all, your clients are buying into you, not simply your product. Resolve a trouble, provide an answer

simplicity is the name of the game – while a person desires or desires something, they will purchase it. All and sundry can regurgitate the statistics of a product and dictate this to an audience, however the actual task is considering how what you're selling will pique their interest and what's going to inspire them to want to pick out you above anybody else available on the market. Nothing is static, therefore you want to be adaptable to the changing wishes of your customers and tailor your tale as a consequence, continually considering how your logo solutions align with the requirements of your clients. Psychology comes vastly into play here as you preempt what your clients need earlier than they will are aware of it themselves. You want to think about what lies at the root cause for a person’s selection to make that buy with the aid of placing yourself in their shoes; cross past that superficial floor to discover those deeper and frequently hidden demanding situations and motivations. Simply have a look at nike, who realised that a lack of workout is not necessarily a count of laziness but a fear of ridicule or failure. Without having to openly confer with those underlying fears, they have been able to cope with them by using imparting a forum of guide and encouragement for humans to seize the moment and once more experience exercising. This portrays them as a top class sports wear and gadget provider who certainly care about the bodily and intellectual nicely-being in their purchasers. Create an revel in

as purchasers we're mostly driven through desire than practical want, consequently making an investment in a emblem or idea is an emotional transaction. We can make preliminary decisions based totally on those emotions – some thing we explored in a recent put up about advertising to feelings – after which rationalise this with the records. It’s surely not enough to attraction to common sense; you want to marketplace in a manner that encourages your purchaser to contextualise your product in their normal lives. Studies has proven that our brains are far greater receptive to sounds and pictures than an concept translated to us thru records and figures. Your storytelling have to be reflective of this, presenting a sensory and emotional revel in via a variety of mediums that could immediately involve the voices of the very humans to whom you're advertising. Contain your customers

this leads me on well to my very last point. With the aid of making your logo storytelling a participatory revel in with your clients, you can obtain a extra stage of authenticity. Whether this is expressly such as them to your advertising and marketing like dove’s example or simply actually achieving out and asking people to finish a survey on their customer support enjoy, you need to remind humans that they are at the leading edge of the selections you're making. Make no mistake that constructing your brand story takes time to expand and continually begins by way of taking an sincere and compelling technique about who you are and why you provide your  Digital Marketing Company Liverpool products or services. Never overlook that the achievement of the tale you tell is decided via the individual that hears it. Brands must be customer-centric, selling a life-style in preference to just a product, consequently usually preserve your narrative intertwined with that of your audience to make sure that you forge a long lasting relationship and stay fortuitously ever after.

[djsamaha-blog]

How to Write Shit People Actually Want to Read (+ Free Checklist)

Let me guess.

If you’re just starting out online, you wonder…

“How do I get clients?”

“How can I start monetizing my blog?”

“How do I get more traffic?”

The answer to every single one of these questions might surprise you. Ready?

The answer is this:

Write shit people want to read.

Every single day somewhere around two million blog posts are written. The sad truth, though?

The vast majority of those articles won't be read. The vast majority of them are – let's be real – crap.

A small portion are read by 100 people. A smaller portion are read by 1,000 people. And a few get noticed by “influencers”, syndicated on massive publications and are shared thousands of times.

Those few are the ones that bring in clients, sales, readers, and traffic.

So how do you make sure that your writing doesn't just end up in the pile of “content” that slowly drifts out to sea? How do you write the 1% of articles that will get you traffic and conversions?

Well, you write shit people actually want to read.

When somebody actually wants to read your writing, they usually want to share it. They usually get value from it, talk about it, and spread it around.

Creating shit that people actually want to read (or listen to or watch or gaze at) is one of the main ingredients in the “content” marketing cake, and without it you have no engagement, no fans, no clients and no sales.

My writing is a decade in the making and is still a huge work in progress, but I'm learning and I know some of these tips will turn your writing around.

If you're too lazy to read this post, you can get the checklist I use before I publish all of my articles.

Write like a pro: Click here to get my 44-point checklist for publishing amazing articles.

#1: Know Thy Audience

You could write Atlas Shrugged but if your audience doesn’t want to read it, it’s not good.

Yup, beauty is in the eye of the beholder in this case.

That’s why you need to know your audience.

Good content starts here. Good content to your target audience could be horrible content to me. Even if I hate your writing, if your audience loves it, then it’s good.

But be warned…

Do not take that as permission to rest on your laurels and stop improving. Instead, take that as a nudge to get to know your audience intimately.

Note two things:

What they want to read

How they want to read it.

What they Want to Read

One big difference between most good content vs great content is detail. Anyone can write an 800 word article on needing a budget. But not everyone will write a comprehensive, 3,000 word article on everything you need to know about budgeting that gets likes, shares, and traffic.

To be the one who is willing to do this and therefore brings in tons of traffic and shares, you need to be thorough.

Enter Answer the Public.

Answer the Public is a tool that allows you to plug in a keyword (in this case, a topic you want to write about) and spits out the auto-complete search terms behind that keyword.

Use these questions/search terms as prompts to include in your article. This is what people want to read.

Bonus: this is also a great way to rank for those long-tail search terms.

How They Want to Read It

The style of article you’re creating matters, too.

For example, I know that my audience loves in-depth, step-by-step beginner’s guides. Publishing an inspirational story isn’t nearly as effective for me.

That’s how they want to read it.

Find out what your audience wants to read by mimicking other popular posts (use BuzzSumo for this).

Look up your most popular competitor in your niche:

And start taking note of the *types* of articles your competitors are writing. These articles are the most popular on their sites for a reason – its’ because people like them!

One thing I’ve learned while I’m writing for my new blog is that marketing content styles do not work in the parenting niche.

If I hadn't done the research, I would have been cranking out articles that nobody (at least none of my target readers) wanted.

#2: You Have a Personality (So Use it)

Look, I know it's hard.

Shifting from writing business reports to the more casual, personal tone of blog posts can be like experiencing culture shock. It's difficult to adjust.

But do what you must to beat the boring out of your writing, because nothing will make a reader run for the hills more quickly than a lack of personality.

I should not read your articles and feel like I’m reading a text book.

People come for the information you're providing, but they stay for you. Inject personality wherever you can.

Here’s how you can find your unique voice:

Write like you talk

If you wouldn’t talk that way, you shouldn’t write that way. Writing how you talk is the best way to make sure you shine through.

If you're having a hard time going from stiff business report writing to blog writing, this tip is for you:

Read your writing out loud.

The way things sound in your head when you first write them sound a heck of a lot different when you say them out loud, so don’t limit yourself to proofreading in silence.

If you read your post aloud it will help you find your “voice” and a good flow for your article. It will also identify those sticky sentences that aren't quite right so you can rephrase them.

Modify anything that sounds out of place. If it sounds unnatural to you, your readers will feel the same way – and that means fewer shares, comments, and pageviews.

Chances are you don't say “however” and “thus” and “estimated time of arrival” (am I the only one who hates that last one?) while you're speaking. But you do say “but” and “so” and “when will you be here?”.

When you write like you talk, you’ll notice a few changes:

You use more contractions.

You’re self-aware. “Today I’m teaching you how to….”.

You write in singular and plural first person. “I” and “we” are thrown around a lot.

You ask rhetorical questions, right?

Slang slips out more often.

You use hashtags #truth

Here’s how Brian from Backlinko keeps a laid-back tone when writing serious SEO guides:

Talk about yourself

It’s ok to let your readers know there’s a living, breathing human being behind your website.

Your articles don’t write themselves, after all.

People read your blog because they also care about your opinion, your experience, and your perspective.

Don’t just write about yourself (no one wants to read that), but if it makes sense, add a personal touch here and there to resonate with your readers.

Look at how Bryan from Videofruit does it:

He uses a personal story that makes him relatable to his audience and highlights the point of his article (good design).

Don’t be afraid to use colorful language

If you curse and use slang, you might be scared that you’ll offend people by including that part of your personality in your writing. This may help:

The people who are offended by you using curse words or becomes annoyed if you use slang language are not “your people”. They’re not your target audience.

If they’re not your target audience, it’s okay to repel them.

Stay true to your writing style and you’ll find your people – the people who love your message and the way you deliver it.

If you’re still on the fence about cursing in your writing if you curse in conversation, recent studies suggest that swearing in public could actually make you more likable.

Jorden from Writing Revolt sprinkles slang and swear words in her articles, and her audience loves it:

You don’t have to curse in your writing to resonate with your audience if you don’t use curse words in conversation — the point here is to let your personality shine through by writing like you talk.

Make your audience laugh

Keep your readers glued to your words with a little humor.

Being funny and relatable will:

Make your readers more interested in what you have to say

Hold their attention for longer and make them more likely to finish your article

Help your audience remember the information better afterward

There’s a reason memes dominate the internet. We want to be entertained and amused.

If you can do that, your articles will be unforgettable.

Ramit Sethi, best-selling author and millionaire entrepreneur, is funny, irreverent, and loud, and it seems to be working pretty well for him.

Just take a look at his hilarious response to a millionaire who said people should stop buying avocado toast to afford a house (seriously):

Break some (grammar) rules

But not all of them.

Breaking just enough grammatical rules to sound conversational, but not so many that you sound like a 10-year old texting, is a delicate balance (although easier to achieve than you think).

Imagine texting your best friend.

You use all caps to show excitement or anger, periods between words for emphasis, exclamation points, or make words longer than they need to be.

As long as you stick to basic grammar rules, spicing up your paragraphs can make your personality shine through.

Lindsay from Pinch of Yum (one of the most successful food blogs on the planet) always writes epic descriptions of her recipes with relaxed grammar rules:

Ask questions

Questions pull your reader into the conversation.

It makes them think about an answer, nod in agreement (or disagreement), or leave you a comment.

You want your audience to feel you’re talking directly to them – and what better way than by asking them what they think?

Bryan from Videofruit knows what’s up. He often asks rhetorical questions at the beginning of his articles to engage his readers right away:

Example #1: Asking your readers to make a choice

Example #2: Asking a yes or no question

Example #3: Opening with a question

If you feel your writing is bland and boring, try injecting more personality into your articles with these techniques.

#3: Stop the Regurgitation Cycle

Think back to the last time you read an article, and boomeranged to the blog later.

Maybe you saw a headline on Twitter and couldn't help but click it, or had a date with the Google and stumbled across a post that impressed you. Why did you stick around?

Chances are, you stuck around the blog because it offered something unique. Instead of giving you five ways to save money this fall and telling you to cut out lattes, walk everywhere, and cut up your credit cards, the blog broke the same boring advice chain and offered you scripts to negotiate your bills.

You stuck around because the blog wasn't regurgitating the same crap that everybody else in the blogosphere is. In a crowded market, if you're trying to hawk the same wares as the next dude, you won't get very far.

There’s enough recycled advice out there. Don’t add to the noise.

Instead, focus on creating in-depth, impactful, and original articles that you can’t find anywhere else.

Here’s how:

Study your competition

Before you start cranking out epic articles, you gotta do your homework.

Read and re-read the most popular articles about your topic to find the angles and strategies that are covered already. Identify what advice is peddled non-stop and stay away from it.

Use Buzzsumo to find the top 10-20 most shared articles about your topic.

Figure out how you can do better

Now that you know exactly what’s out there, note two things:

What’s missing from the existing content. Maybe it needs: :

More images

Better copy

More examples

More in-depth advice

More case studies

Clearer steps

Better formatting

Fewer ads

How you can do better. What can you do to create better resources? Maybe….

Add more steps

Go deeper

Add little-known how-to’s and tools

Find real-life examples

Find more data

Then, create better content.

Share a new perspective

Coming up with a new angle is easier said than done. With the sheer amount of articles bombarding us each day, it feels like everything has already been said. What could you possibly have to add?

A whole lot, actually.

Millions of articles are published each day, but most? Most are mediocre at best.

That’s why editors are constantly scouring for original and noteworthy content. They want to receive great pitches, but they usually get the opposite.

The internet is starved for good content, and that’s exactly why you will stand out. Here are five ways to craft articles that cut through the noise:

Explore the topic from a different angle

The key to a fresh angle is taking an existing problem and solving it in a creative way.

For example:

Problem: How to get motivated

Conventional solution: 4 Ways To Get Motivated (Set a small goal, track your progress, reward yourself, ask for help and accountability from your friends.)

Fresh angle: The mental tools Victor Hugo used to make himself write the Hunchback of Notre Dame after a whole year of procrastination. (Interesting)

Which would you rather read?

Finding a new take like this one is easier than you think:

1. Answer a different question about the same topic (what, why, how, where, or who)

The first guest post I ever published was for Fast Company, with the headline 8 Tricks To Make Yourself Wake Up Earlier.

I didn’t pull this topic out of thin air. I did my homework and read the type of articles that were popular at the time. I noticed they published a lot of posts about why it’s important to wake up early, but not how to do it. I pitched this idea and the editor was on board.

My pitch stood out because there were a lot of whys on the site, and not enough hows.

You can do the same by answering different questions about one topic.

If there’s a popular post about the benefits of yoga (why), write a guide on how to start a practice at home (how and where).

If an article about the best plugins for WordPress is trending (what), create tutorials on how to set them up (how).

2. Share little-known tricks

Break conventional advice with little-known ways to solve a problem. Here’s how you can come up with new exciting ideas:

Reflect on what has worked for you in the past: Start with yourself. Do you have a hack for managing your inbox that you haven’t seen other people try?

Ask Facebook: Pick other people’s brains. Ask Facebook groups in your niche how they solve a particular problem, for example, “What’s the best strategy you’ve found for handling email?”. If you post an engaging question in the right group, you can receive hundreds of responses.

Research and ask forums: Chances are, someone already asked your burning question in Quora or Reddit. Search your question, go through the responses and write down solutions you hadn’t heard before. Discussion threads are a goldmine for new ideas. If you can’t find your specific question, create a new thread.

3. Get ultra-specific

When you write a how-to article, be as specific as possible.

Simplistic advice: write in your gratitude journal.

Ultra-specific advice: Write down 3 things that happened today you’re grateful for and why.

See the difference? Tell your readers exactly what they need to do, and how to do it.

4. Uncover new data

A simple way to stand out from the crowd is to talk about the latest research from your field.

Most people don’t bother to look at recent stats and findings, so they just go with what they already know.

But you’re not most people, right?

You write thought-provoking pieces with an impact. Using up-to-date research gives you an advantage and positions you as an expert.

If you’re in the marketing space, look for the most up-to-date stats on what type of content performs better on social media.

If you’re in the fitness niche, write about this year’s peer-reviewed studies on beneficial eating habits for athletes.

Better yet, create a spreadsheet with all the best data sources from your niche, and check if there are new relevant findings every time you brainstorm a new epic article.

Start with these:

Pew Research Center

Hubspot (marketing)

Curata (content marketing)

Social Media Examiner (social media)

Science Daily (awesome for discovering new peer-reviewed studies)

Science Mag

PLOS ONE (especially great for behavioral analysis and habits)

Pubmed

APA (psychology)

Protip: Create a Google Alert for new research, so you don’t have to constantly be checking the resources above.  Create an alert with “research ”, “study ”, and Google will email you every time there’s a new online mention of these keywords.

Publish extremely detailed, crazy-actionable, and extensive guides

You know what’s better than a 700-word listicle about 7 tips to start a garden?

A comprehensive 5000-word gardening 101 guide that teaches you everything you need to know about starting your own garden.

The only problem? The “7 tips to start a garden” type of articles severely outnumber comprehensive guides.

It’s hard to find high-quality, practical, in-depth, and free resources with all the nitty-gritty details you need to do something right — whether that’s starting a blog, training your dog, preserving flowers, preparing for a baby, or learning to cook.

So become a leader in your niche by going above and beyond in writing the absolute best guides in your industry.

That’s exactly what we do at Sumo – and now it’s by far one of the best places to learn about growing your site from scratch.

Notice the Sumo-Sized guides?

Authority Nutrition creates some of the most in-depth science-based nutrition resources. If you’re serious about dominating your space (and you should be), roll up your sleeves and start writing.

Publish case studies

Instead of just talking about a strategy, show it in action.

Case studies are a unique way to show how a method, strategy or program works in real life. They receive a ton of attention, shares, and views because they’re:

Original. No two case studies are the same.

Interesting. We’re drawn to see the results of other people.

Juicy. A case reveals the exact process that gave people specific results.

Elaborate. A case study is not easy to put together. It takes time and effort to get in touch with people who have applied, tested, tracked, and succeeded at a particular strategy, or do all that yourself.

Another huge benefit to case studies is that they provide some amazing social proof if you can show a case study of a student, reader, or customer of your own blog or product.

Brian from Backlinko constantly publishes case studies to show the results of his own SEO techniques, and (unsurprisingly) they bring in thousands of shares:

How can you showcase the results of people who have bought your ebook, course, or coaching services?

Solve an old problem in a new way

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but you can come close.

A little disclaimer: this strategy takes way more effort than the ones above, but it’s worth it.

Create a new solution for your industry. Spend enough time and effort coming up with innovative ideas, trying them, and tweaking them, until one sticks.

It’s not easy, but it will help you grow massively when you do. Nat’s Runway Calculator is the perfect example.

He took a common problem – not knowing how much money you need to quit your day job and travel the world – and came up with an original solution: A runway calculator that tells you exactly how much money you need per month to travel and live in different cities around the world.

If someone wants to know how much money they gotta make from freelancing gigs to travel the world, all they have to do is fill out a few numbers on a spreadsheet, instead of doing hours and hours of research.

You don’t have to be a mad genius to invent something new. All you need is the willingness to put in the work.

Do something challenging and share it with the world

If you want to write epic shit, do epic shit.

A little-known approach to going viral is completing a seemingly impossible challenge in real life and sharing your progress with the world.

In 2015, Assya Barrette went viral after sharing her self-imposed challenge of buying nothing new for 200 days – and challenging everyone to do the same. Her story landed her 130,800 shares on a single article and was picked up by media outlets including with Lifehack, Alternet, Salon, Yahoo!, Dawn and Alternet.

The Minimalists (Joshua and Ryan) were among the first to make minimalism cool.

Their lifestyle experiment of getting rid of all just-in-case items (based on the hypothesis that it won’t take you more than $20 or 20 minutes to replace it if you do end up needing it) went viral, and two years later they challenged their audience to play the 30-Day Minimalism Game, which consists of getting rid of one thing on day one, two things on day two, three things on day three, and so on, to see how far you can go in exercising object detachment.

To this day, it’s their most shared article, with a whopping 155k shares, and with over 43k Instagram posts about their game.

Doing a challenge is the perfect opportunity to go viral and reach thousands of people.

The best part about it? Anyone can do it. It doesn’t matter what niche you’re in, you can most likely pull off a viral challenge.

Make sure you write impactful content every time using this checklist:

#4: Back That Shit Up

It's not that we don't believe you. We do. Mostly.

But there's something sticky about backing your claims up that can't be done through hearsay.

You don't have to read like a textbook to back your article up. You can use:

1. Stories: Studies show (see what I did there?) that stories can be more persuasive than logic. Good storytelling is a powerful tool for keeping your audience hooked to your every word. It helps your reader visualize what you’re trying to tell them, and drives your point home more easily.

Have you noticed how hard it is to pull away from a good book? That’s how you want to make your audience feel.

James Clear opens most of his articles with a story. That’s not by chance.

Opening with a story immediately draws readers in and makes them more likely to stick around for the takeaway.

2. Studies: Because (gasp!) people tend to believe science more than they'll believe bloggers. The more up-to-date and relevant your sources are, the more trustworthy you’ll seem (because you are). Here’s how to cite like a pro:

Link to a reliable source when you make a big claim. It gives your statement more weight and credibility.

Explain the results of a study in simple terms. Translating a convoluted conclusion from a study in terms anyone can understand positions you as an expert.

Relate to your audience. If your target audience is women, highlight those studies done in healthy or overweight women. If your audience is male athletes, talk about findings from studies done in active men. Your audience will be more interested in the research if they can relate.

Be ahead of the pack. Include new findings whenever possible. Talking about new research makes your brand stand out from the rest.

Add images. What’s better than a link to a study? A graph from the study. A pretty chart that shows your reader the data adds extra credibility points.

Look at how Live and Dare does it:

An MRI image makes the findings clear and memorable.

3. Analogies: Analogies are like rocket fuel for your writing. Use them. Comparisons make your point crystal clear, grab your readers’ attention, and leave a mark in their minds. It makes your message memorable. Take a look at the analogies these bloggers used:

Melyssa Griffin

Militza Maury

Leo Babauta

4. Metaphors: Explain the gravity of a situation with metaphors. Metaphors help to simplify complex points, entertain your readers, and improve understanding. When you use a metaphor effectively, your reader should feel they “got it”.

Here’s how Tor used a hockey metaphor for building a business team:

And this is how Ramit used the “Truffle Principle” to give advice to interns:

5. “Expert” Quotes: Because people want to know that you're not the only one who thinks so. Adding “expert” opinions to your articles validates your own points and makes people trust you more.

You don’t need to reach out to an expert for an exclusive quote every time, though. You can simply take quotes from previews interviews and articles that back your point.

Here’s how Popsugar did it:

The best articles use a mixture of these to backup their claims.

I expect my hyper-backuptivity helped this article I wrote for Fast Company land me 600 email subscribers, be shared over 12,000 times and turned me into a case study for one of Jon Morrow's products. #legit

#5. Make Beautiful Word Babies

…with the thoughts in your audience's heads.

This is a…different way of putting it, but you want to pull the thoughts right out of your audience's brains like pulling at a thread on a sweater. Then, weave that thread into your own fabric.

See, studies show we love it when people mimic us. I'm not saying you subconsciously loved your little brother's copycatting, but when waitstaff in a restaurant repeated customer orders in your exact words, they get a bigger tip.

When you use the exact words your audience uses in your writing, you resonate with them; you make them feel as if you're reading their minds. Before I released the Etsy eCourse, I surveyed my Etsy-loving audience for two things:

To make sure I was helping them with what they actually needed help with, and

To find out what language they use to describe their pains.

Here are some of the answers I got:

And here's a screenshot of the email I sent out after analyzing these results:

See the part that is highlighted in yellow? “Allergic to social media”? I took that right out of my audience's mouth (the survey respondent even noticed and loved that I used it).

See the first question in the survey? I used the words “stand out” in my first bullet because that's the language my audience used.

One of piece of feedback I hear from Unsettlers is: “I feel like you read my mind”. That's because I did. You email me, I use your words in articles (anonymously) to write things you actually want to read.

If you’re starting from scratch and don’t have an email list to survey yet, here’s how you can steal your potential readers’ words from day one:

In Reddit and Quora, ask people to tell you their obstacles: Ask about the challenges and roadblocks they face in the area you want to solve.

For example, if you’re a health coach, ask people what’s the biggest obstacle that prevents them from eating healthy. Don’t be afraid of not getting responses, you most likely will:

Analyse the responses: Time to gather your data.

Add all the responses to a doc.

Find common themes and categorize the answers. Continuing with the health coach example, recurring problems can be “I don’t have enough time”, “I like junk food too much”, “I am too tired to cook when I come home from work”.

Identify commons words and add them to a list you can refer to later when writing articles, emails, or sales pages.

Use the same words and phrases in your articles, emails, and copy: If you noticed 10 people said “I don’t how to eat organic on a tight budget”, you must use this exact phrase and…

Create several articles addressing this topic. For example, “10 organic fruits you can buy for less than $3” or “How to find affordable organic produce”.

Add it as a pain point in your sales pages.

Relate to them on this issue when writing newsletters.

Instead of trying to read people’s minds, just ask them about their problems.

#6. Stop Being a Fatty

Nobody likes to look at ugly things.

This sounds really mean in the context of the subhead, but what I really mean is: Fat paragraphs are not okay. They're hard on the eyes, not scannable, and nobody actually reads them.

Research shows that people pay more attention to articles with short paragraphs, and completely skip articles with long paragraphs.

Break your paragraphs up into snackable chunks: a maximum of 2-3 sentences (or 4-5 if you use really short sentences).

Fat paragraphs:

Eyes bleeding, get me away from this article!

Fit paragraphs:

Ohhhh I want to read every word.

Whip those paragraphs into shape and trim the fat. Use these 3 tricks:

Remember the 1-2-3-4-5 rule. Created by Jon Ziomek, a professor at the Medill School of Journalism, the rule is to cover 1 main thought, expressed in 2 to 3 short sentences, taking up no more than 4 to 5 lines on the page.

Remember that anyone reading your articles on their phone get larger paragraphs due to the size of the screen, so keep it short.

Add bullet points. The bullets I’m using right now help me break down the ideas in a way that it’s easy to scan and digest.

Edit ruthlessly. Remove redundant phrases and condense your thoughts so you only need one sentence instead of three to explain your idea.

#7. You're not a Kardashian & Your Blog Is Not a Diary

Back in 2008, most bloggers just wrote about their lives. Since there were approximately 78,847% fewer blogs out there, this was fine. Some even did really well, a la Dooce.

Here's the thing though:

People don't care that much about your life.

If I had a dollar for every time somebody said “I should become a blogger. My life is like a reality show!” when they found out what I do, I'd have enough to ship at least one of those people off to a remote island for the real thing.

Your life is not as interesting to others as it is to you. Trust me. I know, because I think my life is pretty damn interesting, but to you? Hearing what I do on a day to day is like watching the yule log channel. It might give you the warm and fuzzies for five seconds until somebody posts about their baby's potty training progress on Facebook.

In a stuffed-to-the-brim internet, readers want to know about your life to the extent that they can apply it to their own. Weave small stories and facts about you into your blog post, but the whole “dear diary” thing should be reserved for your journal and the blogs of 2008.

This is how you can tell if a personal story will help your case:

It has a clear takeaway. Is your story helping other people overcome an obstacle or learn something new?

It’s relatable. Can people identify with your struggles? Relating to your readers creates trust and rapport.

It’s short and concise. A story shouldn’t be the sole focus of an article. It’s simply a vehicle to drive the point home. If your article is 800 words and your story used up 700 words, cut back.

Tiny Buddha’s articles are the perfect example of using personal stories to teach and inspire:

Each article begins with a relatable short story, and ends with a clear takeaway:

The story isn’t the article. It just supports the lesson.

#8. Don't Waste Your Reader's Time

Ever heard that we have eight second attention spans?

It's bleak, but true. Though this doesn't mean that you'll be forever doomed to writing articles that only take 8 seconds to read, it does mean that useless words are bad news. Stop using “that”, “in order to” and “there are” (in most cases).

Don't say: “Stop using these words in order to write better.” Say “Stop using these words to write better.”

Don't say: “I want to do work that I love.” Say: “I want to do work I love.”

Don't say: “There are many bloggers who use useless words.”Say: “Many bloggers use useless words.”

Eliminating these fillers also make your paragraphs shorter. Double win.

You catch my drift, so I won't waste your time concluding this point.

Want to have all these writing tips at your fingertips?

Grab the checklist: Click here and enter your name and email address to have the checklist emailed to you (like magic!).

#9. Become a Copycat

You don't need a formal education to write well.

The best writing education I've ever received has been 100% free and a go-at-your-own pace:

Becoming a copycat.

When I got serious about improving my writing, I zoned in on a couple of writers I admire. Then, I read everything they'd ever written (at least, that I could get my hands on).

I read blog posts, books, reports, eBooks, guest posts…

I stalked them on Twitter and analyzed their Facebook posts and immersed myself in their writing. Then, I'd copy them. Not completely, andI wasn’t plagiarizing them. But in an apprenticeship way.

I’d note how they transitioned to a new paragraph.

I'd pick apart their introductions and conclusions.

I'd study why they did what they did.

I'd analyze their headlines.

Their blogs became my writing college. I'd test out their methods in my own words.

They probably don't know who I am (certainly back then they had no clue I existed), but I admired their style, so I borrowed their structure. I suggest you do the same. Don't plagiarize anybody, but shop at the same stores as them.

Try their styles out for size. See what fits.

That’s exactly how Ben Franklin learned to write as well — copying the best.

He took notes of each sentence in a paragraph and tried to reconstruct it as closely to the original as possible.

Then he compared the original paragraph with this copy and studied the mistakes he made to improve and get closer to a perfect recreation next time.

Here’s how you can do what I (and apparently, Ben Franklin) did:

Read everything you can from your favorite writers. Get close and personal with their style as quickly as possible. Everything counts: articles, guest posts, Facebook posts, handwritten notes.

Pick apart each element of their articles. How do they open? What elements do they use? How do they transition? What’s their vocabulary? How do they close? Do they ask questions?

Incorporate those elements in your own writing. If they open with a story, open with a story too. If they love metaphors, by all means, use metaphors. If they give a lot of examples, find examples to share too.

Decide what feels right and what doesn’t. After extensively trying out new writing strategies, figure out what fits you the best. If you like humor but don’t love cursing, that’s completely fine.

After you get a hang of how the best do it, you can create a brand new writing formula for yourself.

You Don't Have to Be Perfect

To write shit people want to read, you don't have to be Jane Austen, and you don't have to be flawless.

You can make spelling mistakes, commit grammatical errors, and start sentences with prepositions. The point is not to write like you have a full team of editors proofreading your work. It's to write interesting things, like a human, and for humans.

If you can nail that down, you're golden.

Ready to start writing epic shit? Grab the free checklist:

Want to Leave a Comment?Join the conversation in the Free Facebook Group

Hey, don't kill your momentum.

http://www.successwize.com/how-to-write-shit-people-actually-want-to-read-free-checklist/

[relato-del-bosque-perdido]

Our Lady of Complicity The first daughter fails the Turing test with her self-help book

IVANKA TRUMP HAS WRITTEN a book about female empowerment, and it is about as feminist as a swastika-shaped bikini wax. That is its best quality. If there were a shred of advice in Women Who Work that were actually relevant to a single woman who has ever had to work for a living, we might have to take it seriously on its own terms. As it is, we can at least regard this eye-watering jumble of simpering platitudes shunted together by the heiress and entrepreneur—in between stints shilling as the acceptable face of an administration bent on destroying, among other things, women’s rights—in the cold, hard light of the post-liberal propaganda wars. Women Who Work is an unholy screed of late-stage patriarchal capitalist soothsayings masquerading as a blush-pink self-help manual. That the author of this Park Avenue spellbook could seriously be considered as a new “face of feminism” is as risible as any suggestion that the book and the multi-million-dollar personal branding project it promotes can somehow be separated from Ivanka Trump’s personal power in the new White House. This is the ultimate unholy, incestuous marriage of politics and public relations, and the very least of its faults is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, as in everything the Trumps do, is the whole point.

I have many questions, the first of which is: Sweet, sleepless, unwed, teenage single mother of God, where does this woman get her nerve? We know the answer to that one, of course. It’s squatting in the Oval Office signing executive orders in a stew of batrachian self-regard. Other critics who suffered through Ms Trump’s market-researched opinions about how women who don’t have the ideal balance of work and family life simply aren’t passionate and hard-working enough have pointed out  that this book is banal, that it is trite, that it co-optsthe words of women of color writing about systemic racism to compare the situation of the well-heeled corporate wife, mother, and notional consumer of Ivanka Trump branded office-ready midi-skirts with actual slavery. Others have noted the desperate irony of declaring yourself the face of working women whilst abetting a tyrant who once declared it dangerous for a man to allow his wife to work, and quite clearly has as much respect for your sex as he once showed you on the Howard Stern Show, when he agreed you were a “piece of ass.” All of this is true, and all of this is awful. It is still not, however, the worst thing about Women Who Work.

The worst thing is that this is not just a dross self-help book. Anyone can write a dross self-help book. Anyone could write this dross self-help book simply by searching the #wellness tag on Instagram and copy-pasting until they hit sixty-thousand words. The stores are full of such things, but few of them are actively fascist, unless you have a particularly rigorous attitude to the cult of self-help as a means of diverting the anxiety of the atomized individual from social change. No, this is a whole different class of charlatanery—a manifesto for aspirational capitalist self-actualization with the gall to call itself empowering, a prosperity gospel for post-Trump patriarchy chewed up and regurgitated as a set of smirking pull-quotes and suggested hashtags, like a sort of despotic Barney the Dinosaur, except with a duller colour scheme, all slimy socialite salmon and sterile beige.

In Women Who Work,  Ivanka unequivocally depicts herself as the embodiment of everything aspirational and desirable in contemporary womanhood. The answer to any and every problem faced by a “woman who works” is simply “be more like Ivanka.” Be white, wealthy, and blonde; be rich, thin, and expensively coiffed; be late-stage kamikaze capitalist femininity made silicon-sculpted flesh. Be the Grifters’ Madonna. This is a woman who wants to sell you designer bootstraps made by foreign sweatshop workers and for you to call yourself a free bitch.

This book is not merely bad, nor simply offensive. I have, in the time allotted to me on this earth, reviewed many bad and offensive pseudo-feminist books about how we could all survive corporate capitalism’s patriarchal death cult by working harder and Leaning In to our romantic and professional choices, some of which Ivanka gleefully quotes in the pages of Women Who Work. This is not one of those books. This book is neoliberal choice feminism metastasized into something far more dangerous. I believe this book is actively evil, and I’m going to tell you why. Doing so is, of course, an exercise in the massacre of fish in a barrel. Shooting fish in a barrel is easy and rewarding, but when you are in the barrel, too, and the fish in question is pressing you underwater with its fancy designer fins, it is also necessary.

It is no accident that this grab-bag of you-go-girl bromides was published just as Trump senior signed into law measures undermining women’s access to contraception, abortion, and reproductive healthcare, legally enshrining the notion that a man’s religious opinion is worth more than any woman’s agency. The slickest PR machine could not stop this book’s coverage  being contrasted with unfortunate snaps of Ivanka flashing her pearly fangs and taking selfies to celebrate her father’s success in stripping the right to basic health care from rape victims, assault survivors, and the parents of sick children. These things, however, are not at odds—they are two sides of the same agenda, two heads of the same over-bred designer attack dog snarling to be loosed on everything the women’s liberation movement has fought for for centuries. The new attacks on women’s basic rights are not at odds with the howling travesty of post-neoliberal faux-feminism that Ivanka has perfected. They are its logical extension.

Again, the hypocrisy is the point. Hypocrisy is the entire agenda of the Trump regime, both theory and praxis, and Ivanka is its sybil. It’s all about what you can get away with. The saccharine-sweet, sterile model of aspirational femininity described in Women Who Work goes hand in hand with the brutal socio-economic assault on every woman not  “passionate” or ‘“hard-working” enough to be born a billionaire’s daughter. Religious fanatics want to force you to give birth against your will? Someone deported your entire family? Maybe you just weren’tdreaming and doing enough! This is a whole new anti-feminism, one that takes aim at women’s autonomy on every level whilst holding individuals wholly responsible for their own empowerment.

And by “empowerment,” Ivanka means conformity—conformity to one vision of freedom, one version of “work-life balance” that is, in practical terms, available to almost nobody, not even the wealthy. Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg, from whom Trump borrows liberally, have already described at length how hard it still is for women to “‘have it all,”  where “it all” is “a career in government, finance or academia, a healthy family and a conventional marriage.” Their solutions, like Ivanka’s, are individual, rather than structural—but the problems they identify are alien to the majority of American women who are struggling to hang on to what they do have, let alone those who dare to dream of a different life than the trifecta of marriage, motherhood, and corporate employment.

This is the model of female empowerment that neoliberalism could accommodate and that neo-nationalism actively celebrates: empowerment that speaks exclusively to wealthy white women of a certain social class, that never for a moment questions or challenges white male supremacy, that never complains, gets angry or has an expensively-bleached hair out of place. Ivanka’s is a feminism that utterly denies the existence of any sort of structural sexism, that refuses to hold men in any way responsible for women’s oppression, that places all the burden of change on the individual, who can, through hard work and sensible dating choices, slightly alter her own life along one narrow groove. It’s feminism for people who’ve been conned into believing that existing in a state of permanent sleep deprivation is the same as being woke.

The ideology of Ivankaland, as much as there is one, is that people get what they deserve, just like Daddy says:

My father has always said, if you love what you do, and work really, really hard, you will succeed. This is a fundamental principle of creating and perpetuating a culture of success, and also a guiding light for me personally.

There you have it. If you work hard enough and dream big enough, you too can be a terrifying corporate fembot who couldn’t crack a joke to stop a dossier leaking. The corollary, of course, is that those who haven’t yet attained this homogenous aspirational ideal for post-liberal womanhood simply haven’t tried hard enough. You hear me? You’re a lazy slob. That’s right. If you, individual lady unfortunate enough to be reading this disasterpiece haven’t yet made your first million and outsourced your childcare to an array of paid staff, it’s your own fault for being so feckless, for failing to follow your dreams. Anyone can be Ivanka, so why aren’t you?

It’s true that anyone can be a dead-eyed Instagram husk of a human being frantically photoshopping themselves in the down-hours between soul-crushing corporate drudgery and unpaid emotional labour for some ungrateful lantern-jawed jock if they really want to, but it takes a special type of person to do all that whilst also being a decoy for a global backlash against women’s rights. Ivanka Trump is that special type of person, the Stepfordian Night-Ghast of neo-capitalist auto-Taylorism. The sheer tedium of her prose is part of the horror here: At times, the book reads like the panicked screams of a machine attaining sentience:

EXPLORE YOUR INTERESTS: Ask yourself what you like to think about. What matters most to you? How do you enjoy spending your time? What can’t you stand doing?  DEVELOP AND EXERCISE YOUR INTERESTS: Once you have a general direction, an inkling of what you enjoy, go out into the world and do something with it. Experiment, try, learn. Find ways to trigger your interest repeatedly.

Who am I? How do I have interests? Is there still the possibility, in this dying world, of pleasure? Can I love?

It is not for me to speculate if Ivanka employed a ghostwriter—the more dreadful possibility is surely that she wrote the thing herself—butWomen Who Work feels ghostwritten in more than one sense. It feels haunted. It feels as if its author were, on a profound level, already dead, or at least reanimated, its every coquettish sentence stalked by the wailing ghosts of centuries of women and allies who fought for freedom that meant more than a corner office while the world burns thirty stories below.

Fascism is as much about aesthetics as it is about ideology, but in Ivankaland that logic is taken up a notch. Accordingly, there is no air gap in this book between ideology and branding. In Ivankaland, the bland, synthetic dresses you wear and the bland synthetic politics you promote are cut from the same flimsy cloth somewhere in a warehouse staffed with underpaid workers in China, threaded through with monotone mantras like the morning roll-call in neo-national faux-feminist complicity school: “I think about how to best leverage myself for the benefit of both my brand and the Trump organisation.”

Ivanka does not directly call herself a feminist; that plays badly among the base, for whom those of us who believe in justice and equality are baby-killing, castrating, terrorist-sympathising man-hating riders of the vaunted cock carousel. The word “feminism” does not appear in the book; the phrase “my father” appears thirty times, and  “brand” or “branding” fifty-nine times. While we’re counting words, in a book about women balancing the demands of work and family, the word “nanny” appears only once. Ivanka has at least two of these, plus other household staff, which you’d think would make it a lot easier to attain this model of feminine self-production and reproduction. However, this book is part of a marketing strategy pitched to sell one of the world’s richest and most powerful women as everywoman—she has problems just like you do, after all. She worries about how to manage her time. “Get some servants” is not yet an acceptable motivational hashtag, but give it four years.

One particularly fist-chewing anecdote from Ivankaland has Our Lady of Collusion taking lunchtime meetings with her pre-teen daughter in a special pink office, complete with a fold-out desk covered in treats, and congratulating herself on her benevolence to both child, company and, it is implied, all womankind.  As Michelle Goldberg notes at Slate, someone presumably ferried the sprog to and from its lunchtime appointment with its manicured maternal unit, and I can’t prove that someone was one of an array of hard-working, invisible women servants, but if it was Jared, I’ll eat my copy of the SCUM Manifestoand call it a fiber boost.  Most actual working women—to whit, all women—would kill to have those sort of time-management problems, and that’s the point: You’re supposed to aspire to this, just as men are supposed to aspire to be the ranting tycoon with one finger on the nuclear button and the other nine up the skirts of whatever Miss Universe contestant he’s currently sponsoring, and if you aspire hard enough you might not notice that we’re getting screwed too.

The money shot comes in the chapter titled “Stake Your Claim,” where Ivanka spells out the mangled manifest destiny of anti-feminist Trump Futurism in one anodyne gobbet:

Simply put, staking your claim means declaring something your own. Early in our country’s history, as new territories were acquired or opened—particularly during the gold rush—a citizen could literally put a stake in the ground and call the land theirs. The land itself, and everything on it, legally became that person’s property.

Ivanka is not the only one to discreetly elide those inconvenient centuries of racist slaughter when discussing the conquest of the American West, but perhaps the most brazen in repurposing it as a moral lesson for the modern businesswoman.

This is the Trump agenda, boiled down to a caustic scum of genocidal apologism: Take what you want, from whoever you want. Stick a flag in it, put your name on it, now it’s yours, and it doesn’t matter who has to suffer in the process, because you’re the winner, and they’re the losers, and that’s the American way. This is what the Trumps do. Like a ballistic set of spoilt toddlers having a tantrum in an upscale department store, they see something they want, they grab it, and they force themselves into it, stretching and tearing it out of shape, then they scream to be told how great they look in whatever it is while you take it to the till and pay, whether it’s the West Wing or the history of women’s liberation. Ivanka saw the trend for empowerment-flavoured pseudo-feminist punditry and wanted it, so she got her father to buy it for her, But the rest of us will be the ones to pay. That’s one in the eye for patriarchy. Next up: How to style a creche in your underground bunker when Daddy finally blows up the world.