#like it was just a personal spreadsheet i could figure out how to format here

[charmac]

ack sorry I was rude about the bathroom problem script I misunderstood what you meant </3 thank you for being a great resource for the sunny stans

No worries lmfao I was being crypto maybe unnecessarily but more for fun… trying to lure people to my blog… lol

But I promise my main goal here is to make sure fans have access to as much Sunny content and resources as possible!

That’s my whole motivation for this blog, after years of searching the depths of the internet for old stuff and running into dozens of dead links (why!! @alwayssunnyfxx !? why did you privatise/delete so many videos!?) and watching almost every social media site fall apart to bad AI search and bots, I want a place where that’s not going to happen (as long as Blogger stays in existence, I guess)

It’s definitely a work in progress, and there’s still a lot to come, to be added and collected, scripts included, but hopefully we will soon have a great resource and fun and interesting site for the community, and a place for great future content and, of course, Season 17+ updates :)

[nekropsii]

How do you create such a cool fanadventure like yours, and how do you make character bibles?

Aw, thank you, that's very flattering!! I'll be sure to pass your compliments onto the rest of the team, too, lol!!

I don't know how much help my advice will be here, since we're still in the Active Development stages, but I'll give what I've learned anyways, both through the project and through other means. Here are some things that will be your best friend in the long run!! Feel free to ask for follow ups or clarification!!

Content Warning: Long, I Guess!

The first thing you need is an idea. I know, that's the most basic thing to start with, but when you have some kind of base concept you want to work with, everything else falls into place with it. Hopefully, anyways. As you develop the story, this foundational concept will also develop. You can have as many beautifully crafted characters as you want, but if you have no plot, or no unifying concept behind the story, they'll go completely to waste.

The second thing you need is something I don't see a lot of people spare themselves, and it ultimately leads to their downfall: TIME. Things like this take a lot of time, and that's not just referring to the active run of the comic. You'll want to give yourself plenty of time to develop the story and it's characters before you really make any publishing moves. Don't just make a basic concept and your main cast and post your first page on the spot- give yourself some time to develop things and get as much planned out as possible for the scope of your story. You'll save yourself a lot of stress.

Dedication!! So much dedication!! Commitment, commitment, commitment. Lots and lots of it. So, so, SO much dedication to the craft. You have to really be passionate what you're doing if you wish to carry through with it and have a good time whilst doing so.

The question here about Character Bibles is very interesting, and very important!! I don't see a lot of people talk about Character Bibles in their writing advice online, and I feel like that's a bit of a crime. To those uninitiated, a Character Bible is an outline document that tells you and whoever else is working on the project everything they need to know about a specific character. It harbors every character detail you could possibly think of- their basic introductory details, their personal history, personality, quirks, everything!! They're incredibly important when it comes to this kind of project- an absolutely necessary thing to have on hand for quick and easy reference!! The aim of the game with them is to not forget literally anything. It's all about consistency and cohesion.

Personally, for Sovereignstuck, we have several bibles per character using varying levels of detail on their specified subject matter. No clue if this is a common method or not, but it’s what works for us. There are some good outlines for what you could write in them online, but my personal advice is to start with charts of the most basic information you have on a character- name, age, orientation, gender, race, class, aspect, et cetera. After that, you can get into the more in-depth stuff. I recommend having a little “Stream of Consciousness” document where all you do is ramble about whatever comes to mind first with the character, write down any questions you have for yourself, figure out answers when you can, et cetera. Stream of Consciousness is a lot more approachable than just pumping out a well structured, well formatted chronological essay on the character off the bat, especially when you’re in early stages and aren’t too familiar with them yet.

If you’re working with large casts, which you most certainly will be if we’re talking traditional SBURB-type fanventures, then spreadsheets are your friend- they are fantastic methods of keeping track of a lot of basic information at once, all with ease of quick reference + comparison. I can maybe make a spreadsheet template for fanventure setups later, if anyone’s interested.

Also, you’ll probably need bibles to keep track of a lot of things in the story! A great example is your personal interpretation of Mythological Roles. It’s generally just a good idea to have some kind of reference page on what your magic system is. Doing all this writing seems overwhelming at first, but you really get the hang of it as you keep doing it.

Also, as general advice, be selfish. This is a project you’re working on for fun, so if you stop having fun, feel free to drop it- whether that’s temporarily or permanently. Put yourself first. Ideally, you will be having fun working on this, and that’s the most important aspect of it all. If you stop having fun, find out why and try to solve the issue! Feel free to hit the bricks literally whenever! Even Hussie did!

Hope this helps at all! Have a lovely day!

[salt-volk]

Regarding PANL and the Difficulty of a Tagging System

Hi, PANL mod here. I had considered staying out of this conversation for a while, but after seeing some harsh and misguided comments I feel the need to speak up.

To the person who submitted post 700628616701181952 and said "honestly at this point stop blaming T3nsh1 and start blaming PANL." and made some comparisons to FR's GASP pinglist...

First of all, no, it's not okay to blame the accessory artist OR the person who maintains a publicly available pinglist for this situation. The accessory artist did not deserve any of the inflammatory asks, and they have the right to use PANL. I helped create PANL as a resource to help accessory artists, and I don't appreciate being shamed because it lacks a functionality that is very hard to implement. Secondly, while I would ideally like to add a tagging system to PANL down the line, it's simply not feasible for me to do so right now (for reasons I will get to later in this post). Finally, if this was such an important issue to you, I would have much rather you brought this up to me privately so I could directly address your concern. Using an inflammatory anonymous post isn't an effective way to get your idea heard in a constructive manner.

To everyone else, I'd like to address why GASP (FR's custom skin pinglist) has the luxury of a comprehensive tagging system while PANL doesn't (and probably won't for the foreseeable future).

For context, PANL was created 4 years ago when the Dappervolk was still in beta and the pet accessory community was much smaller. This was a collaborative project between a few friends and myself who had previously been a part of the FR skin community. Of everyone who previously worked on that project, I am the only one who still plays DV (somewhat) actively and still engages with the accessory community. This means that I am the sole person who maintains PANL, whether it be adding new pets or other new features.

Back when I was actively making FR accents (about 5+ years ago), GASP was incredibly clunky and frustrating to use as an accent artist. While I did partially model PANL after the old GASP, one of the goals I personally strived for was to make a pinglist that was easy and intuitive to use. In addition, since DV had far more pets than FR and released them more frequently, I had to format PANL in a way that could easily accommodate new pet entries as they were added.

As of now, GASP has been cleaned up significantly, is easy/intuitive to use, and has a comprehensive tagging system so that people can easily choose what they do or don't want to see. Additionally, GASP has 12 mods to maintain pinglist entries, as well as a coder who made an off-site functionality to automatically generate pinglists based on the tagging system. GASP is a wonderful resource for the large FR accent community, and has the support of a dedicated team to maintain it.

Meanwhile, PANL hasn't really changed that much from its original iteration 4 years ago. Since everyone else left the project, I am just one person who is proficient with Google Sheets but barely has any coding experience. I simply don't have the time or knowledge to make PANL into an equivalent of the revamped GASP. To accomplish this, I would have to...

reformat and re-code the spreadsheet that contains the 100+ pet pinglists

determine which tags and how many tags to use for the tagging system.

code an offsite functionality to generate pinglists based on these tags

figure out a way to easily add new pets as they are released on-site

ping everyone on all 100+ of the old pinglists to notify them of the revamped system

and finally, maintain ALL pinglist entries by myself since this will most likely not be a self-editing pinglist.

I work full-time and I am incredibly busy outside of work, so I cannot dedicate my free time to an incredibly time-intensive project, especially since I am doing this all by myself.

For those of you who are asking in good faith for a tagging system for PANL, this is something I genuinely do wish to implement eventually, but I cannot make any promises due to my limited time and resources.

To those of you shaming me for not implementing a tagging system sooner. Really think about what your demand entails. Really think about how realistic it would be. I made an entire laundry list of what a revamped PANL would look like, so you're welcome to do it all yourself if it's that simple to you.

I had already been on semi-hiatus before all this due to general frustration with the site's slow updates and my increasing workload irl. But after recent events, I'm just even more burnt out and tired. Depending on how the rest of the year goes, I might take another extended break and hand off PANL to someone else while I'm gone.

[haloburns]

sooooo the new year is coming up and I want to get back into tracking my word count, because I wrote better when I was doing that, so I pulled up my 2022 word tracker that i got from sunnydwrites here on tumblr and started messing around with it. I had already edited it a lot last year since it didn't have formatting to begin with. in the process of attempting to make it simpler for myself, i accidentally over complicated the formulas and made a mess. so i abandoned it after invisobang and haven't fucked with it since

but my motivation has sucked ass lately, and i needed some more. so i pulled this up, copied it so I could have a fresh space and started fixing!

three days later, i'm done!

here's a peak at my massive wip list and their goals! i have a few wips that actually aren't on here (a whole whopping… 3? or 4?) because I don't actually plan on working on them soon. they're more ideas without any actual words behind them. these are all of the ones i switch between on any given day… (there's 42, in case you were wondering.)

we'll see how this goes! i like this spreadsheet much better this year because a) it's color coded and b) it has all current wips i've got already open, with room to create more as needed AND i updated it to allow me to input the current word count on the docs i've already started while not affecting the word tracking, but counting towards the goals.

....i like spreadsheets a lot, okay

if you like this, i made a normal person version with all the same additions as mine. but if you really like these spreadsheets, please consider supporting the person who did the hard part of figuring out the formulas! i just fucked around with what they'd already done to make it work better for me!

here's to another productive year of writing!

[fanfic-reading-challenge]

2022 Multi-Fandom Event

We're baaaaaack! *cackles*

Hello! First of all I'd like to thank @jandjsalmon for essentially being my 'beta' as I developed this second year's Fanfic Reading Challenge. You did so much, and deserve tons of credit for this alongside me! @attractiverock also helped by looking over new tasks and asking some really spectacular questions that helped develop what I think is a really superior challenge this year. Three cheers!!!

But now... It's time to get ahead/on top of the doldrums of 2022 and immerse ourselves in fantasy worlds --- The Neverending Story will always be a classic exactly for that reason --- because we all need a break from the world we live in, right? I know that the 2021 challenge helped relax me and others who participated, and hopefully the trend can continue into this year! (But don't forget to be a good, productive, and caring citizen of Earth, because everyone needs love these days.)

Before we get into the brass tacks of the basics new participants will need/want (though this is all repeated on the first tab of the challenge spreadsheet, and in more detail!), let me give you the link(s) to the challenge and to two wonderful reading log tools @jandjsalmon and @juuls developed to make keeping track of your reading that much easier! (It can also be used for books!)

And here they be...

The Long-Awaited 2022 Fanfiction Reading Challenge!

Open it! Click 'File'! Make a copy! It's yours now! We can't spy on it! Now personalize it, and start reading your hearts o... well. Really, read just as much as you always do! xD This we do know!

The above spreadsheet includes:

Tab 1, the FAQ/Rules/general info section. A welcome page!

Tab 2, Regular Mode

Tab 3, Hard Mode

Tab 4, Extreme Mode

Tab 5, Swappables (see the challenge spreadsheet or blog FAQ for more info on what these are (when the latter is updated)). To put it simply, however, they are tasks you can swap out for any other challenge task you don't wish to complete.

Tab 6 and 7, 'Fic Tracking Sheet' and 'Reading Log', created by @jandjsalmon and @juuls respectively, are there to use if you wish. Both fic tracking tools (to see what you've read over the course of the year, like this example of mine from last year) have their pros and cons, so give each or neither a try, and figure out what works best for you if you want to keep track of each fic. This is not necessary to complete the challenge, though!

Jandy's Fic Tracking Sheet

Juulna's Reading Log

These here, above, are separate copies of the logs if you so wish to keep your files separate from the challenge or... I mean, you could just want to keep track of what you read without even participating in the challenge! *shrugs* Who am I to judge?

For further assistance, here's a link to my reading log from 2021, so you can see how I (sometimes in a very hodge-podge way) kept track of what I was doing, reading, and how I was labelling fics, adding fics for the future, etc.

Don't worry, it may seem like a lot (!!) but it's really quite easy to navigate and understand, and you are always welcome to ask me questions at any time. :) The first step is to open the spreadsheet and then make a copy of your own. Then we can talk if you need to!

(If you need another format other than Google Sheets, like Excel or Word or something else, please let me know so I can get those to you ASAP!)

So what is this 'challenge(s)'? Here are the basics:

The event runs from January 1st to December 31st, 2022. If you started a fic in 2021 but finished it in 2022, that absolutely counts in full towards the 2022 challenge and word count. Anything you read before you start this challenge (whether in January or May or October) counts too!

Signing up: You don't need to sign up at all! You can just grab a copy of the challenge spreadsheet and fill it out however you wish (or even keep track of your tasks in an entirely different manner like a Word doc). Declaring your intention to participate is more of a thing if you want to be held accountable for your goals, but it's not like we're going to be angry with you if you don't finish any of it!

This challenge operates on the honour system. If you said you completed a fic for a certain task, that's between you and whichever ghost/saint haunts/watches over you. Come January 2023, all I'll ask is just to see the document you've used to keep track of your challenge, so I can match it up to the numbers which determine which prize you get!

Yes! Prizes! Here's an example of Juulna's 2021 badge for completing hard and regular mode:

Badge(s) created by the amazing and incomparable artist @saganarojanaolt, who I will be commissioning for next year's badge and a banner as well! (Until then you get my shoddy banners.) They based this particular art on my own basset, Ygritte, and I could just stare at it forever. <3 Here's the link to the post with the other badges!!

So what do I have to do? … Just read!! Have fun! Enjoy yourself! And fill out the challenge spreadsheet if you'd like any of the following badges (further info on the FAQ page or on the spreadsheet itself):

~~~ Participant Prize: Complete at least one task from the challenge!

~~~ Regular Mode: Complete at least 80% of the regular mode tasks, which is the equivalent of 100/125 tasks, regular mode only.

~~~ Hard Mode: Complete at least 90% of the hard mode tasks, which is the equivalent of 78/87 tasks, hard mode only, along with the previous requirement of 80% of the regular mode tasks being completed.

~~~ Extreme Mode: Complete at least 95% of the extreme mode tasks, which is the equivalent of 62/65 tasks, extreme mode only, along with the previous requirements of 80% of the regular mode tasks and 90% of the hard mode tasks being completed. (Grand total of at least 240/277 task completions.) … it's easier than it sounds. *snorts*

~~~ and some secret prizes you can unlock with no clue that you did just that until the end of the year!

Please help signal boost this post, as I only have so much reach into so many fandoms, and it's a rather small number! I will be encouraging friends of mine to reblog this, and I would love it if you could as well. Everyone deserves a distraction this year (wasn't it just 2019 last year???), especially if it keeps you happy, occupied, and away from those who sit just a wee bit too close to you!

That's about it for the Year Two Opening Post! I need a nap now...

But...…

The most important thing of all, in the end..... is to have a frickin' blast, my loves! <3

[jq37]

On a scale of 1-10, how difficult is it to make a podcast? I’ve been following ANA since you first announced it (I’m so excited for it) and the other day I came up with an idea that I think would make a good series

Hey, thanks for the message! And thanks for being interested. Absolutely No Adventures has been a lot of fun to put together and it's nice to see that people are looking forward to it.

As for your question I'd say maybe a 6? But that's a really incomplete answer and I did a lot of searching for help on how to get started when I decided to do this so I'll give you  more in depth breakdown of the steps and if you have more questions you can totally message me off of anon.

(1) Write The Thing

So yeah, no getting around it. The first thing you have to do is just write the podcast. For some people, this is the hardest part. For me, it was probably the easiest part because it's the thing I was most familiar with. You already have an idea, which is great. So now you probably want to sit down and figure out things like is this a limited miniseries or will it be on-going with multiple seasons? How long will each episode be?

You also want to make sure you write for the medium. For example, in a book, you can just say, "She hugged him." But if it's audio, you have to make there's some kind of indication for that (ie: Man: Oh, and now we're hugging).

Format doesn't matter too too much as long as it's consistent. I used film script format in Celtx (which is free) but people also use Google Docs. Just pick what's easiest for you and get going.

I also highly recommend you finish a full season of scripts (or the whole set if it's a mini series) before you move on. Some people write as they go and if you want to do that, cool, but it's one less thing to worry about once you're in production and you don't want writer's block to slow you down once you're already going.

(2) Casting

So this is where I left my comfort zone and had to learn to do things I was unfamiliar with. The good news here is, there are a lot of actors available to be a part of projects like this for varying amounts of money or no money at all if it's an interesting enough project. I will advocate for paying people if you can though because I wanna make money off of my art someday so I think it's only fair to reciprocate. If it is unpaid, just be upfront about that. It's common among indie projects so it's not scandalous or anything.  

Anyway, the basic process here is you write up a casting call that says what the project is, what the deadline is for auditioning, and has some audition lines for each characters (called sides). Then you post on Twitter which has a pretty active voice actor community plus some other places like reddit and certain FB groups and auditions will start rolling in. Casting calls tend to spread--people came to me from Discords I'd never heard of. Once you get a bunch you can pick who you like or, if you can't decide, invite back some people for callbacks and then pick.

I think 2 weeks is a good length of time to keep auditions open, longer if you're looking for something really specific.

It's also possible to simplify this step if you happen to know friends who have mics and wanna help or if you want to do a podcast with a very small cast--maybe even just one person who could be you. There are a number of podcasts with that format. I maybe should have mentioned this during writing but I'll mention it here instead. Anything you have to write, you will have to produce, so keep that in mind. Like, when you're writing, it's easy to have a bunch of extras and sound effects and crazy things happening, but remember that you have to bring that all to life later, so maybe a different character can give that exposition so you don't have to cast ANOTHER person as an extra.

(That being said, most actors I've worked with are chill with doing an extra voice or two.)

Oh! Also. Time zones are a thing. Keep that in mind. I do no regret casting an Australian, a Brit, and Americans across the country because they were all fantastic, but it was hell to schedule.

(3) Recording

So there are 3 main ways to record--in person in studio, remotely together, and remotely apart.

Option one is kind of a no-go right now because of Covid so let's talk about the other 2.

Remotely Together means you get all your actors on a Zoom call with you and they're all in their studios and you record as if you're all in the same room. I did this for ANA and I think it's the best way to do it cause people get to react to each other in real time which is great. The only thing is, it means you have to line up everyone's schedules which is a total bear. Still, if you can do it, worth it.

Remotely Apart means you give everyone their scripts and tell them to send in their lines in x weeks. I did this for some episodes of Secret Podcast Number 2 and it works fine. But for the more emotional eps, we still recorded together. This method is good because it gets rid of timing troubles which was necessary since we're doing a December release (which, trust me, is crazy quick for what we’re doing), but there are some things, you want people to be able to adjust their intensity levels for in the moment.

Either way, but especially in scenario 2, I'd suggest you do a table read first where everyone gets on call and reads through everything. It helps everyone get a feel for each other so they're not going in cold.

Wrt directing, it can feel a little weird to tell people how to talk or inflect or how much they should be crying, but, as long as you're polite, just go for it. They're actors. They can take the notes. That's what they do. All of my actors were always super great about it.

(4) Production

Alright so you have lines in from all your actors.

The next question is, how are you going to handle your production? The actual putting together of the lines and cleaning them up and balancing and adding effects and all that?

I specifically wrote ANA to have relatively simply sound design and it was *still* too much for me to handle so I opted to outsource for that and it was for sure where most of a budget went. If you happen to know how to do this or have the time to learn, you'll def save yourself some money. It is still very time consuming though. The one part that I did do--deciding which takes to use from the lines my actors sent (aka: picking takes) and putting them together to send to my sound guy--took super long as is.

If you're going to hire/recruit someone to do this stuff for you, I recommend you do it before you cast because they'll be able to let you know if the actors who want have compatible audio quality.

IDK what standard procedure is here but the way it works with my guy is I send him lines and then he puts stuff together and sends me a draft of the episode. Then I say what I want changed in an excel spreadsheet with time stamps and we go back and forth until it's done.

(5) Ancillary Stuff

Theme music! You probably want that! There are a couple of routes you can go here. You can get something from a music library--either totally free or for a relatively small fee. This is the most cost effective but will probably more generic and likely in use somewhere else if it's fully free.

You can write it yourself if that's a thing you're good at obviously. Or you can pay someone to do it which will probably cost you a couple hundred bucks but will be totally tailored and unique.

Cover Art! Also very important. People do judge things by their covers so I def rec getting a really dope one made. Canva is also your friend for like icons and stuff.

A Website! You'll want at least a basic one for like contact info, transcripts, stuff like that. I just use Carrd. You can get a pretty classic, website-like setup by using sections and you can link to a custom URL for only like 13 bucks a year which is great.

(6) Marketing

OK so, I'm gonna be real with you, this is the step I'm working on now so I'm still figuring it out!

Besides posting on social media and stuff, you also need to make a press kit which is basically a doc with all the info about you and the show. You can see mine on the ANA site.

I also have mood-board-y graphics I made on Canva to drop with each ep (or ahead of them. Haven’t quite decided). 

I will say, I’ve made friends in the community and a lot of them have hyped up my stuff without me even asking. Which isn’t me saying, “Make friends for what they can do for you.” Gross. What I’m saying is that just participating in the community can help.

Anyway, this is getting way too long. I hope this was at least somewhat helpful. Like I said, if you (or anyone else) has more specific questions, hit me up!

[phoenotopia]

2020 March Update

Happy New Year! Well, I guess it's a bit late for that...

Much of what transpired in the past few months will fall under polish and bug-fixing. Will and I have a mutual friend who got married, so I had the occasion to visit Will to attend the wedding as well as have Will playtest the game in its most complete form yet. He logged 24 hours of playtime and just reached the entrance of the final dungeon. Then we had to call in for the night since it was 5 AM, and I had a flight to catch in the morning.

His completion rate where we stopped was 42% of Heart Pieces, 33% of Energy Gems, and 44% of Moonstones. So... I think we have a pretty lengthy game!

This will take a while to playtest & polish... Will's daytime profession is QA Engineer so he's pretty great at catching bugs. From his playtest, we jotted down 200+ items to fix/adjust. Some as small as a simple misspelling, and some more significant (like Gail being unable to jump when standing at the edge of a steep slope). I'm about half-way through fixing that list...

(Will’s living room where much playtesting was done)

Here are some other things we've accomplished in the past few months. A lot of it falls under polish and bug-fixing, which won't sound outwardly impressive, so I'll dive in a bit under the hood.

-------------------------- Item Balancing --------------------------

There are over 200 items in the game. Of which, 90+ are healing items. While much of their flavor text was already written, their stats weren't yet finally decided. So a large effort was spent to balance them as well as possible. Initially, I balanced items by observation (ex: "The player is relying on this item a lot, so I will nerf it...") Now, I've moved to a more systematic way of doing things. I made an equation that takes in all of an item's parameters, and spits out a score. The higher an item heals, the higher the score. The longer an item takes to consume, the lower the score. And so forth.

As usual, I used google spreadsheets, since they support equations. I could tweak the values of a healing item, and immediately see how its final score was affected. I also made use of automatic color formatting, so a field becomes highlighted red, if it's particularly bad, or green, if it's particularly good. Of course, the sheet is just a guideline. The aim wasn't to make all items have the same final score, but that they made sense for what they were and when you could get them. Late-game items tend to have higher overall scores versus early-game items. Some items, like doggy biscuits, have notoriously low scores across the board - as a joke!

-------------------------- Cooking Systems --------------------------

Another thing that had to be done with the healing items was finally determine their cooking sequences. 38 healing items could be cooked and will transform into something else. The way I specified that an item could be cooked was to add a a little snippet to an item's "meta data". An example would look something like, "COOK,57,62,ABXY,10,1.5,1".

In order, this specified the item_ID that would result on success (57), the item_ID that would result on failure (62), the button sequence (ABXY), the time you had to complete the sequence (10 seconds), how quickly the cursor should move (1.5x speed), and if the item multiplied on success (1). The system appears simple enough - but it was actually extremely inefficient!

For one, this system didn't allow random button sequences - all "berry fruits", when cooked would have the same button prompts and in the same order every time (ABXY). Initially, I thought having set button sequences would be a feature, but in practice, it was less fun. 

Two, this system wasn't human-readable at all. I'd see a sequence of numbers, forget what they were, and have to look them up over and over.

But the biggest problem was that you couldn't evaluate an item's cooking difficulty from these numbers without manual testing. At 1.5 cursor speed, how many times does the cursor pass the center panel in 10 seconds? Maybe that's 15 times... for a 4 button sequence, the player has 11 opportunities to miss - that's too wide a berth for failure. The system also had variable penalties - if you misspressed a button prompt you loss time on the cooking meter. If you didn't press anything, you missed the opportunity, but not the time - but the clock was still ticking, so you did lose time, just not as much. In the end, the difficulty of cooking each item was all over the place. It was also possible to create "unwinnable" scenarios if I made the button sequence too long, the time too short, or the cursor speed too slow. Testing each item manually to ensure doability was too tedious and unreliable - it was a mess!

Which is why, the underlying cooking system was revamped. The new meta data looks like : "COOK,57,62,seq_length,5,spd,1.5,ease_add,2". This is a lot more readable. Beyond the first 3 entries, the arguments could be specified in any order. And their meanings were easy to understand.

"seq_length,5" means a random button sequence of 5 will be generated (no need for me to personally generate it)

"spd,1.5" means the cursor moves at 1.5x speed. I could also leave this field out to get a default value of 1x cursor speed.

"ease_add,2" - the biggest improvement to the system is how we now approach difficulty. We streamlined a miss-press and a missed opportunity as the same level of "mistake", and difficulty is framed as, "how many mistakes is the player allowed to make and still have a successful result?" By default, the player is afforded the ability to make 2 mistakes, and "ease_add,2" bumps the number of allowable mistakes to 4. We then automatically calculate how much "time" the player should have to cook something based on its cursor speed, how long the button sequence is, and how many mistakes the player is allowed to make. This was a more sensible and efficient system that let me knock out all 38 healing item cook sequences in one sitting!

-------------------------- Badges Nearly Done --------------------------

As you may recall from the last update, I was working on implementing the badges.

Thinking up the badge and having its graphic drawn is just the first half. Underneath, the code also needs to be made to track all the relevant player stats - how many times the player fished, ate, got money, used a certain move, etc. Some badges require extra guards, because they can be spoofed. For instance, the "Treasure Hunter" badge is obtained when the player has collected XXXX RIN through the course of your journey. However, there is something like a "gold exchange" in the game, where you could circularly trade gold and RIN to boost this number artificially. It's important to guard against cases like those.

So far, 30 of 33 badges are implemented. The last three have to do with late-game things that have inter-dependencies that we're still figuring out. The Speed running badge for instance is still dependent on two things. One, I need to speed run the game a few times to see how fast it's possible to beat the game and decide finally what's a reasonable time-limit. Two, there's actually a time-keeping bug which can inflate the game time if the system is left in sleep mode. I don't expect either things will be too hard to figure out - just gotta find the time for it.

-------------------------- Script Extra Polished --------------------------

We continued to polish the script, which I thought was basically done before. We added some extra NPCs here and there, and fleshed out the world with lore text where it seemed appropriate. In the end, the game's script ballooned to over 100,000 words! Hah... It's definitely DONE now however!

Some interesting things I noted as I was polishing old text - there were quite a few instances where Gail talks. I began the game's development with the idea that Gail should definitely talk since I wanted her to be a more active participant in what she chose to do. But I discovered later that if Gail talks, but only talked a little, she comes off as a very reticent person. There's no middle lane here - you're either all in or all out.

If Gail was a silent protagonist, she still talked symbolically. She is understood to be talking based on how people react to her - kinda like Link. So that's the direction I went with in the end (again). When Gail has occasion to talk, it comes in the form of a player dialogue choice. She also has an inner voice when she needs to remind the player to do something.

Another reason I went with this direction, is for brevity. Take this exchange for instance: QUEST GIVER : Can you help me find this super rare ingredient? GAIL : Maybe. I can't make any promises...

If Gail is silent, I can reduce those 2 lines to 1. QUEST GIVER : Can you help me find this super rare ingredient? GAIL : ...

-------------------------- Business Taxes --------------------------

Not too exciting, but new year means I gotta do taxes for the business. They're a lot more complicated than personal taxes, and more expensive! Since the game hasn't sold anything, you would think there'd be nothing to file. Hah! If only... The business is there so we can act as a legal entity and record expenses for when we do start selling. I really want to focus on making games, but there’s a small percentage of it that is sometimes boring and dreadful (-_-) ... still it needs to be done.

------------- Why no Public Beta Testing? -------------

As you may have noticed, I haven't put out any public calls for testing help despite being at that stage. Some have offered to help, which I appreciate! But sadly, I cannot accept. Here's the story for that.

Two and a half years ago, I got my hands on a console dev kit - that's very exciting, so I hurriedly took the steps to convert my dev station to be console-capable. After about two weeks, I had the console version working and integrated into my workflow, so all appeared good...

4 Months later, an artist needed an updated PC build to test some new art assets, so I went to build a new PC version. We use Unity, so generally you just need to click your desired build target, and hit "build". However, I now discovered that by attaching the console "hooks" into my work environment, I could no longer build to PC... It was possible, from my end, to test the game from the dev station in dev mode, which was why it went undiscovered for so long.

I did try to excise the hooks, but proved unsuccessful after a day of work. I decided to take this as an opportunity to focus exclusively on the console version first, which afforded me some niceties. Knowing that there's a standardized control scheme meant I could make full use of the control stick for the fishing mini-game. I also didn't need to create a rebindable keys menu - which is a MUST for PC versions... Most importantly, it lets me focus on making the one version as good as possible before moving onto the next. I have NO idea how those other guys release on all platforms at once...

Chalk it up to inexperience. In my defense, this will be my first commercial release, so bear with me. Don't worry, I still plan to make the PC version! It's a bit unconventional, but we're just going to go in the reverse direction of the usual. Console first, then PC, then other consoles. Wherever it makes financial sense, there we will be. (Sorry Ouya!)

Back to the original question - that's why I haven't sent out any public calls for playtesting. Current playable builds of the game are locked to my console dev kit. So actual playtesting unfolds in a very closed setting. Like what I did with Will, I literally sit behind the playtester, breathe down their neck, and watch them play, taking notes all the while.

But since I'm observing the player directly, even just one playthrough nets me a TON of bugs and adjustment tasks. So it evens out I think.

-------------------------- Trailers, Release Dates, etc. --------------------------

Alright, get your frowns ready...

We finished two trailers, and they're raring to go. BUT! We can't show them yet... We're sort of at an awkward spot where we're waiting on some conversational threads to conclude. Say we win a slot in a show - that'd be a HUGE plus for us - but that may also be contingent on us having NOT shown anything substantial yet. The game in its unrevealed state is a negotiating chip. So we're trying to leverage that... and you can only do the reveal once...

We also want to have some "actionable" items in the trailer - a launch date you could mark on your calendar, a wishlist, a website you can visit, etc. So since those things aren't entirely lined up yet, we can't let the trailers rip just yet...

Right now, I can only say we're *aiming* for a late Q2/early Q3 launch. But I can't commit to anything concrete yet. As soon as we know, we'll happily sing it from the rooftops. I hope I can update this blog sooner with good news, but if things move slowly again, I'll send out the next "we're alive" update 2 months from now (end of April).

I know it's frustrating to have nothing major after so long still, so I captured some gameplay footage... May it sate your hungers!

-------------------------- Footage 1 : Fishing --------------------------

You've seen pictures of the fishing, but never video of it in action. Well, here it is!

(And right after I uploaded the video, I noticed there actually was a video of fishing before. D’oh)

The idea is simple. First, get the lure in front of a fish, and assuming the fish isn't scared, it will soon bite. Then begins a fight sequence, where your energy meter is pitted against the fish's energy meter. Whoever's energy outlasts the other's wins.

The fish's resistance is represented by a red moving circular subsection. You fight the fish by pushing the control stick and keeping it on the subsection, which will dart around and try to escape you. Bigger and tougher variants of fish will do a "shake" which will reverse the wheel. When the wheel is reversed, so too are the controls, so it gets extra tricky!

While fishing, your energy meter doesn't recover, so one of the ways you level up your fishing ability is by finding energy gems to increase your max energy. There's another way - but we'll keep that a secret.

-------------- Footage 2 : Kobold Boss Fight --------------

You can actually skip the next section if you'd prefer to be surprised and you find your hunger for info sated. That's how I prefer to consume the games that I know I'm going to get. If you're still hungering for info, and you don't mind the slight spoilers, then feel free to proceed!

The next video shows the new Kobold Boss fight. Let's take a moment to reflect on the old game's visuals and how far it's come...

(we've come a long way since the time of the flash game)

You'll notice the Kobold boss has a name now - Katash! He's a significant enough character that he's earned it. The second thing you'll notice is that he looks better!

Some people have humorously pointed out that the old boss looks like Wolf O'Donnel from Star Fox. There's a funny story behind that. Basically I asked an artist to draw me a space wolf. And the artist, whom I'm assuming wasn't familiar with Wolf O'Donnel, drew that - all of it - all the animations and everything. The first time I laid eyes on it, it was already done, so it was too late to ask for edits. So I just ran with it.

That was seven years ago. Nowadays, I know to involve myself more in the process. I ask for just the design first, and we don't move forward with animations until we're happy with the design. Life lessons!

By the way, if you like Katash’s personal boss theme, give it a lesson on Will's Sound cloud (LINK)

-------------------------- Fan Arts -------------------------- Lots of fan art came in over the past 3 months!

This one is a pixel animation made by Pimez, and shows Gail singing a Christmas carol in various parts of the game. So cute! Years ago, I too was making little animated gifs for my favorite games, so it really brings me back!

This one was made by cARTographer (twitter link) after a request by Deli_mage, so thank you both. Gail rocking stylish boots with a pose that shows confidence in her batting skills. Very anime - Love it!

Another submission of laptekosz of the Last Song of Earth area. Whereas the last picture depicted the night sky, now the orange trees are lit by a rising sun. Artfully done! Kinda makes me want to eat eggs. I hope you'll like the new Last Song of Earth area just as much :D

A new artist to the scene, Not_Quin, submitted two pictures, one of Gail and one of the Sand Drake re-imagined as a centipede. I'm always a fan of these re-imaginings! I like how it's spiky all over and appears to be wearing a skull mask. The Sand Drake is often pointed out to be too similar to Zelda's Dodongos, so maybe a long slithery body would have indeed served better. Fun fact, long ago, when we were working on Phoenotopia 2 in earnest, we actually had a giant man-eating worm planned - WIP animation depicted below. One day... one day...

Negativus Core made two cool new arts! I'm really impressed by their use of unique perspective! Having characters run towards the screen or reaching close to the screen from afar is tricky since the proportions get all distorted - but not an issue for Negativus Core! Love the blur on Gail to show speed, with 66 in focus - really skillfully done! And the cube. Amazing!

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

I'm really honored by the huge fan art community. Thank you all! 

[resonance-and-d]

How to use a budgeting app to track your writing: A shitpost taken too seriously

So I have a complicated spreadsheet to track my writing, and in a moment of inspiration I realized that it’s basically just a subset of features in a budgeting app!

So here, I figured out how to use a budgeting app (YNAB) to track your writing. no one asked me to do this, but i sure did just do this

So! YNAB is great, i use it for my actual budget anyway, but you could probably do something similar in any budgeting app. YNAB isn’t free after the trial, so if you’re not using it anyway you might wanna pick something else.

So! Step 1: Create a new budget and choose the settings.

This is how I set the settings for my budget. I used yen for the currency because there’s no decimals in yen (just like you can’t write half a word). I set it to not display the symbol since we’re not actually tracking yen, it’s really wordcount. The date format can be whatever you prefer

Step 2: I deleted all the default categories for budgeting. We’re not using wordcount to pay rent or anything.

From here, it was tricky to figure out how to translate account/category/etc into what I needed. I decided personally that:

Account = fandom (since I write mostly fanfic, in many fandoms) Category Group = fic Category = chapter

The rationale here is that i won’t be moving things between “accounts” or “category groups” much, so this means I don’t have to “transfer” words between accounts. But it’s simple in YNAB to decide “oh, I have to split this chapter now” and move some words to a new category/chapter. 

Anyway! Once you have your budget, and you’ve deleted all, step 3 is, set up your first “account”. (pick “unlinked” and “cash”). It’ll ask for a starting value. For now, you can put 0. Name it after a fandom if you write fic in more than one fandom, or just name it “words” or something otherwise.

Step 4 is, set up your “category groups” and “categories” in the budget. These are going to be your individual works, so name them after things you’re writing. Under each group, you’ll set up chapters of each work.

Step 5 is, add transactions! This is where you put in how many words you’ve written. Pick the date you wrote the words, and put your wordcount under “inflow” (you’ll almost never use “outflow” since you don’t really spend words). The tricky bit here is the required “payee” field. You can put whatever you want there, it doesn’t matter. I put the rough time of day I wrote the words (evening, morning, afternoon, etc) since that’s something I track. If you have anything to track, this is a good place for it. Otherwise you can just put in like “aaaaa” or something. You also need to add a category (the work/chapter you are writing).

And that’s it! Add more categories and accounts if you need them.

is this needlessly complicated? YES! will I actually be using this to track words? probably not! but it was fun to see that it was possible

[veliseraptor]

2019 Fanfiction Round-Up

I’ve done one of these every year since 2016, so here we are again. At this point I’d feel weird if I didn’t do it, even if it takes a long ass time to do.

Total Year-Long Wordcount: Here as of 8:20 PM, 421,602 words - which includes some essays and original fiction but is, by and large, mostly fic. 

If you’re curious, that’s 35,133.5 average words per month, and 1,155 words per day. The month I wrote most was 48,006 words (January) and the least was 21,550 (October). I may go into more stats later to compare to my 2017/2018 spreadsheet, because that’s the kind of loser I am.

This year I wrote and posted: This isn’t exact, because it includes chapters of things I wrote as separate fics, but probably something around 60 fics. 

Overall Thoughts

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d predicted? 

Less, by a substantial margin. There are a lot of potential reasons for this (a new job that takes a lot more energy and time, me making a concerted effort to socialize more, taking on more difficult projects that require more time/work/effort, a two month horrendous depressive episode) but I’m trying to tell myself that it doesn’t matter why, and it’s totally fine that my total amount written doesn’t match recent years’. Over 400,000 words is still a lot of writing.

What’s your own favorite story of the year? 

This was a hard year, so I’m going to be self-indulgent and pick a few. I remain really, really proud of the fact that I wrote gather frankincense at all, and pretty proud of how it turned out also. good lord turned his back on me was one that I wrote basically all in one go, and I was really pleased with the Natasha POV and getting to write in her voice - I do that shockingly rarely, and haven’t in a while. I really liked both writing that fic and the arc of it - what it did as a story. 

Finally, continuing with the trend of “small fandom fic” which...I wrote a substantial amount of small-fandom fic this year, which pleases me - how this grace thing works. It was in the works for a long, long time and finally was finished this year - it’s the (for lack of a better word) softest Doctrine of Labyrinths fic I’ve written, and quite possibly ever will write. 

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?

I wrote in two different fandoms that I hadn’t written in before or hadn’t written for years. Okay, in fairness I did some Doctrine of Labyrinths writing last year, but this year was really the bulk of the recent writing I’ve done for it. Writing for Lymond was a substantially bigger risk. Glad I did it, and I learned that I could do it, but...

I wrote a fic for someone else in second person, which was certainly a risk in a different way.

Overall...I learned that while I can write in first person still, I deeply prefer both third and second person overall. One of those isn’t surprising; the fact that I’ve come to actually really like second person sometimes is more so. 

From my past year of writing, what was….

My most popular story of this year: 

As usual, excluding my multichapter stuff because that skews results a lot - by hits it was how the dead walk; by kudos it was Seams and Scars, and by both comment threads and bookmarks it was Mirror, Mirror. All interesting! Seams and Scars is the most surprising to me, but also pleasing considering how goddamn long that fic took me to write (I’m so glad I finally finished it this year).

Most fun story to write: 

Five Hundred Ways to Discorporate a Demon. Aka the most light-hearted “repetitive character death” fic I’ve ever written. It was just...writing Good Omens fic this year in general was a lot of fun. It’s a departure from my usual voice, and my usual wheelhouse, but probably because of that was really enjoyable to explore. Though in a weird way good lord turned his back on me was also a lot of fun, in the sense of...it was one of those fics that was easy for me to write. It came out smooth and in a way that I liked basically right off the bat, which is rare and a great feeling when it happens.

Story with the single sexiest moment: 

This was kind of a challenging one, actually, because what I find sexy sort of fluctuates based on what I’m in the mood for at the time, but I might go with the sex scene in The Waxing Moon, partly because, as I discovered writing both that fic and An Ever Expanding Circle, I apparently find cocky Thor really sexy. I sort of resent this. (So does Loki.)

Most “Holy crap, that’s wrong, even for you” story: 

Yeah, I’m going to go with no good doing what I’m told, aka the one where I had a bunch of existential angst about “is this too much? am I going too far?” which...yeah, is always a sign of something considering how high my bar for myself has gotten.

Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters: 

I have a hard time with this question every year. In some way, every story I write shifts my understanding of the characters, or at least deepens it. I guess maybe After the Fire - I dug into Curufin’s head more there than I have in a long time, and since I last did my understanding of him has changed generally. This fic developed more of that changing understanding.

Hardest story to write: 

The Compassion of the Wicked. Even more than gather frankincense, that fic fought me, to the mat, and almost won a number of times. Writing the sex in it was an adventure - I think I noted when I finished it that this is possibly the least explicit fic with explicit sex that I’ve written. Also possibly required the most research, and by “required” I mean “I chose this.” And writing Joleta was...it took me some doing to figure out how to write her, which surprised me a little. 

Anyway, the whole thing was just. A whole barrel of struggle. I’m pretty pleased with the end result, but yeesh.

Biggest Disappointment: 

As usual, in myself, for not working more on my WIPs and not finishing we live until we die. I wanted that to happen this year, I really did, and while I suppose it’s not surprising it didn’t (there was a lot of planning that needed to happen, and continued to need to happen), I’m still disappointed. 

Biggest Surprise: 

Other than “the fact that I wrote Lymond fic at all” and “the fact that people actually read the Lymond fic I wrote”? Probably the continued and aggressive expansion of the Where the Devil Don’t Go verse. I thought it was over after I wrote drown my woes in a lake of fire but then it turned out that there were (checks) five more installments I was going to write, and two more in the works, and one other that is on Tumblr but not cross-posted. 

I did not see that coming at all.

Most Unintentionally Telling Story: 

I never really know how to answer this question. I guess sometimes there is an obvious one, usually meaning “Jesus, Lise, how fucked up can you get” and in that sense it would definitely be no good doing what I’m told, but...I actually think in some ways it might be how the dead walk. It isn’t...exactly the same as my issues, but there are some ways in which it aligns with them in ways that are different from the ones I usually work with when I’m writing Loki.

Favorite Opening Line(s):

1. The first thing that Felix noticed about Malkar was his hands. (The Anvil and the Chain)

2. The moment he was left alone, Maeglin stumbled to his feet, untethered the nearest horse, and set off back toward the smoke and flame still visible on the horizon. (how should I begin)

3. For the first month and a half after Rocket’s friends arrived on Midgard, along with the remains of Asgard’s population, Loki avoided Gamora with the skill and determination of a mouse evading a fox. (came through the jaws of Death)

4. In the summer of the Year of Our Lord 1000, there was a false alarm, brought about by millennial fever both Up and Downstairs, that the Apocalypse was imminent. (Mercy)

5. A long while ago Loki had read, in a book that was now ash, about the formation of storms. (we haven’t slept in years)

Favorite Line(s) from Anywhere:

1. I was lying on my stomach with shackles on my wrists and ankles and the water was rising. Someone, somewhere, was crying. It might have been a ghost. It might have been me. (As I breathe, he burns my lungs like fever)

2. Like my fear of water, fear of Malkar ran in my blood, and was as much a part of me. (The Road to Mourning)

3. “I am not in the mood for indulgence. Is there a purpose to this pageantry, o my Pasha?”

“Save that it is my pleasure?” Gabriel regarded him with a touch of amusement. “You would rather I tied you to a whipping post and had you flogged?”

“You would gain marks for consistency,” Lymond said. (gather frankincense)

4. “Because you are the flaw. You are the fault along which the stone splits. You are what is wrong.” (Mirror, Mirror)

5. “Would you rather I were?” Loki said, and there was something soft and vicious in his voice even with the lingering rasp that made the hair on the back of Clint’s neck all stand on end. “I think not. I am aware that you do not want me here. No doubt you would rather have Thor. That is fine; I would rather you had Thor, too. Don’t think I am not aware of the long and manifold list of my failures. That does not mean I want them enumerated to me by you.” (the enemy of my enemy)

6. “I am too beautiful to die,” Celegorm said with confidence.

But you are going to, Curufin thought. We all are. Condemned as surely as if we were Secondborn. Maybe not now, but... He held his tongue and simply said, “oh, naturally.” Celegorm wheezed a laugh and closed his eyes again. (After the Fire)

7. And yet he misses Thor. No, that is wrong: saying he misses Thor is as inadequate as it would be to say that he misses breathing. He is that central, that vital, that involuntary.

If anyone asked, Loki thinks he would tell them that was why he was running. To prove that he can. (These Vagabond Shoes)

8. The smile, when it came, was sharp. “O Castitas,” Lymond said, “Mater et Virgo, extingue carnales concupiscentias! But enough. For whom this mummer’s show? Do we not know each other better now? For certainly I have known flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood... and she drew mine.” (The Compassion of the Wicked)

9. There was a way Thor had of saying things that made them inarguable. Loki had no idea how he did it - it was as though he spoke the words and it just was, like the world bent itself to suit what he said, only it bent itself so it was as though it had always been true. Loki had always found it maddening. (Speak every man the truth)

10. Everyone got a bit twitchy in the 1300s. People started getting suspicious of the dark glasses. They seemed to think Crowley was hiding something, which he was, but that wasn’t any of their business. (Five Hundred Ways to Discorporate a Demon)

11. This was what the Grandmaster did. He showed you a door, or what looked like a door, and then yanked you back just when it seemed to be in reach. Or proved that it had never been there at all, and what had you been thinking to try to get away, anyway, after everything he’d done for you? (preacher man won’t cut no slack)

12. “You can’t help me,” Loki said, breathless. “There is nothing left to help.”

“That isn’t true,” Thor said weakly. “You are here, aren’t you?”

“Here,” Loki said. “Yes. But I am - I am not myself. I am a cobbled together patchwork of Odin’s making and the Grandmaster’s making and the making of the Void. And yours.” All the feeling had gone from his voice. “You want your brother back. But that person doesn’t exist. If he ever did.” (where I make my home)

Top 5 Scenes from Anywhere You Would Choose to Have Illustrated:

There are a lot of pieces from Mirror, Mirror that I would love to see, but maybe especially the one where Loki is looking at his reflection and notices how sick he appears, when the shadow appears behind him.

Gabriel making Lymond kneel in gather frankincense. Look, I am who I am.

Thor sitting next to ghost!Loki from it slips between my fingers now.

Curufin kneeling (SHUT UP) in front of Finrod with wounded Celegorm in his arms from After the Fire. It could be very Pieta. There’s a lot going on there. I just want it.

Steve and Loki at the top of the waterfall from into the light of a dark black night, just before Loki dives over.

Fic-writing goals for 2020:

Finish we live until we die. This is probably the biggest, most concrete one on my list. 

Write! More! Lymond fic! I have three ideas and I really like all of them - I just need to stop having staring contests and psyching myself out and actually do the writing.

Whittle that WIP list down to at least under 70. Under 65 would be even better.

That’s really all. I’m keeping them modest. Also here is “try to chill out, a little, about your pathological productivity problem” but that’s an ongoing project that maybe doesn’t count for the spirit of this question.

[feel199x]

to protect our district— 09

TO PROTECT OUR DISTRICT — CH. 09; THE DEVIL

I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX masterlist

♟ ceo!hwang hyunjin, mafia boss!hwang hyunjin, mafia!au

♟ summary: basically this vine

♟ warnings: trauma symptoms, minor character death, depictions of blood and fighting, angst, themes of sexism

♟ a/n: i’ve been gone for a while but!! as a gift, this chapter is twenty three pages long!! i promise i’m doing my best to update, there’s just been a lot going on! thank you for all the support, thank you for keeping my passion for writing alive!! ALSO trying out a new format!! let me know if u like it!!

♟ song rec: believe what you want, blue rose, & painting

 You gripped the side of your desk, inconspicuously shoving the slip of paper in your mouth. You weren’t stupid enough to throw it away, and definitely not stupid enough to keep it on your person. Were you going to go? You didn’t know, and you definitely didn’t want to have to make any more life-threatening decisions if you could help it.

 There was something sort of comforting about a monotonous life like the one you were pretending to live. Always knowing what was going to happen, doing simple things like organizing schedules, sending faxes, and making spreadsheets.

 You’d like to imagine you had lived the type of life and family dynamics that you had seen from time to time on television. It hadn’t occurred to you that this type of life wasn’t normal, not until very, very recently. How was it fair that most people’s problem consisted of what to wear, what they looked like, the drama between friends and what the latest text from their romantic partner actually means. You wanted that type of simpler life, you wanted more knowledge when you were a child. You felt stupid, you wanted to scold yourself and you want to yell and tell that child how stupid, foolish and utterly naive she was.

 But that child needs sympathy and protection, just like you still do.

 It was all getting too much the more you thought about, making your head spin.

 Your eyes were burning, and it could have very well been from staring at your desktop screen instead of actually doing anything. Something just felt wrong, and you didn’t know what. It was like a clock striking the final hour, and all it could say was wrong! with every chime. Your head was drooping, exhaustion lulling you even as paranoia consumed you. The sound of carousel music jolted you awake, making your desk chair squeak as several coworkers took a quick glance at you. And for a brief second, you swore you saw Sir Hwang and his record player. He was there, and then he wasn’t. Your sanity was slipping for you. You rubbed your eyes, shaking your head as your fingers hovered over the keyboard. Getting up, you smoothed your pencil skirt as you found yourself pouring yourself a cup of coffee, your eighth one in the span of two hours.

 You should’ve been off your rocker, being able to complete more than what was tasked to you that day. And you were- off your rocker that is, but in a different way. All this caffeine coursing in your blood made it impossible for you to sleep, even as your eyes drooped and your body begged. And yet, you were hyperaware. Every noise, the rustling of paper, the tapping of paper, the hum of the printers, all of it echoed in your brain.

 You watched as everyone leave for the lunch break, and you slipped into a leaving crowd of people who didn’t work on your floor. The elevator filled up with people and you crouched down, pulling a hoodie over your head and tucking your hair into the back. You moved your way to the front, your coworkers too invested in picking the restaurant that they should go to next. If they were suspicious of what you were doing, you wouldn’t have known. Not now, or later. You tagged along before swiveling into an incoming crowd, going back into the building.

 You’d never been in the surveillance room, and it was locked when you came across it. It was a lot better than having the guards actually in there because you had yet to come up with an excuse or more likely, distraction. You figured they must’ve been on patrol, but still, an uneasiness made your lips tight and chapped. You slipped in after playing with the lock for a minute or two, and you hurried to play with the security footage. Something felt off, definitely off, even if you were unsure of what exactly was wrong. You gave yourself some time to make it to Changbin’s desk, out and then into the building again as if you were returning from lunch with the rest of your coworkers.

 It took you longer than you had wished, and you knew that the guards would have been returning from their rounds. (If that was really, indeed what they were doing.)

   If anyone was to have information about the feds visiting, and more importantly, the trip that you were all soon about to take, it’d have to be him. Sure, he had said that he wanted to help. But you didn’t know if you couldn’t trust him. Hell, you didn’t even know if you could trust Hyunjin. You pulled your gloves on and went through his papers. Until finally, after looking over your shoulder more than a dozen times, you had found a few sheets of loose paper. And though some information was redacted, you rushed over to the copier. Glancing nervously at the ticking clock, there was a lump in your throat as you tapped your foot. Something was wrong. Something was clearly so, so wrong. And yet, you couldn’t make out what it was.

 The copier took forever, and with each somehow delayed second, you grew more and more panicked.

 To make matters worse, Hyunjin hadn’t even come in. You knew he couldn’t have been dead, his father was very adamant of securing his son’s place as an heir, even if that wasn’t what his son particularly wanted. You weren’t afraid that Hyunjin was dead, you were afraid that he was very nearly dead.

 It had only happened a few times before, but that was enough for it to stay lodged in your brain. A fervor hatred like gasoline to a forest fire. You’d never want to see you Hyunjin like that again, face swollen, his identity nearly shrouded with all the blood covering his face. His father had found out that he had skipped several lessons, to be in your company, no less. And he had still been smiling, crawling into your bedroom as you cleaned him up. He had made you laugh when he saw you cry at his pain, telling you not to worry as he winced from the alcohol as you cleaned his cuts.

 Later you had learned that his dad had challenged him to a fight, under the assumption that if Hyunjin had been skipping, it must be because he had surpassed the skill currently being taught.

 Looking back at it now, it made you even more resentful and anxious. So terribly, terribly anxious.

 Your bullet wound was beginning to stick to the inside of your blouse, and growing more uncomfortable as it began to wet your shirt, a growing humid and wet patch starting to grow on your blouse. But you ignored it, telling yourself you could stand it a while longer. Just a while longer until you could slip away and patch it yourself. This wouldn’t be happening if your first response wasn’t aiming to fucking kill you instead of you know, providing actual first aid. You pulled your shirt, swiveling your head to look for Chan’s desk. You couldn’t do much except for wipe the affected area off with tissues so that’s what you did, folding the paper into small squares as you tried to ignore the smell. You furrowed your eyebrows, remembering the last couple days as if it was some sort of fever dream instead of reality because it would’ve been much better if that was, in fact, the case.

 Before you could think- and sometimes you really wish you’d think your actions through- you found yourself walking to Chan’s desk with determination. You leaned over the wall that separated Chan’s cubicle from his coworker, an overwhelming itching sensation coming from

 “Hey, ____, how’s the wound coming? Do you want me to have a look at it later?”

 “Are you sure your boss is going to be okay with it?”

 He blinked, but didn’t miss a beat answering your question, even if he turned towards his computer. “I’m not sure what you’re implying, ____, we’re a team.”

 You placed your hand on his glass desk, sure you’d leave some fingerprints but you didn’t care- and leaned to face him, your face merely a breath away.

 “I’m not a fool, I know where your loyalties lie. But it’s tradition you know, district nine fights for answers.”

 “I’m not going to fight you, ___.”

   “Why not-?”

 He looked straight at you, teeth slightly clenched but his face otherwise blank, “Because you suffered a bullet wound less than a few days ago, and need I remind you- we’re-,” he paused with each word, “a fucking team!”

 “Some shitty team if you were ordered to give me fucking gangrene.”

 He clenched his jaw, furrowing his eyebrows at the computer. He tapped his fingers against his desk a couple of times, leaving behind oily residue from their pads.

 “You wanna fight? Fine. But not here. Have some fucking decency, ____.”

 He leaned back into his chair, pushing it away from you to continue whatever work he was assigned. He was right, in some sense, if you fought here- Sir Hwang would know.

 “But it’s not because I want to, or because I’m guilty of anything,” he said as he began to file a few sheets of paper, “But because I have a feeling you won’t leave until I agree to it. And maybe if you lose, you’ll finally understand that not everybody’s against you.”

 You walked away, dumbfounded. And sat in your desk chair repeating his words in your head until it was finally time to leave. You zoned out staring at Hyunjin’s office, your desktop going dark as your body was finally starting to give in. There was so much to be worried about, and it all felt like it was going to suffocate you. It would’ve been better if Hyunjin was here, just seeing him right now would give you an inexplicable type of comfort. Still, there was an air of guilt around the thought of Hyunjin. Should you tell him before it’s too late? You knew he was aware that something was going on, and you had never been one to keep things from him. It felt like you owed it to him, but you couldn’t be hasty. One wrong move and it’s all gone. It’s all over.

 Your body was beginning to shut down, your shoulder area throbbing and growing more uncomfortable by the second. You should’ve fixed it before everyone had returned from their break, it would’ve cost you this discomfort. But even the thought of someone seeing you walking out with a roll of gauze- the thought of someone seeing you vulnerable- that was too intimidating for you to even risk it.

 The office floor had cleared out without you noticing. Thankfully, you had gone somewhat on autopilot, typing up an email to another company the Hwangs wanted to collaborate with. Jisung leaned across the desk from you, a small smile as he took a peek at your screen.

 “Are you almost done? I didn’t want to leave without you.”

 “I’ll be right down, you can go on ahead. I’ll catch up.”

 “Listen…”

 His voice trailed off and you looked up after you sent the email, raising an eyebrow. “Yes, Jisung?”

 “I heard you were fighting Chan.”

 You grabbed your bag and rubbed your aching heels before slipping them into your flats. “And you think I shouldn’t do it.”

 He fluffed his hair nervously and looked to the side, “I’ve seen him train before, I don’t think it’s a good idea. Considering your condition and all.”

 “You’ve seen him train? You guys know each other?”

 “No- uh, not really? I’ve only sparred with him a couple of times before.”

 “How is that possible? The only other kid I’ve met is Hyunjin, I didn’t even know you guys existed!”

 He pursed his lips, “Listen, let’s talk about this another time. Just, don’t fight him, okay? He won’t think less of you.”

 “To the contrary,” you slipped under the strap of your purse, “he will. You will. Everyone will. There’s a lot I don’t know, but I promise I’m not as weak as you guys think. I’ll prove it.”

 He followed you anxiously, twirling the keys of the van. “I don’t think we should fight, especially not physically-!”

 “What’re you so worried about Jisung? Chan could’ve killed me, I deserve to know why.”

 He looked down, running his fingers along the grooves of the keys. “Just be careful, okay?”

 The tensions were high inside the car. Jisung and Changbin stealing nervous glances towards you and each other. You pretended not to notice. Chan, however, was as calm and poised as ever. He tapped the steering wheel along to the beat of the song. The sun was still to set as you looked out the tinted windows, the sky painted soft watercolors as day dripped into night.  No matter what happened, the world goes on. Everyone you see, holding hands with their lover and walking their dogs, their lives will keep on going. And you wanted to be like them, you yearned to walk a cute dog and hold hands with Hyunjin in a park. It was spring after all, and you’d had very few chances to enjoy it. Before you knew it, the flower’s petals would already have fallen. Summer would pass and the leaves would turn brown and the trees would become bare.

 And then it would come again, it would be spring then summer and winter all over again. Nature knew, nature was never changing and ever-changing all in one, and you? You didn’t even know what would happen within an hour from now. This was not what nature intended.

 You wondered, to yourself, if this was indeed a game. And if it was, were you winning? Right now, who had the upper hand? Who was making the smarter moves? At least in Chess, you could see all the pieces, but you weren’t even sure what your next step would really be.

 In the end, who would be saying checkmate?

 A surge of doubt came across you and you clutched the hem of your skirt, feeling the stitches on the underside. You bit the inside of your cheek. Was your goal in vain?

 The car came to a stop, the opening of doors and jangling keys taking you out of your trance. You didn’t have time to think about it, even if you wanted to. Jisung hurried off with Chan, giving you a nervous smile as he walked in. “We’ll see you in the training room in the west wing.” Changbin lingered behind, walking by your side. “You’ve probably never been by there, right? I’ll go with you.”

 You nodded, thanking him in your head. He followed you as you walked to your family’s small part of the estate, your hand was on the doorknob before you suddenly remembered.

 “Sorry Changbin, I just remembered I keep my training stuff in the North Hall. You ever been there?”

 He nodded, “Only a couple times, by accident. Do you really think you can win this spar?”

 The both of you hurried along, “I do. Or, at the very least, give him a hell of a time.” He gave you a small smile, keeping along with you as you broke into a run for the north hall. You reached the room where you were scheduled to train. Without having to ask, Changbin turned around as you stumbled around to change. You ignored the dizziness and nausea in you, chalking it up to repressed anxiety. “Aren’t you scared? Chan is quite big, and I’m sure Jisung has told you about his capabilities.”

 “Why is it that none of you are concerned about Chan’s well-being? How do you know I’m not stronger than him?”

 “Because, well-.”

 “Because I’m a girl right?”

 “That’s not fair, ___, he’s had more years of training and he’s just-!”

 “Just what, Changbin? You can turn around now, let’s go.”

 He sighed and put his hands up in surrender. “You’re right, sorry. But regardless, you still have a bullet wound. We’re in the mafia, we don’t exactly play by the rules.”

 You shrugged, fixing your shirt as the pair of you ran off to the West Wing. You ran, silently wincing with every jolt of pain that came when your heel hit the floor. Fortunately, Chan hadn’t arrived yet. You stretched for a few minutes, Changbin joining you in silence. “Bet you miss Hyunjin. Huh?” You kept a neutral face and nodded, you knew this was Changbin’s specialty. You felt so transparent with him, unsure if it was his demeanor and character or title and status within the group. “I’m going to check up on him after the spar,” you looked at yourself in the mirror, “Probably spend the rest of the night with him. I’m scared his dad hurt him.”

 You spent a minute or two in silence, abruptly broken by the opening of the door. Jisung gave you another nervous smile, throwing you a small hands up and Chan ignored your gaze. You got up slowly, pulling your shirt again. You had made sure to grab a loose, flowy one, but your wound kept sticking to it. Your legs were starting to feel weak, the floor seeming to ripple underneath you. Still, you were calm. Probably calmer than you should’ve been. You swallowed hard and faced Chan.

 He didn’t look at you, but instead, past you. He was a little less than neutral, a little more than blank. He seemed slightly annoyed, not angry- but instead gave you the sense that he wished he didn’t have to deal with this.

 “Let’s get this over with okay? Maybe I’ll knock some sense into you.” He finally looked at you, an intense gaze that could make anyone back down. And maybe it was the haze, maybe the lack of sense that had strung you this far, but you weren’t scared. Not agitated, or irritated either. Just calm.

“Thought you’d be above trash talking before sparring, Bang Chan.”

 “I’m not above anything.”

 “Lovely moral compass you have there.”

 “I wasn’t the one crying because my boyfriend would sacrifice me in a heartbeat.”

 You didn’t mean to, but you found his nose blood on your knuckles before you could give it a first thought.

 Now you were pissed.

 His eyes began to water, and he was startled, staring at you dumbfounded. He wiped his nose, the blood leaving a trail up the back of his hand. It was barely a second before he started swinging. You felt it hit your shoulder, a burst of sharp pain engulfing your shoulder.

 Dirty whore.

 You found yourself retreating, even though you had initially planned on staying on the offense. You needed a second, just one- to recuperate. But that wasn’t a privilege you had.

 You stumbled, struggling to keep a stance as the pain faded into an ache. He swung again and you slid next to him, and with both your legs you trapped one of his pulling his free arm down so he would fall. You kept pinned down, but you knew not to grow confident. He broke free of your grasp, using his leg to throw you over his shoulder. Your back hit the ground hard, but you rolled before he could keep you do. You were growing light-headed, the room beginning to spin but you went on. He had thrown you hard, and was not about to give you another chance to get him on the floor again. He hit you in the chest, propelling you back. He went in for the kill, but you countered, kicking him back and you struck him in the chest back. Taking advantage of the close proximity you tried to keep Chan in a chokehold, but he didn’t let you secure a hold on him.

 He aimed for your stomach next and then your throat, and you wheezed, but didn’t clutch your stomach as you stumbled back.

 You fell to the floor and slid between his legs, pulling one of them down and he stumbled, falling to his knees, but quickly spinning on them, and he lunged towards you again.

 Your hands flew to try and block his next punch, but it was too late. You ended up clutching his forearm as he hit you by your temple. You paced backward, straightening up, attempting to grow the space in between the two of you. He moved to close the space, and you feigned a kick, and as he moved closer to make it ineffective you turned and you pulled down his arm again, but instead of tripping him, you spun yourself up trapping his head in between your thighs. Involuntarily, he rolled, falling and following the motion of your force. You held his arm down, keeping him down between your legs. Your bad shoulder hit the floor and clenched your teeth, squeezing your eyes shut. Chan flexed and struggled to escape.

 “..9,10! ___, let go! Let go, ____, he can’t breathe!”

 Chan tapped your calves twice, and you nodded finally, unwrapping your legs from around his neck. You crawled away, limbs trembling from exhaustion. You spat blood, heaving as you clutched your throat. Your hair stuck to your face, you were a complete mess. Chan, by the looks of it, was too well off either, slumped up against the wall as Jisung cleaned up Chan’s bloody face. His eyes were closed, and his sleeveless shirt damp with sweat.

 “You’re bleeding,” Changbin said, pulling a tissue from his jacket pocket, “Wish I remembered to bring a first aid kit.”

 You threw your head up, squeezing your eyes shut as you sat in a more comfortable position. ��I’m fine,” you muttered, “Don’t worry about me, okay, Binnie?” You looked back at him, and tried to give him a reassuring smile, throwing two thumbs up. “I’m peachy.”

 You turned your attention back to the two boys on the other side of the room. You stood, legs nearly giving out under you. “Chan?”

 At the sound of his name, his eyes fluttered open and Jisung backed away. Chan gave you a small dimpled smile. “I have to be honest, I didn’t expect you to win.” He straightened himself up, leaning himself up properly against the wall. He looked to the side, staring at the both of you in the mirror and chuckled to himself. He brushed the hair out of his face, “We look like hell, huh?” Chan sighed again, smoothing his shirt of creases, “Sir Hwang’s going to kill me.”

 You looked at him through the mirror, observing your kneeling position, looking into his eyes. There was a sudden weight of guilt that tagged along with his words, hiding in the letters and in between the spaces. “But tradition is tradition, right?” He looked down, and tossed his head back again. “Right, so-,”

 “You’re fine.”

 “What?”

 You stood up, tucking a loose strand of hair behind your ears. “I said you’re fine. If you don’t tell me, he can’t hurt you. We’re a team, right?”

 He smiled at you. “Of course, we’re a team.”

 Changbin guided you back to your family’s place in the estate, not that you necessarily needed him. Still, it was nice to have someone alongside you. And then, after you could no longer see him, you collapsed in your front door. You couldn’t hold yourself up any longer, you couldn’t pretend anymore.

 You crawled, crying out for your mom like a small child, like so many nights before. But as you walked into the room, lifting your head up.

 You realized you didn’t have a choice.

 There wasn’t much you could do when you found the tipped over chair in the living room except cut the rope with scissors, you tried catching the limp body before it fell, but fell with it as the chair tipped over, the back of it hitting your legs.

 You didn’t know what to do, so you dragged her to bed and tucked her in.

 It was a desperate moment as you kissed her forehead, pulling the sheets up to her neck. You wanted to weep more than anything, but you couldn’t bring yourself to. You sat at her study, staring at her for what seemed like hours, you were running again. You didn’t care who would’ve seen you, and most certainly weren’t going to stop. You let yourself in, Hyunjin was never one for knocking himself.

 He was down on the kitchen floor, the gas still clicking. You turned off the stove, cupping Hyunjin’s face. It felt like you were adolescents again. He furrowed his eyebrows and leaned into your touch, his shaking hand moving to hold yours. “C’mon,” you said softly, “Let’s go to bed, Hyunjin.” He fell into your embrace, going nearly fully limp. It took you longer than you hoped to get him to settle him into bed, he kept reaching out and insisting that you join him.

 “Come to bed, ___. Please.”

 “I have to clean you up.”

 Hyunjin wouldn’t be able to come in for several days considering the state he was in. You wish it was an exaggeration to say you had never seen Hyunjin in this bad of a state. His lip was busted, and his face entirely cut and red. He was all bruised up, wincing at the slightest of touches.

 “You gotta kiss me,” he pointed at his mouth, ”You have to kiss it to make it better.”

 “Jinnie, stop talking, you’re gonna make it worse.”

 “Will you kiss me if I stop?”

 “You’re such a dork,” you pressed your lips lightly against his, “But my dork, I guess.”

 “That wasn’t even a real kiss, it was a peck!”

 “I’m not gonna make out with you when you have a busted lip, Hyunjin.”

 “Coward. You only like me for my looks.”

 “You’re right. You’ve got me, I guess I should leave, huh?”

  He pointed his index finger, wagging it around limply in your face. “I’ve been gone one day and you get so bold, what happened to you?” You shook your head, throwing away the bloody wipes and putting away the first aid kit. “Are you gonna tell me what happened?” He reached for your hand, squeezing it. “Let’s just rest, you look like hell.”

 “Always such a gentleman, what a prince.”

 “Just for you. Now come to bed.”

 You sighed, crawling to his side. Without another word, he pulled you into his chest. Neither of you spoke for quite a while, and even though your eyes were on the clock, your body was starting to give in. Every once in a while, he would kiss the top of your head. The tensions in your muscles began to relax. Maybe you had lost your family, but at the very least you had your team. And most of all, you had Hyunjin. He had always been there for you, no matter how big or small the problem was. Things had definitely changed, even your relationship with him. You thought about the movies you would watch every once in a while. How the couple would hold hands in public places and go to coffee shops. They would fight about normal things. You wanted that, and it was silly, sure. But for some reason, that didn’t make you want it any less. You wanted matching outfits and to celebrate 100 days. You brought Hyunjin’s hand up to his chest, intertwining his fingers with yours.

 You wanted to be normal.

 You were thinking about not meeting up at the address, and maybe even skipping out on work when there was a rustling in the sheets. You felt cold, missing out on Hyunjin’s warmth. He sat away from you, head bowed and forearms resting on his thighs. You sat up, shifting your body weight and leaning to touch him when he shied away from your fingers.

 “Hyunjin-?”

 “You need to go.”

 “Why, what’s going on? Did I hurt you?”

 “Get out of my room, and stop coming to me.”

 “Hyunjin, I don’t understand-.”

 “You can’t even blame me, this isn’t my fault. It’s yours,” he paused, “Do you know how much trouble you cause. You’re not noble, ___. There is no greater good to fight for. You’re selfish.  All the shit that’s happened, it’s all you. I don’t want to be part of it anymore. It was just luck we met, I don’t even think I really like you. Even just as a person.”

 “Oh,” you slid over the opposite side, “sorry for the inconvenience. I’ll be going.”

 For a spring night, it was cold. There were no busses at this hour, and it’s not like you wanted to cry in front of a bunch of strangers anyway. You couldn’t pull yourself together. It wasn’t the fact that Hyunjin broke up with you, you weren’t stupid, his father obviously played a part in that. But he didn’t have to end it the way he did, nor did he have to say the things he said. What was the end goal here, what was the purpose of doing this?

 You got lost several times trying to find the address given to you. The people you came across were hesitant to answer the questions of a puffy-eyed and dried blood wearing stranger. It made you slightly angry, but you understood. You were just lucky that no one called the police. What explanation could you possibly give? Besides, you weren’t sure you’d want to help yourself either.

 You found yourself at the diner from a couple of days ago. The lady at the counter recognized you, and immediately bowed her head at you. To your surprise, she didn’t tell you to go away. Instead, she thanked you for helping get rid of the men and for your work in the police service. You weren’t sure why she thought that, but you didn’t question it either. It was better for her to think that instead of knowing the truth. Besides, you didn’t doubt that Sir Hwang had connections within the police force. You scanned the room finding no one you recognized, and no one that seemed like they were trying to meet you. So you just sat in a booth, unsure of what exactly you were waiting for.

 In the meantime, a waitress brought you some food. “On the house,” she said. You weren’t in any position to protest, and so you didn’t, silently thanking her for the food. You let your legs rest on the plush booth directly in front of you, silently musing at the nightlife when you felt someone slide in your booth.

 “C-?”

 He pressed a finger to his lips, signaling you to keep quiet and shook his head. He pulled out a pad of paper and started writing.

 I know you stole my files.

 Why would you say that?

 Your bag. He pointed. While you were fighting I saw the paper.

 Suppose I do have it. What are you going to do?

 I want to help. I want out.

 Who are you trying to fool?

 The question is, who are you trying to fool?

   Both of you left the diner, thanking the staff for their generosity. “Can we take a walk?” He nodded, slipping his hands into his pockets. “Didn’t you say you were going to visit Hyunjin?” You scoffed, crossing your arms and rubbing them. “I did.”

 “And something bad happened.”

 “Bad? To him, yeah. I guess you could say that. It’s not like I didn’t think something like this would ever happen.”

 “You broke up.”

 “Bingo.”

 There was a moment of silence between the two of you, and you sighed. You looked around, more out of habit than paranoia. “No one’s following us, I promise I checked.”

 “Then why didn’t you just come with me?”

 “Sneaking out is harder when you’re with anyone but yourself.”

 “Then why agree to the walk?”

 “You look like you could use a friend.”

 You knew he was particularly trained to observe people’s behavior, but it was scary and comforting at the same time to know someone was keeping an eye on your every movement. And yet, you didn’t deny him the role he wanted to play. You needed a friend, and he was willing to play one. Be one.

 You don’t know how long the fear of him turning against you will last, or if it will ever go away. And maybe it was your flaw, to be this human and succumb to this loneliness, but maybe that’s what separates you from this regime.

 Unexpectedly, you felt arms wrap around you tightly. You stumbled for a moment, and then fell into his touch. He held you for what seemed like a long time. He waited until you dropped your arms until he released you. There wasn’t another word said between the two of you, and you avoided looking back at Changbin.

 Admittedly, it was against your best judgment to return to the garden, but you wanted desperately to see the koi. The image of the apricot and pearl fish swimming in dark water kept fishing through your mind. You weren’t allowed to be up here, that much you knew, but it never quite registered in your brain. The gardens had always been your safe space, somewhere you knew that you and Hyunjin could always run to. Maybe Hyunjin was no longer here for you, but the koi still were.

 The smell of the elaborate garden was almost haunting, you could smell it long before you were up on the roof. It was always curious how you were never allowed to leave your side of the estate, but no matter how rich the Hwang family was- or was perceived to be, you’d never seen any signs of caution or security around these parts.

 Maybe it was the paranoia, maybe it was common sense- but either way, there was this undeniable, irrevocable feeling that you should run for it.

 You weren’t the most rational person, though.

 So you pressed on, finding yourself up on the roof. It was a bad night, a new moon and the stars nowhere to be seen. The clouds were dark, covering the sky in a blanket as it would just before a storm. You felt the air shift, tense.

 You could always smell the rain before a storm, and though you really couldn’t afford to get a cold- not in this state, you roamed the garden. You stilled, letting the pads of your finger caress the delicate petals of the roses. You could feel choked sobs bubbling in your throat, you wanted nothing more than to be able to cry.

 Everything changed that night.

 It took a deep breath and counting several times to ten to get you to move on from the rose bush. The path twisted and turned, it seemed to stretch out. Your eyes were drooping, burning. Every part of you hurt so bad, you wanted nothing more than to collapse right then and there. Finally, finally, you had reached your destination. Only to find a silhouette poised on the bench.  You knew better, you knew better so why did your breath hitch? Why could you feel the hair on the back of your neck rise? You knew that he knew you were there, so why did you freeze? Did you really think you could have run, that he wouldn’t have noticed you by some merciful god?

 No, god was never that kind.

 He raised his hand and motioned for you to come over. Biting the inside of your cheek, you complied, sitting next to him. You didn’t look at him, but you could feel his gaze on you, his arm stretched across the back of the bench.

 “What god do you serve, ___?”

 “None.”

   He clicked his tongue, lifting up your chin with his fingers. “Pity, such a dirty mouth. What use did Hyunjin have for you?” He gripped the sides of your jaw, “Wrong answer, dear.”

  “Enlighten me then, almighty.”

 He laughed, “Don’t get cheeky with me now, girl. The answer,” he paused, “Is me.”

 “You gave that up as soon as Hyunjin became of age, he’s the leader now. You’re rotting, just biding your time.”

 He kept a neutral face, even as he pulled your hair, “I should get rid of you, have you join your parents. Things would be much smoother, that’s for sure.”

 “High and mighty but can’t smite me down? What a lousy god you are. Why don’t you just do it?”

 Despite his experience, you watched as jaw clenched and he pulled tighter. Your legs bowed as he made you look at him. His face was red, tight with an emotion you had never seen painted on his face.  “Because I promised your dad I wouldn’t, but fuck, dead men tell no tales now do they?”

 He sighed, letting go of you to smooth his suit down and straighten his tie. He cleared his throat, looking to the koi instead of you. “Starting today you’ll be working on both my operations and Hyunjin’s, do you understand?”

 He put his hands in his pockets, turning to look at you one last time. “You’re going to work until you realize your life is not in your hands.”

 You sat at the edge of the koi pond for some time. Fingers dipping into the cold green tinted water, the pond rippled under your touch. Instead of swimming away from the motion, fearing your hand, fearing your touch, they circled around the edge. Even in the moonless night, where even the stars were in a seemingly deep slumber, the koi seemed to glow. Through the murky water, you could see the floating spectacles of coral and orange bled fish. They were beautiful, and even though the koi pond was considerably much bigger than a pond, you felt bad for them. Such beautiful animals swimming around the same cage for years, kept as decoration instead of having a life of their own.

 You couldn’t sleep. You’d much rather sit on your bed, eyes bloodshot than be plagued with nightmares. Every part of you ached or throbbed. You would take care of your wounds, you really would, but you couldn’t will yourself to move. It seemed like an eternity before the sun peeked through the blinds.

 So, until that happened, you reviewed the file you had stolen, er, borrowed. It was against your better judgment, like so many decisions you had made recently, but you pulled it all out in the open. You figured, if they bust your door open and dragged you back to that white room from last time, you’d have an excuse. How am I supposed to fulfill my duties if I’m not aware of what is going on within my team? Was it the best? No. But would it make sense? Absolutely. Even if they decided to dig deeper, which would be protocol, you’d just say you had taken it from Changbin during a meeting. There were no cameras in the conference room- how could there be? And with frequent checks for bugs planted by the feds, the entire room was a complete blind spot. So left with no way to fact check, they’d be resigned to believe you.

 You stared at the rather thin file for a while before opening it. It all seemed so normal, deceptively so. Important information all stored in a khaki paper file. What loomed more over you though, was the reality of your situation. You sighed, goosebumps covering your body and chills swimming down your back.

 Shipment scheduled to move from Eclipse Bay to Blood Bay. Security should be kept the same, and ordinary item cargo should be moved at the previously agreed on time.

 Being moved are several thousand kilos of rewind (see: previous deals).

 At 0300, Hyunjin and his team should be flown to Hong Kong for the festival. Along with Hyunjin’s established bodyguards (see: Han Jisung and Bang Chan), multiple armed men should be ordered to see the liftoff.

 Hyunjin is on his own, no interference by anyone. Observation only. Expected to win 100 billion won over the week, and multiple alliances with other families.

[2]

 Allied cops with the Hwang Family:

 Kim Wonpil

 Park Jaehyung

 Kang “Young K” Younghyun

 Park Sungjin

 Yoon Dowoon

 Hwang Yeji

 Shin Ryujin

 Lee Chaeryeong

 Shin Yuna

 Choi “Lia” Jisu

   Look into got7, this goes without being said, and connections with Kim Woojin.

[3]

 Interrogation scheduled for 0100. Lieutenant Wonpil.

 Suspected 02 of being a double, here’s the link for his file.

[4]

 New families have paid their way into the festival. Goes by the names of TXT and Monsta X, here’s the link to their file.

[5]

 Stakes are now higher. Families betting their entire estates and fortunes, along with betting valuable information, set to a series of predecided games. Winner takes all.

[6]

 Bugs planted by the feds have been found in these locations. Watch the sensitivity of your issues. They have not been taken out. Doubles have been found applying to the company. Order to observe all workers, you’ve been assigned to the twelveth and thirteenth floor. Rewards to be discussed.

 Granted, there weren’t many things written in the email transcripts. But the importance lied in the things that were indeed, not written. You scribbled noted all over the copy, the original text almost omitted from view. It didn’t matter though, all the information imprinted onto your memory. You knew that there were a lot of blanks that needed to be filled in yet, and that meant asking Changbin to fill in the gaps. There was an air of anxiety around that, but even without the information that could be given, this was a start.

 And what a hell of a start it was.

 You decided, in those couple of hours before dawn pulled and scratched itself up into the sky, making it bleed blue, that your first two steps would be to find out all you could about the corrupt cops and specifically, especially, Kim Wonpil.

 You stretched out, your back cracking in all sorts of different places. You groaned, heaving your dense and getting denser body from your bed. It was hours before you were scheduled to show up at the Main Entrance for work, but you needed something to occupy your mind. Sitting and staring at the ceiling until your alarm snapped you out of your trance didn’t really fulfill that purpose.

 Your wound was getting worse, obviously so. Your eyebrows furrowed in the mirror, a look of pain and displeasure slapped across your face. You pulled out your first aid kit, which was really so much more, and got started.

 It was ghastly. Tears brimming in your eyes as you cleaned the wound with alcohol. You were clenching your teeth, letting out strangled groans and gasps. And the worst part wasn’t even over yet. Your shaking fingers meant that it was a while before the thread finally slipped through the eye of the needle. Your vision was growing black as you tried to stitch the gaping wound. Legs bowing and falling over the sink, you toppled down to the ground. The needle pierced the palm of your hand, a thin stream of blood coming down your arm. You sighed, the cool tile of the floor and the sharp pain in your back bringing you back to your senses.

 You were almost glad you were alone, so that no one could hear your almost inhuman cries. Almost. You felt alone, so, so alone. The inside of your cheek was beginning to bleed, and that’s when your teeth let go of the tender meat. If there was any time to cry, it would be now. But you couldn’t let yourself, no matter how much your body begged you. Your brain wouldn’t. You clutched the edge of the sink, now stained with messy prints of your palms. You heard your alarm go off, and you weren’t even halfway done with your stitches. You finished the third loop before cutting the thread.

 Man, you looked like shit.

 The shower was quick, more to fulfill the morning routine than to actually make an effort to get clean. You were angry at yourself, thinking you should’ve pushed yourself harder, but you just couldn’t. Your hair was wet, barely free of all the knots and still dripping onto your blouse. Your state was deteriorating, and you didn’t know how to redeem yourself.

 At the very least, you were the first one to arrive at the Main Entrance. If one didn’t think there was a need to be competitive, even about the smallest things, they’d be wrong. Your fingers threaded through your hair, a shallow attempt to make sure that there were no remaining knots.

 To your surprise, Hyunjin was the second to arrive. He looked great, perfect even, not at all in the state you found him in last night. He kept his hands in his pockets, only moving from his position to check the time in his expensive watch. He didn’t shy away from your gaze, either.

 “Problem, ___? Please refrain from gawking at your superior like that.”

 A wave of annoyance splashed across your face, one that couldn’t help. You knew he noticed when he smiled at you. “I said, is there a problem, ____? I asked you a question.”

 “No, Hyunjin. No problem. Sorry.”

 “Sir.”

 “No, sir. Sorry, sir.”

 It felt so foreign to you, like you were haphazardly dropped into an alternate dimension. If it had been anyone else, you would’ve snapped entirely. But before Hyunjin, you seemed to sink into the ground. The back of your high heels pinching the skin around your ankle, your feet pressing into the uncomfortable sole of the shoes. The rest of your team arrived shortly after, but instead of being lead to the van, Hyunjin stayed where he was.

 Everyone stood around him, anticipating what was to come next. Hyunjin smoothed his hair, turning sideways and smiled.

 “It is my pleasure to announce that all of you, save one, have completed your individual missions to an astonishing degree, more than what was asked of you.”

   Your feet grew heavier, and you held your arms behind your back. Interlacing your fingers, you tried to self soothe. Usually, whenever you would tell Hyunjin about something stressful, he would always hold your hand. You kept your gaze level, refusing to look around even in your confusion. Your stare fell upon Hyunjin again, and he reached in the inside of his suit jacket.

 “Consider this a thanks from the Hwangs to you. To District Nine!”

 “To District Nine!”

 He gave all of the team members, excluding you, keys. Car keys. Luxury car keys. And you thought, you really thought that they’d be above this type of encouragement. They all chattered happily, jangling the keys and pointing at the logo embroidered on the black keys. You stood in the circle, albeit somewhat on the outskirts, and found your eyes falling upon Hyunjin again.

 He just smiled at you.

 And you decided, in that moment, that this was so much worse than his father’s signature neutral face.

 Hyunjin cleared his throat, and silence fell upon the boys. “I hope you find the car suits your tastes well. We have another meeting with Stray Kids today. Please prepare accordingly. In your cars, you’ll find another gift. Don’t worry about parking, you have your own spots.”

 He waved his hand, a gesture fit to dismiss the boys but you spoke up, earning a nervous glance from the boys.

 “And what about me?”

 “What about you?”

 “How am I expected to get to work?”

 “You’re a smart girl, ___. Aren’t you? If that’s too much to be expected of you, maybe one of your fellow team members would have enough pity to offer you a ride.”

 You bit the inside of your cheek again, feeling bits of metallic liquid seep into your mouth. “Of course, sir.”

   You just short of hissed the last word, and ignored Changbin’s calls after you as you walked out. You weren’t sure how it would be seen to prefer to arrive late rather than accept help, if it was petty or strong. But either way, you were still on a crowded bus to Central.

 You thought about the koi stop after stop, as people flooded the bus. It comforted you, somehow, thinking back to the bright orange fish in the murky water- how they circled around the rippling water. You felt someone bump into you, interrupting your mental image of the elegant fish but ignored it. You didn’t want to deal with this today, you didn’t want to make a scene. You were just so tired. So, so tired.

 You got off the bus the next stop, even if it was nearly a mile away from the building. The streets were busy, and as self-conscious as you were about walking bare feet for almost a mile, the blisters on your achilles’ heel couldn’t take it.

 You stared at the sidewalk even as you heard people whisper and stare at your feet. Your feet were dirty as you reached the doors of Hwang Headquarters. You walked quickly into the nearest elevator, almost forgetting that there was no ladies’ bathroom on this floor. It hadn’t helped that there was a light morning shower as you were walking here, and your wet clothes and the distinct smell of rain on you didn’t go unnoticed. As you reached your floor, the elevator had thankfully grown empty.

 With your wet hair stuck glued to your face, blouse sticking to your chest, and blackened feet, you stepped onto the floor. You went immediately to the bathroom, glad for once that you were the only female employee on this floor. You cleaned your feet, sitting less than gracefully on the sink counter.

 Man, you really did look like shit.

 You washed your hands quickly, the soap stinging the flesh your needle had pierced.

 “You’re late. Everyone’s already in the conference room.”

   You decided not to let Hyunjin get the best of you. Or maybe you were too tired, too exhausted to snap back. Still, you were never better to let a smark remark slip past.

 “Aw, look at the new secretary. Does that mean I’m the C.E.O now? About time, if you ask me.”

 You walked past him, and moved your hair out of your face. What you were doing was bigger than him, bigger than everybody in the room. You scolded yourself, you couldn’t let him get to you like that.

 You were across Jeongin again, he tilted his head slightly, asking you a question without words. You waved it away with your hand and shrugged. You could talk about it later.

 “Is there a reason you need to move up the meeting? We had one scheduled just hours later today.”

 “No, I just felt like being an asshole and calling you in earlier for the hell of it. It’s not like either of us have better things to do.”

 “Wouldn’t put it past you, Hwang. Could this have anything to do, by chance, with our alliance with GOT7?”

 Bang Chan sat up straight in his chair, hands folding over his lap. Hyunjin ignored the movement, spinning his pen around his fingers. This lasted for a few moments. “Always so efficient with time, Woojin.” He straightened, pulling his feet off the table, and put the pen in his pocket, all in one swift movement. You raised an eyebrow at the sudden use of first names. “You know, as part of our protection over you, we requested to know about all of your alliances.”

 “Protection? Is that what you call it, Hwang? Does your team not know about the things we’ve discussed? Pity. You’re more disorganized than your father.”

 “Oh, what we discussed? There are no secrets between my team and I, Woojin. Which is more than you can say.”

 Hyunjin walked to the other side of the long table, more leisurely than you thought a person could walk. His steps were slow and deliberate, and you watched intently. He placed a tape recorder in front of Woojin, pointer finger hovering over the play button. He whispered something lowly in Woojin’s ear and then turned to face everyone, a sweet smile plastered on his lips.

 “You wouldn’t want them to hear about that, would you?”

 “No, I wouldn’t. But you know what the feds would love to know? That their trusted Kim Wonpil is providing information about the investigation being held on you. Could you imagine the scandal? The media?”

 Hyunjin laughed, his hands slamming on Woojin’s shoulder. “Is this a game you want to play? Are you confident in the moves you are making?”

 “Does a fish swim, Hwang? But that’s not what we’re here to do. Your ego is suffocating everyone and everything, you’re no different than your father. Let’s get to the point shall we?”

 “Go ahead, Woojin. Fill in the blanks.”

 “GOT7 is up and coming, you know that, I know that. The best way to dismantle their current system is by alliance and infiltration, there are no losses here. They’re in no place to refuse.”

 “Then why not disclose that information?”

 “It wasn’t finalized at the time.”

 “Do you really expect me to believe that?”

 “I do. Especially if you want an alliance, and more so with the upcoming festival. You’re in no place to refuse.”

 Woojin stood up and smoothed his suit sleeves, ridding the luxury clothing of any wrinkles. He was almost imitating Hyunjin’s gestures, who was watching him amused back from his end of the table.

 “Seungmin, open the presentation. Minho, please distribute the files.”

 The rest of the meeting went until lunchtime, and you couldn’t bring yourself to be interested in financial talk. You wanted to contribute something, anything, but you were beginning to doze off. Your attention span was decreasing exponentially, and even as determined as you were to stay awake, your body was beginning to shut down.

 It was paused, briefly, giving everyone two hours for lunch. And you couldn’t be more thankful.

 “Let’s get coffee, Jeongin. Please.”

 For some reason, you had expected him to object. You didn’t even want to discuss your plans, you didn’t want to plan a huge dismantling of a system that went as far back as history could tell. You just wanted a friend. You just wanted to talk.

 “You seriously look like shit, ___.”

 “Hey!”

 “I’m sorry, and I mean that in the kindest way. You need some sleep. Maybe a couple of centuries.”

 “Justice never sleeps, Jeongin.”

 “Okay, Batman. I’ll go get us coffee and meet you in the park. Don’t run off into the night.”

 “I feel like you just want me to get out of your car.”

 “I do. Get out of my fucking car.”

   There was something about spring afternoons that you had never really noticed before. Was it risky to be here? Of course, it was. What part of your life wasn’t full of risk? But you didn’t want to think about that, you wanted to think about spring. The fresh breeze softened even as rose into the clear sky’s view. It felt good, calm. The older wood of the park bench pressed into the base of your neck as your head fell back against the top. It wasn’t long before you found tears escaping your eyes.

 “Jeongin.”

 “___.”

 “It’s good to see you.”

 He smiled and snorted, sitting next to you and handing you a warm coffee cup. He held his own cup in between his thighs, both hands resting on the lid as he looked up into the night sky. “How have you been doing?”

 “Shitty.”

 “What happened?”

 You found yourself jumbling your own words. Cutting off sentences short and running to a different topic as if you would run out of time or he would cut you off. “...things just haven’t been the same with Hyunjin since he got, er, promoted?”

 “Wow,” he said finally, “That fucking sucks.”

 You shrugged, suddenly embarrassed as you felt your face go hot. You hadn’t meant to tell him such personal things. You looked down, taking a sip of the latte. But to your surprise, Jeongin did the same.

 “Woojin doesn’t trust me,” he commented, “I mean, I get that he’s trying to protect me but I hate feeling coddled you know? I think he feels bad about the night at the warehouse, but it’s not like I’m mad about it.” He shrugged, and his voice trailed off before picking up in volume. “I’ve seen them kill people. It hasn’t even been that long and I’ve watched them do it. I’ve even helped-”

 “Jeongin!” Your hand clamped over his mouth as you looked around frantically. “Not here, never here.”

 His eyes widened, and he took a sip of his coffee cup.

 You sat in silence for a few minutes, just enjoying the breeze and petrichor. “You should eat,” Jeongin stretched out his legs, “We can stay here for a while, but we’re going to a restaurant soon.”

 “I thought you wanted me out of your car?”

 “Charity for the poor. I’m a generous man.”

 “Man? With that squeaky voice?”

 “My voice causes earthquakes, fool. Get in the car before I leave you here.”

 “You’re so mean to me,” you faked sobbing loudly, earning estranged looks from passerbys, “And I treat you with such kindness.”

 “Get up, dumbass. People are staring. I swear to god-”

 “Alright, alright. I’m going. I need the ringing in my ears to stop.”

 “God fills me with enough power to purge you.”

 “Oh, no. I’m so scared. Someone, please. Help me. Mickey Mouse is coming for me.”

 “Get in the car before I drag you!”

   Jeongin kept raising the volume of the music every time you tried to talk to him, a playful smile on his face. Less than ten minutes later, the car stopped in front of a lush restaurant. You felt almost out of place being here. Even though you were always surrounded and exposed to signs of wealth, the exaggeration of it all never seemed to stop amazing you.

 “Isn’t this a place a little...much?”

 Jeongin shrugged, “I doubt this is going to cause a financial concern for Woojin. Besides, this is the only buffet I know that has high-quality food.”

 “We could’ve just gone to a diner.”

 “Live a little. You deserve it.”

 Those words swam in your mind for a bit, repeating themselves like a broken record. You and Jeongin talked and talked. About everything and nothing in particular. And for a while, both of you forgot about your life outside the restaurant. You forgot about responsibilities, even your paranoia, your hypervigilance was kept in the back of your mind. For now, you could pretend that everything was okay. Because that’s how it felt.

 Your stomach was full, and you had long stopped counting plates by now. Jeongin was no better, still going on even after you slumped over in your chair.

 “You’re a coward.”

 “Oh fuck off, Jeongin. My stomach feels like it’s gonna pop.”

 “I said what I said.”

 You groaned, clutching your stomach. “I don’t even know why we made this a competition. Jeongin. Jeongin. I think I’m going to die.”

 “Shut up. I’m almost done, we’ll go soon.”

 You hid your face in between your hands, and started to fake cry again, just as loud as last time. “Quit it, dumbass.”

 Your crying got louder, your shoulders shaking as he kicked you under the table. “Oh fuck-!”

 “If it were not for the laws of this land, I would’ve slaughtered you. Let’s go. I paid while you made a scene.”

 “I love you.”

 “I despise you with every inch of my being.”

   The rest of the day went on without anything memorable happening. You were feeling better, much more energetic and happy. You knew you’d have to meet Jeongin later that day to discuss what was actually going on, but for now, you didn’t want to think about that. For at least a couple hours of the remaining day, you could pretend all you did was work a nine-to-five job. You could pretend that all you did was have lunch with a co-worker.

 For now, you could just pretend.

   “Hey, I’m Felix.”

 You looked up from your computer, tilting your head and looking up at him quizzically. “Hey, Felix. Can I help you with something?”

 “Uh, well not really. I just never talked to you, and I figured I should introduce myself. Personally.”

 “Okay, well, I’m ___. What do I owe the pleasure of this meeting?”

 “Boredom. Listen, can I ask you something?”

 “Ah, there it is.”

 “No, no! It’s not like that! Look,” he sighed, “I’m friends with everyone here but you. I just wanted to know if you wanted to get coffee sometime.”

 “That’s it?”

 “That’s it.”

 You watched the freckled boy carefully. “Oops, looks like I overstayed my welcome,” he looked quickly to Hyunjin’s office, wearing a playful smile, “I’ll take you up on that coffee soon! I’ve been told I can be very insistent.”

 “I can imagine. We can go for lunch tomorrow?”

   “Can’t wait.”

 You’re unsure of any of the between the lines implications, if there were any. But really, wasn’t there always? It was naive to think there were any purely good-hearted people in this setting.

 But for now, you could pretend.

 Woojin and his team left a bit later, Jeongin gave you a polite head nod as he walked past your desk and Felix gave you a warm smile, waving brightly. You waved back, unsure of what else to do in that situation. It’s not like you’d had much practice, anyway.

 Hyunjin left after all the common employees, but before you. You watched him bluntly, but he paid you no mind. You wondered if he had been listening into you and Felix’s short interaction. It was the kind of wondering that you were sure you’d never get much closure for, but it kept your mind busy as you made schedules and faxed papers. You missed him, you concluded. It was weird, not being able to talk to him and having his warmth. That was the thing about all types of relationships, wasn’t it? You’ll never really find another person like that. Maybe that was the point, in order not to go through the same pain. But you still loved him, and you knew that only time and patience could heal this kind of hurt. But you did, that was the truth. For today at least. Today, it was today’s truth. Maybe tomorrow’s will be different. There was really no way to know except to get there.

 You thought about a million little small things, how soft his hair was or the little beauty mark below his eye. You thought about the way he smiled and how he always clapped when he laughed. And then you thought about your dad, and then your mom. And your heart ached in a way it had never. This was a different kind of hurt. You wiped your teary eyes, and throughout the stained paper. What good did this pain do? All it had done was ruin a spreadsheet, and now you had to print another one.

 You wanted to stay in late, you really didn’t want to go back to the estate. You had no idea what Sir Hwang had in store for you, but you knew that it would be no good. There was nothing you could do to prepare, you didn’t know what to expect. That much power, yes, he did have over you.

 And you were right, you had no idea.

 Going to the main building for purposes other than given orders was prohibited. Mostly because no one liked unwarranted visitors, but you supposed that you had an excuse. A half hour passed, and then an hour came and went, and you gave up. Your feet hurt, and you needed a good shower. If Sir needed you, then surely, he could come get you himself.

 Night came and the sky deepened, and you started to relax. Maybe it was unlikely that he would have forgotten, but he was a busy man after all. Plus, doing and managing illicit activities was tiring, he could just need rest. Maybe you were off for the night, just for today.

 After a long shower and eating a subpar dinner, you passed out on the couch. You hadn’t meant to, really, you just wanted to rest your eyes. You were really nothing but human in the error of your ways.

 But your rest was plagued with nightmares, and Sir was the rat that spread disease. You were on the living room couch, sitting upright and before you were your parents. And Sir. He sat in the middle, on a simple black chair. Your father began to bleed from his head and torso, but he did not move, his expression blanker than a sheet of paper. Your mother sat too, in the same way, a noose around her neck and the tail of the rope sitting curled on her lap. You too, began to bleed. But from where, you could not tell. Your hands held a mess of blood, and with your vision hazy, you looked up at Sir. And he smiled.

 You woke up then. Not screaming, not thrashing. You just sat up. Your mouth was unbelievably parched, a jackhammer heart pounding into your chest, you were sure your chest was going to crumble into pieces. You felt so, so hot. You pulled at the collar of your sweater that stuck to your body like you had run through the rain. You pushed yourself up, pressing hard on your numb leg as the static pins and needles seemed to prick your leg. It was late, and you knew you had to meet Jeongin soon. You had to go over all the new information you both had, but you hadn’t done it earlier.

 You were annoyed at yourself, changing out of your sweaty clothes into similar sweats. You bit the inside of your cheek, already sore from your previous assaults. Instead, you resigned to bite your lip, which probably wasn’t much better, but at least it gave time for your cheek to heal. It didn’t take you much time to get back to the abandoned cafe. Well, abandoned was no longer the right term, it seemed. Construction tape and a new name that hung upon the storefront. You were early, so it was no surprise that Jeongin hadn’t arrived yet.

 But your stomach grew more and more upset as more time passed. The file you had hidden away in the inside of your shirt would begin to crease, and it probably wouldn’t smell too great either. Realistically, you knew that a lot of things could’ve happened. Maybe he had just overslept, and wouldn’t be coming at all. Maybe he was caught sneaking out, or maybe he had just forgotten. All of those things could’ve happened before the worst of the worst- and you weren’t even sure what that would be. Still, something from the depth of your stomach crawled and clawed. You felt dread, anticipating what couldn’t be anticipated.

 “Sorry, I overslept. I’m so tired.”

 You sighed a breath of relief, laughing at yourself. You relaxed, tensions unraveling themselves in your back and in your chest. There Jeongin was, cheerily holding up to coffee cups. “I got coffee, it’s different this time though. It’s-.”

 He was interrupted by a loud bang, and the cups toppled to the ground. A mess of green foamy liquid stroked the air like a paintbrush, and then splattered onto the ground. Jeongin was on his knees, holding his chest.

 You ran towards him, holding his anguished face before you noticed the man behind him.

 You don’t know what took over you, whether it was a moment of self-realization, or anger that had consumed you like no other. His face was becoming unrecognizable, a bloody pulp and yet, you couldn’t stop. You kept going, your vision hazy and breath labored. Was it you? Were you really doing this? You wiped your face, only to make it more messy, more bloody. The blood on your hands, quite literally, wasn’t yours. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t you, that you were impulsive. What mattered is that you wanted him fucking dead. In that moment, he deserved it, and to you, that was your gospel truth. Written in scrolls and tattooed on your back. You didn’t need to play god to kill someone, you could be Cain for that.

 “You’re gonna fucking kill him, ___, stop! Stop!”

 “He’s not dead! ___, he has a pulse! Fucking stop!”

 You could feel them grabbing at you and you felt animalistic, kicking and screaming. Were you crying? You don’t recall, but your face was wet. You didn’t even know who he was anymore as they pulled you away. You thrashed like an animal caught in a net as all the members of your team worked to drag you away. You couldn’t see straight, abstract figures of color swirling around you. Struggling to calm down, your breath was erratic, palpitations so strong you felt as if you were going to throw up. You were positioned against a wall, poised like a doll. Sweaty, lips chapped, hair sticking to your face, and decorated in blood like you’d just won the hunger games.

 Shit. Shit!

 You woke up in a room you had never seen before. Stark white walls and a lone painting of the Hwang family in the center of the wall before you. You heard movement and swiveled your head to the right, finding Sir Hwang standing straight from his leaned position in the doorframe. His hand pushed the door lever, he was on his way out as he paused, turning to face you. With a satisfied smile, he looked down at you,

  “I knew you had it in you.”

[purplesurveys]

739

Do you enjoy watching birth vlogs? OMG never. Those are a thing? I would imagine there’d be enough butthurt people flagging them enough to be taken down YouTube, but if they’re being uploaded there and are able to stay uploaded then that’s a really good thing. I’ve seen birthing photosets on Facebook but I’ve never watched an actual video. Would you rather paint on canvas or wood? I don’t paint but if given the chance I’d probably pick canvas just because it’s more common. What regret keeps coming back to haunt you daily? Recently it’s the daily decision to keep ignoring my thesis. UHGJGHFKD I’ll do it and have it finished in May I fucking swear, I just can’t right now. Do you miss someone? I miss all my best friends, close friends, friends, acquaintances, classmates, groupmates, and everyone I’ve ever come across in school including the cats and dogs. If you could cure yourself of one allergy, what would it be? I don’t have any allergies but I wish the irritation in my eye that will occasionally annoy me like an allergy would go away forever.

Do you know anyone else with your name? Yeah when I was applying for AIESEC there were two people there with the same name and even the same spelling - I had never felt so common until then lol. I know more Robins with an i. Have you felt like the main character in a book was you? No, but I know if I read more then I will probably be able to name a character for you. Which country's flag is your favorite? Nepal’s. I also found Libya’s old flag interesting since it used to be just green with no designs whatsoever. What would you be most afraid of happening if you were to visit Africa? This has some pretty awful undertones but uhhh I’d be wary of being attacked or scammed as a tourist, which is just the same thing I’d be scared of if I went to a different continent. Where are you tempted to move to sometimes? Chicago. Have you ever hiked a mountain? I’ve hiked before, but not for a mountain. Who seems like they have the perfect life? One of my acquaintances, Chesca, is reeeeeally intelligent but also incredibly rich and funny and POPULAR and pretty and trendy and an insanely talented speaker and very well-loved. I know no one has a perfect life per se but out of all the people I observe, she’s definitely the one who seems to authentically have it all. Do you ever take pictures of negative moments? I only did that once. The only thing it did for me was remind me of how much I was in a shitty place then. Do you think it would be a good idea to post photos of negative moments as well as positive? ^ Clearly, no. I never wanted to take photos of shitty moments after that. What time zone are you in? I never memorized the format but it’s something with +8 in it. Would you ever post a picture of yourself crying on social media? No. ^Why or why not? Because I find that extremely personal/private. Do you like dark blue jeggings or light blue jeggings better? Light blue even if I don’t wear jeggings, I guess. Dark blue isn’t as trendy these days. What color is the rim of your whiteboard? I don’t even own a whiteboard. Do you have trouble staying organized? For some spaces, yes. I can’t ever keep my car clean, for one. Throughout college it’s kinda served as my second home so I’ve never been able to avoid having my stuff from home pile up in there instead lmao. What was the last thing you cried about? The Philippine Bar exam results got released today and there was a video that quickly went viral of a family finding out their daughter/sister passed before she knew, and the passer only found out because they were all whooping and screaming downstairs. When she realized what they were making noise for she fell to the ground and started crying and oh my god there is a lump in my throat right now just thinking about it again. Have you ever held a newborn baby? No, I’ve never been in a delivery room nor met a baby a day or two after they were born; there’s just lots of sanitary/hygiene stuff to worry about and I’m ok with getting out of the way for a few days to ensure their health. Do you know anyone who has twins? I know sets of twins, which I guess kind of means the same because it means I am at least remotely aware of their mom lolol. Would you rather look older or younger than your age? Younger. Where do you buy calendars from? I don’t. Do you shop at the dollar store often? That’d be impossible to have here because we don’t even use dollars. But we don’t have anything equivalent to like a peso store either, so no I don’t. What does your name rhyme with? Foreign. Are you following in the career path of any family members? Yep. I have two aunts who worked as journalists; one of those aunts also worked as a radio DJ at one point; my great-uncle was a historian, author, and a professor and dean of history; and I have too many lawyer relatives to count on one hand. Have you ever met anyone who talks like a robot? Yeah, some really bad reporters in some of my past classes. Name something unique about your town. We have an authentic Swiss restaurant. That’s genuinely the most random, unique thing I’ve seen come out of any towns lmfao because any restaurant that isn’t Chinese/Japanese/Italian/American/Mexican is just not a common concept here at all, much less Swiss. I haven’t tried it yet since it’s fine dining but hopefully soon. Who does all the chores in your home? My mom. She’s super particular about chores and likes things to be done her way. Every time we’ve tried to help her we just end up getting yelled at because as much as we try to imitate her, somehow we always do the chore wrong. Do you feel you missed out on a lot as a kid? I missed out on the emotional foundation/support, for sure. I had to figure all that out on my own. What is your best kept secret (or one big secret you have right now)? This blog that to this day, only my sister knows about. Do you have anyone you can tell your secrets to? Yes. ^If so, who? You. Hahahahaha Who was that best friend you ever had? This is in past tense, so my best best friend that I’ve since lost was Sofie. I’m sad we drifted apart but we both seem a lot happier today and that’s what matters. She was an important person in a certain period in my life so I don’t regret the friendship. Do people appreciate you and accept you for who you are? I feel this from them, so I guess they do. What color is your laptop? Silver. What class would you like to repeat over again just for fun? Bio 1 because it was easy and POLSC 180 because I learned so much.

What are five careers you think you'd be good at? Corporate lawyer, any job that requires a lot of spreadsheet-y and internal work really, PR, a consultant for something I’m interested in, historian. I tried to delete this question but I brought it back at the last second because now is so not the time anymore to still dodge my future career prospects lmao. Are you thriving in your life right now? I don’t think anyone is at the moment, and that’s okay. Who do you have moral support from? My girlfriend and close friends, mostly. Who encourages you to go after your dreams? Them, and sometimes my parents. Do you have people in your family who want you dead? That’s horrible lmao I wouldn’t think so? Are the police criminals in your town? Yes. List all the antiques you have in your room. I don’t have any. What Bratz doll resembles you the most? JADE. My homegirl through and through. Do you have a walk-in closet? No. What was the last thing you ate? I had a chocolate chip cookie. What would you do to save money for your wedding? Allot some money from my salary for it, lmao. Have you ever been manipulated, lied to, abused, or controlled? Yes, of course, yes, and sure. Are you against plagiarism? Of course. That’s literally the biggest no-no in journalism.

[level99life]

I’m back

Just a quick post to say that I’m back and I’ll be trying to actually update this now.  I basically set this up last year and then never touched it again - becauseeee I immediately got in a relationship lol....  I haven’t re-read my posts yet but maybe I talked about it?  Because I would have been texting her the very week I set this up I believe.

A quick update about me:  So yeah, that relationship thing happened, that was scary.  We ended roughly around August 2020 (but off-and-on did a friends-with-benefits thing until January 2021, after which I’ve since completely blocked her on everything - maybe I’ll go into that in the future, probably not though). At work, I took on more management roles and so that takes up a lot of my time and mental bandwidth (I’m slowly trying to get a new job, however - one I’m not embarrassed about - so far I just have my resume like 95% complete).  At home, I still live with super weird/messy roommates that I really need to get out of (surprisingly this is probably the #1 issue in my life right now, and I think that by solving this I’ll have a lot of derivative benefits across all other facets of my life).  Relationship-wise, currently not seeing anyone or even trying; I’m forcing myself to address other things before I bring someone else into my life (relationships are time-sinks and money-sinks, not to say that’s bad [in my opinion those are like the best money/time-sinks possible, it’s basically the whole point] but I either literally don’t have those things available to me at the moment or need to figure out what I can budget for it).  Free-time wise: completely stopped working out all of COVID so far - I had injured my back (that took a good 6-8 months to heal), my stomach constantly has problems that get much worse when I work out, and I haven’t been able to figure out meals that... A) I can make fast enough to have time to do other things in the day, B) have enough calories that I even gain weight when I’m not working out (all of COVID my weight has slowly been going down, so I can only imagine what it would have been if I had been working out).  I played RuneScape a little bit all year (came back from a 3 year hiatus) and finally maxed both of my accounts plus some other side-goals, and I’m calling it mostly quits again (I might pick it up every few months, but I’m definitely done grinding) -- this is probably the most important part to make note of as it’s what made me remember this blog lol; throughout the last year I blogged on my clan’s dead forum and it felt really good to journal goals and accomplishments and thoughts like that, so once again I’d like to try applying that idea to my real life here.  Self-wise

I just finished some quick spring-cleaning of the blog (fixing pictures, styles, links and such).  Also renamed it from Lvl 99 Life to Level 99 Life because yeah.  Still not totally sold on using Tumblr for this (honestly I love the format of forums so much, but I want something to be a bit more public even if I’m not actively sharing it and expecting people to read it - I love semi-anonymous, semi-public posting), but it’s one of those “we’ll improve it with time” things I need to get more comfortable with (I so often fall into the trap of thinking I need to perfect things at the very beginning).

Some quick reflections on this blog: Almost certainly not going to do those weekly update things.  Structure like that, while pleasing to my OCD-like tendencies of wanting strict organization, is stressful as fuck.  Nah.  I’m keeping this super loose (as you can tell from this jank-ass post) the same way that my RuneScape blog was over the last year, and maybe with time it’ll converge to something more structured.

Alright, I think that about covers everything.  My ending notes will be my current overarching life goals and what I’m actively working on:

Actively working on:

Project 0: Get a rotation of meals to make every week (super quick to make, high calories so I gain weight, and that don’t upset my stomach).

Next life goals:

Finish my PC (I’ve put next to zero focus on this since January-ish so I’m forcing myself to re-focus and get this bitch done; I literally just need a GPU but I’ve been super defeated because of how hard they are to buy for normal prices... this annoying project has taken me something like 5 years and will stand as a trophy to my inability to complete things in reasonable timeframes whatsoever, jesus fuck).

Finish budget & financial goals spreadsheet (I don’t want to know how many hundreds of hours I’ve put into this now).

Finish resume, post to Indeed/Linkedin/etc., look for a new job.

Find a new place to live (alone or with just one other person).

Go back to college.

EDIT: I went back and read my other posts.  Oh boy.  Alright so, from this post:

Today, Sunday, has been especially bad. I got into bed as soon as I got home and I haven’t been able to leave. I haven’t had this happen in months, if not more, so it’s worrisome. I’m scared about roommates seeing me for some reason, can’t leave to eat anything, and sometimes can’t even get out to go to the bathroom.

Yeah, I continued to be like this all year, and especially all of 2021 so far.  I had no fucking clue until now how literally nothing has changed in over a year.  I need to start seeing doctors again, wow.  Really proves the importance of journaling like this - you don’t realize the time of things until you read old thoughts.  In January I was my absolute worst - I was literally only awake for 9 hours as most, and slept the rest of the day, and it’s becoming that again.

I truly can’t get myself to go grocery shopping, and I ran out of meal foods on Friday, so I’ve been severely under-eating. This has likely caused a loop wherein I feel more depressed/anxious/etc. due to my hormones and stuff being out of whack from bad diet, further preventing me from going out to get food. So much for the budget helping with this.

Still such a huge problem, if not worse?  I don’t think I even go grocery shopping once a month anymore, it’s a little over that.  I do laundry just once a month.  These two things are examples where I feel like living on my own would have huge bonuses though, since (as I talked about above) I’m so scared of being around people (and conflict with them in terms of needing to use certain things/rooms at certain times) that I can’t just get shit done when I want, be noisy at weird hours in the kitchen, etc.

I started my role as assistant manager at work. Nothing has changed yet, no training yet, so it’s very weird where people are asking me things that I can’t do anything about.

Yeah that hasn’t changed.  Fuck this job actually sucks harder than I thought.  I could be hard on myself and say it’s (at least in part) on me to have initiative and seek things out on my own, but honestly no - I’m blaming the company for such a terrible training structure.

[michaelandy101-blog]

Search engine optimization Forecasting in Google Sheets

New Post has been published on https://tiptopreview.com/seo-forecasting-in-google-sheets/

Search engine optimization Forecasting in Google Sheets

Approach again in 2015, I revealed an article giving freely a free, easy, forecasting software, and speaking by way of use circumstances for forecasting in Search engine optimization. It was a fast, efficient technique to see if a change to your web site visitors is a few type of seasonality you’ll be able to ignore, one thing to have fun, or a worrying signal of visitors loss.

In brief: you possibly can enter in a sequence of knowledge, and it will plot it out on a graph just like the picture above.

5 years later, I nonetheless get folks — from former colleagues to finish strangers — asking me about this software, and most of the time, I’m requested for a model that works immediately in spreadsheets.

I discover this straightforward to sympathize with: a spreadsheet is extra versatile, simpler to debug, simpler to increase upon, simpler to take care of, and a format that persons are very aware of.

The tradeoff when optimizing for these issues is, though I’ve improved on that software from a number of years in the past, I’ve nonetheless needed to preserve issues manageable within the famously fickle programming setting that’s Excel/Google Sheets. Which means the template shared on this put up makes use of an easier, barely much less performant mannequin than some instruments with exterior code execution (e.g. Forecast Forge).

On this put up, I’m going to present away a free template, present you the way it works and tips on how to use it, after which present you tips on how to construct your personal (higher?) model. (When you want a refresher on when to make use of forecasting on the whole, and ideas like confidence intervals, discuss with the unique article linked above.).

Varieties of Search engine optimization forecast

There’s one factor I need to increase on earlier than we get into the spreadsheet stuff: the various kinds of Search engine optimization forecast.

Broadly, I feel you’ll be able to put Search engine optimization forecasts into three teams:

“I’m feeling optimistic — add 20% to this year” or related flat adjustments to current figures. Extra complicated variations would possibly solely add 20% to sure teams of pages or key phrases. I feel plenty of companies use this sort of forecast in pitches, and it comes all the way down to drawing on expertise.

Key phrase/CTR fashions, once you estimate a rating change (or sweeping set of rating adjustments), then extrapolate the ensuing change in visitors from search quantity and CTR information (you’ll be able to see an identical methodology here). Once more, extra complicated variations might need some foundation for the rating change (e.g. “What if we swapped places with competitor A in every keyword of group X where they currently outrank us?”).

Statistical forecast based mostly on historic information, once you extrapolate from earlier developments and seasonality to see what would occur if all the things remained fixed (identical degree of marketing exercise by you and rivals, and so forth.).

Kind two has its deserves, however if you happen to examine the likes of Ahrefs/SEMRush/Sistrix information to your personal analytics, you’ll see how exhausting that is to generalize. As an apart, I don’t suppose kind one is as ridiculous because it appears, but it surely’s not one thing I’ll be exploring any additional on this put up. In any case, the template on this put up suits into kind three.

What makes this an Search engine optimization forecast?

Why, nothing in any respect. One factor you’ll discover about my description of kind three above is that it doesn’t point out something Search engine optimization-specific. It may equally apply to direct visitors, for instance. That stated, there are a few causes I’m suggesting this particularly as an Search engine optimization forecast:

We’re on the Moz Weblog and I’m an Search engine optimization advisor.

There are higher methodologies out there for lots of different channels.

I discussed that kind two above could be very difficult, and that is due to the extremely non-deterministic nature of Search engine optimization and the commonly poor high quality of detailed information in Search Console and different Search engine optimization-specific platforms. As well as, to get an correct thought of seasonality, you’d must have been warehousing your Search Console information for a minimum of a few years.

For a lot of different channels, prime quality, detailed historic information does exist, and relationships are much more predictable, permitting extra granular forecasts. For instance, for paid search, the Forecast Forge software I discussed above builds in components like keyword-level conversion information and cost-per-click based mostly in your historic information, in a manner that may be wildly impractical for Search engine optimization.

That stated, we will nonetheless mix a number of varieties of forecast within the template beneath. For instance, reasonably than forecasting the visitors of your web site as a complete, you would possibly forecast subfolders individually, or model/non-brand individually, and also you would possibly then apply proportion progress to sure areas or construct in anticipated rating adjustments. However, we’re getting forward of ourselves…

How you can use the template

FREE TEMPLATE

The very first thing you’ll must do is make a replica (underneath the “File” menu within the high left, however automated with the hyperlink I’ve included). This implies you’ll be able to enter your personal information and mess around to your coronary heart’s content material, and you’ll at all times come again and get a contemporary copy later if you happen to want one.

Then, on the primary tab, you’ll discover some cells have a inexperienced or blue spotlight:

It is best to solely be altering values within the coloured cells.

The blue cells in column E are principally to verify all the things finally ends up accurately labelled within the output. So, for instance, if you happen to’re pasting session information, or click on information, or income information, you’ll be able to set that label. Equally, if you happen to enter a begin month of 2018-01 and 36 months of historic information, the forecast output will start in January 2021.

On that notice, it must be month-to-month information — that’s one of many tradeoffs for simplicity I discussed earlier. You possibly can paste as much as a decade of historic month-to-month information into column B, beginning at cell B2, however there are a few issues you want to watch out of:

You want a minimum of 24 months of knowledge for the mannequin to have a good suggestion of seasonality. (If there’s just one January in your historic information, and it was a visitors spike, how am I imagined to know if it was a one-off factor, or an annual factor?)

You want full months. So if it’s March 25, 2021 once you’re studying this, the final month of knowledge it’s best to embrace is February 2021.

Ensure you additionally delete any leftovers of my instance information in column B.

Outputs

When you’ve performed that, you’ll be able to head over to the “Outputs” tab, the place you’ll see one thing like this:

Column C might be the one you’re all in favour of. Remember that it’s stuffed with formulation right here, however you’ll be able to copy and paste as values into one other sheet, or simply go to File > Obtain > Comma-separated values to get the uncooked information.

You’ll discover I’m solely displaying 15 months of forecast in that graph by default, and I’d suggest you do the identical. As I discussed above, the implicit assumption of a forecast is that historic context carries over, except you explicitly embrace modified eventualities like COVID lockdowns into your mannequin (extra on that in a second!). The prospect of this assumption holding two or three years into the longer term is low, so although I’ve offered forecast values additional into the longer term, it’s best to preserve that in thoughts.

The higher and decrease bounds proven are 95% confidence intervals — once more, you’ll be able to recap on what meaning in my previous post if you happen to so want.

Superior use circumstances

You could by now have observed the “Advanced” tab:

Though I stated I needed to maintain this straightforward, I felt that given all the things that occurred in 2020, many individuals would wish to include main exterior components into their mannequin.

Within the instance above, I’ve stuffed in column B with a variable for whether or not or not the UK was underneath COVID lockdown. I’ve used “0.5” to signify that we entered lockdown midway by way of March.

You possibly can in all probability make a greater go of this for the related components for your enterprise, however there are a number of necessary issues to bear in mind with this tab:

It’s high quality to depart it fully untouched if you happen to don’t need to add these further variables.

Go from left to proper — it’s high quality to depart column C clean if you happen to’re utilizing column B, but it surely’s not high quality to depart B clean if you happen to’re utilizing C.

When you’re utilizing a “dummy” variable (e.g. “1” for one thing being energetic), you want to be sure to fill within the 0s in different cells for a minimum of the interval of your historic information.

You possibly can enter future values — for instance, if you happen to predict a COVID lockdown in March 2021 (you bastard!), you’ll be able to enter one thing in that cell so it’s included into the forecast.

When you don’t enter future values, the mannequin will predict based mostly on this quantity being zero sooner or later. So if you happen to’ve entered “branded PPC active” as a dummy variable for historic information, after which left it clean for future durations, the mannequin will assume you’ve branded PPC turned off sooner or later.

Including an excessive amount of information right here for too few historic durations will end in one thing known as “overfit” — I don’t need to get into element on this, which is why this tab known as “Advanced”, however attempt to not get carried away.

Right here’s some instance use circumstances of this tab so that you can contemplate:

Enter whether or not branded PPC was energetic (zero or 1)

Enter whether or not you’re operating TV advertisements or not

Enter COVID lockdowns

Enter algorithm updates that had been important to your enterprise (one column per replace)

Why are my estimates totally different to your outdated software? Is one in every of them unsuitable?

There’s two main variations in technique between this template and my outdated software:

The outdated software used Google’s Causal Impact library, the brand new template makes use of an Ordinary Least Squares regression.

The outdated software captured non-linear developments through the use of time interval squared as a predictive variable (e.g. month 1 = 1, month 2 = four, month three = 9, and so forth.) and attempting to suit the visitors curve to that curve. That is known as a quadratic regression. The brand new software captures non-linear developments by becoming every time interval as a a number of of the earlier time interval (e.g. month 1 = X * month 2 the place X will be any worth). That is known as an AR(1) model.

When you’re seeing a big distinction within the forecast values between the 2, it virtually actually comes all the way down to the second cause, and though it provides just a little complexity, within the overwhelming majority of circumstances the brand new method is extra real looking and versatile.

It’s additionally far much less prone to predict zero or detrimental visitors within the case of a extreme downwards pattern, which is sweet.

How does it work?

There’s a hidden tab within the template the place you’ll be able to take a peek, however the quick model is the “LINEST()” spreadsheet components.

The inputs I’m utilizing are:

Dependent variables

No matter you place as column B within the inputs tab (like visitors)

Impartial variables

Linear passing of time

Earlier interval’s visitors

Dummy variables for 11 months (12th month is represented by the opposite 11 variables all being zero)

As much as three “advanced” variables

The components then offers a sequence of “coefficients” as outputs, which will be multiplied with values and added collectively to type a prediction like:

“Time period 10” visitors = Intercept + (Time Coefficient * 10) + (Earlier Interval Coefficient * Interval 9 visitors)

You possibly can see in that hidden sheet I’ve labelled and color-coded plenty of the outputs from the Linest components, which can make it easier to to get began if you wish to mess around with it your self.

Potential extensions

When you do need to mess around with this your self, listed below are some areas I personally take into consideration for additional growth that you just would possibly discover attention-grabbing:

Each day information as an alternative of month-to-month, with weekly seasonality (e.g. dip each Sunday)

Constructed-in progress targets (e.g. enter 20% progress by finish of 2021)

Richard Fergie, whose Forecast Forge software I discussed a few instances above, additionally offered some nice recommendations for bettering forecast accuracy with pretty restricted further complexity:

Clean information and keep away from detrimental predictions in excessive circumstances by taking the log() of inputs, and offering an exponent of outputs (smoothing information might or will not be a great factor relying in your perspective!).

Regress on the earlier 12 months, as an alternative of utilizing the earlier 1 month + seasonality (this requires three years’ minimal historic information)

I could or might not embrace some or all the above myself over time, but when so I’ll be certain I take advantage of the identical hyperlink and make a remark of it within the spreadsheet, so this text at all times hyperlinks to essentially the most up-to-date model.

When you’ve made it this far, what would you prefer to see? Let me know within the feedback!

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[louiphotography]

Starting a photography business… how to keep a sane mind.

By no means has this been easy, my current 9 to 5 is with a financial institution that changes processes/procedures almost daily… so it’s saying a lot that getting into photography has been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to work through. I want to take a few moments to discuss a few examples of how I structured my plan. By no means do you have to follow this as a guide, it’s simply a few tips I wish I had been given and hopefully you can learn from some of the hiccups I went through! Further below I will dive into each of these further however here’s a quick recap of the topics will cover in this post: 

Social media

Organization

Helpful services to leverage

Portfolio

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Let’s first start off with social media. It’s easy to feel that this channel isn’t going to really make a difference in your business including learning, growth, and overall success… but you’d be wrong. Everything I know about photography (outside of “gut feelings”) is from self taught social media. Social media does not hand you the answers, but it gives you great direction to go off and practice until you find that best fit for YOU. Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook, and YouTube are my main go-to’s. Not only does this give you an opportunity to find inspiration whether that be styles/locations but also things that could take you years to figure out… experienced photographers are happy to clue you in on. Often there are going to be demographics that you meet with each source, for example there are some people who just refuse to download TikTok, however you likely could still connect with them via Facebook or Pinterest.

Make sure that when you are first starting out and find a name/brand that you want to build, go through and create an account on each of the above platforms to reserve your name (or close to the name if not available). Whether or not you use each one, you at least want to avoid someone else from utilizing your handle on a social media site- that can get confusing! The other piece of advice I’d give is to get organized. We will discuss this more in the next section, however have a plan for social media usage. This could include ideas that come to you to post, when/how often you want to leverage each account, and tracking what you’ve done on each platform. I’ll provide you examples of what this looks like for me in the next section. To sum this up, leverage social media! 

Avoid: setting up social media accounts before you have a set name. I did this before I registered my business, and my original idea ended up not being available through my state. Not fun to go change all emails/accounts and in some cases make new accounts! —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————Next up is organization, and it’s the topic I feel most passionate about. My corporate job has created a monster who loves spreadsheets and honestly it has helped my business immensely. It will be easiest to just bullet point the programs I use, and what I use them for:

Excel spreadsheet tabs

Items to do

Social media ideas

Social media usage tracker

Location wishlist

Shoot ideas

Shot lists

Expense Tracker (taxes)

Folders within external hard drive

Sessions- break down by year, subfolder for client, then within each client folder they have a “edits” subfolder, within that a “social media” subfolder

Social Media- subfolders for created IG posts, IG stories, Pinterest pins, TikTok, marketing, welcome guides, session guides, recap guides

Branding Pack- all the color schemes, logos, fonts that I use for my company brand

Business documents- anything related to registering the business, all emails saved from the state or IRS, receipts subfolder taxes

Purchases- where I keep any items I got from Creative Market (fonts/graphics)

Notes app

Post templates- I keep a note for each type of post I may make during the day, so I don’t have to find my commonly used format/hashtags for each social media platform

Ideas list (for when I’m on the go and can’t update my excel sheet) however I make it a point to update my excel each night before bed

Calendar app (I leverage this to schedule myself weekly tasks). For instance:

Monday- Engagement, check in with people and see how their weekend went, post your weekend in photos and post weekend challenge results

Tuesday- Content creation day for the next week (or more if possible for backup)

Wednesday- Schedule content for the next week (or more if possible)

Thursday- Weekly blog write up

Friday- Photography challenge jar to accomplish over the weekend

Saturday- Shoot as much as you can/focus on photography challenge/work on any extra “to-dos” such as Lightroom practice

Sunday- Shoot as much as you can/focus on photography challenge/work on any extra “to-dos” such as Photoshop practice

Even writing that felt like a lot… and truly it is. Starting a business and getting into the “groove” is NO JOKE. Now image this on top of your regular 9-5, actually having consistent photoshoots, the client management aspect, possibly having a family or spouse, and trying to manage your health both physical and mental. If you have a loved one that is starting a business, GIVE THEM A HUGE and maybe some Starbucks! Again these are not things you HAVE to do when starting your business, these are just items I feel work for me. 

Avoid: Having NO organization plan whatsoever or feel as long as you take some notes here and there, it will be sufficient. There is so much information available to us that I would write down pages of information and when I’d review, it was too overwhelming and I would want to quit. Play around with it and see what works best for you!

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Now let’s get into the systems/services I use that have really made a difference! Yes I pay for each one of these, it can add up, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

PicTime- Delivering client galleries on a professional platform and provides them high quality products for purchase (1 FREE month code- M275PS)

Honeybook- online service for client management, helps automate tasks for example “as soon as client sends in XYZ document, the system shoots them the contract to sign”. It saves so much time! (20% off)

Lightroom- Photo editing

Photo Mechanic- Photo culling system that helps me go through thousands of photos in a JIFFY prior to Lightroom importing, works in tandem with Lightroom to flag which photos you’d like to edit, and will import directly for you.

Canva- Program to build social media content, I also used this for building all guides for my business.

Creative Market- online marketplace for creatives to sell their graphics/fonts/templates. They also will have weekly freebies that are amazing!

Avoid: signing up for things before you need them. For instance, since I’m starting out and have minimal clients, I haven’t pulled the trigger on customized accounting or even quickbooks. Once I find a consistent client stream, I will certainly do this however I personally feel confident in my tracking/organization for taxes purposes at this time.. I’m not going to pay hundreds for an accountant before I actually need it. As small businesses starting up, money can be tight, I would really do your research on what you need vs. what you think you should do because you saw it on the internet. Again I am not a financial master, this is just my two cents!

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Portfolio time! This is something that I was so worried about when starting… if I’m just starting, how am I supposed to get clients?! My honest answer- ASK PEOPLE! Ask your friends, mother, neighbor… anyone you feel comfortable working with! Not only does it give you a chance to practice, but they get free photos (saving hundreds mind you). Now, this also depends on what you want to shoot, but when you are starting you really should shoot anything purely for practice. This also helps you really nail down what you want, you may think couples are fun to shoot, but when practicing you find that families are where you have the most fun. The only way to really know is to shoot- for example I have such a huge passion for travel photography, my favorite photos I’ve taken are from trips. However there is no way to constantly practice traveling… I have a job, oh yea and Covid is a thing! I always have a blast shooting families/couples/individuals so for the time being I am throwing all my effort into creating the best experience/product for those clients. Eventually with practice I can get to that “end game” dream, but no one is above practicing and putting together a solid portfolio to show what you can do.

It will be very hard to get any paying client to trust you enough to book, without examples of what your results look like. If you are going to offer family shoots, I recommend having at least 2-3 full session examples you can showcase to a potential paying client. I also found that creating guides that not only showcase your work, set an expectation for pre & post session, and then having a professional gallery to deliver images is HUGE for the client experience. At the end of the day, there are a ton of photographers, but I want you to focus on how you set yourself apart in the experience you provide (this is what clients will remember and share)!

Avoid: Thinking your first session will be how your pictures will always look! Even if you like them, you will find your photography game will change/grow with each client. Take each session seriously, learn all you can, and try to prepare… but do NOT get dow on yourself if everything doesn’t go 100% perfect, as long as you take steps to avoid it the next session. This has been such a learning experience for me, and continues to be each day.  I’m always happy to talk through things if you have any questions, feel free to shoot me an email or direct message at the below resources. Keep your chin up, it doesn’t get easier, but you will continue to get better!

E: meg@louiphotography.com

@thelouiphotography

[dearben]

30.09.20

Dear Ben

i. My parents have a neighbour, this pension-aged divorcee who lives alone. She’s got two grown children, both in high-powered jet-setting careers, whom she doesn’t talk to a lot. She calls pretty much on the daily to talk to my mother, and the isolation hasn’t been kind to her because we get the sense that she’s losing the plot. She called the other night ranting and raving about how I’d screwed up her phone, but Dad’s convinced that it was because she refused to update her iOS.

(FTR, Dad used to try to get me to talk her through how to use her phone but three unsuccessful attempts convinced me that you can’t teach an idiot, so I try to refrain from talking to her where possible).

Mum and Dad have tried to convince her to seek help, but that suggestion hasn’t been taken very well.

(I wish you could talk back to me, but let’s be clear that you’re really a figment of my imagination, because I find it so much easier to talk to one, and part of me doesn’t want to scare you away even though there’s realistically close to zero chance that we’ll ever talk again.)

Anyhow the real reason I don’t like her is because she is essentially who I fear becoming in the future – alone and isolated both by volition and vocation.

ii. I just got into a fight with dad and my sister about what a failure I am. I’d seen this coming for a long time since moving back in – Dad even took me aside to warn me in advance not to be a pain in the arse before I came home. Dad told me that he’s essentially given up on nagging me and only keeps it up instinctively because I’m his progeny, which only hammers home that it’s no longer just in my head but in life that I might’ve failed.

I thought that this was going to be my year, the year that life was finally going to start behaving itself, and then a pandemic came along and gave it all a giant middle finger. It’s been over 6 months yet I still find myself yearning for what could have been. Everyone’s like, “maybe this is the year you strip it all back and regroup, and emerge from the other end like a butterfly”. Since then Operation Butterfly has become my obsession but part of me thinks it’s a distraction from the mess my life’s become.

This year has essentially just rammed home time and again what a failure I am. Crappy job, no social life or skills, and hardly any personality and generally a terrible excuse for a human being. I remember the darkness starting when I was finishing high school – it was like I knew uni was the peak and after that everything would start going downhill. I’m always terrified of the possibility that I peaked way too early, but Dad reckons (rightly so) that I have a complex where I’m unhappy if I’m not the centre of attention. How ironic then that I seemed to have developed a meta-complex about this, rather than behaving constructively about it.

iii. Then kids I’d grown up with are off conquering the world, getting high-powered jobs, getting married, buying houses and having children (or all at once). I can’t even hold down a boyfriend who doesn’t espouse right wing tendencies or isn’t a kidult. But then that opens a pot-kettle situation which I quite often run out of steam to cycle around.

Sarah’s said that anxiety does this – that it zaps the energy to give a fuck, resulting in one becoming an arse to the world because what’s remaining of that energy’s just directed towards keeping the basic systems running. I can’t even figure out how to format excel spreadsheets anymore. It’s super funny because I feel like I don’t have the patience to understand mental illness anymore, having fallen into that chasm despite once being so curious about it. I somehow manage to drown every day while decrying everyone else in the same boat for being a wimp. It’s days like these that I can’t picture the sun coming up tomorrow – or if it does, that the world will be in grayscale.

iv. Gabby’s just made us do a gratitude exercise. Truth be told I’ve always been skeptical of these because every time I do that, the rug gets pulled from under me and things on that list just mysteriously disappear. Mihika said that it was almost as if I was scared of being happy, which was pathological, but is it possible that I’m just too lazy to be?

I don’t know why I’m writing, when I haven’t in such a long time (I was afraid, I think, that my writing had become mediocre but I don’t care now because no one’ll read this…I think). I’ve always been a fast talker, fast thinker – maybe I just have too many thoughts in my head yelling over one another like inkblots and fireworks, and perhaps this might help me slow them down. I don’t need this to look pretty or aesthetic – I just need to figure a way out of the knots.

v. What I want to say to Dad and Mom and Ying (and the world) is that I wish I had the maturity to own a house, or have children, or even make things different for myself when I’m not happy about them, rather than make excuses all the time and wallow in self-pity. Or even, just to be happy with myself. Buying a car was terrifying enough, and that was with Ying and Dad there to do most of the legwork for me. Why the fuck am I licensed to perform surgery and give people life-changing medical advice, when I can’t even drive properly without thinking I’m going to die every time I step into a car?

All I can promise is that I will try, but that there will be days when I’ll fuck up again and again, even though that’s not an excuse to let things slide. I’m afraid to talk openly about this because it’ll force me to confront that deep dark chasm that is my anxiety about being a failure in life, and if I’m not careful I might finally fall in.

I know that I have so much growing up to do because I’ve spent too much time with my head in the clouds – mostly as a distraction because I’m fed up with life and humanity. I want to say that I care enough to not be a terrible person, but sometimes I find it hard to be 10/10. Dad keeps telling me to be introspective and self-reflective but sometimes I feel like time alone with my thoughts isn’t helpful but that’s mostly because I end up wallowing in cycles of despair. I know it’s a cop-out whenever I call myself a failure because it’s the easy way out, to fall with gravity, but my choices have consequences and I don’t like what’s on the other end of that alternative. But treading water is getting so tiring sometimes – I wish I could accept that this will be for life but I find it difficult sometimes to realise that there are ups and downs.

vi. I have found myself indulging, more and more, in thoughts of what we could’ve been. I find that they tend to be more salient whenever things and times get rough. Kit reckons that I do this to comfort myself with the memory of the closest I came to success but it always comes with that painful shock from your rejection. Even though rationally, you were reacting or behaving normally and were honest enough as to warn me ahead of time that you weren’t ready for a relationship and were even kind enough to check up on me despite my stupid faceplant, it only made you more irresistible. How I have tried time and again to be rational and stop thinking of you on a pedestal; once I even forced myself to read through your old messages talking about how you’d moved on. Oh god, I thought the pain would kill me but it didn’t and here I remain a strange shade holding onto regret. We only met twice and I was stupid at both, and clearly stupid enough to keep using you as the benchmark for what every subsequent partner should be. It’s been nearly 5 years. It nearly destroyed the one who came after you because he wasn’t you and despite both of us trying it wasn’t fair for him to be compared to a memory.

But then I’m starting to wonder if what I’m really finding alluring about you are your qualities and successes. I wonder if you were just another right-wing conservative social justice denier with stunted career prospects living with his parents, I would still be enamoured of you – and I’m starting to come to the realisation that perhaps I might not be. But you aren’t any of those things (particularly the right-wing conservative) – and here I’m falling into my own trap yet again.

I sometimes flirt (and come close to) with the idea of just asking you. Not flirtatiously with an emoticon in an unexpected text, but with raw honesty. Are you still with her? Are you happy? How is working from home, since you were already an expert before this shitstorm hit. How do you become an adult? And do you ever think of me as anyone aside from a fling?

But then that would utterly destroy the boundary I put up for my own good, by not replying to you the last time you asked me, and I know realistically I have destroyed any chance of that happening when you must’ve found me stalking your LinkedIn. More importantly it will make it blatantly obvious that beyond those two times, I wasn’t anything but a blip on your radar. Maybe I prefer this illusion of you, after all, and confronting you in life will eliminate him.

You’re not the only guy I’ve done this to. Most of the time, I embarrass myself enough in my delusions that I shudder at the mere thought of ever talking to them again. Once, it worked out, but then I ended up getting bored and breaking his heart years later. I often wonder if this is karmic payback for being so thoughtless but again the rational part of my brain realises that’s a cop-out.

vii. When I was thirteen my parents made me attend this motivational seminar over summer break, which famously (and sensationally) involved bullying us to study hard by visualising our parents on their deathbeds. They made us chant the line “Choices have consequences” on the hour and it has stuck. It’s wavered in my consciousness at times, particularly when I’m swimming in depression, and I often feel guilty coming out of the zenith when I realise that I’d just left it up to fate and faith to float me back to normality.

Every time I go back to Singapore and want to visit the places of my childhood, I find myself saddened by how things have changed and how my memories are disappearing. Again, there’s that tendency to comfort myself with memories to the extent of wishing them to reality, again an impossibility. Maybe that’s a good way to let your ghost rest, by realising that that is all you are – a memory, and a fleeting one at that. Again, I know it won’t happen overnight but it’s worth a try.

The other main strategy that everyone espouses to that end is trying to make myself the best possible version of myself I could be, almost to convince myself I deserve better than you. But why should I need to convince myself when I could just believe – but oh, that is still strangely counterintuitive.

What would giving in and talking to you achieve? Realistically, it’s been two years since that last message that I never answered, so quite possibly an unwelcome shock to you because why won’t I just rest and move on with life already? Awkward, almost immediately, because I’d been stalking your LinkedIn. You’d ask me how I was and I’d either a) launch into a diatribe about how I hate my life and existence and you’d be stuck at an awkward loss or b) I’d lie outlandishly about how my life is fucking awesome and you’d congratulate me and I’d struggle to fall asleep in self-loathing because my reality is anything but. So not a good outcome either way.

My choices have consequences, right? So talking to you, in both scenarios, would result in a negative, soul scorching outcome. I don’t ever want to have to endure that gutwrenching ache ever again, the choking sensation of my heart almost being hooked out of my chest. So rather than contemplate that today, let me figure out how I’m going to try and fix one broken part of my life, in planning out what to say to my family when I apologise for tonight’s outburst. Hopefully some of my earlier reflections will help.

And I know that this isn’t goodbye, not just yet. Perhaps I will one day be ready to finally lay you to rest. For now your phantom will just need to listen to my rambling emotions. For some reason or other I don’t think you’ll mind, so thank you for that. Maybe I’ll know you’re ready to go when I no longer have anything to say to you.

[sandralmuller]

What the FAQ?

Why FAQs provide a poor user experience

If your client thinks they need a Frequently Asked Questions page on their website, there’s most likely a problem with their website structure or their content. 

FAQs are like the bandaid on a slashed carotid artery. They’re trying to patch a deeper issue but offer no help at all to the gushing wound.

Users should be able to achieve their goal on a website without having to resort to an FAQ page to get the information they need.

It’s unlikely a user is on your client’s website for fun. They’re there because they have to do something (a task-based visit) or find something out (an information-based visit).

By better understanding what your client’s user needs are, you’ll have a clearer idea of how to best serve them and eliminate the need for an FAQ page.

The UK’s Government Digital Service agrees. They don’t recommend FAQs, no longer use them. They advocate for others to ditch them as well.

Why companies love FAQs

Organisations love creating FAQs because they are easy to write in their simple question-answer formula.

FAQs become a lazy catch-all for odd bits of information.

Not sure where this bit of info goes? Let’s put in an FAQ.

Thought of a question one user out of 10,000 might ask one day? Put it in the FAQs.

Had one enquiry about a topic via email that’s specific only to that one person? We took the time to answer them, so let’s add our answer to the FAQ page. Just in case.

Some organisations have trained their users to find their content via the FAQ section. It will be more challenging to convince these organisations to let go of their FAQ pages.

Examples of why FAQs provide a poor user experience

A quick poke around the web and it’s not hard to find examples of FAQs providing a poor user experience.

FAQs that are not even questions

Some organisations write sentences instead of questions, expecting the user to infer what the question is.

Immigration South Australia has a large FAQ section. This is just one part of it. They mix questions and sentences in their FAQ lists.

The not-so-FAQ FAQ

My most-hated FAQ is the FAQ that poses as a thinly veiled vehicle for self-promotion. You know the ones that read something like ‘How can I tell all my friends about your exceptional product?’

I’ll tell you exactly how many people asked that question. Zero.

If your client has these kinds of FAQs, get rid of them.

Here’s an example of a not-so-FAQ FAQ from Urban Home.

The problem with FAQs

One of the reasons why FAQs provide a poor user experience is that they quickly grow from a manageable handful to 15 to 30 to 63.

Before you know it, the dumping ground is a disorganised mess where a user must sift through dozens of FAQs that are of no relevance to their question.

Or the questions are so specific that your user can’t identify their problem among the FAQs.

This, apparently, is a frequently asked question. It’s on the ATO website.

This is an example of when FAQs become so trivial and specific to a single person they don’t cover important information relevant to most site visitors.

Heading length and FAQs

Another problem with FAQs is that FAQ headings are often longer than standard headings.

For example:

How do I get the stun feature on my Zombie Zapper 2.0 to work?

When users scan your page, they look at the first few words of headings.

So, if you have ‘How do I get the …’ as your first few words, your users are missing the key words about the stun feature on their Zombie Zapper 2.0 when they scan your content.

Instead, a heading like this works better:

Using the stun feature on your Zombie Zapper 2.0

Here’s another example of a dog’s breakfast of FAQs, courtesy of our federal government’s FAQs on the Australian Parliament House website.

FAQs on mobile phone screens

These headings are not optimised for scanning. Some of their FAQs are far too long and wrap across 2 or more lines on a mobile phone.

This is what the same FAQ list looks like a mobile phone screen.

It’s not a pleasant user experience.

Action-oriented headings

Starting headings with a verb makes them action-oriented and more engaging. Users are more likely to see their key words as they scan your page.

Short headings also work better on mobiles.

If this wasn’t an FAQ page, the headings would be more like:

Contact your local member

Learn what work the House does

Get your petition before the House

House sitting times

Standing and sessional orders

FAQ alternatives

If FAQs are so bad, what can we do instead of creating an FAQ page?

We can make sure the website’s information architecture (IA), is giving users the right cues to help them find the information they need. (A website’s IA is the labels we assign to menu topics.)

You can move FAQs onto the relevant web pages.

To make sure you’re only moving relevant and appropriate content, start this process with an FAQ audit.

Audit the FAQs

Gather a list of all the FAQs. My preference is to do this in a spreadsheet and identify:

the user need

the topic it most relates to

location of where the info belongs on the website

if it’s duplicated or already answered in the content

if it’s a true frequently asked question or if you can cull it

Move FAQ content into the relevant web pages

Map the FAQ content you’ll keep to the relevant page on the website.

Check if the page already addresses that question. If it does, there’s no need to add the FAQ content.

The only reason to include an FAQ format on this page is to address the SEO benefits through keyword targeting. We’ll cover this in more detail further on.

Test the IA

When a client’s site is undergoing a redevelopment, it’s the perfect time to assess the need for their existing FAQ page.

The new IA should capture the most likely place for the FAQs.

I use Treejack by Optimal Workshop to test IAs. Upload your menu headings, set user tasks, recruit users to complete those tasks. You’ll soon figure what’s working and what’s not working well with your menu design.

I’ve over-simplified IA testing, but that’s a whole new topic in itself.

*Adds IA testing to list of blog posts to write*

Set strict rules around the creation of new FAQs

Just because someone asked a question once back in 2017, it doesn’t build a business case for the website to include it.

So, what does?

Call centre staff, especially if they log call data, are a brilliant source of data. Sales staff also know the main objections and questions potential customers have about a product or service.

There are no definitive criteria for FAQ governance, you can set the criteria with your client. Consider if frequently asked questions:

are true FAQs

have evidence to back up that they are an FAQ

are not self-promotion

have already been answered in the page content

highlight a flaw in the site’s IA

need further user testing

are keywords that need to be included for SEO purposes

When FAQs work well

In most situations, if you or your client thinks you need an FAQ page, the content or menu structure isn’t doing its job well.

I hate blanket rules — that’s why I say ‘most’ situations.

There are a few situations where FAQs can work well. For example, they can work well:

When you have a transaction-based eCommerce site and need to cover shipping and returns information.

For an event or conference that has a lot of details about the logistics of the event.

For a sales page where you can use the FAQ format to counter objections. You also want to keep the user on the sales page, rather than sending them elsewhere to find the information. You might lose their attention during the sales process if you send them elsewhere to find the information they need.

But for everything else, let’s ditch the FAQ page and incorporate the information into the relevant place on the website.

FAQs and their impact on SEO

With the rise of voice search and the valuable real estate of search engine results pages up for grabs with rich snippets, questions and their answers have become an important component to include in your web content.

I’m not saying no to FAQs full stop. I’m saying no to FAQ pages and FAQs as a main menu heading (unless you’re ultra-specific – like the ‘Shipping FAQs’ for an eCommerce store). 

But ditch the standalone FAQ page.

One of the last major Google algorithm updates was about relevance.

An FAQ page with loads of questions and answers across a broad range of topics will most likely not satisfy Google’s thirst for relevance.

You’re better off building the credibility, authority and relevance of a single page. Add the FAQ keyword to the core, pillar page. Don’t add the keyword to an FAQ page where you’ll be sending mixed signals and cues to search engines and diluting the value of the keyword for your site.

And when was the last time you remember stumbling across an FAQ page via a search engine?

The FAQ challenge

Is there an FAQ page or *gulp* an entire FAQ section on your client’s website you could disassemble and disseminate the information to specific pages in the right context?

What the FAQ? was originally published on Sandra Muller