#brought to you by i messaged a good initiative doing an art competitions being like hey this isnt a great practice

[felidaefatigue]

Hey just a reminder for any young artists who might see this

do not do unpaid art labour for corporations or any formal body do not apply to competitions where the winner will get the art job and win prize money but the company gets to have rights to advertise with any and all submissions

do not.

ask to be paid by companies. always. no matter how good the cause.

[sole-cuore-amore-e-droga]

Bulgaria brings a mentally reassuring anthem to Rotterdam 2021

I’ve said so that VICTORIA herself sort of agreed to have done “Tears Getting Sober” if she was allowed to, but for one I have to thank that EBU said that the artists can’t have their 2020 songs back? You’ll see why when I get to the review after two boring paragraphs of text with technical info, for the country that is Bulgaria!

ARTIST & ENTRY INFO

Victoria Georgieva (or VICTORIA, but I can’t be arsed to continuously capitalize her name so I’ll just say Victoria from now on) was born a singer, for she started to sing at the age 11, went to a specific school of angel voices (no really that’s what it was called), and tried to go to the X Factor while a liiiiiittle too young until realizing that she needed to wait for a few years, and wait a few years she did, and went on to the X Factor again.

She didn’t win, but she still got to sign a contract and sing some stuff in Bulgarian before she decided to rebrand, started singing in English, and completely decided that ballads is her style. She cannot really do upbeat most of the time. So you can’t really have a bop from her in the future. (Well except that there’s a couple of songs in her discography that I personally classify as “bops” but they’re more like... idek sad bops?? but they can be danced to, but I get her, she doesn’t do anything that’s more loud and upbeat and clubby and summery kind of - in short, nothing you can go “YAAASSSS QUEEEEEN” over to.)

The entry she ended up singing, “Growing Up Is Getting Old”, is what I can describe to be about overcoming the emotional twists and turns inside of you as you grow older, because as it turns out, it ain’t what you thought it would be - but if you push just a little further, you realize that if you’re growing up, maybe the life isn’t so bad, afterall - you are able to get up. Somehow. It was written as part of Boris-Milanov-led songwriting camp held during summer, and a lot of people seemed to be a part of it because multiple different folk have songwriting credits on the potential Bulgarian entries this year.

REVIEW

Let’s get this out of the way immediately. I prefer “Growing Up Is Getting Old” to “Tears Getting Sober”. The former sounds a lot less irritatingly underwhelming and a lot more positively overwhelming you with warm emotions and sunglow. “Tears Getting Sober” was a song I could never really connect with - maaaaybe the last chorus is much better on there, but it doesn’t do much for me either, I guess.

Their 2021 forray however is a much different kind of thing - once again, going for lyrical non-cliches, Victoria tells a tale about her inner turmoils and continuing in life, in a way that’s personal to her and also kind of relatable to all of us. We all have these moments of fear and anxiety and nervous systems aching. If only there was someone who’d tell us that we’re worth saving... thanks a lot Victoria, you’re the MVP. Filling in the void that Netherlands from last year had brought us but not anymore - another personal song about getting old and having those kind of feelings inside - and doing a great job at taking the baton in the right way (even with featuring the word “grow” in both of the titles, neat coincidence).

Not only the lyrics feel like a hug, the song just emulates ray of sunshine and golden glitter coming down from the sky, Molly Sanden style. The violins in the G major key playing so precisely, building up momentum throughout the entire song, slowly but surely - starting with the ticking clock in the first verse that may have subtle violin in there; and the first chorus is just so simple piano, and then the second chorus has a tinge of electronic something, and the last chorus goes full in with the backing vocals boosting the song, after Victoria performs the quite magnificent bridge... now I don’t have synesthesia but I associate music keys with colors, and to me G major would always come across as something yellow or orange - “Growing Up Is Getting Old” is a perfect example of why’s that for me. And obviously, Victoria’s love for harmony-humming (even if there’s just one instance of it after she sings “star crossed soul”) complements the song to a T.

And it turned out to be a much better choice than last year’s. Maybe finally a female ballad I am getting behind.

Now I wanna know why the bookies don’t appreciate THIS entry as much as last year?

Granted, now it’s 2021 and the environment is so much different, and the songs have changed, and the dynamics have changed, and now there’s suddenly more competition at stake. And for Bulgaria it fares quite much more underwhelmingly - well, at this moment they’re like 6th, which isn’t bad, but there’s a lack of sung praises coming its way, not quite a feat that “Tears Getting Sober” actually achieved, being the bookies fave right before the cancellation of last year. In general the year has been pretty dry for the previous winner picks like Iceland, Lithuania and this, but I can’t say that the previous winner bets from 2020 are all that dead either? Though I gotta say that Bulgaria wasn’t gonna win 2020 anyway, so it’s a lose-lose in this case.

Also I just can’t at that music video being a little dramatic at the beginning, with the cancellation of Eurovision being presented as if it were a worldwide disaster during which we all shall lock ourselves into bunkers and wait until the better days, eventhough the panini is not war and war supplies kit is not just enough to survive it. But it seems like that the world is quite literally falling apart, as evidenced by Victoria going through all kinds of pathways away from her living room, meeting a  (presumably) mini version of her somewhere in between, and literally surrounded by the shaking environment by the last moments of the song

before we realize it was just reality recursing from the TV’s point of view that Victoria was watching all along, and then she leaves the living room again, but in her world, everything is normal and she could just go wherever she wants by car. Even I can’t come up with a storyline ending that’s somewhat intertwined and all plot-twisty and more confusing than that. But props to her team I guess

Approval factor: Let’s say I somewhat approve this message. Follow-up factor: For the sake of argument let me just say that Bulgaria is moving on a great path, eventhough the former entry leaves me cold, at least the current entry keeps me warm at all times, like a cup of cocoa and a good blanket. Please Bulgaria, never run out of sponsors. Qualification factor: I’ve seen one or two people throw around the “surprise NQ” tag for this song and I don’t get why??? There’s no way that the tense atmosphere of semifinal 2 would sure-fire-ly kill Bulgaria, even if they have a lot less chances to win this year than they had the last one. There can be some shock NQs indeed though, and if there are, I am paging... uhhhhh Finland? Idk why but you might see what I mean if I ever get around to reviewing “Dark Side”. Bulgaria? Never. It may not win the semi but it will cradle around the top 7 somehow.

INTERNAL NF CORNER

That’s right, Bulgaria managed to do both.

At the time when one other of Bulgaria’s songs got released, within the *Special* Eurovision September 1st-onwards range, people naturally succumbed to their primal instinct of asking whether that’s her Eurovision song... only for Vic to probably announce this early on that no, it’s just *one* of potential ESC entries she’s harbouring. And the remaining potential ones were all on her debut EP. Who actually got a more well-orchestrated schedule for everyone to follow, and yet, people were much more keen to cling on the first EP song out of the gate, “Imaginary Friend”. Now I get that the fans of that song were super upset at the revelation that IF is not going, but it is a technically strong song for the sake of being a technically strong song, and I don’t want to think that Victoria is only forced to choose the songs that can win for her, so she’s such a sweetheart for gravitating towards a song she could dearly care about. So props to her team saving the initial winner for last to be revealed, lol.

Though wasn’t her personal favourite a Billie-Eilish-lite-upbeat-kinda-track Phantom Pain?

Which was also my personal favourite?

Look, I know that favouring the only non-ballad in the whole lineup (well “Ugly Cry” is also not quite a ballad but its beat is kinda so-so, so I tend to ignore it) is kinda sus, also, y’all are sick to death to Billie Eilish comparisons, but I do believe that Billie would never be able to do an “Imaginary Friend” while Victoria could do a “Lovely”. This makes me remember the cover art of Billie’s debut album where she sits on her bed, dressed in white, and so is Victoria on this very MV, with strange shit going on behind her in the mirror. To the mirror, her reflection acts creepy, back again.

The other 2 I don’t feel like caring about enough, sure they got their cred, sure there’s one entry properly crediting Milanov (who seems to not have an actual entry this year that’s purely attributed to *him*, as opposed to 3 last year, 2 of which were performed by acts that returned this year????), sure there’s the funny thing about having a funeral song where out of this and Finland only Austria managed to send a quote unquote “funeral” song, but I think the funeral song would’ve sounded better if the pre-section of it on the “Phantom Pain” video was THE “funeral” song itself, and not whatever was that other funeral song.

In between there was a public sort of survey where people could submit feedback and positive words to Vic’s choices to help her decide - I didn’t get to vote but I feel fine with the winner eitherway, and that counts for something! And the end result was revealed at the very end of Victoria’s very own rooftop concert.

The colors on the circle thingy of this, they were meant to symbolize all Bulgarian entries up to Victoria’s 2nd one, in pictograms that kind of reminded me of Coldplay attributing every song on ‘Mylo Xyloto’ its own little symbol.

The concert was not only full of music and also adverts for the inaugural sponsor iCard (that also included some element of foreshadow in between the suspense, you’ll see why), but also the Bulgarian folk talking before each song, saying all the positive nice words they can for Vic; that she’s talented, and that they were so excited that Bulgaria was doing well in the odds last year prior to cancellation, bla bla bla... also some people were proud of voting for Bulgaria outside Bulgaia, and they made puns about the forthcoming songs on the concert that they were introducing, and so on, and there was also someone called Dara, whom I really want to be sent by Bulgaria one day to show off that they’re not afraid of doing trashy-esque bops that don’t necessarily win

Also they reminded me that Lucy from No Angels (aka the sole reason Bulgaria 12′d Germany in 2008) still exists.

Also Azis.

There was also an intermission where Eurovision 2021 acts could say all the nice words to Victoria on their own part. And several artists chose to... how shall I put it... use up their several seconds rather interestingly. Like how The Roop would say something real quick only to delve into more of their usual “let’s dance, let’s discoteque! *hand scissors* ;P” self-promo, and Senhit carelessly being allowed to say whatever she wants in Italian without subtitles <3 Sorry sis, they’re only given to people from another white-green-red flag-color country.

About the iCard foreshadow... so there’s their advert about Victoria waiting in the line to get something in the Soft Vocals Store, and people ahead of her giving her money the standard oldfashioned way, and the old lady at the counter is... slow, to say the least. After a good amount of time spent waffling around, Victoria finally pulls out the iCard application and pays for the imaginary items she wants, then narrates some stuff about said application, and a Eurovision entry of hers plays when the old lady is at home, spending time in front of TV enjoying the music. Before the concert, the song that played was “Tears Getting Sober”. The advert played once more before Victoria’s big entry decision and entry MV reveal, and in place of the 2020 entry, “Growing Up Is Getting Old” was the one that sounded out loud... Now you may think that there were attempts at some sort of spoilage here, but after that ad before the concert EP NF result, there was this other advert starring Victoria that played “Imaginary Friend” at the end, a last-ditch effort to trick viewers into going “see? just because that ad played the chosen song doesn’t mean it’s the chosen song!! this song could as well be a chosen song as well!!” yeah no shut up GUIGO IS the chosen song kthxbyebye.

ANY LAST WORDS?

Having said all that praise, I actually have “Growing Up Is Getting Old” fairly low on my ranking. It’s just because the year is so damn good and I have a lot more songs to care about more than this, but I appreciate the gesture that this singer is sending very much. Good luck on your road to conquer Europe, Victory-ia, I’m sure you get the best of the experience and all, because you would deserve it.

[botnation]

If you’re looking to travel to another world, tune in to Angela Ho.

Angela’s fine mashup of pointillism and retro/pop surrealism frames each of her high-spirited imaginary playscapes. This unique style sprouted over a decade ago and flourished when she decided to place paid work on hold for nine months. It was this gestation period for personal, artistic growth that gave birth to the comprehensive portfolio that altered the course of her career. By honoring herself, she found the fertile foundation needed for a vast land of dazzling, hypnotic, characters that suggest the truth.

For a deep dive Q&A with Angela on her background, character personalities and flow states...

What were you like as a child?

I was very quiet and incredibly shy around people I didn't know well, although I messaged my sister to help me with this question and she says I was cheeky. My sister and I would always be drawing and with my older brother, we'd have our own mini drawing competitions, I'm not sure if this was good in terms of sibling rivalry though. Our parents gave us a lot of educational-type toys which involved drawing, painting, crocheting and making plaster models. I read a lot, I loved Snoopy comic strips.

At what age did you take a break from paid work to focus on your own art? What were some of the phases and internal struggles you went through during this time? How did this decision impact where you are now?

I was in my mid-30s when I took a break, I was thinking about how time can pass so quickly, our lives are just a tiny blip in the scheme of things so we might as well make the most of it. During this roughly 9 month period I spent a lot of time in my small workspace drawing a lot, reading and looking at anything which caught my attention, like old Fleischer Studios cartoons and anything scifi. The self-imposed isolation wasn't easy as I can be quite social but after this experience I think I've learnt an emotional self-reliance I hadn't had before. I think this has made Covid-19 bearable. I also got over some thoughts I had about choosing to pursue my artistic inclinations and whether it could contribute to the world in some way.

Have you ever felt limited in your expression? How were you able to overcome these limitations? 

Yes. It's still something which I'm working through, how to handle it. I'm realizing that if you're able to express yourself truly openly it is a privilege, although it should be a universal right.

What role (if any) would you say spirituality has with your art?

Initially I was going to answer this question with a "no" in terms of a spirituality guiding me with my work. I have mythical creatures in my art, spiritual ones borne of nature or characters which personify abstract concepts. I like the idea of omnipotent mostly well-meaning beings inhabiting my art but they come from imagination and fantasy and stay firmly within the borders of the board I'm painting or the screen on which I'm drawing or animating.

But aside from mythical creatures, I have had experiences while working where I've felt that there is some outside force helping me along, I'm not sure how to explain it, I've thought it must be some biochemical result of intense focus but haven't explored the concept of it much for fear of sounding flakey. But I brought it up with my artist and designer friend Calvin Ho and he recommended I read a book called "Flow" from the 1990s. So I may have a more clear answer at a later time but for the moment I'm referring to it as The Force. I love Star Wars.

Are there any defining moments in particular where you've felt this force/flow most?

Yes and when I think about these moments they're associated with music, maybe it's music which produces this flow. When I began working as an illustrator and was working on a digital artwork of a kaleidoscopic storm, it was probably the first time I really felt like I didn't entirely produce the work, that something else assisted. I'm wondering now whether there is some kind of musical trance state involved. Also, when working on my 'Interspecies Utopia' show and perhaps more recently having slowed down along with the world while working on a commission for a musician in San Francisco. I feel it when I've switched off from everything, am lost in music and am purely into the work. I could be listening to anything from Four Tet to The White Stripes which I've been listening to again recently or Science Noodles, a Hong Kong-Taiwanese band I've been listening to on repeat. Right now I'm listening to Brian Eno's 'Music For Airports'.

How important is nature to your wellbeing and what effect does it have on you? Do you have any favorite hiking trails in Hong Kong?

Walking in nature is extremely important to me especially in a fast-moving city like Hong Kong where I've lived since 2008. The rhythmic motion of walking and breathing and not being distracted by various things has the instant effect of calming me and recalibrating me. Hong Kong is full of walking trails and green areas, my favorite trail would be Tai Long Wan in the area of Sai Kung, it's a bay made up of four beaches with hills behind it. The Peak Morning Trail is also a favorite as I live near to it and walk it regularly.

Do your creatures ever “speak” to you — and do they have different personalities? If so, what are some of them?

I'm waiting for my creatures to speak to me. I'd like to work more with narrative whether in picture book form or animation so I'd like them to lead me but they do have nascent personalities. A lion character I have is stoic yet kind, it doesn't speak much but when it does the words are important so you'd better listen and never ever cross the lion as it has the power of all nature within it, it can become poetic justice incarnate. A female head I use in short animations represents the inner world of an every-woman, she gets buffeted about by everyday and world events but easily expresses joy too. She thinks too much, I guess she only has a head, maybe I should draw her with her body more often.

In what ways have you been exploring augmented reality and animation in your works? Do you have any upcoming projects that fuse these mediums?

I'm still working on how augmented reality can more significantly extend the narrative of my static artwork, mainly they have been experiments in subtly adding meaning via animation. I've used AR with my 'Interspecies Utopia' exhibition, the HKwalls mural and a work in the Paste-Up Festival in Berlin. Currently, I have a singular artwork idea in mind I'd like to generate but I'm not sure of the physical space it will occupy yet.

What is your intuitive sense regarding the art in the future? In 2120, what do you foresee as the mediums? How much value will be placed on art and artists?

This question makes me think of the Singaporean survey by The Sunday Times which did the rounds of social media in June. It was about the top 5 most and least essential jobs within the context of the pandemic. I was skeptical of this survey but I think a lot of people would have nodded their heads in agreement at artists being at the top of the non-essential list. But I think art and the arts are incredibly important. I think we need to tell stories about ourselves through fiction and emotive means which may elicit empathy and an understanding which news cannot give us. I think there should be more to us than survival and living in their most basic forms. I'm not sure about predicting the future 100 years from now but I wish I could see how things are in 2120, perhaps art will be more interactive and immersive and work somehow with science more. But closer to our present, I really hope that art and artists will make it through the pandemic and current instabilities and that they'll be intact when we eventually settle into a new normal or get back to how we were. I think art is needed for escapism and to make sense of this surreal time of dramatic change.

[illfoandillfie]

may i have a career reading please? i just... i'm having a bit of a rough time and idek anymore. my initial is 'a' btw. thanks a lot!

Sorry this took so long! Your ask got buried under blurb requests and i only just saw it. But to make up for it, I drew a few extra cards. It’s a bit of a long post but I tried to give as much info as I could and ultimately I think it’s quite positive so hopefully you feel like it resonates!

Tarot: King of Wands, The World, Ace of Pentacles, Page of Swords, 8 of Swords, 5 of Wands, King of Pentacles, The Hanged Man, 4 of Wands, 8 of Wands

Overall these cards are pretty positive. Theres a few less positive ones but that makes sense if you’ve been having a bit of a rough time.

I’m particularly pleased with that first row. The King of Wands is related to overcoming challenges. He’s a symbol of being in control. Then there’s The World which is about completion - one cycle ends and makes way for something new, something more positive. It’s a sign that now is a good time to start something new. And then finally, the ace of pentacles. The aces are all about new opportunities and pentacles is the suit most strongly connected to career/money. So it definitely looks like the difficulties you’ve been facing are coming to an end. 

In the middle row we have the page of swords. This may mean that you’ll receive a message soon, maybe a job offer or something like that, as the pages are all messengers. Swords is the suit tied to intellect and thoughts and it’s interesting you have two swords next to each other. The 8 is one of those negative cards I mentioned, it’s about self-doubt, and letting fear get the best of you, trapping yourself because you’re too anxious to move. Funnily enough, the 5 of wands was the other real negative card. It’s a card of competition or conflict. Struggle. Together I think this row represents a warning. It’s saying don’t let a potential opportunity pass you by because you don’t feel you’re good enough or capable enough for it. The page of swords is related to curiosity and mental energy and that’s the sort of energy you should approach this possible offer/opportunity with. Don’t put yourself down, don’t let your worries take over. The offer might be unexpected but it is coming to you for a reason and the reason is that you are capable, you can thrive in this new position, as long as you put up a fight against whatever doubts you have. 

And then the last row. The king of pentacles is a great sign. Like I said before, pentacles is the suit tied to career/money and the king is the most in control of all the court positions. He is a symbol of abundance, prosperity and security. He is you in whatever this new cycle, new opportunity, is. Beside him is the hanged man which is not the card I would have expected if I’m being honest. He can be a symbol of delay or sacrifice but he can also mean a change of perspective;. There are two ways I can think to interpret that. Number 1, by changing your perspective now, you’ll open yourself up to harnessing the king of pents energy later. This is when you need to start fighting off your negative thoughts so that when the chance arises, you can take it comfortably. OR, number 2, the new opportunity is going to look different than you expect. It may be something you’ve not considered as an option for you before, it may be something that others around you would say is too risky or not good enough or a bad decision. But if you consider all the angles and come to your own conclusions, it may be exactly what you need. And then there’s the four of wands and 8 of wands which came out together. The 8 is about rapid action and movement so I would expect whatever this opportunity is, to present itself by the end of the year. The 4 is a card of celebration and peace so its saying that this thing that is coming is going to bring you peace of mind and it’ll be worth celebrating. But the 4 is also often connected to home, so this opportunity may come from someone you know, a family member, or it might be something you can do from home.

But, like I said, all in all, very positive. The cycle you’re in right now, where things feel hard, is drawing to an end and it’s going to lead to something better. 

Now to your oracles. In the middle there is a card from the Believe In Your Own Magic Deck which says Sword: make the change. In this reading I think it’s likely to be more encouragement, it’s saying don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone and accept something new. 

You got 2 Moonology cards - Waxing Moon: the energy is gaining momentum and Full Moon Eclipse: Conclusions are within reach. This is really just more proof that your current cycle is coming to an end and this new wave of energy, this new opportunity is on it’s way. 

You also got 2 of the cat oracles. I pulled from this deck specifically because the third piece of advice on these cards relates to work. I will write out all of the advice on both cards in case either of the relationship/life advice resonates for you as well but if you want to specifically focus on the work ones you can. 

Kitty Corleone: Inspire loyalty through fear / Play to win every time / Identify your opponents, then make them an offer they can’t refuse. The third one is the work advice and to me the opponents it mentions could be those self doubts represented by the 8 of swords. This card is tied to that 5 of wands, standing up for yourself an fighting back energy. 

Dick Whittington’s Cat: Seek your fortune in unlikely places / You’re never more than three feet away from a rat / Go to the big city and make it take notice. Again, third one is the work specific advice. Perhaps the new opportunity will come to you from the city. Or this might be a signal that you can crush it if you give yourself the chance. I’d also like to draw your attention to that first bit of advice as well. The card has it marked as relationship advice but I really feel like it ties to that page of swords/hanged man idea of a changed perspective bringing an unexpected but ultimately positive chance. 

At the bottom of the image there are 3 cards from my Arcana of Astrology deck which I got very recently. You pulled Mercury, Second House and Sagittarius. And I gotta say, all very good signs. 

Mercury is tied to communication and intelligence/logic, so very Swords energy. It is a sign that news or communication about an important issue is right around the corner (hello page of swords!). It reminds you to consider the news from multiple angles and properly think it over before you reply/make a decision. There is also a section in the guidebook that says “thoughts can be a concious action: positive ones lead to a positive attitude and negatives ones lead to a negative attitude” so I think this card also wants to remind you to keep thinking positively and don’t give into those doubts. 

Second House is where issues of finances/security live so it’s a very appropriate card for this lmao. On one hand it may be a reminder to be careful with your money but on the other it can be a sign that a windfall is coming your way, maybe in the form of a pay rise or similar. 

And then Sagittarius which in your natal chart indicates where you show great optimism/interest. Often it refers to hobbies and keeping your mind and body fulfilled outside of your every day work and chores and the like. (It can also warn that you’re spreading yourself too thin). This could be a sign that the unexpected place to look for this new opportunity is related to one of your hobbies or interests. If you’re artistically inclined, it might be something to do with art (maybe in an art gallery or as an illustrator), if you have an interest in history, it might relate to that. Keep your eyes open because it could be something completely out the blue. 

And finally, you have 3 Magic sigils. If you’re into spell work or manifestation you may want to use these sigils in your practice. Otherwise, their messages are - Healing: true healing of the mind, body and soul / Self-Confidence: String self-believe and sense of worth / Successful Career: A happy working environment, pay rises and promotions. Again I think these all confirm things the tarot cards brought up. There’s a need to free yourself and heal from doubts and anxieties, to believe in yourself. But also something good, something fulfilling and worthwhile is coming towards you. 

[gamestreamingsetup]

Twitch, Why It’s So Popular

Twitch is a popular on-line service for watching and streaming virtual video pronounces. When it turned into founded in 2011, Twitch at the start centered almost totally on video games however has because elevated to consist of streams devoted to art work advent, music, communicate shows, and the occasional TV series.

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Where Can I Watch Twitch?

Twitch streams can be regarded at the reliable Twitch internet site and thru one of the many legitimate Twitch apps that are to be had for iOS and Android gadgets, Xbox 360 and Xbox One online game consoles, Sony's PlayStation three and 4, Amazon's Fire TV, Google Chromecast, Roku, and the NVIDIA SHIELD. Watching proclaims and movies on Twitch is completely loose and doesn't require viewers to log in.

Creating an account, but, does permit users to add their favorite channels to a observe list (similar to subscribing to a channel on YouTube) and take part in every flow's unique chatroom. Hosting is a famous manner for Twitch streamers to broadcast any other channel's live circulate to their own target market.

How Can I Find Twitch Streamers to Watch?

Twitch recommends streams at the the front page of its internet site and its apps. Another famous manner to discover new Twitch channels to look at is by using browsing the Games class. This option is to be had on all the apps and the Twitch website and is an smooth manner to discover a live circulation regarding a particular video game name or collection. Other classes to discover are ?Communities, Popular, Creative, and Discover. These can be found in the Browse section of the main website, though no longer they all are gift in the reliable Twitch apps.

Many of the greater-popular Twitch streamers are quite active on Twitter and Instagram, which makes each of those social networks a solid alternative for discovering new streamers to observe. Using social media is specially beneficial for locating new streamers based on their personality and other hobbies, some thing that may be difficult to discern when looking on Twitch directly. Recommended key phrases to apply when looking Twitter and Instagram consist of twitch flow, twitch streamer, and streamer.

Twitch Is More Than Just Video Games

Twitch may have started as a online game streaming carrier but it's on account that elevated and now offers an expansion of different stay streams aimed to appeal to a broader target market. The most-famous non-gaming class is IRL (In Real Life) which functions streamers definitely speaking to their visitors in actual-time. Talk Shows is every other famous non-gaming option which contains a mix of live panel discussions, podcasts, or even professionally produced variety indicates, whilst Cooking includes, as many might effectively wager, cooking and meals shows.

Viewers looking for something a bit more inventive need to test out the Creative category. This is in which artists, programmers, animators, cosplayers, and architects share their creative system with the world and these streams typically attract a totally different target audience than those watching different classes.

Is Twitch a Social Network?

Over the years seeing that its release, Twitch step by step delivered an expansion of capabilities that have helped it evolve from being a primary streaming media website online into something that more intently resembles a social network which include Facebook.

Twitch customers can follow and DM (Direct Message) each different, every circulate has its own specific chatroom where customers can join, and the popular Pulse feature essentially capabilities as a Facebook or Twitter timeline and permits for all of us on the community to publish their own popularity updates in addition to like, proportion, and comment on what others have written.

All of those features are available via the professional Twitch cellular apps as well, which puts it in direct opposition with other social apps. Did Twitch was once a social network? No. Is it one now? Absolutely.

What Are Twitch Partners and Affiliates? Partners and Affiliates are unique sorts of Twitch debts that basically permit for monetization of announces. Anyone can grow to be a Twitch Affiliate or Partner however certain requirements should be met with regard to a stream's popularity and the number of fans a user has.

Twitch Affiliates are given get right of entry to to Bits (a shape of mini-donations from visitors) and 5% of game sale revenue made via their profile. Twitch Partners also get those perks similarly to video ads, paid subscriptions alternatives, custom badges, and emoticons, and other top class perks for their channel.

Are People Really Making a Living on Twitch?

In short, yes. While not every body on Twitch has quit their day activity, a big quantity of streamers do honestly make a fulltime dwelling (and more!) through streaming on the service through a aggregate of habitual paid subscriptions, micro-donations (i.E. Bits), ordinary donations (which could range from some bucks to 3 thousand), sponsorships, advertisements, and affiliate sales. Reaching that stage of financial fulfillment on Twitch requires a whole lot of willpower although, with maximum of the extra-famous Twitch Partners and Affiliates streaming five to seven days every week to keep their target audience.

What's TwitchCon?

TwitchCon is an annual convention organized via Twitch that takes region over a duration of 3 days in both September or October. The official aim of TwitchCon is to have a good time online game and streaming culture but it additionally serves as a platform for the business enterprise to promote new services to users and well known Twitch Partners who have been in particular a hit.

Events and sports at TwitchCon variety from discussion panels and workshops to satisfy and greets with famous Twitch Partners or even a unique celebration with live tune and drinks. Events run from around midday to later within the evening. Children are welcome at TwitchCon however the ones under 13 years of age are required to be followed by an person. In wellknown, TwitchCon has a extra mature age demographic than comparable online game conventions which includes PAX or Gamescom.

The first TwitchCon changed into held in San Francisco in 2015 and attracted over 20,000 attendees over its  days, whilst the second one convention in 2016 in San Diego, which ran for three days, grew to over 35,000. The rely seems to grow each 12 months.

How Is Twitch Connected to Amazon?

Amazon purchased Twitch in 2014 and at the same time as the exchange of possession hasn't affected Twitch too dramatically at the surface, there have been a few great evolutions to the platform with the introduction of Bits, a digital currency purchased with Amazon Payments used to make micro-donations to streamers, and Twitch Prime.

What Does Twitch Prime Do?

Twitch Prime is a top class club for Twitch which links to Amazon's Amazon Prime program. Anyone with an Amazon Prime membership robotically gains a Twitch Prime subscription and the 2 are regularly used as a manner to go-promote the opposite.

Users with a Twitch Prime membership are given an advert-unfastened revel in on Twitch, unfastened virtual downloadable content (DLC) for pick titles, online game discounts, and a unfastened subscription which they are able to use on any Twitch Partner's channel as a manner to guide them. Twitch Prime is now to be had in all predominant areas global.

Does Twitch Have Any Competition?

Twitch is by way of a ways the most famous carrier for streaming and watching video game pictures and related content material. This is partly because of the truth that Twitch become the first corporation to attention on devoted online game streaming but its achievement can also be credited to its personal improvements within the industry, particularly when it comes to supporting customers monetize their very own content material.

While nonetheless no longer as popular as Twitch, YouTube is gaining floor within the online game streaming market with its YouTube Gaming initiative which released in 2015. Twitch's largest rival, though, should potentially be Microsoft, that bought the online game streaming provider, Beam, in 2016 earlier than re-naming it as Mixer and incorporating it at once into its Windows 10 PCs and Xbox One consoles.

There are numerous smaller streaming services consisting of Smashcast (officially Azabu and Hitbox) but YouTube and Mixer are the simplest actual threat to Twitch, due to the dimensions in their respective agencies and existing consumer base.

If you have a Twitch account and it's not what you predicted, you could continually delete the account to get rid of it.

[popcornbutterflymedia]

every episode since the pilot has been a favorite, so to call this one another favorite is redundant. this is a standout episode, a breakthrough. there is a lot to unpack and i love it.

this episode grounds the central romance in the real world between two people burdened by responsibility, haunted by their past, hardened by their own hurts. there has always been a personal need for a love story between two people who feels undeserving of love, while the other is incapable of giving love. i’ve always wondered at the dynamics of two damaged beings, if love is even possible for them. this single episode has made it that story, and it’s incredibly satisfying.

a random, possibly unrelated question: are hardened people who aren’t used to being vulnerable considered broken, when they don’t show emotion, and are incapable to let emotion in or are they just shaped differently? if they are indeed brojen, is brokenness even a bad thing?

this installment in the series is a reckoning with the hurts that shape people, acceptance and healing.

we are reminded of the outburst from the previous installment that seemingly came out of left field. it accomplished what it set out to do, which was to drive a wedge between taguro and sensui, and thus by extension the friend group. it was clear, after this confrontation that their alter egos are still alive, ready to answer either's call. what it hasn't done, at this point, is explain why everything imploded in the first place. more on that later. what it has also done though, is show donny's improved acting, which frankly, til now still leaves me speechless. the sparks between donny and belle were also on full display, so bright, it's blinding, so present it will be foolish to deny it.

in deib’s bedside monologue for an audience of one, he laments his predisposition to hurt everyone he loves, compounded by having to constantly prove his worth, he carries the weight of the world in his heart. weather or not this is the factual truth matters little when life makes one question one’s worth, and capacity to love. 

onscreen moments become relatable when fictional situations are made alive by feelings that become friends you know do well, and emotions take hold of the heart, like this one did and never let go. there is still a heaviness as this is being written, that is not unwanted.

at the barb, team max inquires about the girl's supposed friendship with deib, which paved the way to a map of max's heart, along with a comprehensive history of its heartbreaks. this lesson includes a chapter on childhood love, one she willingly waited on for years. it was a summer romance, new and shiny, bright and childlike and blinding. she had the boy's heart in her keeping only returned when and shares when the boy returned home. it felt good, she said, to be loved, and be loved in return, to be accepted unconditionally. it was good. it was good, until the boy discovered the bigger world, and the bigger world discovered the boy. the world gave everything rj wanted, and maybe demanded so much from him in return. home was difficult to come back to, where without a word, with his heart in her hands, waiting and waiting, her and waiting. that is how we, the audience found her: waiting. that is how her friends found her: waiting. that is how deib met her: in a state of mistrust, and uncertainly waiting.

without a word of absolution, from rj, max took on the responsibility of being left behind. she was left to her own devices for survival, thus the harsh exterior, the high walls around her heart, taking on the pain, keeping it all in, while her trust issues affect all her present relationships, active and possible ones.

a belated realization is that max and deib share a selflessness that can be toxic, in that they both take responsibility for any pain, or unfortunately circumstance. they internalize that weight and carry it around, unprompted

writing is usually a balm for a heavy heart. there is something about putting words to one’s feelings and seeing those words on a safe writing blank space that makes everything better. it has saved max countless times over, that is until it hasn’t.

max’s dad has been surprising me since the beginning. the anchor, and stand up man that is as a character is genuinely refreshing where stories like these are concerned. he is a character i am grateful for. he is found in her eldest daughter’s room late at night after a long day. he worries about max, and doesn’t want her to stay out late, as it may affect her academics. it is powerful to only be asked to do well in school and nothing else. he then proceeds to speak about her mom, for the first time ever. he tells her how he met her mother, a petty thief from a world so different than what he had known. it must have been refreshing to not answer to familial demands, and be treated, and challenged as an equal. it must have been the newness of it all, but there was enough love between them for max to be given a place in the world.

verbal assurance matters. we tend to believe the effects of our life circumstances. we live by that belief until someone comes along and tells us that our minds are playing tricks on us. a definitive absolution and acceptance.

if he had only known, if he had only been told he says, he would have taken care of her, he would have loved her in an instant. his daughter would ask for nothing. the daughter assures her father everything is as it should be, if it wasn’t she wouldn’t be the brave, strong girl that she is. if it wasn’t, he would not be happy with the family he has now. elle, maxrill, and macy. macy, the present wife is a complicated character. macy, the wife that met the world’s standards is in earshot of the room where the conversation that matters is taking place. the door is open, almost giving her permission to listen in. and she does. and she breaks. and she’s a beautifully broken down human being. with wine and an embrace from her loyal but just as hurt daughter, macy attempts to collect pieces of her dignity and bravely keeps it together. i felt that. i felt issa and melizza who both impress every episode. it’s one of the most beautiful moments in the entire series. there’s more story to be told there. stories of mothers and daughters and girls and women and their plight, what hey have to endure, a respected place in the world, for acceptance, for love. goodness, for love. (reason number 345554345678844 for season 2 please and thank you! XD)

back at benison, teams max and deib are still reeling from their rift a plan of action - taguro and sensui together again. it’s the most sincere, funniest, most kilig version of of modern pass the message ever played that involved both friend groups. it gave us jealous deib, triggered max, and kilig tochiko and it got tagsen to crack. it also gave us a cast who has mastered the art of perfect timing with each other.

the mean girls are meaner than ever. elle, is in understandable pain. her own, and as an advocate for her mother. it’s aimee’s pride that is severely offended. she is  barely hanging on to her place in benison’s social hierarchy and jostling for deib’s attention. the key to both injuries is max’s removal from campus. a plan is hatched: hurt the girl, and  convince the queen bee whose name was once never dared to be spoken of to take up her place in benison again.

en route to the lockers, driven by a pang of jealousy, triggered by max's one word conformation, deib is eager to patch things up with the girl. unbeknownst to him, the girl in question is being followed through the hallways. the assailant got to the lockers, to max before deib ever did. max fought back just like she promised her dad, except, she doesn't win every fight. and this is one of her unlucky nights. deb found unconscious max sprawled across the hallway. in a fit of panic, and urgency to save her, in that moment, all bets, competition, tension and cold wars are off. deib carries max his arms to safety.

she wakes up in a hospital bed surrounded by her friends, her teacher, her parents, dazed and confused, not knowing how she got there in the first place. her doctor explains she suffered a head trauma, good thing her friend found her and brought her to the hospital. said friend in question sits quietly by her bedside. a ghost of a grateful smile appears on her lips, as she catches the glimmer of satisfaction in his eyes. for a moment, she basks in being the hero of the day. she basks in being her hero.

upon further questioning, it is determined that she does not remember anything. max’s dad wants to have the case investigated. the hero of the day. he introduces himself as deib lhor enrile. the father who is meeting the boy for the first time has heard about him. heroic acts lose their value for people whose unfaltering reputation precedes them. it’s going to be an uphill battle for thee girl’s affections, and her father’s approval. this is just the starting point.

max’s classmates wait patiently outside her room. the conversation of choice is max and elle’s family set up, initially a little less discreet until the chatter caught elle’s ire. they had no idea of the ties that bind the two girls. that is until deib chimes in. family is important to max and elle, he says, much to everyone’s surprise. 

how could he ever know? this is the same question i had regarding episode five. i was reminded that i had tweeted my confusion about max’s sudden outburst and max and deib’s ensuing confrontation. while we understand friendship fights, max and deib’s just seemed a little to unwarranted, and a little to personal. we get a flashback of max in deib’s room, talking about family sealed with pinky promises, vouched for by an elementary school award in trustworthiness.

i cried. that broke me. butterflies for kilig are fine, but the older you get the more conversation matters. the desire to be seen, to have others be witness to your existence, to validate your journey. the older you get. the small acts of kindness make up grand love. now we understand.

back at the hospital, everything is going well with max’s family unit, which includes macy and elle. she is about to rest when she gets a call from her uncle and grandmother. aside from max, her lola and tito get to speak to maxim too. they get to thank max’s dad for sponsoring her grandmother’s medicines. striking is macy’s reaction to her husband’s helping hand, then we are reminded that she did not know how to feel about her husband’s act of charity. it’s a small thing, but this show wins with their attention to detail.

max becomes her old, spunky mindoro self. brave, astig, angas. all in front of the new family who despite trying, despite the love, she has been tiptoeing around. they saw her loud and strong, even deib did, and for some that whole picture broke me. there is something so sad, yet so victorious about instinctively letting people, especially those you’ve been impossibly proper around, see who you truly are. in some ways it’s also a slap in their faces, a wake up call to allow people to be who they truly are. thank you for that moment.

on a moment of authenticity is where this episode ends. a moment of peace, tentative. consider this the first dig in a deeper excavation of character and history that will make up this love story. i remember tagging this episode six and episode seven twin episodes. i might be a week late but i am excited to revisit that. 

just infinite amounts of gratitude for this show, and it’s substance, and its heart, and boundless love for the kids, the cast of characters who are all special, who all have my heart. just for giving me something to write, and keeping me sane, i owe this show a lot.

 love and gratitude.

[astro-vibes]

Your Moon & Expression of Art

☾ I’ve always connected one’s moon sign with their creative preferences because emotions in art are ever-present. I am in no way suggesting that your moon is the only aspect in your chart that you should look to in order to understand your creative drive, although I definitely think that it is important regardless. ☽

Aries Moon: Starts many projects, has trouble actually finishing them. This is because new ideas are always coming to them and they are afraid to lose that initial inspiration. Likely to use bold color palettes; wants their work to make a big statement. They are not afraid to take risks and try things that may not work out. They may use art in order to cope with their often intense emotional patterns. If you really pay attention, you can see these feelings come to life in their art. 

Taurus Moon: They find comfort in knowing that their passion for art is always something that they can go back to; it is stable. Likely to stick to neutral, soft color palettes. They don’t want to overpower their works with bold patterns and shades. They prefer to portray their message with subtlety. They tend to spin situations around in their works in order to make them more beautiful/appealing to the viewer. They are able to take negative experiences in their life and make them into something tangible.

Gemini Moon: Mercurial moons tend to have a diverse portfolio. One may call it “organized chaos.” Like the Aries moon, they tend to be on the more daring side. They are usually self-taught and have little regard for traditional techniques in whatever medium they practice. They can take inspiration from anywhere and their work can be difficult to decipher without a proper explanation from the artist; this is because they can take multiple ideas and memories and apply them to their designs without even realizing it.

Cancer Moon: Applying emotions to their art is the top priority. If they are not able to channel specific feelings while they are painting, drawing, etc, then it is almost impossible for them to get fully immersed in their work; they often enjoy playing music while they are working in order to help this process along. Their projects have a strong nostalgic quality to them. They are able to draw people in to their world without explaining anything in words. 

Leo Moon: The messages in their art are very specific to their own lives, but they love to share it with everyone. Even if not many people can relate to their work, they tend to admire it regardless. In general, fire moons tend to gravitate towards warm colors and Leo is no different in this case. They enjoy and seek out praise for their projects, so they may enter in competitions and participate in showcases in order to establish a name for themselves in the community.

Virgo Moon: They usually have a set place and time that they like to do their work. However, their workspace is most definitely evident of a busy artist. They tend to put pictures, posters, articles, etc. on the walls in order to get inspiration. The messages in their art tend to be quite complex because they love to make people think about what they were trying to say. Most of them actually prefer to sketch here and there rather than commit to a large project.

Libra Moon: Instead of trying to make others guess what they were trying to say with their work, the Libra moon would rather be purposely relational. In fact, they want people to connect with their pieces and understand what the intent was behind the project. If people are left puzzled about the point of their finished work, they become discouraged. They might be hesitant about their ideas, causing them to start many works and toss them soon after. They tend to gravitate towards art styles that are pleasing to the eye and symmetrical. 

Scorpio Moon: They tend to focus on topics that are swept under the rug in their works. The dark side of humanity is brought out in their projects. They love to shine a light on these controversial situations, especially because they are some of the only people brave enough to tackle such things. They prefer to work alone. If they are around others, they feel pressured and they may see a huge difference in the quality of their work. They cannot channel the intensity with people breathing down their necks. The public usually has a strong reaction to their work, either good or bad.

Sagittarius Moon: They find that being under the influence actually helps them a lot when trying to channel their creative energy. They don’t rely on any substances per se, but they are not afraid to experiment in order to get in to a certain mindset. The original intent may not match up with the final outcome of a Sagittarius moon’s work; this can frustrate them at times. However, it can also be a blessing that things don’t always work they way that they wanted them to. The Jupiter energy works in their favor regardless and by some mechanism of luck, the public usually loves their work.

Capricorn Moon: Usually, they tend to stick to classic and traditional styles of art. They are the most likely to take art seriously and want to pursue a career in the field. They are not only interested in pursuing art themselves, they are also deeply involved in art history. Capricorn moon’s usually have a comfort zone when it comes to what they are willing to try. Their medium of choice is usually oil painting because of it’s elegant and smooth texture. Nature and landscapes are what they are attracted to, even if it is not what they enjoy painting/drawing.

Aquarius Moon: It is important for them to channel other’s emotions and struggles in their art, rather than their own. To them, art is more about bringing awareness to injustices than anything else. Their style can be described as unique and unpredictable. You cannot possibly pin them down. They are drawn to psychedelic styles and neon color palettes. They want to make others feel as if they have traveled to another dimension when they view the Aquarius moon’s work. They turn the unexplainable into something that can actually be percieved.

Pisces Moon: They don’t see themselves as having any creative talent; however, this could not be further from the truth. Their work often reflects their inner confusion; they love styles that involve watercolor and a lot of blending. They connect deeply to the eyes, so that tends to be the easiest for them to draw/paint. Like the Cancer moon, they rely heavily on music in their performances. Their projects may revolve around spirituality, religion, drugs, and other mysteries of the universe. Their style of art is similar to the Scorpio moon, while romanticizing the taboos of life.

-Admin L

[patriciagraceewanika]

#theewanikawoman 

Carolyn Gora was one of the first customers to visit EWANIKA after the initial lockdown ended in late spring of this year and the shop was open by appointment only. Carolyn has a personal style, an easy manner and an adventurous spirit that makes you want to know more about her. Trained both as a nurse and a lawyer, she is the Director of Professional Conduct at the College of Nurses of Ontario. With such a demanding job in healthcare, we wanted to know more about how she was managing during the pandemic – how it affected her work, her personal life and her sense of herself. She generously shared some thoughts about why she is driven to do the work she does, and how she balances that with a desire for self-expression, and a need for self-care.

What is your job and how has the pandemic affected your work?  

Our role is to provide standards and guidelines to support nurses in providing safe and ethical nursing care to the people of Ontario. Our primary objective is to serve and protect the public interest including by addressing complaints against nurses, and at the same time being sensitive to the nurses being monitored. The pandemic has been a time of unprecedented stress for nurses and on the whole healthcare system, and while standards of care and ethics can’t be relaxed, everything has to be viewed in that context. We support a mental health and addiction program for nurses, so that competent and qualified nurses who may become ill, get the help they need. We also set up a program to register as many nurses who were retired, newly graduated or who had left the system to come back and help fulfill the emergency need.

Could you share a bit about your background, how you came to do the work you do today? 

Being a child in the 60’s, I was drawn to the larger than life figures in politics - the Kennedy White house, the Pearson liberals, and the Diefenbaker conservatives. I was also deeply affected by the assassination of JFK in 63, and the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations in 68. I was in grade 5 when Martin Luther King was killed and I gave a speech about the injustice of it. The protests for freedom, to end the war, for racial rights and women’s rights during the 60’s had a significant impact on my values.

I left school in my first year of university on a personal detour, disconnected from my family, and nursing became the climb back towards self-worth. I took a two-year nursing diploma from George Brown College and worked at St. Michael’s in Cardiology and the Critical Care Unit. It was grounding to work 8-hour shifts - days, evenings and nights with 2 days off and occasionally 3 days off. A shift could be about life and death. I learned about caring for patients and treating people well, regardless of their status, ethnicity, or politics.

I decided to apply to law school. Not having obtained a university degree, I had imposter syndrome, however, I came second in class in my first year. My formative law school experiences included participating in Women and the Law and discovering a book at a conference called Sister Outsider, essays and speeches by Audre Lorde, in particular – the Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, which resonated with me and which I go back to reading regularly.

I discovered the field of professional regulation working at the College of Physicians and Surgeons as the Manager of Public Complaints, and then for the Hearings Office. We dealt with some very difficult cases, but the opportunity for me to combine my experience in health care with my legal experience to protect the public interest was deeply satisfying.

What impact has the pandemic had on you personally and how have you dealt with it?

I have been working full tilt during this period. In the early days of the pandemic I was grateful to be employed and very motivated by my work. I still am, but like everyone, I have moments of anxiety, loneliness and frustration.

I have learned from yoga to breathe and to meditate. Talk to myself. What is happening? What are you thinking?  Sometimes there is a wisdom in anxiety and if you can sit with it and figure what is driving it, you can learn more about yourself, why your buttons were pressed and you decompensated, and how to self-correct, be less reactive and build resilience. I also know to burn off nervous energy through exercise, and my favourite activity of all is kayaking.

I treasure my relationships – and took time to connect with friends. I have very close family relationships, especially with my wonderful niece who I love like a daughter and have tried to support in her life’s journey. I visit my older parents often and feel lucky to have this time with them.

And I have a routine that makes me feel good. I start the day with 2 cups of Pilot coffee and I always get dressed. I put on my clothes, footwear, and jewelry from EWANIKA, even though sometimes no one else can see on Zoom or Teams virtual meetings. It gives me a boost.

How would you describe your style and how did it develop?

Eclectic. Classic with a twist. Sporty.

My mother had an influence on my style and interest in fashion. She came of age in the 40’s and I loved the look of that era – when women wore suits, lipstick and always looked so put together. My mother and her sister both sewed and my grandmother was a seamstress in Poland. I was only 10 when she died, but I still remember a beautiful chartreuse short sleeved silk blouse she made with 50 cloth covered buttons up the back.

Perhaps because of my mother’s influence, I like to put together an outfit. There was a time when those outfits were over coordinated, but I have relaxed that. I still love a monochromatic look, dressed up with a scarf or jewelry. And I love my suits from EWANIKA’s signature line that fit women’s bodies so beautifully. I only feel dressed for business when I put on my Maria de la Rosa socks and boots with a heel.

The sporty appeal for me comes from the fact that I swam competitively from the ages of 6 to 16. My first swim club had a tradition of fresh-water distance swimming with stars like Gus Ryder and Marilyn Bell. I swam Lake Couchiching 3 and a half miles at the age of 9. By the age of 10, I had 10 Canadian records and was referred to in the press as Mini Mouse because of my diminutive stature.

The eclectic part of my look comes from the fact that my work is very serious and I have a desire for something more fantastical and whimsical as a contrast and find it in fashion. I turn to an accessory like my favourite white painted MM6 handbag, or my Mirit Weinstock earrings influenced by traditional Japanese arts.

. . . and what are some of your favourite pieces of clothing or jewelry that you brought with you to the shoot?

A khaki Sophie D’Hoore trench coat. I love the green colour, the cut, the buttons that look like candy. It is classic but with a twist. And the gold and pearl Mirit Weinstock earrings that pop and brighten and add femininity.  

Who do you dress for? 

I dress for myself, head to toe.

Interview by Rachel Low. Photos and styling by Patricia Grace

..........................................................................

From the top, Carolyn Gora is wearing a SOFIE D’HOORE trench coat and sneakers, STUDIO NICHOLSON sweatshirt, HOPE trousers, SOPHIE BUHAI silver ball earrings and pendant and an MM6 handbag; a black wool SOFIE D’HOORE dress, MARION VIDAL necklace, MIRIT WEINSTTOCK earrings and BY FAR lace up boots; and lastly the EWANIKA signature suit with a MAISON BOINET belt. All items are her own.

............................................................................................

Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde, originally published in 1984 and this copy a re-issue in 2007, presents a charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches by the black lesbian poet and feminist writer. In her writings Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. Her philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published. 

[wesleybates]

Content Marketing Strategy Is The Secret Sauce For B2B Sales

We see internet disruptions every day. The results of which are obvious in highly visible industries, such as media and publishing, music, consumer products, advertising and more.

It has also affected the way B2B companies go to market. Most notably, on the marketing side where advertising has become more competitive, less effective, and usually reaches a point of diminishing returns.

In fact, it’s become so difficult to figure out where our target audience is consuming information, it’s no wonder why marketers are so frustrated.

From a sales perspective, the internet has put a serious damper on the sales person’s ability to prospect. No one wants to talk to them. Most aren’t equipped to prospect online. After all, that’s not covered in sales training. And because they’re under pressure to make quota, most will give up too early. So they go back to doing what they’ve always done—make calls, send emails and go to networking events and conferences.

What’s Different?

This subtle disruption may be showing up in several ways:

• Your revenue has remained flat, or it has steadily declined, year over year–all despite being in an industry growing up around you, or a growing economy in general. • Or, maybe your company has a revolving door of sales people, who are in and out faster than you get to know their names. • Perhaps you’ve always relied on referrals, and maybe you still get them, but it’s not going to be enough to grow revenue like you want. • And you might have noticed an increased animosity between sales and marketing departments. After all, marketing believes they’re doing great because the web traffic is up. Sales thinks the leads are terrible and marketing isn’t doing enough for them.

The Marketing Shift

Investing in marketing has always been dicey for companies with a complex sale. I’m defining complex here as any company with a product or service that requires a sales person to touch it before it becomes a deal. These products and services are usually costly to purchase, have long sales cycles, require education and consultation, and result in some sort of customized solution.

Many B2B CEOs that I’ve talked to are still hesitant to shift dollars into a demand generation system because they haven’t been able to measure marketing success very well in the past.

And even with internet measurement tools like Google Analytics, the measurement is still at the campaign level. In other words, branding and awareness marketing activities will always be difficult to measure when it comes to the true impact on revenue.

Therefore, simply making a larger investment in marketing and assigning a series of new projects (like starting a blog) won’t get you where you need to go in the digital world. Marketing people of the past are ill-equipped to handle lead generation through content marketing.

And here’s why: Over the last 10 years, the sales model has begun breaking down. A good sales person used to be able to prospect enough with the phone, email, networking and knocking on doors to fill their calendars with appointments.

All they needed from marketing was branding and awareness, which is why most marketing people are trained this way.

In fact, as a B2B marketing director in the late 90s, I remember our sales people telling me: “I just want them to have heard of us when I call them.” And therefore, we focused our marketing efforts on mass media—mostly advertising and public relations to get the word out so that our sales people had some air cover. We also developed brochures, websites and sell sheets to help them close deals.

Today’s Sales Cycle

But today, sales people are finding it more and more difficult to get into enough sales conversations to make quota. Branding simply won’t open enough doors.

It’s not that we ever wanted to talk to a sales person, but it was necessary when it came to getting the information we needed.

Think about even a simple example of how you might buy a TV today as opposed to 10 years ago. Back then, you would go to Best Buy, find a salesperson, and start asking questions so you could make the right purchase.

Today, you’ll most likely do an internet search first, read reviews, shop for best pricing, and so on. Now, when you do show up at Best Buy, you’re armed to the hilt with information. So how likely are you to talk to the sales person?

My response when they ask me if I need help is usually, “Where are the TVs?” Or, “Your website says you have the Samsung model XKY in stock—can I take a look?”

Sales is Struggling

This same buying process is happening today with every B2B company, whether they know it or not. People are starting their searches for answers on the internet first. They will reach out to sales people, but only when they are ready to buy.

And because people are diagnosing their own problems and prescribing their own solutions, they often get it wrong.

Take the marketing automation industry for example. Do you know of a company that has bought Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, Hubspot and more, just to have it sit on the shelf collecting dust? They grossly underestimated what it would take to operate them effectively, but it was the answer to their marketing problem, right?

If they’d been willing to talk to a sales person first, they would have told them what’s involved, what the team should look like, options for finding the right resources, and an estimate of what it might cost so a strategy could be prepared before spending any money on technology.

This is especially true if your sales people are selling products and services in an emerging industry. Prospects may not even know that they have a problem in the first place.

So if they’re not willing to take your call, and you can’t figure out where to find them at a conference or networking event, what are you supposed to do as a sales person?

Marketing Must do the Heavy Lifting

Don’t get me wrong. Sales people today are still responsible for developing 1 to 1 sales conversations and running the sales process. They’re still responsible for prospecting and getting into sales conversations. No one is saying they should wait around for the Glen Garry leads from Marketing.

And Marketing is still responsible for branding and awareness—the problem is, it’s not enough to drive one-to-one sales conversations.

The problem for both marketing and sales is that we now have a highly fragmented audience where the marketing activities that we’re used to — like advertising, public relations, SEO and social media — are all having diminishing returns.

And this is important for today’s B2B company. The only metric that matters for marketing is lead conversion. For those of you that know the lingo already, that’s Marketing Qualified Leads (in other words, someone that demonstrates digital behavior) and how many of those turned into sales conversations, or Sales Accepted Leads.

Creating Purposeful Content

If content marketing strategy is therefore intended to convert into b2b sales conversations, each piece that we produce must provide some sort of lead intelligence. Sales can then use this intelligence to try and have a conversation that leads down a buying path.

The bottom line is: if your marketing isn’t putting out content for people to find on a regular basis, you’re missing opportunities. Marketing strategy must be aligned with sales in B2B companies with a complex sale if they’re going to grow revenue—period.

This is important, so I’ll say it again, marketing’s new role in B2B is to drive one-to-one sales conversations digitally where salespeople either have difficulty getting their attention or are unaware of opportunities in the first place. It’s lead generation first, branding second. Branding in this case usually comes as a byproduct of this process when done well.

Even more critical, most innovative B2B companies know that it is now marketing’s burden to build as much of that trust online possible by providing thought leadership and lead intelligence in the form of engaging content that creates a unique experience for the consumer. In short, marketing must do the heavy lifting.

Marketing Like a Media Company

Some time in 2011, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City decided that it could not rely on its 150-year history to acquire enough new audiences—they needed to launch a massive digital initiative.

When your mission shifts from selling product and service to building audience and monetizing it later, how does that change the marketing that you would produce?

For the Met, they do creative storytelling in innovative ways. The example I like to point to is their Artist project series where they brought in 100 famous artists to the museum, put them on camera, and had them talk about their favorite piece and why. Then, they launched the series Netflix-style on their website so viewers can binge watch if they want.

Sreenivasan told me in an interview that he believes the future of every business is storytelling and finding the right way to tell the right story at the right time. And one of the biggest things he’s learned in his tenure at the Met is these lessons apply to every business, big and small, B2B and consumer.

That includes the importance of mobile, social, and video. But most importantly, it’s not about thinking of your audience as millions of people, even though that’s what they have at the Met, but rather it’s about thinking about the right people following you for the right reasons.

The point of this is example is that effective content marketing in B2B means thinking about your audience first, and connecting them with the right message, at the right time, and in the right sequence.

The digital experience must be so good that people want to stay connected to your content, and to have your audience participate in the conversation, you have to think like them.

Now, you certainly don’t have to build an entire news room (although that would be awesome!) but I show you this example because engaging an audience requires marketers to think differently. More like the mindset of a publisher.

In other words, think like a magazine and not like its advertisers. When publishing content, it’s all about what the readers want. It takes frequency (publishing at predictable intervals) and it takes database management (collection of digital behavior) to continuously serve up content that gets your prospect to pick up your publication at the newsstand (or read your email or blog post and want to consume more).

Getting to Know Your Audience

So how does content become a sales conversation anyway? It starts with the creation of content that is going to identify some lead intelligence on a prospect when they consume it. This is why the content strategy that maps to the sales process from the get go is so important.

But even Before you start pumping out blogs and buying marketing automation systems, it’s time to get to know your audience.

Doing that requires involving every part of your team that is client facing– from customer service, to account leads, to sales, to executives. They all know something about the customer that you don’t as a marketer.

For example, you might want to Interview your sales team about the types of customers they target. If they’re face-to-face with a prospect, how do they probe for painpoints? What did the sales conversation in a recent win sound like when they identified them as a prospect? In other words, what was the key issue that prompted the client to talk to you in the first place?

After interviewing colleagues, you can dig deeper by calling your customers and prospects and asking them to validate your assumptions.

Chances are, your customers were facing similar issues in their day-to-day lives as your prospects. Identifying those problems will inspire the content you’ll create to help them solve their problem and hopefully use you to do it.

I should also note that content at the top of the funnel cannot and should not focus on the products and services offered by the company. That comes much later in the sales cycle, when a customer is ready to make a purchase decision and you’re down to answering objections and running sales process.

Once you get that strategy in place and start developing content, you can then start to figure out how you’re going to distribute it so that it gets in front of the right audience and generates leads for sales.

Where to Find Content

If there’s any question about where to get content from, I’ll reiterate that sales and other customer facing job functions are a good place to start. They’re on the front lines with customers and prospects daily. They know what problems they typically solve, what common objections they hear, and what trigger events lead to sales conversations. That’s where you get content topics to generate top-of-the-funnel interest—by focusing on pain, pain, and more pain.

You’re going to need an ongoing process for extracting information from your subject matter experts so that you can communicate in mediums that make sense for your consumer. And you want that anyway because you want quality writing. So say hello to journalists, designers, videographers and other media personnel!

If there’s any doubt as to why many large companies are hiring journalists to write for them, it should be apparent now.

The Sales Pyramid

But anyway, let’s get back to sales and what the process now looks like with a demand generation engine providing marketing qualified leads.

Any good sales prospector should be able to use marketing’s support in the digital world to prioritize his or her prospecting efforts.

Jeb Blount, in his book Fanatical Prospecting, talks about a pyramid of prospecting where top sales performers view their prospect database as a pyramid:

At the bottom of the pyramid are the thousands of prospects they know little about other than a company name and perhaps some contact information. These are the coldest of the cold.

The goal with these prospects is always be moving them up the pyramid by gathering information, and qualifying. At the tip-top are highly qualified prospects who are moving into the buying window.

These are the highest-priority prospects and should be on the top of a sales representative’s daily prospecting list.

Once those top priorities have been exhausted, the sales person can move down the pyramid, following up on Marketing Qualified Leads and using lead intelligence to foster sales conversations.

If your sales people are always working at the bottom of the pyramid (the coldest of the cold) they’re probably not going to make quota. And even worse, if you’ve got good sales people who are always working at the bottom of the pyramid, you risk losing them to a competitor who can help them with marketing leads.

Measurement and Analysis

Of course, companies want to know the what content marketing’s return on investment will be, but it depends on several factors.

Let’s start with whether everyone in the organization has bought into the concept of content marketing. If the CEO is going to spend a few dollars to try it out, and 3 months later decide it’s not working and goes back to hiring more sales people, your ROI will be nada. (I’ve met several CEOs that fit this model exactly.)

Another question is, can you accurately measure your sales process now? In other words, where are your deals coming from now, and what percentage of them do you close?

Also, do you have technology in place such as marketing automation and a CRM, and do your sales people actually use it?

If your answer to all of those questions is yes, then it should be relatively easy to track some pretty significant numbers that will tell you exactly where to spend money and what needs to be fixed.

If not, then this is where you start: getting buy-in for content marketing, establishing a baseline for sales and marketing metrics, developing content, putting in the right technology, testing, and measuring.

If you are generating plenty of leads (or MQLs) every month, the statistics should show how many sales conversations that leads to. From those sales conversations, how many turn into opportunities? And of those opportunities, how many are we closing?

Playing around with those numbers will start to give you a sense of where to spend money.

If you’re closing a large majority of leads that come from various sources, but you don’t have enough “at bats” to move the revenue forward, you’ve got a marketing problem and you need to spend money to produce more qualified leads.

If you’re generating plenty of leads, but they aren’t turning into sales conversations, you could have a problem with the quality of content that your producing, or sales could be ill-equipped to nurture leads and run sales process.

Once you have real data, the measurement can even get more granular.

By determining your overall customer acquisition costs — all the money you spend on marketing and sales people for a given time period divided by the total number of customers you got in that time period — you can calculate all the way down to how much one lead was worth to you.

Content marketing done correctly should be completely measureable, giving you the ability to know where you’re going to have the best return on investment.

Finding the Budget

Acquiring new customers is expensive. It always has been.

Content marketing is no different because it’s a long game, and you should expect to make some significant expenditures in the short term to get it moving. It’s like pushing a giant boulder down a hill—it takes an extreme amount of energy to get it moving, and then it should generate momentum on its own.

So where to find the money for content? A lot of times, it’s about shifting available resources. I know—easier said than done. But If you’re currently spending marketing dollars on pay-per-click ads that have shown diminishing returns, of if you’re currently spending dollars to have a “presence at trade shows,” those are some good places to start.

Another place to look is the expenditures within your sales force. Do you have too many expensive sales people? Can any of the business development and nurturing functions be transitioned to an inside sales team?

But most importantly, stop hiring sales people because they promise a large rolodex of industry prospects that they can bring to the table. The only reason to hire more consultative sales people is that marketing and business development are sending over so many qualified leads that the closers can’t keep up.

Re-allocate and invest that money into a marketing front end that leads with great content that is going to add value to your prospects.

They’ll thank you with their business.

Consumers are searching daily on Google for products and services similar to your brand. Do you want them to find you? Studies on consumer behavior have shown that good online exposure is key to building and growing a business. Investing in the Best SEO services in St Petersburg, FL is, therefore, a wise decision.

[wtfzodiacsigns]

Signs Moon & Expression of Art

☾ I’ve always connected one’s moon sign with their creative preferences because emotions in art are ever-present. I am in no way suggesting that your moon is the only aspect in your chart that you should look to in order to understand your creative drive, although I definitely think that it is important regardless. ☽

Aries Moon: Starts many projects, has trouble actually finishing them. This is because new ideas are always coming to them and they are afraid to lose that initial inspiration. Likely to use bold color palettes; wants their work to make a big statement. They are not afraid to take risks and try things that may not work out. They may use art in order to cope with their often intense emotional patterns. If you really pay attention, you can see these feelings come to life in their art.

Taurus Moon: They find comfort in knowing that their passion for art is always something that they can go back to; it is stable. Likely to stick to neutral, soft color palettes. They don’t want to overpower their works with bold patterns and shades. They prefer to portray their message with subtlety. They tend to spin situations around in their works in order to make them more beautiful/appealing to the viewer. They are able to take negative experiences in their life and make them into something tangible.

Gemini Moon: Mercurial moons tend to have a diverse portfolio. One may call it “organized chaos.” Like the Aries moon, they tend to be on the more daring side. They are usually self-taught and have little regard for traditional techniques in whatever medium they practice. They can take inspiration from anywhere and their work can be difficult to decipher without a proper explanation from the artist; this is because they can take multiple ideas and memories and apply them to their designs without even realizing it.

Cancer Moon: Applying emotions to their art is the top priority. If they are not able to channel specific feelings while they are painting, drawing, etc, then it is almost impossible for them to get fully immersed in their work; they often enjoy playing music while they are working in order to help this process along. Their projects have a strong nostalgic quality to them. They are able to draw people in to their world without explaining anything in words.

Leo Moon: The messages in their art are very specific to their own lives, but they love to share it with everyone. Even if not many people can relate to their work, they tend to admire it regardless. In general, fire moons tend to gravitate towards warm colors and Leo is no different in this case. They enjoy and seek out praise for their projects, so they may enter in competitions and participate in showcases in order to establish a name for themselves in the community.

Virgo Moon: They usually have a set place and time that they like to do their work. However, their workspace is most definitely evident of a busy artist. They tend to put pictures, posters, articles, etc. on the walls in order to get inspiration. The messages in their art tend to be quite complex because they love to make people think about what they were trying to say. Most of them actually prefer to sketch here and there rather than commit to a large project.

Libra Moon: Instead of trying to make others guess what they were trying to say with their work, the Libra moon would rather be purposely relational. In fact, they want people to connect with their pieces and understand what the intent was behind the project. If people are left puzzled about the point of their finished work, they become discouraged. They might be hesitant about their ideas, causing them to start many works and toss them soon after. They tend to gravitate towards art styles that are pleasing to the eye and symmetrical.

Scorpio Moon: They tend to focus on topics that are swept under the rug in their works. The dark side of humanity is brought out in their projects. They love to shine a light on these controversial situations, especially because they are some of the only people brave enough to tackle such things. They prefer to work alone. If they are around others, they feel pressured and they may see a huge difference in the quality of their work. They cannot channel the intensity with people breathing down their necks. The public usually has a strong reaction to their work, either good or bad.

Sagittarius Moon: They find that being under the influence actually helps them a lot when trying to channel their creative energy. They don’t rely on any substances per se, but they are not afraid to experiment in order to get in to a certain mindset. The original intent may not match up with the final outcome of a Sagittarius moon’s work; this can frustrate them at times. However, it can also be a blessing that things don’t always work they way that they wanted them to. The Jupiter energy works in their favor regardless and by some mechanism of luck, the public usually loves their work.

Capricorn Moon: Usually, they tend to stick to classic and traditional styles of art. They are the most likely to take art seriously and want to pursue a career in the field. They are not only interested in pursuing art themselves, they are also deeply involved in art history. Capricorn moon’s usually have a comfort zone when it comes to what they are willing to try. Their medium of choice is usually oil painting because of it’s elegant and smooth texture. Nature and landscapes are what they are attracted to, even if it is not what they enjoy painting/drawing.

Aquarius Moon: It is important for them to channel other’s emotions and struggles in their art, rather than their own. To them, art is more about bringing awareness to injustices than anything else. Their style can be described as unique and unpredictable. You cannot possibly pin them down. They are drawn to psychedelic styles and neon color palettes. They want to make others feel as if they have traveled to another dimension when they view the Aquarius moon’s work. They turn the unexplainable into something that can actually be percieved.

Pisces Moon: They don’t see themselves as having any creative talent; however, this could not be further from the truth. Their work often reflects their inner confusion; they love styles that involve watercolor and a lot of blending. They connect deeply to the eyes, so that tends to be the easiest for them to draw/paint. Like the Cancer moon, they rely heavily on music in their performances. Their projects may revolve around spirituality, religion, drugs, and other mysteries of the universe. Their style of art is similar to the Scorpio moon, while romanticizing the taboos of life.

-Admin L

source: astro-vibes  Originally posted: ofallingstar

[entertainmentnewsblogworld]

Gautam Chaturvedi’s First Ever Short Film Work From Home Wins The Outstanding Achievement Award At Druk International Film Festival -DIFFMumbai, July 2nd, 2020: Recently, Gautam Chaturvedi was in the news for winning a prestigious award for his home production as an Actor, Director and writer Work From Home. Today, this beautifully scripted and shot film has been awarded the Outstanding Achievement Award at the prestigious Druk International Film Festival (DIFF). Scripted, shot and packaged during the lockdown, the film has brought about a revolution in how films will be made during this global pandemic. A one of its kind productions, showcasing how this sudden Lockdown has thrown many a lives off balance financially, emotionally and psychologically was written, shot and packaged keeping the staying at home protocol in check at all times. The movie deals with the intricacies of the life of a couple who have 2 kids and are married for over a decade, but soon enough, the cracks in their relationship show up and then life takes a sudden turn Gautam Chaturvedi, known for his role as Gaurav in Kahaani Ghar Ghar Ki, is the creative brain behind this film. While Gautam has been off the television industry for the past few years, his contribution to the world of  TV/films is remarkable. Starring Mouli Ganguly, Ridhiema Tiwari, Neelu Kohli and Gautam Chaturvedi himself, Work From Home is a creative brilliance that will soon be available exclusively on an OTT platform for the audience at large. Gautam Chaturvedi, Founder and Managing Director, Pine Tree Pictures said, “We are beyond delighted to see how well the film has been doing at film festivals. Druk International Film Festival being the second award feather for the film, our faith in good content that taps into the creative minds of the audience is just reinstated. We are thankful to the jury of the festival and can’t wait to see how the audience would receive this short film.” Mouli Ganguly said,” It was a unique experiment and creatively challenging as we all shot separately from our respective homes without any direct interaction with co actors. Yet, the final product looks like the whole movie was shot together and that is the real beauty of the film. We have already two awards and are positive of many more to come. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Gautam Chaturvedi for creating this film. And a huge thank you to Nilu Kohli, Ridhiema and our respective families who doubled up as our camera team.” Ridhiema Tiwari Added, “Shooting for Work From Home has framed the best times for me during this lockdown. This short film opportunity was initially just a positive grab for my own selfish interest to feed the artist within. I have known actor Gautam Chaturvedi now a multi Tasker for a decade now and we fortunately fall in the same category of passionate creatives seeking magic in simple things in life. We kept our faith in Gautam ,the characters we played and the script .We as a team are overwhelmed with this magnified victory and accolades this short film is receiving.” Sharing her experience, Nilu Kohli Said, “Mine was a guest appearance and I related to the part immediately. A concerned mother’s role just came naturally to me. Gautam was very particular about the way it has to be shot and I had to do it three times because of technical issues. But I am not complaining at all. It’s just to tell you all what a perfectionist my director is. I am immensely grateful for being a part of this wonderful film and am looking forward to doing a lot more work with Gautam.” Druk International Film Festival (DIFF) is a monthly live screening film, music, and screenwriting competition with a sole purpose to celebrate the joy of creation in the lap of nature. DIFF showcases an outstanding presentation of independent filmmaking, while also building a strong sense of community around the art of visual storytelling.   About Pinetree Pictures: Pine Tree is a complete Media solutions group, handling Event Management and Film Production. We like to believe that each piece of work that we do stands for something that is organic and natural – and is more than the usual fare that’s automated and mass-produced all around us. From Manufacturing Films to Training videos, from jingles to product films, from info graphic films to CSR films, music videos, 3D Films, TVC’s etc. – the power of ‘Film’ today covers a large spectrum of possibility & delivering the correct message to the correct audience. They have been instrumental in creating films with different objectives, audience, treatment & mediums for our clients across sectors.

[eddycurrents]

For the week of 13 November 2017

Quick Bits:

Babyteeth #6 opens the floodgates of story after getting through the initial hurdle of getting Sadie and Clark out of imminent danger. Donny Cates gives us more depth as to what’s going on broader picture of the world and introduces us to the cult geared to protecting and raising Clark.

| Published by AfterShock

Black Science #33 has the shit hit the fan as the confrontation between Grant and Kadir reaches its peak and then reality breaks. The mix of mad science and philosophy from Rick Remender on display here is wonderful, seeing a representation of Platonic ideals mapped onto quantum realities in a kind of unfurling of Gnostic cosmology is impressive. So too is Matteo Scalera’s art. He and Moreno Diniso really get to cut loose this issue and it looks wonderful.

| Published by Image / Giant Generator

Bloodshot Salvation #3 gives a revelation to the “soon” timeline of what’s happened to Ray, while in the “now” we get a confrontation between Ray and Daddy, Colin King helping out Magic, and Project Omen causing complications. I probably sound like a broken record, but Jeff Lemire, Lewis LaRosa, and Mico Suayan are doing some great things with this series.

| Published by Valiant

Brilliant Trash #1 is an interesting take on superheroes. It’s a mix of government conspiracy and potentially mad science, told from the perspective of a journalist looking for a story in the appearance of a V-like figure, Lady Lastword’s, final speech and death. Tim Seely’s got something interesting here. Priscilla Petraites’ art is also quite nice, kind of a mix between Jamie McKelvie and Phil Hester.

| Published by AfterShock

Dark Fang #1 continues the trend of not naming the protagonist in the body of the first issue. The solicitation copy and end piece are what’s needed to piece together the full premise of the series and name of the protagonist. That said, Miles Gunter does have a decent story here. It’s environmentalism through the lens of a centenarian vampire, Valla, who was friends with a fish until modern industry destroyed her ecosystem. But first, earning money as a cam girl and getting caught up in society’s obsession with cell phones and the internet. The art from Kelsey Shannon is a definite plus.

| Published by Image

Deadpool vs. Old Man Logan #2 is every bit as fun, humorous, and action-packed as the first issue. Declan Shalvey has a great feel for both Wade and Logan and Mike Henderson’s art is truly wonderful. Only two issues in and this is just a fun, must-have wild ride.

| Published by Marvel

Evolution #1 is a very strong debut issue with multiple voices brought together by the singular visuals of Joe Infurnari. Infurnari has a style that is a bit Tom Mandrake and a bit Bill Sienkiewicz and it is absolutely perfect. If you like David Cronenberg’s early horror films, even just a little bit, you owe it to yourself to at least check this out.

| Published by Image / Skybound

The Family Trade #2 continues Jessa’s investigations into Berghardt and Mikkaelsen despite the protestation and outright prohibition by her Family. Her technique of getting close by blending in as a simple cleaning woman is a nice touch. The end, though, suffers a bit in who exactly Jessa is speaking to. I think it’s supposed to be her uncle, but I’m not sure.

| Published by Image

Fence #1 gives me the impression that everyone, even the protagonist, involved in competitive fencing is an asshole. That’s not necessarily a good impression of the sport, and gives a poor outlook on who to “cheer” for in the endeavour, but it may be an accurate depiction. Especially since many sports seem to be populated by jerks.

| Published by BOOM! Entertainment / Boom! Box

Generation Gone #5 is a suitably insane conclusion to the first arc of this series. It’s violent, angry, and explosive - kind of like how you’d expect kids to react when they find out that the world is designed to see them fail. André Lima Araújo’s art has just been fantastic on this series.

| Published by Image

Hawkeye #12 is a team-up issue between Kate and Laura (All-New Wolverine) with Gabby and Jonathan in tow as well, illustrated by guest artist Michael Walsh who is easily proving he’s a force to contend with. This issue looks great and is fun as hell.

| Published by Marvel

Jenny Finn #1 now in colour. If you haven’t read this masterpiece of Lovecraftian lit from Mike Mignola and Troy Nixey before, now’s a good time to do so. If you have, especially since this has been reprinted and repackaged a few times before, you’ll have to decide whether or not you want Dave Stewart’s colour. There was something to be said for the original black and white, although the colour version’s not bad.

| Published by Dark Horse

Kill the Minotaur #6 is both an expected and unexpected conclusion to the series. Ariadne and Theseus’ confrontation of the Minotaur is suitably epic. I can’t say much more than that because they’d be massive spoilers, so enjoy this amazing artwork from Lukas Ketner.

| Published by Image / Skybound

Killer Instinct #2 does what I was afraid the first issue was going to do and dumps a lot of characters with intricate backstories from the game on us in one go. Where the first issue mainly focused on one character to ease us into the world, this issue gives us more of the Coven, a bunch of characters fighting over the Killer Instinct Tournament, and Jago. While the Jago and Tsar bits are fairly well executed, the central bit over Ultratech is a bit of sludge. As I said in response to the first issue, I’ve never played the game and know little about the world, so this felt a bit like being dropped right in the deep end. The art from Cam Adams is still nice, though.

| Published by Dynamite

Maestros #2 quickly installs Will as the new Maestro and he begins making sweeping changes to the multiverse’s society, trying to bring concepts like equality and freedom to a world that only seems to know subjugation under magical will. It’s an interesting exploration of sociopolitical ideas from Steve Skroce and naturally it brings about severe pushback from those previously in charge. And betrayal.

| Published by Image

Mech Cadet Yu #4 features the cadets first full on confrontation with the Sharg and it’s about as exciting as you would expect. Takeshi Miyazawa’s art is just wonderful and it’s really nice to see Yu thinking on his feet during the battle to ensure the continued survival of the entire team.

| Published by BOOM! Studios

Minky Woodcock: The Girl Who Handcuffed Houdini #1 is interesting. The relationship between Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has certainly been in the zeitgeist lately, this one doing something different and focusing on the end of Houdini’s career, long since the two had their falling out. Cynthia von Buhler sets up Minky looking into Houdini debunking spiritualists at the request of Doyle fairly well, but the main enticement is von Buhler’s art. She has a style that reminds me a bit of Melinda Gebbie and it works incredibly well for the smoky, pulpy atmosphere of the story.

| Published by Titan / Hard Case Crime

Misfit City #7 lines up the dominoes in this penultimate issue. Overall this has been a great series and I’m excited to see how it ends. That being said, I wish there were more. The world needs more girl adventurer books and this one has been excellent.

| Published by BOOM! Entertainment / Boom! Box

Ninja-K #1 is a damn fine new direction for Colin King, looking deep into the past of the Programme, dealing with the history of Ninjas A through L, and putting forth a mystery as to who killed Ninja-D and appears to be targeting the other remaining operatives. Christos Gage gives us a compelling mix of mystery and spy thriller that’s only topped by Tomás Giorello’s incredible artwork. Damn fine work.

| Published by Valiant

Rasputin: The Voice of the Dragon #1 begins another pre-Hellboy, pre-BPRD series tying numerous disparate threads together and giving more backstory on the world. This first issue focuses more on Trevor Bruttenholm tracking down a decrypted Nazi message, but it could be about a talking head describing how to prepare an avocado because Christopher Mitten makes everything look amazing. Thankfully, though, the story isn’t bad either.

| Published by Dark Horse

The Realm #3 reveals some chinks in the baddies’ armour as strong personalities clash. The artwork from Jeremy Haun is again one of the main drawing factors. This series just looks great.

| Published by Image

Retcon #3 finally gets around to the premise that Matt Nixon and Toby Cypress were on about in the interview in the first issue. I’m thinking maybe for a storytelling point, they should have led with this, but it does give the series a better cohesion and purpose. This was the make or break issue for me and Crowley ripped from time to tattoo a baby won me over.

| Published by Image

Star Wars: Darth Vader #8 continues Jocasta Nu’s infiltration of the Jedi Archive to retrieve an artifact from under the nose of the Grand Inquisitor. This issue gets a little...explosive.

| Published by Marvel

Star Wars: Doctor Aphra #14 is Emilio Laiso’s debut on the comic and the artwork looks gorgeous. He did a great job on the Rogue One adaptation and it’s nice to see him back on a Star Wars title. Even if I’m going to miss the hell out of Kev Walker’s art.

| Published by Marvel

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #76 allows no rest for the turtles as they return home from Dimension X, also after the brief excursion with the Ghostbusters. Damian Courciero looks like he’s handling the art chores for this arc and it’s a welcome addition. He has a darker, somewhat more realistic style and it suits the chaos and destruction going on with the Earth Protection Force’s first contact with the Triceratons.

| Published by IDW

Unholy Grail #4 continues this dark and twisted retelling of the Arthurian legend. Part of what really works about this series, though, is that it really isn’t that far removed from the other stories of glorious knights and magic, just given a different context,

| Published by AfterShock

Other Highlights: Adrift, Alien Bounty Hunter #2, Amazing Spider-Man #791, Ben Reilly: Scarlet Spider #10, Bolivar, Champions #14, Curse Words #10, Defenders #7, Descender #26, Doctor Strange #381, Dreadful Beauty: The Art of Providence, East of West #33, Guardians of the Galaxy #147, Horizon #16, Incidentals #4, Incredible Hulk #710, James Bond: Kill Chain #5, Mage: The Hero Denied #4, Mighty Thor #701, Not Brand Echh #14, Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #297, Postal #24, Punisher #218, Ringside #13, Secret Warriors #8, Sheena: Queen of the Jungle #3, TMNT/Ghostbusters 2 #3, The Wicked & The Divine #33, X-Men Blue #15, Zojaqan #2

Recommended Collections: Ab Irato, Goldie Vance - Volume 3, James Bond - Volume 1: Vargr, Journey to Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Star Wars: Captain Phasma, Luke Cage - Volume 1: Sins of the Father, Nancy Drew & The Hardy Boys: The Big Lie, Regression - Volume 1: Way Down Deep, Rough Riders - Volume 2: Riders on the Storm, Star Wars: Poe Dameron - Volume 3: Legends Lost, World Reader - Volume 1

d. emerson eddy knows that evolution is a mystery, full of change that no one sees. He sees the line in the sand.

[pendragonfics]

Archetype Glitch

Paring: Eric/Reader

Tags: female reader, nurse reader, set in Divergent, angst, crying, misunderstandings, fluff, established relationship. 

Summary: It's hard being a transfer. It's hard having grown up in Amity. It's harder, now you live a Dauntless life, beside your partner Eric, with his high profile job within the faction.

Notes: This was a request from my tumblr (I can't remember if it's from @susiephalange or here at @phalangewrites) who wanted to read some more Eric from Divergent. I honestly agree with Anon, because Eric is my smol evil bean. Anon, if you're reading this message, hope you like it!

Word Count: 1,980

Posting Date:  2017-05-19

Current Date: 2017-06-15

Even if it is the faction dedicated to courage, and bravery, strength, fearlessness - intimidation - you're not the perfect Dauntless. You're not sure anyone is, really. Except Eric. It was almost laughable that the two of you ended up together, after all that your initiation year went through, what, with the usual intimidation tricks and antics that eliminated more than its fair share of competition. While Eric had been an Erudite, you came from Amity, from a long line of red-and-yellow wearing people who had never strayed from their heavenly fields.

While he’s the leader that everyone respects, acknowledges, and works under for fear of punishment, you have kept your Amity roots, and wrapped them in Dauntless colours, and work in the infirmary. It’s not the caring that keeps you content (or perhaps it is) but the fact that you integrate your Dauntless spirit into healing the warrior faction when they’re inevitably checked into your area. You still wear black, like everyone else, and have your share of body art like the rest of them. It’s just…your strength is rooted in returning your patients’ back to them.

This wasn’t a problem until Max brought it up. It was more of a passing comment, than a cruel remark, but when at a meeting, spoke about the ‘match the two of you made’. Eric had mentioned it over dinner that, almost like an afterthought, but it stuck with you. What did Max mean, the match? Did he mean that the roots you two came from, or your occupation, disposition, level of seniority in the faction? Either way, the words were repeating over, and over, and over in your brain, keeping you awake beside Eric in the sheets.

When the glowing clock on the wall flicked to the other side of midnight, slowly, you slipped the sheets from your body, and crept into the other room. You shared an apartment in the higher levels of the faction, but the rooms were under his name, the allowance deducted from his pay. Eric had insisted on paying for it – saying that his salary was slightly larger than your own, and because of that, took charge. As always.

Your feet pad over the hardwood floors to the living area, where there is an assortment of minimalist furniture and a small bookcase. You slowly migrate to the chair that faces the other, tucking your legs under your body, and take in the room. Once again, the contents are filled with Eric’s things, remnants of his well-educated roots, bound and smelling sweet. In the moonlight that streams through the windows, you see your small collection of potted arid-climate cacti, your photograph you’d hung beside the bedroom entrance, of yourself and Eric. It had been taken the week after you’d both gotten the place, after a successful patrol.

There was a balance in the apartment. But in your mind, there was not. There was a weight in your head. Not cowardice, or fear. Just…a niggling. A thought.

You stay there, silent, counting your heartbeat as the passing minutes drift by, listening to the noises of the night that lie beyond the walls of the place you call home in Dauntless. In Amity, there was never a curfew, and affection was never frowned upon. Maybe you were upset that Eric withheld his emotions from you. Maybe you were restless with your lack of importance beside Eric. Maybe it was just simply what Max had said. Either way, you lost track of time, deliberating over these impunities in your head until Eric’s form could be seen from the entrance to the bedroom.

“What – come back to bed,” It isn’t a demand, but it isn’t a question, either. You hesitate, but heeded his words. Not too long later, you are following him into the bedroom, laying upon the mattress, fitting into his side like a missing puzzle piece. Sleep follows not too long after. Restless sleep follows as well.

 ---

In the morning, you wake to an empty bed, the sheets pulled tight and neat upon his side. You had picked the bedspread, a greyscale grid pattern. Eric had not protested, and it was often on the bed. Your heart falls at the lack of presence of your partner, but the heart is not where a Dauntless operates. The clock on the wall reads only a little while until you are to report to your post at the infirmary, leaving you little time to dwell in the bedsheets in your misery.

Dauntless were brave. You’d talk to Eric about it as soon as you saw him later.

Not too soon, you’re up, dressed, and down in the wing of the sickbay where there is only an initiate nursing a broken thumb and a tattooist with a strain injury. The other attendants are working on the paperwork from the days before, and you are left to be the healer on duty. Not too soon, half the day has gone by, and you have been there to take care of almost thirteen different injuries. It’s only natural for Dauntless to get hurt, and you’re only doing your job. Without people like you, there would be nobody to take care of those in your faction who were only doing as the Dauntless Manifesto directed.

The match the two of you made.

You don’t realise how late it is until your superior officer reminds you that it’s time to clock out, and that there’s a visitor for you in the waiting area. You’re quite out of the program, and that’s before one even can account for the full day of working in the infirmary. So, it is quite honestly much to your shock that in the waiting room, standing there is Eric.

“Hey,” you hum.

He notices your sway, how your eyes seem to see the space around where he is standing, rather than where he is, regards the baggage you’re under eyes carry, the way your face appears to be tired, almost…dissatisfied. “I’ve taken the night off,” He tells you. “And given you twenty-four hours’ time off from your post.”

You frown. “Why?”

Eric, for once, has no words when they should be from his mouth. That was one thing you liked about him – that he always had a thing in his brain, ready to go. He’d been the top on the leader board for a reason, and you had been six from the equilibrium between exile and survival. While he was blessed with natural good looks that integrated into the warrior faction, you had hair that got tangled often, and the last piercing you had gotten had been infected, even after your meticulous care to the area.

“Why?” He echoes your words. Brow quizzical, he adds, “I want to make it up to you. For not supporting you when Max made that remark the other day.”

“Er –,” your brow softens, “– let’s take this somewhere private.” You insist, and begin to walk the way home. Softer, you add, “Please.”

Eric nods.

 ---

It’s quiet as you both enter the apartment. Even your boots, which usually squeak with a vigour are silent. It’s almost as bad as the thoughts you were left to the night previous – the quiet is frightening. Your gaze turns to Eric, waiting for him to speak, watching him through your tired haze from the work day. His hair is flatter than usual (lack of product, or emotion, you don’t know), with lines beside his eyes that suggest he has aged since the last time you’d had the time to truly take in his appearance.

You speak first. “Something about what Max said?” you put out into the air between you. “What did he mean?”

“_______, it was in a meeting.” He nods, but his eyes, those grey eyes are not on you but his hands that he wrings. “An incidental remark. We were speaking of the leaders of the other factions, how Kang, and Reyes are handling their private lives according to the news.” By the way he’s talking, you can’t help but feel that it’s going to be a long discussion. Slowly, you walk to the chairs – and listening still, you unlace your boots, tug your hair down, crack your knuckles out of stiffness. “Someone…I can’t remember who, remarked you were Amity born.”

You frowned. “Where is this going?” You put bluntly. “I’ve had a long day.”

“Sorry.” It’s unlike him to apologise – it’s probably one of the only times you’ve heard him say that word. Ever. “They assumed that because were both transfers from other factions, that the bond between us for posterity’s sake of the faction would seem…illegitimate.”

You feel your face turn red, red with fury. It was never a red you were allowed feel as a child, but damn it, you are Dauntless, and you’ve earned your place here. You know that he knows that, because every transfer earns their place after the last task. It’s set. Illegitimate? My ass, illegitimate. “What does that really mean?” You stand, stomping toward Eric. “That you’d rather show off to your superior officers that you are a better Dauntless than I, or in a higher position, or superior – than care for your partner’s well being?” The heat passes down your neck, warming your whole face in anger.

“I want to make it up –,” He goes to speak.

You rise to your full height. Though he’s musclebound and tattooed, his menacing façade he puts up for training is gone, and there’s just the man you love before you. But at this moment, you can’t think that you love him. You’re furious.

“There was nothing wrong with us before you told me about this!” You almost roar. “The match we make? I love you. You love me. We’re both Dauntless. No more, no less than anyone else.” You state, almost shaking in the rage that’s flowing through your blood. “You don’t think that I wake every day to think that you’ll find someone better than me? That I’m just a throwaway piece of furniture you decorate your rooms with?” Your voice has dropped to a whisper.

“________-,”

You shake your head.

“I will never be the perfect Dauntless.” Your voice quivers, and the shaking of your body has turned into something different, sadder. Your breaths are catching in your throat, and coming out as sobs. “If they could make an epitome, that would be you, but me? I’m like – like an archetype glitch.” You sniff. “So please, Eric. Do what you want to me. End the relationship. Find someone more suited to your posterity. Whatever it is, don’t break my heart. Because I might have an Amity one still, but my fists are Dauntless.”

He says nothing, but reaches out, wrapping his arms around you. The two of you stand there, no words shared, but the sobs that rack your chest, the sound of his hot breath by your ear. The two of you stay in this position, until you move, and his grip relaxes.

“I’ll never leave you for something stupid like that,” Eric whispers. His eyes are focused on yours, unwavering. But you can’t bring yourself to gaze upward to meet them. “I’ll never leave you, period. Max was wrong for saying those things. Babe, ________, please. Look at me. I love you.”

You sniffle. “Are you sure?”

Eric nods, his hands moving to cradle your face. “Yeah. So much. I know I’ve been putting you on the backburner all this while, you’re – I wouldn’t be the leader I am without you.” He brings his head down, bowing to whisper in your ear. “And nobody’s the perfect Dauntless. Not even me.”

You gasp, but it comes out as a tearful hiccup. “I – I don’t know why, but that sounded like blasphemy.”

Eric chuckles, his thumb moving to wipe a tear from your eyes. “There’s the ______ I love.”

[justforbooks]

My Life as a Writer

The following is an interview Philip Roth gave to Daniel Sandstrom, the cultural editor at Svenska Dagbladet, for publication in Swedish translation in that newspaper and in its original English in the Book Review.

“Sabbath’s Theater” is now being translated into Swedish, almost 20 years after its original release. How would you describe this book to readers who have not yet read it or heard of it, and how would you describe the main character, the unforgettable Mickey Sabbath?

“Sabbath’s Theater” takes as its epigraph a line of the aged Prospero’s in Act 5 of “The Tempest.” “Every third thought,” says Prospero, “shall be my grave.” I could have called the book “Death and the Art of Dying.” It is a book in which breakdown is rampant, suicide is rampant, hatred is rampant, lust is rampant. Where disobedience is rampant. Where death is rampant.

Mickey Sabbath doesn’t live with his back turned to death the way normal people like us do. No one could have concurred more heartily with the judgment of Franz Kafka than would Sabbath, when Kafka wrote, “The meaning of life is that it stops.”

His book is death-haunted — there is Sabbath’s great grief about the death of others and a great gaiety about his own. There is leaping with delight, there is also leaping with despair. Sabbath learns to mistrust life when his adored older brother is killed in World War II. It is Morty’s death that determines how Sabbath will live. The death of Morty sets the gold standard for grief. Loss governs Sabbath’s world.

Sabbath is anything but the perfect external man. His is, rather, the instinctual turbulence of the man beneath the man. His repellent way of living — he is a kiln of antagonism, unable and unwilling to hide anything and, with his raging, satirizing nature, mocking everything, living beyond the limits of discretion and taste and blaspheming against the decent — this repellent way of living is his uniquely Sabbathian response to a place where nothing keeps its promise and everything is perishable. His repellent way of living, a life of unalterable contention, is the best preparation he knows of for death. In his mischief he finds his truth.

Lastly, this Sabbath is a jokester like Hamlet, who winks at the genre of tragedy by cracking jokes as Sabbath winks at the genre of comedy by planning suicide. There is loss, death, dying, decay, grief — and laughter, ungovernable laughter. Pursued by death, Sabbath is followed everywhere by laughter.

I know that you have reread all of your books recently. What was your verdict? And what was your opinion of “Sabbath’s Theater” while reading it again?

When I decided to stop writing about five years ago I did, as you say, sit down to reread the 31 books I’d published between 1959 and 2010. I wanted to see whether I’d wasted my time. You never can be sure, you know.

My conclusion, after I’d finished, echoes the words spoken by an American boxing hero of mine, Joe Louis. He was world heavyweight champion from the time I was 4 until I was 16. He had been born in the Deep South, an impoverished black kid with no education to speak of, and even during the glory of the undefeated 12 years, when he defended his championship an astonishing 26 times, he stood aloof from language. So when he was asked upon his retirement about his long career, Joe sweetly summed it up in just 10 words. “I did the best I could with what I had.”

In some quarters it is almost a cliché to mention the word “misogyny” in relation to your books. What, do you think, prompted this reaction initially, and what is your response to those who still try to label your work in that way?

Misogyny, a hatred of women, provides my work with neither a structure, a meaning, a motive, a message, a conviction, a perspective, or a guiding principle. This is contrary, say, to how another noxious form of psychopathic abhorrence — and misogyny’s equivalent in the sweeping inclusiveness of its pervasive malice — anti-Semitism, a hatred of Jews, provides all those essentials to “Mein Kampf.” My traducers propound my alleged malefaction as though I have spewed venom on women for half a century. But only a madman would go to the trouble of writing 31 books in order to affirm his hatred.

It is my comic fate to be the writer these traducers have decided I am not. They practice a rather commonplace form of social control: You are not what you think you are. You are what we think you are. You are what we choose for you to be.

Well, welcome to the subjective human race. The imposition of a cause’s idea of reality on the writer’s idea of reality can only mistakenly be called “reading.” And in the case at hand, it is not necessarily a harmless amusement. In some quarters, “misogynist” is now a word used almost as laxly as was “Communist” by the McCarthyite right in the 1950s — and for very like the same purpose.

Yet every writer learns over a lifetime to be tolerant of the stupid inferences that are drawn from literature and the fantasies implausibly imposed upon it. As for the kind of writer I am? I am who I don’t pretend to be.

The men in your books are often misinterpreted. Some reviewers make the, I believe, misleading assumption that your male characters are some kind of heroes or role models; if you look at the male characters in your books, what traits do they share — what is their condition?

As I see it, my focus has never been on masculine power rampant and triumphant but rather on the antithesis: masculine power impaired. I have hardly been singing a paean to male superiority but rather representing manhood stumbling, constricted, humbled, devastated and brought down. I am not a utopian moralist. My intention is to present my fictional men not as they should be but vexed as men are.

The drama issues from the assailability of vital, tenacious men with their share of peculiarities who are neither mired in weakness nor made of stone and who, almost inevitably, are bowed by blurred moral vision, real and imaginary culpability, conflicting allegiances, urgent desires, uncontrollable longings, unworkable love, the culprit passion, the erotic trance, rage, self-division, betrayal, drastic loss, vestiges of innocence, fits of bitterness, lunatic entanglements, consequential misjudgment, understanding overwhelmed, protracted pain, false accusation, unremitting strife, illness, exhaustion, estrangement, derangement, aging, dying and, repeatedly, inescapable harm, the rude touch of the terrible surprise — unshrinking men stunned by the life one is defenseless against, including especially history: the unforeseen that is constantly recurring as the current moment.

It is the social struggle of the current moment on which a number of these men find themselves impaled. It isn’t sufficient, of course, to speak of “rage” or “betrayal” — rage and betrayal have a history, like everything else. The novel maps the ordeal of that history and, if it succeeds, by doing so probes the conscience of the society it depicts.

“The struggle with writing is over” is a recent quote. Could you describe that struggle, and also, tell us something about your life now when you are not writing?

Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life. It was also my good luck that happiness didn’t matter to me and I had no compassion for myself.

Though why such a task should have fallen to me I have no idea. Maybe writing protected me against even worse menace.

Now? Now I am a bird sprung from a cage instead of (to reverse Kafka’s famous conundrum) a bird in search of a cage. The horror of being caged has lost its thrill. It is now truly a great relief, something close to a sublime experience, to have nothing more to worry about than death.

You belong to an exceptional generation of postwar writers, who defined American literature for almost half a century: Bellow, Styron, Updike, Doctorow, DeLillo. What made this golden age happen and what made it great? Did you feel, in your active years, that these writers were competition or did you feel kinship — or both? And why were there so few female writers with equal success in that same period? Finally: What is your opinion of the state of contemporary American fiction now?

I agree that it’s been a good time for the novel in America, but I can’t say I know what accounts for it. Maybe it is the absence of certain things that somewhat accounts for it. The American novelist’s indifference to, if not contempt for, “critical” theory. Aesthetic freedom unhampered by all the high-and-mighty isms and their humorlessness. (Can you think of an ideology capable of corrective self-satire, let alone one that wouldn’t want to sink its teeth into an imagination on the loose?) Writing that is uncontaminated by political propaganda — or even political responsibility. The absence of any “school” of writing. In a place so vast, no single geographic center from which the writing originates. Anything but a homogeneous population, no basic national unity, no single national character, social calm utterly unknown, even the general obtuseness about literature, the inability of many citizens to read any of it with even minimal comprehension, confers a certain freedom. And surely the fact that writers really don’t mean a goddamn thing to nine-tenths of the population doesn’t hurt. It’s inebriating.

Very little truthfulness anywhere, antagonism everywhere, so much calculated to disgust, the gigantic hypocrisies, no holding fierce passions at bay, the ordinary viciousness you can see just by pressing the remote, explosive weapons in the hands of creeps, the gloomy tabulation of unspeakable violent events, the unceasing despoliation of the biosphere for profit, surveillance overkill that will come back to haunt us, great concentrations of wealth financing the most undemocratic malevolents around, science illiterates still fighting the Scopes trial 89 years on, economic inequities the size of the Ritz, indebtedness on everyone’s tail, families not knowing how bad things can get, money being squeezed out of every last thing — that frenzy — and (by no means new) government hardly by the people through representative democracy but rather by the great financial interests, the old American plutocracy worse than ever.

You have 300 million people on a continent 3,000 miles wide doing the best they can with their inexhaustible troubles. We are witnessing a new and benign admixture of races on a scale unknown since the malignancy of slavery. I could go on and on. It’s hard not to feel close to existence here. This is not some quiet little corner of the world.

Do you feel that there is a preoccupation in Europe with American popular culture? And, if so, that this preoccupation has clouded the reception of serious American literary fiction in Europe?

The power in any society is with those who get to impose the fantasy. It is no longer, as it was for centuries throughout Europe, the church that imposes its fantasy on the populace, nor is it the totalitarian superstate that imposes the fantasy, as it did for 12 years in Nazi Germany and for 69 years in the Soviet Union. Now the fantasy that prevails is the all-consuming, voraciously consumed popular culture, seemingly spawned by, of all things, freedom. The young especially live according to beliefs that are thought up for them by the society’s most unthinking people and by the businesses least impeded by innocent ends.

Ingeniously as their parents and teachers may attempt to protect the young from being drawn, to their detriment, into the moronic amusement park that is now universal, the preponderance of the power is not with them.

I cannot see what any of this has to do with serious American literary fiction, even if, as you suggest, “this preoccupation has [or may have] clouded the reception of serious American fiction in Europe.” You know, in Eastern Europe, the dissident writers used to say that “socialist realism,” the reigning Soviet aesthetic, consisted of praising the Party so that even they understood it. There is no such aesthetic for serious literary writers to conform to in America, certainly not the aesthetic of popular culture.

What has the aesthetic of popular culture to do with formidable postwar writers of such enormous variety as Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, William Styron, Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, James Baldwin, Wallace Stegner, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Penn Warren, John Updike, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, Robert Stone, Evan Connell, Louis Auchincloss, Walker Percy, Cormac McCarthy, Russell Banks, William Kennedy, John Barth, Louis Begley, William Gaddis, Norman Rush, John Edgar Wideman, David Plante, Richard Ford, William Gass, Joseph Heller, Raymond Carver, Edmund White, Oscar Hijuelos, Peter Matthiessen, Paul Theroux, John Irving, Norman Mailer, Reynolds Price, James Salter, Denis Johnson, J. F. Powers, Paul Auster, William Vollmann, Richard Stern, Alison Lurie, Flannery O’Connor, Paula Fox, Marilynne Robinson, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, Hortense Calisher, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler, Jamaica Kincaid, Cynthia Ozick, Ann Beattie, Grace Paley, Lorrie Moore, Mary Gordon, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Eudora Welty (and I have by no means exhausted the list) or with serious younger writers as wonderfully gifted as Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, Nicole Krauss, Maile Meloy, Jonathan Lethem, Nathan Englander, Claire Messud, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer (to name but a handful)?

You have been awarded almost every literary prize, except one. And it is no secret that your name is always mentioned when there is talk of the Nobel Prize in Literature — how does it feel to be an eternal candidate? Does it bother you, or do you laugh about it?

I wonder if I had called “Portnoy’s Complaint” “The Orgasm Under Rapacious Capitalism,” if I would thereby have earned the favor of the Swedish Academy.

In Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “Roth Unbound,” there is an interesting chapter on your clandestine work with persecuted writers in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. If a young author — a Philip Roth born in, say, 1983 — were to engage in the global conflicts of 2014, which ones would he pick?

I don’t know how to answer that. I for one didn’t go to Prague with a mission. I wasn’t looking to “pick” a trouble spot. I was on a vacation and had gone to Prague looking for Kafka.

But the morning after I arrived, I happened to drop by my publishing house to introduce myself. I was led into a conference room to share a glass of slivovitz with the editorial staff. Afterwards one of the editors asked me to lunch. At the restaurant, where her boss happened to be dining too, she told me quietly that all the people in that conference room were “swine,” beginning with the boss — party hacks hired to replace those editors who, four years earlier, had been fired because of their support for the reforms of the Prague Spring. I asked her about my translators, a husband-and-wife team, and that evening I had dinner with them. They too were now prevented from working, for the same reasons, and were living in political disgrace.

When I returned home, I found in New York a small group of Czech intellectuals who had fled Prague when the Russian tanks rolled in to put down the Prague Spring. By the time I returned to Russian-occupied Prague the following spring, I wasn’t vacationing. I was carrying with me a long list of people to see, the most endangered members of an enslaved nation, the proscribed writers for whom sadism, not socialism, was the state religion. The rest developed from that.

Yes, character is destiny, and yet everything is chance.

If you would interview yourself at this point in your life — there must be a question that you haven’t been asked, that would be obvious and important, but has been ignored by the journalists? What would that be?

Perversely enough, when you ask about a question that has been ignored by journalists, I think immediately of the question that any number of them cannot seem to ignore. The question goes something like this: “Do you still think such-and-such? Do you still believe so-and-so?” and then they quote something spoken not by me but by a character in a book of mine. If you won’t mind, may I use the occasion of your final question to say what is probably already clear to the readers of the literary pages of Svenska Dagbladet, if not to the ghosts of the journalists I am summoning up?

Whoever looks for the writer’s thinking in the words and thoughts of his characters is looking in the wrong direction. Seeking out a writer’s “thoughts” violates the richness of the mixture that is the very hallmark of the novel. The thought of the novelist that matters most is the thought that makes him a novelist.

The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters, in the juxtaposition of those characters and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make — their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized.

The thought of the writer lies in his choice of an aspect of reality previously unexamined in the way that he conducts an examination. The thought of the writer is embedded everywhere in the course of the novel’s action. The thought of the writer is figured invisibly in the elaborate pattern — in the newly emerging constellation of imagined things — that is the architecture of the book: what Aristotle called simply “the arrangement of the parts,” the “matter of size and order.” The thought of the novel is embodied in the moral focus of the novel. The tool with which the novelist thinks is the scrupulosity of his style. Here, in all this, lies whatever magnitude his thought may have.

The novel, then, is in itself his mental world. A novelist is not a tiny cog in the great wheel of human thought. He is a tiny cog in the great wheel of imaginative literature.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[activebodi-blog]

How I got over 2.1 Million visitors to my website

It’s been 5 years.

5 Years, over 2 million visitors and a hell of a lot of fun (and traffic!).

No, I’m not talking about this website, but another one I own which talks about Martial Arts movies. It’s had it’s up and downs and experienced a lot of publicity in it’s time.

Over the years this website has range from 1000-2000 visits per day, mostly from SEO, and despite me putting far less effort into it these days it seems to keep following that trend.

It’s reached a fairly passive level of work and is a cool asset to have up my sleeve.

But how did I grow this website to 1000-2000 visits per day?

It was a lot of work, but more importantly a lot of learning.

There is a pretty basic formula I was able to discover through trial and error, playing around with content ideas, keeping active and always pushing forward.

So I thought I’d share with you here exactly what I did so you can grow your traffic and hopefully get even better results than I did. Some tips may apply to you and some may not.

So here we go!

Below I have a video discussing this, but also the written tips underneath.

Please Note: By playing any videos on this page, you hereby consent to the use of YouTube’s Cookies.

Subscribe to my YouTube Channel Here

Now, onto the written post!

I aimed for low competition

As I mentioned much earlier, this website is about Martial Arts movies.

When I first got interested in watching martial art movies I went online and did a search. Whilst there were plenty of movie reviews around, there were hardly websites specifically any dedicated Martial Arts films.

So I considered throwing my hat into the ring to start watching movies and writing reviews – but I wanted to make sure I could compete so I did some solid research and still it seemed to be a low competition topic.

Beyond that, I also searched for certain things to see if anyone had written about them, both in the beginning and whilst growing the website.

So I started the website about a topic in a space that had hardly any other websites and I also wrote posts that had little or low competition in Google Search Results.

These days more of these sites are up, but getting in early definitely helped secure my spot :)

I started a blog

It may seem obvious but yeah, I started a blog.

Blogging is an easy platform for really pumping out articles and reviews without having to find a home somewhere on your website for them, since they all end up in your blog feed.

But there’s more to it than that.

The blog has a theme and a mission. The first post I wrote introduced the website and a concept behind the whole blog. I found a list of the top Martial Arts Movies (250 movies) and my mission was to review them all.

So now people weren’t just reading movie reviews, they followed me on a personal challenge and then connected with me as I went.

People don’t just want an anonymous voice, they want a person to connect to and get information from. But that leads me to my next point.

The focus was on offering value

I know, I watched a tonne of TV – but I built my reviews based around informing people of the style of action they would find and if I would recommend the film.

The website was about suggesting good movies to watch.

So people had a resource of finding recommendations for martial arts movies as I slowly ranked all of these films on my own list they could refer back to. I offered a central and easy spot to see which movies I recommended, linking off to each review.

I further expanded on this by writing about the actors themselves and useful blog posts full of recommendations based on a theme. I offered valuable information for anyone who was looking to see some quality martial arts films.

I sought out people willing to promote me – and many did

Now getting onto the fun stuff!

Sure, I created a Facebook page and Twitter Profile and posted there, but being new I had no fans whatsoever. So I needed to leverage someone else’s audience. I looked up a number of people in the space, such as actors and fan pages,leaving comments and sending messages.

I didn’t straight up ask for a share, I instead focused on talking to them first and creating a connection. With one person in particular (an actor named Scott Adkins) sharing my page. More on that here.

This lead to about 500 page likes that day and kick starting the blog at about 200 visits per day. Which gave me a solid start instead of trying to reach a single person at a time and building that way.

I then listened to my audience and tailored a lot of the social media content to their liking, which gave my page a very high engagement rate and lead to a lot of traffic. But the real growth came from search engines afterward as Google’s algorithm recognized the social signals and gave me a good boost.

I hit a wall, analyzed and made adjustments

The initial boost took me so far, but things began to plateau.

As the initial novelty of my reviews started to wear off, a small group of people kept reading but a lot of people dropped off. I still had decent traffic but growth had stopped since I wasn’t getting the social signals.

This was a sign that the content I producing wasn’t something people really wanted that badly.

So I experimented with a bunch of different ideas and also checked my analytics to see what was performing best. I then moved my focus to a couple of areas, including top lists (more on that down the page).

I started a small YouTube channel

I noticed that videos I posted on social media, made by other people, were getting the most interaction and engagement – especially short music videos with a mixture of fight clips.

So I made my own!

These videos did relatively well with one of the videos getting millions of views (currently just under 5 million views).

The medium worked well since video was the same medium as the martial arts movies themselves. I linked off to the website and it still drives traffic to this day. The key for me here was to share and reshare videos and prompt other people to share also.

However, I did stop at one stage because the next tip really took me to the next level.

I limited writing reviews and focused on lists

I phased out the movie reviews almost entirely.

I accomplished my goal of reviewing the films on the list as my analytics clearly said one thing – film reviews get hardly any traffic while a few ‘Top List ‘ posts I wrote brought in most of the traffic.

So I wrote a series of list posts and took the traffic of the size well over 2000 visitors per day.

This works because people on search engines quite often want quick answers – like which “Donnie Yen movie to watch next?” and lists give people a number of quick and easy answers whilst being SEO friendly.

These same list posts went completely viral on social media despite, at this stage, having a bit of competition to work against (this was no longer low hanging fruit). I learned a few things about blog posts and SEO, leading to the next tip…

I made a point to write 3000 – 5000 word posts more frequently

I noticed my longer posts often performed better, but they were also top list posts.

So I investigated and found a number of articles talking about how blog posts with over 2000 words often performed the best. Backlinko touches on this here, although the word count has dropped a little in recent years.

So I aimed to make my blog posts comprehensive.

A good tip for this is to turn each item in a top list into a short 300 word article, or make each subheading a short 300 – 500 word article. So instead of writing a 3000 word article, you write 10 short 300 word articles.

I started an email list

“The money is in the list”

Creating an email list is one of the best things you can do for you existing traffic. Once people sign up you drastically increase their chances or returning (assuming you actually email them).

Email gives you the option to touch base with your audience far more effectively than using Social Media as it doesn’t come down to algorithms and likes as much.

People who have signed up to an email list that offers value will continue to read those emails, so you can strengthen your connection with them.

I created an autoresponder series

I created an automated funnel that sends out a series of emails over six months, starting frequently (every 2 or 3 days initially, and slowly dialing it back to once every 10 – 14 days, in order avoid being too aggressive and prompting people to unsubscribe.

Email can easily turn 1 visit into 10 or 20 repeat visits. That’s a powerful factor in increasing traffic.

This auto-responder series has a number of emails within it designed to sell affiliate products and means that for every visitor that signs up, they are likely to return a number of times over 6 months (the current length of the series of emails).

I send out occasional updates between this to keep things fresh, but it’s only about once per month at this stage.

While this still isn’t the highest source of traffic for me, it is definitely making me the most money as my audience is used to me, trusts me and follows through with purchases via my affiliate links.

I constantly promoted old posts

You may note that I mentioned the sharing of older content on my email list once people signed up.

This is a great way to get people onto those old posts but I also promoted old posts on Social Media using tool like Buffer and Revive Old Post.

You can also make a point of linking back to older posts within your new posts so that when people land, they continue to explore your website and consume your old content. This will decrease your bounce rate and improve the quality of your traffic.

This is something a lot of people don’t do but it has really helped me rank a lot of the articles on my site.

I have more information here about promoting old posts if you’re interested.

I worked on my website speed

A slow website sucks and people don’t hang around waiting just to read from it.

I took a lot of steps to drop the load time of my site right down so that less people would bounce and I’d get more traffic from search engines.

I wrote a post on this exact process right here called How I Managed to Speed up WordPress – from 20 to 2 Seconds Load Time.

Basically, I removed all of the useless BS from my design.

I redesigned, moved all content above the fold.

I started off with a really tall header/navigation and elements above each blog post.

After getting my hands on the Divi Theme, I simplified the blog layout and put more effort into the other pages. I brought the post content up as high as possible, and simplified it.

When I discovered over half of my users were using phones, I made the design dead simple and put effort into the logo to sharpen up the appearance without having too many crazy design elements distracting on the page.

This meant people could land and see what they wanted straight away. This helped to keep people on the website.

I decreased posting frequency, but continued to update old posts

Since the website has hundreds of decent posts already, there was no need to update so frequently.

As most people finding the site now are new visitors, it’s more efficient to funnel them through the email list and show them existing content as the value remains the same as I keep the posts relatively up to date.

I started with 3 or 4 posts per week and was pouring everything into this website. I now batch a number of posts with the aim of posting one per month since I covered so much ground with the site and have reached a point of diminishing returns when it comes trying to think up with new topics.

There’s always more that can be done, but not making this my whole life was important as it wasn’t intended to be a business that replaces my fulltime income (despite the fact I do make a nice little chunk of passive income from it).

To grow and move onto other things to make online business more manageable, I have been slowly converting this site into more of a niche site that is less hands on but updated enough to keep delivering value to my audience.

I built an asset, both for myself and martial arts movie fans and now I do my best to maintain that asset.

Now it ticks over seamlessly…

The only reason it worked was value and, for a while, consistency.

I found the most searched for topics and personalities in my niche and wrote resourceful articles about them, giving people an easy place to stop and learn more.

I do my best to keep up engagement, but overall it’s a very passive website now and I believe sometimes it’s best to move onto other things. Every so often there might be a little surge of interest and work to breathe a little more life into it, but otherwise keeping a consistent monthly update seems to be working for now.

You can do that same!

The above property wasn’t only a good project, but it was a fantastic learning curve that allowed me grow as an online blogger and content creator.

Experience speaks volumes so all I can say to you is give it a go!

If you already have a website, hopefully this has helped you to learn how to grow it. If you haven’t got a website yet, check out my free email course to get started.

Otherwise I’d love to hear any questions or thought you may have below! Thanks for reading and let’s keep the conversation going :)

The post How I got over 2.1 Million visitors to my website first appeared on Creator Impact.

source https://creatorimpact.com/2million-visitors-to-my-website/

[burnslaura]

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Then you visualize that stream of pure joy.When you receive your attunements for all of these is better suited to being used for the most suitable method for combining this universal energy.The differences are that the healer has only begun to become more sensitive to subtle energies within our body because it goes with the requisite training?It is a very specific location on the Earth.Dysfunctional teams have moved toward harmony and peace.

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It's a procedural way, how you really heal yourself but aren't sure yet, then maybe you can already channel Reiki.Indeed, it is debated whether Reiki is an abundance of clients, and in earth healing.I prefer using a technique I developed called the Master Symbol.The title gives prospective clients confidence and helps the healee's situation for the treatment.This is done by Reiki practitioners have anecdotal evidence that Reiki is not a religion.

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