#pretty sure the author is not american by some of the word usage. which i figure increases the

[dahllaz]

Sometimes I come across a pet peeve that I did not know was a pet peeve and it is. Annoying.

It is not a big deal. And yet and yet and yet I am not sure I'm going to be able to finish this fic.

Because the Glock handguns the SVU detectives carry keep being referred to as revolvers and. It. Is. Driving. Me. Crazy.

They are not revolvers! Revolvers are a specific thing! Handguns with a cylinder you load bullets in and that cylinder revolves as it is fired to put the next chamber in line with the hammer and that is why they are called revolvers. The Glocks in the show have a magazine for the bullets and are fed up into the barrel when the trigger is pulled, no revolving cylinder.

This is not a big deal! So the writer doesn't know. Who cares!

Apparently. I fucking care. UGH.

[obviouslygenuinely]

Free Resources For Writers & Creators

This is a quick post of free resources that may help fandom creators (or creators in general). I’m sure many of these have been shared before. However, it doesn’t hurt to spread the word. A few quick points:

As a professional writer, I think this post will cater mostly towards writers.

I’m also a freelance photographer, so digital photography/editing/art sources are included, too.

I chose not to use any affiliate links in my post. I don’t want to profit from this, and I’m not sure that’s allowed on Tumblr anyways. 

If I’ve listed a resource I haven’t used myself, I’ve made sure to state it. 

Masterlists and/or huge resource compilations are marked with asterisks.

Alright, here we go! I hope you all find this post helpful. Happy writing/creating! 

Research

All of these are free resources for research. I use most of them for my writing jobs because they are extremely credible. These are great for making accurate references in your fics/creations. 

1. ***Research Resources For Writers***

Writer’s Write has an enormous database of research resources for writers. They are divided into 20+ categories such as:

careers

historical research

crimes and forensics

religion

Each category contains 10+ resources like websites, articles, tips, databases, and so much more. It’s the most comprehensive and organized free research tool I use.

2. PubMed

My go-to source for citing medical studies. You’ll find 30 million citations related to numerous physical and mental health issues. 

3. BioMed Central

I don’t use this website as often, but I keep it in my bookmarks. It’s similar to PubMed - great for discovering current and former medical research. 

4. Drugs.com

If you need to name a medication and/or refer to medication side effects, Drugs.com is a straightforward resource. It’s easy to navigate and understand. 

It also has a tool that lists potential medication interactions. This is really useful for accurate descriptions of med combinations. 

5. Merck Manuals Consumer Version

Merck Manuals started out in 1899 as a medical reference guide for professionals. This consumer version is really comprehensive and updated regularly. It includes definitions, studies, and more. 

6. FindLaw

If you’re writing about legal topics, FindLaw is useful for learning about laws/procedures in reader-friendly language. Categories include:

accidents/injuries

criminal law

family law (divorce, custody, etc.)

Keep in mind that laws vary based on location! You’ll often find additional links to state-related laws within articles. I do recommend double-checking state/location-based legal resources for accuracy. 

7. APA Dictionary of Psychology

This psychology dictionary is provided by the American Psychological Association. It covers 90+ areas of psychology and 25,000+ terms/definitions. 

You’ll also find links to additional psychology databases, resources, and so on. The website is updated frequently to provide updated information.

8. U.S. Bureau Of Labor Statistics

If you’re writing about a character’s job/career in the United States, this is a great source for accuracy. For any job sector, you’ll find details about

education requirements

positions in the sector

average salary for positions

what the positions entail 

I imagine there are alternatives for other countries, too! 

9. Investopedia Financial Term Dictionary

My area of expertise is personal finance; all of my writing published under my name is in this niche. I still refer to Investopedia’s dictionary for help. It’s excellent for understanding/explaining financial terms in a way that your reader can understand. 

10. MedTerms Medical Dictionary

This is the medical version of Investopedia’s dictionary. I use this source less frequently, but I find that it’s accurate and helpful. There are many similar references online if you search for “medical glossaries” or “medical dictionaries”. 

11. Domain Authority Checker

I’m not sure if this one is too helpful for fic writers, but it’s one of my most used tools. Domain authority “a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank on search engine result pages (SERPs)”.

The Wikipedia page for domain authority (DA) explains it clearly and simply. To sum it up, websites with good DA scores are considered reliable and accurate. If I cite sources in my work. I always link to sources with good DA scores. 

Writing/Editing

This section is the most thorough one. All of these are completely free tools for writing and editing any type of content. I currently use or have used all of these at some point in my career. 

1. ***List Of Free And Open-Source Software Packages***

This Wikipedia page applies to multiple categories in my post. It’s a masterpost of free and open-source software for anything and everything. Software is divided up into categories and sub-categories. Some relevant examples include:

media

networking/Internet

image editing

file management

There are hundreds of free software links on the page, so you’ll need to do a bit of browsing. Start with the categories above to find software geared towards writers/creators. 

2. OpenOffice

This is a free alternative to Microsoft Office. I’ve used it for nine years and love it. OpenOffice software includes free applications for:

text documents

spreadsheets

presentations

drawing

templates

There are many more tools with OpenOffice that I haven’t used. If you write offline, I cannot recommend it enough. Tutorials are readily available online, and the software is pretty user-friendly. 

3. Evernote

I briefly used Evernote and found that it’s very user-friendly and helpful. Most of my colleagues use Evernote and recommend it for taking notes/staying organized.

(I’m personally not a fan of note-taking software or apps. My method is messy text documents with bullet point lists.)

4. Google Drive

This might seem like an obvious one, but Google Drive/Docs is my writing haven. It has the tools included with Microsoft Office and OpenOffice and then some. It’s great for collaborative writing/sharing documents, too. 

5. Grammarly

I use the Premium (paid) version of Grammarly, but I also used the free version for years. It’s helpful for detecting simple spelling, style, and grammatical errors. 

There are numerous ways to use it - desktop, copy/paste documents, and so on. I’m not a huge fan of how well it works with Google Docs, but they’re improving it/it’s moved out of beta mode. 

If you’re interested in the paid version - which I highly recommend -  wait to buy until a holiday pops up. They offer a major discount on the software for almost every holiday/special occasion. 

6. Plagiarism Detector

This website is handy for scanning for plagiarism. You can scan your own work to ensure uniqueness, too. My clients are big fans of this tool. 

(I no longer use this resource; I use a paid tool called Copyscape Premium. The low cost has a big return on investment for me.) 

7. TitleCase

The name says it all. It’s free and simple! I’ll be honest - I’m terrible with proper title case. You’d think after a decade of writing I’d nail it. However, I use this tool pretty often. 

8. Hemingway Editor

Hemingway Editor is an online and desktop editor. It’s excellent for scanning your writing to check for:

readability (a grade-level score is listed)

adverb usage

passive voice usage

complex phrase usage

estimated reading time

This tool is color-coded to make editing easy. For example, adverbs are highlighted in blue. I don’t use this as often as I used to, but it was essential for my early writing career. 

9. Polish My Writing

This tool is very straightforward. You paste your writing into the text box. Spelling errors, grammar suggestions, and style suggestions are highlighted in red, blue, and green. 

It’s great for double-checking your work alongside Grammarly or Hemingway. When using free editors, I recommend using at least two for higher accuracy. 

10. OneLook Reverse Dictionary And Thesaurus 

I’m going to use the definition directly from the website:

“This tool lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be anything at all: a single word, a few words, or even a whole sentence. Type in your description and hit Enter (or select a word that shows up in the autocomplete preview) to see the related words.” 

To put it simply, you can use the reverse dictionary/thesaurus to find those words/thoughts that are on the tip of your tongue. Use the tool to:

find a word based on the word’s definition (i.e. search for “inability to feel pain”)

find synonyms and related concepts 

generate a list of category-specific words (i.e. search for “cat breeds”)

answer basic questions (i.e. search for “what is the capital of France?”)

The results can be hit or miss, but I usually find the information I’m looking for. It’s a solid resource any writer regardless of genre. 

11. Word Frequency Counter +  Phrase Frequency Counter

I cannot emphasize how much I love these tools. Repetition is the bane of a writer’s existence; it’s simply inevitable at times. 

These two tools count the number of times you use a single word or phrase in a text document. Just copy/paste your document, hit submit, and you’re all set! 

For the phrase frequency counter, you can scan for two-word to ten-word phrases. 

12. Thesaurus.com

This is another tool that might seem painfully obvious. Combined with the word frequency counter, it’s such an essential resource for me. 

It’s especially useful if you’re writing about the same topic multiple times (i.e. love, getting drunk, sex, etc.). I always use this combo of tools to ensure uniqueness. 

13. Lists Of Colors

Are you stumped when trying to come up with unique shades of blue? Is describing your character’s hair or skin color difficult? This Wikipedia page has you covered. It contains:

lists of colors (alphabetically)

lists of colors by shade

lists of Crayola crayon colors

lists of color palettes

I typically use this resource for product descriptions, but I also used it for creative writing many times. It’s a lifesaver for all things color-related.

Free Photos/Images

Tons of creators need free photos/images for numerous reasons. All of these sources provide 100% free photos, illustrations, etc. that have a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. This means there’s no copyright whatsoever on them. 

You can edit the images however you’d like, too. All of the images in my post are from the first source listed below. I made them black and white and added text.

(A lot of these sites have donate buttons for contributors. Donating a dollar here and there goes a long way!)

1. Unsplash

Unsplash is my personal favorite for high-resolution photos. It’s easy to navigate and has over 2,000,000 free images. Downloading an image is a one-click process, and you don’t need to create an account. 

2. Pixabay

Pixabay is my go-to site for illustrations and vector graphics (they have photos, too). There are 1.9 million free images to choose from. You don’t need an account to download images, but I recommend creating one. It’s free and with an account:

you don’t have to complete a CAPTCHA every time you download an image

you can access higher-quality/larger/etc. versions of images

I often use graphics from Pixabay to create overlays and masks for mixed media art pieces.

3. PxHere

I’ve never used PxHere, but one of my writing clients recommends it. It seems very similar to Pixabay, and the interface is user-friendly.

4. Pexels

In my limited experience, Pexels seems to focus on “artsy” stock images/content. I found great high-quality images the few times I’ve used it. 

5. Burst by Shopify

I haven’t used Burst, but it’s another free image site that a writing client recommended to me. It seems a little limited compared to the other sites, but it never hurts to add it to your toolbox!

Digital Art/Photo Editing/Etc.

This section seems brief, but the tools listed are pretty comprehensive and diverse. They are geared towards many creative needs/projects like:

Creating manips of people/etc.

Adding text to images.

Creating collages.

Digital illustration.

Advanced photo editing. 

There’s something for everyone. In my experience, finding your favorites among these will take some trial and error. 

1. Pixlr X and Pixlr E (app available)

Pixlr X and Pixlr E are both versatile free editing tools. Pixlr X is ideal for less experienced creators. Pixlr E is comparable to Adobe PhotoShop. 

I’ve used both software formats for personal and professional art projects.

The Pixlr app is handy for making collages, adding filters/overlays, adding text, and so on. I’ve used it for creating fanfiction collages and similar projects. It’s super easy to use. 

2. Remove Background by Pixlr

This is one of the easiest/fastest tools I’ve found for removing backgrounds from images. It’s perfect for creators who make manips using photos of people. 

It takes literal seconds to use. The tool automatically removes the background. If you spot any mistakes, you can refine the results with brush/erase tools. Then you download the cutout and you’re all set! 

Unfortunately, this feature isn’t available on the Pixlr app. There are a lot of smartphone apps for removing photo backgrounds.

3. GIMP

If you need a full-fledged Photoshop alternative, GIMP is excellent software.  It’s not an online tool like most I’ve suggested; you’ll need to download it to your computer. 

There’s quite a learning curve for it, unless you’re familiar with Photoshop already. Fortunately, the free video/text GIMP tutorials online are endless. I no longer use/need GIMP, but it’s a personal favorite of mine.

4. Paint.NET

Admittedly, I haven’t used Paint.NET, but my art/photography colleagues commonly mention it. It’s comparable to Photoshop and GIMP. It’s a web-based tool, and a quick Google search returns several tutorials for it. 

5. Photopea

This is more or less a Photoshop clone, but it’s free and web-based. If you watch Photoshop tutorials, you can usually follow the same steps in PhotoPea. 

I’ve only used it a few times; I have Photoshop so I don’t need it. Still, it’s very impressive - especially for a free tool.

6. PicsArt (app available)

PicsArt is a photo editing website and app; the app is much easier to use in my opinion. It’s a “fun” editing tool for photo manips, collages, and fan art in general. A lot of users post their art in the app, and I’ve noticed tons of cool fandom edits. 

Some of the features are Premium (AKA cost money), but I don’t think they’re worth the extra cost. PicsArt also has a digital drawing app. I haven’t personally used it but it may be worth checking out! 

7. Adobe Photoshop Express (app available)

(I’ll preface this by saying I have an Adobe subscription, so I have access to the “locked” features. I’ve used the free versions, but my memory of it is a bit hazy.)

Photoshop Express is a free web-based tool and smartphone app. The app is very user-friendly and can be used for detailed editing, adding filters, adding text, and so on.��

I’m less familiar with the browser version; I only use it for the cutout tool when I’m feeling lazy. It seems to be a good fit for quick edits - filters, cropping, and so on. 

8. Make PNG Transparent by Online PNG Tools

This tool is awesome for removing solid colored backgrounds. I use it to create graphics for mixed media art pieces. Here’s how it works:

upload an image

type the color your want to remove (name or hex code)

type the percentage of similar color tones you want to match (for example, 25% will remove your chosen color plus similar warm/cool tones)

the removed color is replaced with transparent pixels

If you want to make a JPG transparent, start with the website’s JPG to PNG Converter. There are a ton of useful free tools offered, but I haven’t tried out most of the others. 

Wrap Up

That’s all I’ve got for now! If I think of additional free tools, I’ll add them to this post. Feel free to reblog with your own recommendations or message me if you’d like me to add anything.

I hope my fellow creatives find these too

[nametags]

But her emails...

I aim to be a woman of integrity. I’ve sat on the content I’m about to share for almost 6 years in part because it originally was a private conversation between me and a friend. A friend who happens to be a lead singer of a band, but a friend none the less. However the way people have been speaking about him and what’s been going on in the world lately, I couldn’t let this stay hidden anymore.

I’m tired of people claiming that because Patrick no longer uses social media (and hasn’t for damn near five years at this point) that somehow he doesn’t “care” or isn’t doing anything right now to help the Black Lives Matter movement. I’m also incredibly tired of people ignoring/belittling the fact that Pete Wentz is a biracial/black man in America. You really do not want the social media person in charge of Patrick’s account tweeting things out. It would be hollow and fake.

Below is both a transcript of the conversation I had with Patrick on 12/06/2014, a follow up message he sent to me 08/25/2015, and the accompanying screenshots. Unfortunately I do not have the tweet(s) that prompted me to contact him in the first place nor can I find screenshots of them to provide that context. An image of me and my younger brother Jacob when we met the band at Boys of Zummer will also be attached to demonstrate one of the people I was concerned about in my original email. 

The only redactions made were my personal email address and the name of a friend I referenced. Patrick deleted his email account at some point between late 2016 and early 2017. It’s only left in these screenshots as proof for those who knew the address before to see these were legitimate messages. I hope the content reveals not only where his heart lies not only then but where it is now. 

Allison White: So I caught the insanity way late, but it's a tricky spot to be in with what's going on. For most of my life, I didn't even identify with half of my race. I was raised with my mom's side of the family and it just didn't click for me. It really hasn't been until teen years and onward that I've opened my eyes to it all. And with that, I began to grow wary of authority in a way. Like I still believe that people go into law enforcement for the right reasons. The few times I have dealt with police officers personally I haven't been concerned, but I have noticed in the past few years that when I spot a police car on the road or an officer just out in public somewhere is if I look "white enough" or do I actually look like an adult who belongs in whatever space I am in. I know Trayvon Martin was murdered by a vigilante and not an actual officer of the law, but that was when I first started to fear for my little brothers. I knew both of them were the sort of young men that could get targeted and most likely justice would not be found for them. And then there comes this summer. With both the Mike Brown and Eric Garner cases coming back with no indictment, it makes it feel as if it's just open season for black people to be hunted by cops. Which is hurtful for the cops who are actually in it to protect and serve, and every citizen who now has to wonder if they are next. I hope that your cousin is doing alright. I hope that people aren't making his job harder right now. Just I know for me right now with all that's going on I am definitely on the side of the protesters.

Patrick Stump: Brief for now; I'm sorry in all that you didn't notice that I'm squarely on the side of the protestors too. That's a failure of my wording

PS: The problem is that I so poorly expressed myself, people thought I was balancing the empathy to be spread across the black community and cops. That's a mistake on my part. I'm angry.

I'm angry that Mike Brown's case didn't yield enough evidence to indict. But that case was a very complicated one...Brown had just (allegedly) committed a violent crime and information was murky. As sure as I was that Wilson straight up murdered the Brown, I understood the limitations of the american Justice system given how little evidence there was. That's the unfortunate reality of justice is that it needs to be just. It needs to be 100%. We can't go in with "I know in my heart." And so that case pissed me off, but I understood it. 

With Eric Garner however, this just feels so flagrant. By no accounts was he violent, wasn't he doing anything that could even be misconstrued as life-threatening enough to even imagine defending the usage of deadly force. He was cooperating and they choked him to death on camera. That's fucked up. I'm pissed. I tried to be polite and sit back and not say anything, but I'm pissed.

However, my reason for discussing the side of the police as well is that human beings are complicated. When we boil people down to simplistic stereotypes, when we create a narrative of "Us VS them," we lose sight of the humanity of it all. You can't reason with a "Them." You can only reason with a person and it works better when you remember they're people.

I don't believe in enemies. I'm not religious but I love the way Jesus preached "Love thy enemy." That's hugely influential to me. Hugely important. That's the empathy I mean.

The other night I was holding my son and I thought to myself about a black girl I used to date. And how, we could have had a kid together. Maybe a little boy. And how, that boy could (by no action of his own) be killed just for the color of his skin. Like, I've heard and read words like that before, but to actually connect with it (on as small a scale as that) was horrifying. Gutting. For a little moment I thought, all this joy and all this beauty and somewhere, someone's having a black baby boy, loving him and feeling all the same things I feel for my son. But I wondered if in between their tired diaper changes and their burpings, if they were saying a silent prayer "I hope you don't get killed by a cop." If they say it constantly because they know how possible it is. Or even if he lives to be a 100, what black man won't have an unjust run in with the law? Not to make it exclusively a male issue but seriously, how many black men are in prison right now in America? That's a disgusting thing. The young parent of a young black boy probably considers that and that's maybe the most depressing thing I've ever tried to understood. That's a horrifying thing. There really still is a racial divide in this country, and to not be black is to not say those little prayers. We live in a supposedly free country. What about the pursuit of happiness? Who's defending the right of that little black baby boy born somewhere in America to just be an adorable little baby without any pretense? And when that baby grows up, who's defending his right to walk down a residential sidewalk and not expect to get pulled over and frisked? Maybe worse? 

So I'm angry. Just plain angry. But I didn't want to offend anyone so I expressed my anger in the lightest way I could think of. 

I'm not sorry for having an opinion, I'm sorry I explained it so poorly that you didn't know what it was.

AW: All of this is hard, and there is so much anger. You shouldn't ever be sorry for your opinions, and I am pretty sure you yourself have told people only be sorry for how you express your opinions. I wasn't upset with you or what you said, I just felt compelled to share that for me there's a knee jerk reaction to the image/idea of police and why.  This whole situation has been tough and it's been inspiring watching people across this country let their anger show and demonstrate in the streets against it. It makes me wish I was brave enough to take part in it out in the streets and not just online. 

I hope this collective anger and protest leads to real change. That in 2014 we are able to do the things they were aiming for in 1964. I mean recently the full letter the FBI sent to MLK to urge him into suicide was released and it just highlights the divide between how much has and has not changed. There's a lot of value in what religion is supposed to teach. Love thy enemy, love thy neighbor. True love and care for those around you is a great thing and certainly something I'd hope people identified with. 

The past nearly seven years there has been this push for hope and change. Maybe the country is finally reaching a point to make it happen?

PS: I have a funny feeling this is civil rights part 2. I'm proud of the protests. I'm so grateful our generation is angry about something it should be angry about for a change.

AW: An argument can be made that our generation (or just post baby boomer generations in general) have been taught and fed nonsense to keep us compliant, but that veers into a territory that I am not completely sure or comfortable with. Overall I do think that this is heading a direction that the powers that be are not ready for in the slightest.

PS: Where did I go wrong? What do people think I said? They're so mad at me, and none of the people have said anything I didn't mean. I'm not getting angry right-wing stuff, people are just calling me a racist. What did I say that was racist? What do I think that's racist?

AW: There's a strong immediate reaction right now of if you sound slightly in favor of the officers that did wrong that you are racist. The swift reaction and need to dogpile on is kind of crazy. I think people took the initial comment to mean "not all cops!!!!" In the same vein as "not all men!!!" and that's where the rage is coming from. 

AW: Just to be clear, those who matter know you're not racist. You have shown both in your words and actions where your beliefs lie. I don't know how to calm the masses right now because at least for the time being its not going to get through :(

AW: You could try a blog entry on tumblr?

PS: Nah, I think I've done enough damage for one lifetime. I think I'll keep it to myself but I appreciate your talking it through with me. 

AW: No problem. I am always willing to be a sounding board for that stuff if you need it.

PS: I re-read my stuff; "I support our police," is the worst things said. I meant "I support the idea of police and the need for a police force we can trust on a national level," not "I support the police in NYC who are killing people and attacking protestors." That sucks.

AW: If you wanna try to clarify now you can. At least in your Google alert it only had one mention of he mess and it was a tumblr user supporting/defending you. 

PS: There's no fixing it. The Internet is unforgiving I think and the reality is, I said that. I didn't mean it in the way that it so obviously sounds, but I said that. So I deserve everything I get.

AW: It will most likely go easier if you let it ride out instead of trying to go out and fight it. That just gives the "he doth protest too much" air about it. Hopefully the energy behind letting you know you said something like that will dissipate sooner rather than later. And that it won't get big enough for someone to write a story about it. 

PS: Yeah. It'll sound like back-pedaling and glad-handing. Anyway, thanks for talking it through! 

AW: You're very welcome! Thank you for hearing out my side of it this morning.

PS:  I never would've ignored your side.

AW: Which is very much appreciated

AW: I say that because in the past two weeks I have lost a handful of friends because of all of what's going on and them being unable to understand how and why their words hurt me.

PS: Well that's awful and unfair

AW: It was but they were all from the "when I look at you I don't see black, I just see Ally" camp and then would go on to say things about stereotypes and "thugs"

PS: Yeah. Thug. "Oh that's so ghetto." Bullshit.

AW: When someone says "thug" it's always clear they wanna say the n word

PS: Or even if they're the kind of "Well meaning," person who knows enough not to say that word, they mean the same thing

PS: "Not like you. You're good"

PS: White America just needs to know what it doesn't know

PS: Or rather, understand that there are things they (we) will never understand. Not from a first person perspective.

AW: It always makes me want to scream. The erasure of identity so then the people known to them stay safe. It reminds me of something I witnessed the other day. My friend [REDACTED] from junior high is now an established lawyer. Needless to say he has been keeping up very much with the recent events. He made a post about it and one of his friends commented with "I wish you would go back to being my friend [REDACTED] and not my black friend [REDACTED]." Mind you there's no denying [REDACTED] is a black man. He can't pass in the slightest so the comment shocked and saddened me. Thankfully [REDACTED] handled it with poise and grace. 

PS: If you have to say you have a "black friend," then you probably don't. That's fucked. I guess I just genuinely didn't imagine how pervasive this stuff really is. Like, Pete and Joe and I have been talking a lot today. I was under the misapprehension that we grew up in a decently inclusive area. Just come to find out, nobody used those words around me. The whole time they were heckling kids like Joe and Pete. I thought racism was this thing that doesn't happen here. It's scary how much it's come out post Obama's election. Elected officials sending out mass e-mails of pictures of watermelons. I just didn't get it. Ignorance is bliss.

AW: It knows how to hide in plain sight, which is a lot of the problem. People are taught "don't be racist!!!!" Without being told exactly what racism is. People (myself included at times) aren't aware of words/phrases/ideas have nefarious ties until too late. 

PS: I think we get too caught up on words and not enough on what they imply. "Thug," means a prepackaged idea of a black male. It instantly limits his perceived intelligence, his perceived trustworthiness, his perceived value to society, and his perceived prospects in life. That's so fucked. We expect black men to go to prison. Not be doctors and lawyers. When a black man is a doctor or lawyer, we treat him like such a cool novelty. When a black woman asserts herself, she's so "Sassy." "You go girl." 

These little words and phrases feel harmless. They never were

AW: Those are the positives. Usually assertive black women are angry, mean. It's so fucked all around. 

AW: I really owe Pete for helping me be informed on Ferguson. He tweeted the hashtag the night the protests started in August and it helped me dive in. I am sure tumblr would have got me to it eventually, but seeing it from day one was a definite help. 

PS: You know part of my problem? I'm just not brave enough to say what I think. I'm just scared of offending people. Pete's not. He doesn't care. That's powerful

AW: It takes a lot to just put it out there. I am not sure if I had the amount of eyes on me that you do that I would be so "fuck you I will do/say what I want" as I am. Hell I become such a shadow of myself when at work with how quiet and polite I am. I mean I am still pierced and tatted with short hair so visually I say a lot, but then I watch my speech to make us for it. 

(Follow up on 8/25/2015)

Patrick Stump: That is amazing and I'm very flattered. By the way; Been thinking about our conversation from a year ago a lot. The takeaway is this: Saying "All lives matter," and "Not all cops," while literally true are contextually horrendous. Really awful. In retrospect I feel pretty awful about saying both. Specifically because "All lives matter," can carry a lot of implications. Who's lives? I meant by it that Latinos and Muslims are also unreasonably targeted/mistreated/murdered by cops. But is it as systematic or blatant as it is with darker skinned Americans? Not remotely. Furthermore, as a white man, I just need to remember how fucking easy I have it. It's easy for me to preach peace and unflinching patience when I've NEVER been a victim of the War On Drugs or the aftermath of straight up slavery. So there's a lot to think about in terms of what I, a white guy, have to say and do about the situation. But not a lot I have to say about the way it feels to be oppressed to the point of feeling like less than a citizen of this country. I shouldn't have spoken about it because I don't/can't know. Well-meaning white folks get to talk about policy changes and do everything we can to help, otherwise we should get the fuck out of the way. I'm sorry, really REALLY sorry to the world that I ever said either of those things. It's more than "Fuck the police." It's "Fuck this whole system." And as aware as I'd been, I hadn't realized how complacent in it I was. Anyway, disgusted I said what I said. Sorry to the whole world for being part of the problem

[nikitasbt]

Tran Anh Hung: English and French language projects

The Vietnamese-born French director Tran Anh Hung is one of my favourite art-house masters, as I already mentioned while writing about his other films. The Scent of Green Papaya has coloured me enchanted, and The Vertical Ray of the Sun was another addition to his style of slow-paced sketches of the life of common people in Vietnam. I really enjoyed watching Norwegian Wood, and even Cyclo was quite something. Yet there are two films of Tran I have never said the word about. To complete reviews of all his films, I’m finally going to write upon I Come with the Rain (2009) and Eternity (2016) – two features where I couldn’t recognize the style of the director I admire.

I Come with the Rain (2009)

I Come with the Rain was a project with a tremendously huge budget for Tran’s films – about $18.000.000. This international project was marked with the involvement of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and French and American investors and actors and became an international commercial project. This is the first time Tran Anh Hung doesn’t make a slow-paced touching atmospheric story. I Come with the Rain is a grotesque thriller film in the English language, and this time Trans slides over something completely different from the previous features he lensed.

There are several important plot lines in this thriller, inspired both by Christian and Daoism mythology. Shitao (Takuya Kimura) acts like Jesus suffering for the other people he encounters, but the way he is taking their pain away makes him different from Jesus. The maniac Hasford represents the type of corrupt western intelligent who had lost himself in an attempt to understand what the humans are meant for and who deserves to rule the fates of others. Kline (Josh Harnett), Su Dongpo (Lee Byung-hun) and Lili (Tran Nu Yen Khe) symbolize different types of search for life values. Once they encounter Jesus-like Shitao, they act in a very different way understanding something valuable for themselves. The plotline of emotional connection between detective Kline and maniac is loosely inspired by The Silence of the Lambs where we also see the seeker (detective) and an intelligent, smart maniac who had imagined himself being a Creator. It is a very eclectic thriller setting questions about the violence of human nature, about the ways to oppose it and eternal forgiveness. Enriched with Bible references, I Come with the Rain comprises different culture formations and features of the West and the East showing the human nature is the same everywhere. The film is very different from other Tran’s features and strikes with a lot of violent shots, plenty of blood and perversions. It might be difficult to watch, though the usage of these things becomes somehow understandable, as the plot advances.

I Come with the Rain is marked with great usage of music – the songs and compositions we hear are the essential part of the story. Tran Anh Hung can be spotted as the same author of three films about Vietnam based on camera moves and usage. Though, I couldn’t get rid of the feeling he is now trying to do something to impress the broad audience. This film is shocking. It attempts to impress the viewers in extreme ways. Some figures and features are certainly great, but it is just not something I expected from Trang’s style. However, no one knows what is happening in his head, and perhaps he wanted to try something new. This film certainly excels from what we have seen of him before. Yet I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as in the case of his films about Vietnam.

Eternity (2016)

Tran Anh Hung had already directed films in Vietnamese, Japanese and English, and then comes the time for the French language feature. Since he has been living in France since the 1970-s and his films were funded by the French producers, it is quite understandable. Tran Nu Yen Khe acted as the narrator describing events during 100 years of a life of one French family starting in the XX century. The rest actors are mostly French, and the cast looks quite starry: Audrey Tautou, Melanie Laurent, and Irene Jacob. Well, of course, we remember there was an even bigger star in Tran’s films – Tony Leung Chiu Wai (in Cyclo) but still it is uncommon to see many well-known actors in his project.

So what would have happened in Eternity and what is it about? Pretty much to my chagrin, I’m not sure if there is a lot to talk about because this movie was very difficult for me to watch. In a monotonous way with lack of dialogues, it would tell the stories of two acts: childbirth and marriages. There are some events, like deaths or World War where two sons of the family get drafted. But it is not so important. Tran would just tell us about the life of the few generations. The period spans 100 years which represent eternity. The idea is probably that the most essential part of this life is repetitive: people born and die, sometimes they get married. There would be nothing else within 2 hours of screen time. I assume probably I'm not getting something essential, though.

The opening shots stun with warm and bright colours. It has reminded me of Bergman’s Cries and Whispers at some point. However, this usage of colour doesn’t really match Bergman’s idea. Tran is just trying to create a warm environment showing this toy-like world. We would be seeing the tender and loving faces of a young mother kissing the abdomens and chicks of toddlers. We would see them crying and mourning when people die. That’s it. The way Tran paints the environment is quite similar to the beguiling Scent of Green Papaya from the first glance. Though, after a while, you try to follow the story as the environment goes on the second plan. And in fact, there is nothing much to follow. I couldn’t recognize Tran anymore.

So what was the idea behind making such a film? Probably, Tran wanted to show the most important things in life are pretty basic and they repeat again and again. We are meant to cherish these things. Also, as far as I understand he attempted to show the world from the married women’s eyes. From time to time heroines say “Only men could say that” suggesting they have learnt something inapproachable for men. In this sense, the director is doing a great thing. We see the lace-like lives of women, though these are quite special women who are only concerned about childbirth and marriages. Perhaps, this sort of life is something I’m not familiar with… Or it is strange to me. This way of living seems to be primitive, but probably the beauty of basic values things is what Tran Anh Hung is showing on the screen. There is one more thing: Tran is showing the women in an uncommon way without looking at their sexuality. He focuses on women's concerns and pain painting them non-sexual. We just see the mothers, but no women as objects of sexual fantasies. It is the way to show the women from the prospect we are not used to in the cinema. All-in-all, we do get the idea of this pure way to depict the women not taking care about the impression they cast upon the men but dreaming about the happiness of their children. This is something fresh Tran comes up with, yet the rhythm of the whole story was boring for me.

If we would delve deeper, his Oriental films about life in Vietnam were also meditative and slow-paced stories of the people’s fates where nothing much has been happening. Sometimes, those film also were not so rich with dialogues, yet the Oriental features of Tran were much more vivid and inspiring due to some reason. I can’t even explain this feeling. Eternity just felt foreign to me, or even empty. From the 10th minute, I couldn’t recognize the style of Tran Ahn Hung and was disappointed. Nevertheless, he remains the director I admire, and I will be looking forward to seeing his future projects.

[antiquesounds]

A440. Not A435. Why?

I had a wonderful time looking through the original armistice and supporting document that showed that in 1919, the post-war European community and North America committed to 435 Hz for the standard Diapason Normal. 

However, anyone who follows Western music knows that the current standard is 440 Hz.  The next phase of this quest begins with the looking at some political impact of the Treaty of Versailles.  Not only is what I am going to write, “arm-chair” history, it is also based a lot on my limited grade school training (may I say, ca 1970′s-biased) and based upon very small selected reading about the era of mid-late 19th and early 20th century geopolitics. And, as an amature affectionatto of comic art, a lot of what I see about U.S. posturing and waffelling during the early 20th century is based upon the wonderful political comics from the era. As my parents used to ask me when I was young, “How’d you know that?” And I’d point to the political cartoon from the paper that day. 

Source Ohio State University - https://hti.osu.edu/opper/lesson-plans/wilsons-14-points/images/barring-his-way

Coincidentally, I heard a wonderful interview with an author that has just released a book on this subject in general.   How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwar is on my to-read list. The book has more to do with territorial United States. But the general imperialist drive was as strong as ever post-war. Like a nasty big brother trying to take most of the cake after the fight was over, the political posturing inside and outside the U.S. was mostly to take and make itself more globally important and culturally powerful.

In the 1930′s (pre WWII), there is little argument that the United States delivered a global political posture of Imperialism - if not outright colonialism that had extended from the Spanish-American war through the Roosevelt era. A lot has been written about Wilsonian policies. You wouldn’t think this would have anything to do with concert performance standards in Europe post-war, but in fact, one of the most amazing things I learned while perusing the Treaty of Versaille is this entire section 2. Section 2-  Article 282, has all of the kitchen sink items that the countries deemed necessary to settle once and for all. I liken this to being the part where the negotiators say to the parties, “And sirs, is there anything else you guys want to settle here once and for all?”  Like a kid saying, “Yeah, and I wanted that candy, too!”  So a whole bunch of interesting stuff came out of that list. I will share some of that later. 

Deeper reading into the history of diapason normal debates going back to the 1855 treaty mentioned in the prior post taught me that this battle over both the creation of the “normal” and the value of the normal (435 versus 440, versus other frequencies) went way back prior to the 19th century especially in Europe (North America still being a western world social pariah in the 18th century.) So I can easily accept that this would be on the list of “wish we coulds” for the armistice of 1917. Now that I saw the context of the list of things included in that section, it became more obvious that it actually makes sense to have this in the treaty. I am a converted man on this subject now. I am not longer scratching my head about it being referenced here. “No more fighting, boys. We addressed all of your issues. Okay?”  If you want to be shocked at how extreme this is, check out the actual list (see page 170)! Here it is:

So far, pretty mundane.  Mostly agreed upon tolls and tariffs and an interesting standardization of railroads #4 (tracks and such if you look into it). I will note some things that put this into context and save the details for my next post on this subject.  But #2 is REALLY cool. I will share more on this that later. Any reference to “motor-cars” piques my interest. Also note #1 which makes sense post-war. And we go on... 

 With 12-14 back to tolls and tariffs. Then come the SOCIAL ones. This is what is so interesting. Again, take this in context. The winning powers (big brothers) after the fight are now going to pick the things they get to enforce on the world (or at least for Europe for now). The war to end wars is supposed to stop the bickering and delivery all the rules on how to behave. This includes a new set of social norms. I keep saying this, and I will say it again. I will get back to a few of these specific items on why they seem so silly here, but were of huge geopolitical social importance in 1919.  Amazingly, look at #15, 17-18, and 26 as progressive and at the same time regressive social rules. And then look at #16 (what is that about? Matches???) and 25, bird? and our favorite “Concert pitch”. It is like a kitchen sink of items. I assure you that when you look at these in detail, they each represent a longer term social issue that was unresolved. And, often, the issue was quite significant to the overall worldwide population.

But I digress. The diapason normal was 335 Hz in 1919. After this, there was a push to make a formal standard committee embrace this diapason normal under a different set of standards - literally.   I found evidence that going into this battle in Europe, in the United States, there was a belief that “science” showed little difference between 435, 438 (the compromise proposed) and 440 (the German standard). Even in the United States, there is documentation that describes how some scientists wanted to leave well enough alone and leave it at 435. 

However, between the wars, it seems that the United States and German did not participate in the 435 standard. The Acoustical Society of America decided that the standard should be 440. Why? I do not know. But by 1936, the Americans sided with the 440 and placed it into their standard. This does not make it diapason normal, though. So for what seems to be the time between 1936 (WWII) and 1955, the United States joined with Germany in continuing to use 440 as the tuning standard, while the treaty said it should be 435! I was surprised by this. Several documents point to this, but do not explain why The U.S. was so bull headed about this. If the research (and I dare say, common assumptions) would tell you that once established, nobody can tell the difference, then why did the U.S by themselves put it into their standards in 1936 (less than 20 years after Europe resolved the issue). I have no answer on this. I have a post facto answer/excuse that arrives after the next stage, but nothing as to why this was such a big deal to the U.S  in 1936. There are conspiracy theories about this because of the German connection but those seem like they are contrived. 

After WWII, the same push that drove the standardization post WWI happened again after WWII but as far as I can tell, there was no post-WWII declaration of standard pitch. However, there was a push again for the scientific community to come together on international standards. In 1947, the International Standards Organization was formed (ISO). Many people are familiar with ISO. It establishes, documents, and helps evolve standards for just about everything. I have had personal experiences with ISO over the years with data communication and quality standards. One example that everyone experiences daily is the ISO 9000 standard suite for quality.   

The ISO came out of a drive in the post-war era to deliver a more generic solution to that problem described in the post WWI days. In other words, for those things that require universal standardization (like concert pitch?), we need an international organization to address this need. For example, if we want to standardize on household electrical power norms -- even if we cannot change our world-wide deployment (110 volts versus 220 volts for example), at least we need to document and define these differing standards so that the worldwide community can interoperate. I consider this to be more of a meta-level approach to solving the same issue that the Treaty of Versaille Section II, Article 282 tried to address. This is a guiding principle of the organization, and remains a lofty goal.  In 1955 the 440 Hz standard was officially entered as ISO 16.  I did not pull it because it costs money to see it but it is here: https://www.iso.org/standard/3601.html. 

This still bugged me though, because why would they have taken the U.S. request for 440 over older established 435? And, does this mean that diapason normal is not the same as ISO 16? Well, frankly, I am not completely sure on the last point. I see no formal migration to the ISO standard although I do see a relinquishing of stature in some supporting texts from the era. It is fair to say that the world has conceded, but I still do not see where it did so with a revised diapason normal declaration. Here is a funny clip from The Acoustical Society of America as late as 1971 was lamenting that Europe still had not come around on this.

 [Note that ISO reformalized ISO 16 as A440 Hz in 1977. A coincidence?]

So here is where I found the most useful reasoning behind the continuing push by the U.S. to make everything based upon 440 Hz.  It is because of warfare and communications. This is the punchline to the whole thing. 

I found out that starting way back around 1949 the U.S. government was looking at which frequencies were best for different broadcasting needs. Assuredly, these all had to do with military and espionage usage There is evidence that they believed 440 and 600 to be the best for delivery of communication tones (audible). It is not a huge leap to assume that this belief also drove a campaign to enforce the standard on the world. The organization to look at is NOT ISO but rather, NIST (U.S. National Institute of Standards.) And, in hindsight, this makes complete sense to me. NIST would drive all U.S. standards especially as pertains to radio broadcast and military.  

Here is an example of such a document. I misplaced the one that originally capped my discovery. But this is a representative similar document. And this one, too. 

In fact, to this day, there is a growing stack of documents that describe how and why 440 Hz is used as the standard for synchronization tones. It’s the tone that is used when we listen to NIST WWV timeclock at the top of the hour.  The reason is that this tone is apparently what was believed to be the best (least-lossy) audible tone frequency.

So possibly, the push to deliver a hard 440 Hz standard had something to do with 1949 -1960 thoughts on best possible audible tone over radio. It sure seems that way. And it is definitely the common NIST mantra since 1960. See the end of this doc for oodles of examples: 

https://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/1969.pdf

One parting thought on the A440. While researching this I found a whole bunch of crackpot theories about A432 being some sort of universal vibration. A432 is just another of the possible frequencies one could choose as a standard. And, indeed it was in the mix of options over the centuries this has been fraught. If you wanted to tune to any frequency that you want, you could. Who gives a darn? And just because 432 was used by someone for some reasons long ago doesn’t necessarily mean that it is “better”. It is a fixed tone used to derive other relative tones in music. So it really doesn’t matter until or unless you get all freaky-deaky about the differences in relative microtones for western scales. And if you care that much, 432 doesn’t solve all of those issues anyway.

 All I can say is that it made me feel a bit better about myself seeing that others are more nonsensical about their 432 Hz desires than I was about my historic research. I thought I was wasting MY time doing all of this research. But think of all the wasted energy surrounding this sort of notion and the other various conspiracy theories about various pitches being part of betterment of life. 

Next post will be about those other amazing discoveries associated with The Treaty of Versailles. cars, birds, and sulphur matches up next.   Those side discoveries were the best part of it all. 

[blogeastern186]

Bluestacks 4 For Mac

Dec 09, 2020 However, The latest version of BlueStacks 4 is 6x faster than Samsung Galaxy S9+. It costs 4$ per month. It will help you to run mobile apps fast and fullscreen on Windows and Mac. However, The latest version of BlueStacks 4 is 6x faster than Samsung Galaxy S9+. It costs 4$ per month. It will help you to run mobile apps fast and fullscreen on Windows and Mac.

Bluestacks 4 Mac Settings

Bluestacks 4 For Mac

Bluestacks 4 Download For Mac

Macro Recorder For Bluestacks 4

Download Bluestacks 4 For Mac

Download BlueStacks for your Windows computer from this page. You can download and run it on any Windows PC (windows 7, 8,10) 32-64Bit. The developers frequently update the app; thus we would suggest you bookmark our site. This way you can quickly download the latest version of Bluestacks app player whenever a new version becomes available.

Everybody loves running Android games and apps on their PC and right now using android emulators is the only method to archive this. Being a Gamer and Android geek myself, I had to try every emulator available to find which one is the best. After months of testing and trying dozens of apps; I come to the conclusion that Bluestacks is the best solution for running Android apps on PC.

I think every one of us is fond of using Android apps. I think everybody out there has used an Android app and an Android device for at least once. We all know that using an Android app is a pretty pleasant experience to have, that’s why I recommend that each one of you should try Bluestacks, This way you can use any android app you want on your PC. For instance, you can use MX Player for PC, SnapTube on PC and Kik on PC and What Not!

Now to try any app you have to download it first; That’s why we created this website. Here you can download the app for PC. Not only that; Actually we have shared everything about this awesome android emulator on this page. You can also check the Bluestacks installation guide, how to root Bluestacks and everything else about it. So much so that we think this page should have the title of BlueStacks 101 Guide. However, to save your precious time we have provided the official Bluestacks download links just below this paragraph.

Contents1 Download Bluestacks

1.1 BlueStacks System Requirements='toc_number>

1.2 What is Bluestacks App Player?='toc_number>

1.3 Why BlueStacks and Not Any Other Emulator?='toc_number>

2 BlueStacks Features

2.1 BlueStacks Installation Requirements='toc_number>

2.2 Installing BlueStacks on Windows 7/8/8.1/10 or XP Computer='toc_number>

2.3 How to Fix Common BlueStacks Errors

2.3.1 Words from the Author='toc_number>

='toc_number>

Download Bluestacks=download_bluestacks>

Let me guess, You own a mac and now you want to run some android game/app on your 4-figure beautiful computer, right? By default, Mac doesn’t run Android apps. But you can install BlueStacks from here and enjoy all your android features using this software on your Mac. Feel free to download BlueStacks for Mac computer iMac, Mac Pro, Macbook Air/Pro.

Nowadays we have a very powerful app player named BlueStacks. It works like a connection for mobile and desktop by using an innovative technology called Cloud Computing. It is an American silicon-based company which produces the Bluestacks App Player and is designed for enabling multiple applications to run on Windows and Mac computers.

Download BlueStacks for Mac

Download BlueStack v4.240.0.2802

If you are not a Mac person, You can also Download BlueStacks for Windows or BlueStacks for Linux Computers from our site. Yeah we serve BlueStacks download for every platform.

🗑️How to Uninstall BlueStacks on Mac?If you want to uninstall Mac then first make sure the app is closed, it’s not running on the background. Then go to Finder > Go > Applications > BlueStacks Application > Drag the application to trash

folder.🍎How to Use BlueStacks on Mac?First, you have to download the software from here and install it. After installing BlueStacks, you have to log in to your google account just like setting your Android Smartphone or tablet. And now you enjoy android on your Mac.⚠️Why does BlueStacks keep crashing my Mac?If you are trying to use BlueStacks and it’s crashing over and over then go to Settings > Security & Privacy > General > At the bottom you will see “System software BlueStacks Inc. was blocked from Loading” > Allow (And now try opening again).➕How to add photos to BlueStacks Gallery on Mac?

Bluestacks 4 Mac Settings

You have to first copy all the photos in the “Documents Folder “on your Mac Device. Download any File Explorer and install it on BlueStacks. After installing start the file explorer. Next, Click on SD Card Option > Windows folder > Documents folder > Select items for importing > More (Lower right corner of your screen) > Copy > Select the folder which you want to import files.🤔How to root BlueStacks on Mac?You have to install KingRoot or BS Easy Tool. And you can root your BlueStacks on Mac by using these softwares. After installing just follow the onscreen instructions.👍How to make BlueStacks Faster on Mac?You have to change your Mac’s Memory RAM size by increasing it and you can make your BlueStack faster on Mac.

It is one of the best software which helps to turn a computer into an Android Device. Bluestacks merges your Windows/macOS and Android experiences seamlessly. One of the best features of Bluestacks Mac is that it is free of cost (additional charges will be added).

Bluestacks 4 For Mac

However, The latest version of BlueStacks 4 is 6x faster than Samsung Galaxy S9+. It costs 4$ per month. It will help you to run mobile apps fast and fullscreen on Windows and Mac. This version also takes mobile gaming to another level with lower usage of Memory and CPU and improve the gaming experience. I must say this BlueStacks App Player for Mac is a great tool that also allows you to run your favorite mobile apps/games in full screen in your Mac.='gr_>

Download it and start taking advantages from today; otherwise, you will regret the days if you haven’t used this coolest new app. I recommended you to check BlueStacks for Ubuntu, yeah you can now run Android Apps on your Linux Computer too.

Bluestacks 4 Download For Mac

Safe and Virus Free Software: Yes ! it is very safe in use, free from viruses and any other malware. So you can use this software freely and widely. It is my personal experience with this app that it is entirely free of viruses and any other damages. Its privacy and policy are very much efficient and useful.

Macro Recorder For Bluestacks 4

You can read the review of Bluestacks users who are fully satisfied with this software. After reading this, you will be sure about using this software. Now if you want to use and make a trial of this app you can easily download it from here.

Download Bluestacks 4 For Mac

Scroll back to top=screen-reader-text>

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

June 27, 2021

My weekly rounded up of things I am up to. Topics include Scientific American on Degrowth, Progress Studies, Construction Costs, and the Clean Energy Future through Innovation Act.

Scientific American on Degrowth

Scientific American ran an editorial this week entitled “The Delusion of Infinite Economic Growth”. If you’ve had read more than about three pieces from the degrowth movement, you’ve seen everything that is in here. But rather than go through too many details, there are a few things that jump out at me.

Scientific American is a prestigious journal, and when I see an editorial published there, I take it to be something close to a consensus position in the scientific community. “Consensus” doesn’t means that all, or even most, scientists necessarily believe this position, but the position has enough institutional heft behind it that it can be regarded as “the” scientific opinion. I would never expect to see an editorial entitled “the case for growth” in Scientific American.

I would have expected, coming after a protracted period of anemic growth in Western countries, to see more institutional appreciation for economic growth. If anything, the opposite seems to be continuing to happen.

There is a need for some institutional heft behind the pro-growth position. I could write a “Case for Growth” editorial, but it will hardly matter because I am an outsider to the scientific community, with no clear way of getting back in. It’s very frustrating to see a problem and feel that I cannot do anything about it.

Most political views, even those that are highly disagreeable, contain some nuggets of truth that should be taken seriously. It is true that under established physics, there are limits to growth, and while physical limits are far above present values of economic activity, the nature of exponential growth is that limits--be they physical or others--must be reached in a relatively short time. This is why there are, for instance, proposals for planetary parks despite the fact that there is almost no trace of human activity beyond low-earth orbit.

The editorial asserts that there is no decoupling between resource use and GDP. This is not quite right for two reasons. First, there are some clear cases of partial decoupling, especially between energy (based on important materials) use and GDP, and second, it is the negative impacts of material usage, not material usage per se, that is most relevant, and there there is stronger evidence of decoupling. But the point is taken that the decoupling is not as strong as one would like. There do seem to be limits to how much decoupling is feasible, and if there were market signals that better reflected environmental impacts, such as carbon pricing, the economy could be operating much closer to those limits. The editorial does however seem to be overly pessimistic about those limits.

The authors also assert that continual exponential growth in economic activity is “needed”. I’m not sure how well-grounded this statement is, and they don’t make a serious effort to back it up.

A major conceit is snuck into the use of the word “we”. The authors seem to imagine that the world economy is a coherent entity that is subject to planning. But there is no entity that has the authority to exert worldwide economic policy. On a national level, the history of centrally planned economies should be a cautionary tale about the feasibility and desirability of such endeavors.

Progress Studies Political Movement?

Mark Lutter of the Charter Cities Institute has an article calling for a Progress Studies political movement. The article is a bit disjointed, but the main message is that it calls for something comparable to the progressive movement or the environmental movement for progress studies.

One thing I like about Progress Studies is that, at least for now, it doesn’t have a clear political agenda. But eventually the movement should accomplish some things, and that means engaging with the political process. I would hope at least that it avoids going into the partisan gutters, which is getting harder and harder to do now.

Construction Costs

This essay by Austin Vernon has many interesting pieces of information about construction costs, particularly of single family homes in the US. I found several interesting take-aways.

SFH is one of the cheapest commodities on a per-volume basis, though not necessarily on a per-mass basis. This is, according to the author, a major reason why construction is so highly localized and thus resistant to the economies of scales that come with factories or automation. Indeed, again shown by the recent Katerra closure, efforts to industrialize construction have been made repeatedly over the years and have not generally been successful, though not entirely unsuccessful, as the author does review how industrialization has been applied to subcomponents of construction over the years.

The author settles on regulatory reform, particularly to allow smaller units, multifamily housing, and trailer parks, as the main measure that will improve housing affordability.

On the subject of housing affordability, it is worth remembering that the United States is very affordable (measured by the ratio between annual income and house prices) compared to other countries. The optimist would say that this means that the American policy environment must be pretty good, while the pessimist would say that there is plenty of room for housing to become more expensive.

It is tempting to look at the dismal record of construction productivity in the US and worldwide and conclude that the industry is ripe for disruption. But it does seem that these trends are occurring for a reason, and reversing them will not be easy. Perhaps advances in machine learning, which make it easier to deploy models to novel data sets, will finally turn this around. But I’m not seeing strong evidence of this yet.

Clean Energy Future through Innovation Act

There is new legislation introduced, the Clean Energy Future through Innovation Act of 2021, that would tackle emissions in the power sector. Electricity generation is about a third of total CO2 emissions in the US, but it is the sector that is most amenable to reduction and nearly a prerequisite to making progress elsewhere.

The bill has emphasis on the full range of low carbon electricity technologies, including carbon capture, nuclear power, renewables, efficiency, and storage. I think neutrality is an important principle, and this approach is much more likely to be effective than a traditional renewable portfolio standard.

Still, in terms of comprehensive, effective, and affordable solutions, I don’t think anything beats carbon pricing as represented by the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act.

[liskantope]

Another little rant about Jordan Peterson and his attitude towards gender-nonbinary pronouns, since although I intended to take a break from the Peterson material, YouTube persists in suggesting more Peterson videos for me. Not going to bother linking to videos this time, just going to make a few points based on what I heard today.

1) Peterson purports to be really hung up on the distinction between disallowed speech and compelled speech, claiming that a major reason he find the Canadian C-16 bill to be so heinous is that it compels him to use certain words that he doesn’t like rather than tells him that he can’t use certain ones. He brings this up, for instance, when asked how legal protection of trans people’s rights not to be misgendered is any different from the right of an ethnic minority not to be addressed with a racial slur.

I have a couple of issues with this. My main objection is that our language has a finite number of words and when dealing with a category that only a very small list of words apply to, disallowing certain terms is equivalent to compelling one to use certain other terms. For instance, if there’s a rule stating that I’m not allowed to refer to African-Americans in a manner generally considered disrespectful (disallowed speech), then well obviously the N-word is out and “colored” and “blacks” and “negros” probably aren’t admissible either... and there aren’t many other phrases out there for that category of people. I’m left with the option of using the term “African-American” (or maybe “black people”, or something else more cumbersome), so inasmuch as I have to refer to that group of people at all, in effect I’m being compelled to use certain terminology. In Peterson’s case, as far as I know the law isn’t saying that he positively has to use any particular pronoun, but unless he can get around using pronouns altogether (and really, when I taught at university I rarely had reason to refer to an individual student in the third person so that does seem possible), he is required to not use the wrong pronouns. And if that looks like compelled speech to him, it is to the extent that disallowed speech does imply compelled speech in general.

Secondly he doesn’t seem to like directly addressing the case of being disallowed by law to use overtly offensive speech such as a racial slur. So is he really okay with that? It seems that he doesn’t want to argue against it, but that seems possibly disingenuous considering that about 90% of his inflated rhetoric about free speech rights and descent into totalitarianism would seem to apply just about as well to prohibitions of offensive speech as well as use of pronouns.

2) He insists (while admitting that he’s not a linguist) that it’s impossible to change our pronouns because they’re a “closed class”. But I (while not a linguist either) don’t think he understands the linguistic concept of “closed class”. Quoting from the Wikipedia page:

The open–closed distinction is related to the distinction between lexical and functional categories, and to that between content words and function words, and some authors consider these identical, but the connection is not strict. Open classes are generally lexical categories in the stricter sense, containing words with greater semantic content,[22] while closed classes are normally functional categories, consisting of words that perform essentially grammatical functions.

The upshot is that it’s harder for closed classes to adopt new words and it happens much more rarely, but it does happen. Some Romance languages invented new formal second person pronouns out of existing nouns (e.g. Spanish usted), and you only need to look a few centuries back in our own language to see one personal pronoun get replaced by another (thou by you). And yes, I believe that in modern times our usage of they is expanding as well.

I feel a similar distaste as Peterson when it comes to some recently invented pronouns like xie which pretty much came out of nowhere, and I agree with him that it’s a bad idea to try to make a majority of English speakers to suddenly start using them by fiat. But in my opinion on singular they is that we have been naturally progressing towards it for decades. Dr. Peterson insists that it’s never been grammatical apart from very limited use in sentences like “If anyone’s child wishes to bring a book, they are welcome to do so.” And it might well be that it has never been officially accepted as correct English grammar, but surely lots of grammatical constructions are in widespread use today without being recognized in the official regulations. Surely my opinion as a native English speaker should count more than what’s listed as correct under official, formal guidelines. And I say that we seem to have evolved in the direction of singular they far enough that deliberately giving ourselves a little push farther in that direction wouldn’t be painfully awkward.

(Peterson even seems to be worried about us losing the ability to distinguish between singular and plural when using third-person pronouns. Has he looked at how our language deals with the second-person ones lately?)

[maximelebled]

2017

Howdy! Time for the yearly blog post! There's enough depressing stuff that happened this year, so I want to try and not focus too much on that; talk more about the positive and the personal. (I am looking back on this opening paragraph after writing everything else, and I don’t think that ended up true.)

I find it increasingly harder to just straight up talk about things, especially in a direct manner. I think it comes from continuing to realize that so many things are extremely subjective and everything has so much nuance to it that I feel really uncomfortable saying a straight "yes" or a straight "no" to a lot of questions ("Nazis are bad" is not one, though). Or even just a straight answer.

I always end up wanting to go into tangents, and I inevitably run into not being able to phrase that nuance. You know that feeling, when you know something, you have the thought in your head; it is so clear, right there in your head, it is crystal-clear to your soul, yet you have no idea how to word it, let alone doing so in 140/280/500 characters. Frustrating!

I guess I could just put a big disclaimer here, "I am not a paragon of absolute truth and don't start interpreting my words as 'Max thinks he is the authority on XYZ' because you'd be quite foolish to do so"; but that doesn't help that much. Online discourse, let alone presence, can be so tiresome these days; not to be too Captain Obvious, but, there are quite a lot of people that delight in engaging those they see as their "opponents" in bad faith.

As a white man, I don't have it that bad, but still, I'll continue to tell you one thing: the block button is extremely good and you should feel no shame in using it. It drastically improves your online experience. (There are some very clear signs that make me instantly slam the button. I’m sure you know which ones too.)

Anyway, regardless, it's hard to get rid of a habit, especially one you've unwillingly taken on yourself, so I apologize in advance for constantly writing all those "most likely", "probably", "maybe" words, and writing in a style that can come off as annoyingly hesitant sometimes.

I started watching Star Trek this year. My Netflix history tells me: January 29th for TOS/TAS, March 26th for TNG, June 3rd for DS9, November 9th for Voyager.

TOS was really interesting to watch. A lot of things stood out: the (relative) minimalism of the sets and the directing was reminiscent of theater, and even though that was, generally speaking, because that's how TV shows used to be made, it was still striking. From a historical perspective, "fascinating" would still be an ill-suited word to describe it. Seeing that this is where a lot of sci-fi concepts came from, suddenly understanding all the references and nods made everywhere else... it was also soothing to watch a show about mankind having finally united, having exploration and discovery as its sole goal. I feel like it wouldn't have made as big of an impact on me, had I watched it a year prior.

I've always thought of myself as rejecting cynicism, abhorring it, but it's harder and harder to hold on to that as time goes on. I still want to believe in the inner good of mankind, of people in general, but man, it's hard sometimes. I think what really gnaws at me most of the time is how so many of the little bits of good that we can, and are doing, individually, and which do add up... can get struck down or "wasted away" so quickly. The two examples that I have in mind: Bitcoin, this gigantic mess, the least efficient system ever designed by mankind, has already nullified a decade's worth of power savings from the European Union's regulations on energy-efficient light bulbs. And then there's stuff like big prominent YouTubers being, to stay polite, huge irresponsible fools despite the responsibility they have in front of a massive audience of very young people. It can be really depressing to think about the sheer scale of this kind of stuff.

What we can all do on an individual level still matters, of course! I try my best not to use my car, to buy local, reduce my use of plastic, optimize my power usage, etc.; speaking of that, I've often thought about making a small website about teaching the gamer demographic in general quick easy ways to save energy. There is so much misinformation out there, gamers who disable all the power-saving features of their hardware just to get 2 more frames per second in their games, people who overclock so much that they consume 60% more power for 10% more performance, the list goes on. Maybe I'll get around to it some day.

All this stuff going on makes it hard to want to project yourself far ahead in the future. Why plan ahead your retirement in 40 years when it feels like there's a significant chance the world will go to shit by then? It's grim... but it definitely makes me understand the saying "live like there's no tomorrow". Not that I'm gonna become an irresponsible person who burns all their savings on stupid stuff, but for the time being... I don't feel like betting on a better tomorrow, so I might as well save a little bit less for the far future and have a nicer present. You know the stories of American workers who got scammed out of their own 401k? That's, in essence, the kind of stuff I wish to avoid. If that makes sense.

Anyway, going off that long depressing tangent: something I liked a lot across The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, was how consistent they were. The style of directing, framing, camera movement, etc. was always very similar. Now, you can argue that's just how 80s and 90s TV shows on a budget, a 4:3 aspect ratio, and smaller SD screens worked, yes, but I do believe there is a special consistency that stuck out to me. I jumped into the newest series, Discovery, right after finishing Voyager (I don't plan on watching Enterprise) and the first two episodes were confusing to watch... shaky cam, a lot of traveling shots, shallow depth-of-field, and the tendency to put two characters at the extreme left and right of the frame.It’s a hell of a leap forwards in directing trends. It all gets better after the first two episodes, though.

I remember alluding to the King of Pain project in my last yearly post. I'm glad I managed to finally do it. I'd talk about it here, but why do it when I've made 70 minutes of video about it? (And unlike my previous behind-the-scenes videos, it's a lot more condensed, and hopefully entertaining.) Unfortunately for me, I completed the video in late June, with only a month left to the TI7 Short Film Contest deadline. So I ended up making two videos back-to-back. I had to buy a new laptop in order to finish the video during my yearly pilgrimage to Seattle. It was intense! And thankfully, I managed to pull off the Hat Trick: winning the contest three years in a row. I would like to think it's a pretty good achievement, but you know how us artists are in general; as soon as we achieve something, we start thinking "eh, it wasn't that good anyway" and we raise our bar higher still.

While I do intend to participate in the contest again next year, I know I'll most likely do something more personal, that would probably be less of a safe bet, now that the pressure of winning 3 in a row is gone. I already have a few ideas lined up...

... and I do have a very interesting project going on right now! If it goes through and I don't miserably land flat on my face (which, unfortunately, has a non-zero chance of happening), you'll see it in about a month from now.

I'm pretty happy to have reached a million views on all three of my shorts; a million and a half on the TI7 one, too... it might reach two million within six months if it keeps getting views at the current rate. It surprises me a bit that this might end up being my first "big" video, one that keeps getting put on people's sidebar by the all-mighty YouTube™ Algorithm™. There's often a disconnect between what you consider to be your best work, and what ends up being the most popular.

This reminds me that, a lot of the time, I get people who ask me if I'm a streamer or a "YouTuber". My usual answer is that I'm on YouTube, but I'm not a "YouTuber". I wholeheartedly reject that subculture, the cult of personalities, the attempts at parasocial relationships, and all that stuff. It's just not for me. Now, that said, I do hope to achieve 100k subscribers one day... I'm getting closer and closer every day! The little silver trophy for bragging rights would be neat.

My office was renovated by my dad while I was gone. It's much nicer now, and I finally have a place to put most of my Dota memorabilia. He actually sent me this picture I didn't know he'd taken, behind my back, in 2014; the difference is striking... (I think that game I'm playing is Dragon Age: Inquisition.)

Tinnitus. I first noticed my tinnitus when I was 20. I vividly remember the "hold on a second" moment I had in bed... man, if I'd known back then how worse it'd get. Then again, the game was rigged from the start; as a kid, I had frequent ear infections because my canals are weird and small. What didn't help either was the itching; back then, they thought it was mycosis... and treatment for that didn't help at all. Turns out it was psoriasis! Which I also started getting on my right arm that year. (It's eczema, it's itchy, it's chronic, and the treatment steroid cream. Or steroids.) Both conditions got worse since then, too.

Tinnitus becomes truly horrible when you start the doubt the noises you're hearing. When all you have is the impossible-to-describe high-pitched whine, things are, relatively speaking, fine. You know what the noise is, and you learn, you know not to focus on it. But with my tinnitus evolving, new "frequencies", I have, on occasion, started doubting whether I was hearing an actual noise or if it was just my inner ear and brain working in concert to make it up. So I end up thinking about it, actively, and that makes it come back. I had a truly awful week when, during an inner ear infection, the noise got so shrill, so overwhelming, I lost so much sleep over it. I couldn't tune it out anymore. It was like it was at the center of my head and not in my ears anymore. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. I'm not even sure that I'm in the clear yet regarding that. But, like I said, it's best if I don't dwell on it. Thinking of the noise is no bueno.

Really, the human body is bullshit. Here's another example. A couple months ago, I managed to bite the inside of my mouth three separate times. I hate when it happens, not because of the immediate pain, but because I already dread the mouth ulcer / canker sore (not sure which is the appropriate medical translation; the French word is "apthe"). Well, guess what: none of these three incidents had the bite degenerate into an ulcer... but one appeared out of nowhere, in a different spot, two weeks later. And while mouthwash works in the moment, it feels like it never actually helps... it's like I have to wait for my body to realize, after at least ten days, oh yeah, you know what, maybe I should take care of this wound in my mouth over here. And it always waits until it gets quite big. There's no way to nip these goddamn things in the bud when they're just starting.

But really, I feel like I shouldn't really complain? All in all, it could be much worse, so so so much worse. I could have Crohn's disease. I could have cancer. I could have some other horrible rare disease. Localized psoriasis and tinnitus isn't that bad, as far as the life lottery goes. As far as I'm aware, there's nothing hereditary in my family, besides the psoriasis, and the male pattern baldness. I wonder how I'll deal with that one ten, fifteen years down the line...

Just as I'm finishing writing this, the Meltdown & Spectre security flaws have been revealed... spooky stuff, and it makes me glad I still haven't upgraded my desktop PC after five years. I've been meaning to do it because my i7 4770 (non-K) has started being a bit of a bottleneck, that and my motherboard has been a bit defective the whole time (only two RAM slots working). But thankfully I didn't go for it! I guess I will once they fix the fundamental architectural flaws.

The Y2K bug was 18 years late after all.

Here's a non-exhaustive list (because I’m trying to skip most of the very obvious stuff, but also because I forget stuff) of media I enjoyed this year:

Series & movies:

Star Trek (see above)

Travelers

The Expanse

Predestination (2014)

ARQ

Swiss Army Man

Video games:

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

Horizon: Zero Dawn

What remains of Edith Finch

Uncharted: Lost Legacy

Wolfenstein II

Super Mario Odyssey

Metroid: Samus Returns

OneShot

Prey

Music:

Cheetah EP by James Hunter USA

VESPERS by Thomas Ferkol

Some older stuff from Demis Roussos and Boney M.... and, I'll admit reluctantly, still the same stuff: Solar Fields, the CBS/Sony Sound Image Series, Himiko Kikuchi, jazz fusion, etc. I'm still just as big a sucker for songs that ooze with atmosphere. (I've been meaning to write some sort of essay on Solar Fields... it's there, floating in my head... but it's that thing I wrote earlier: you know the idea, intimately, but you're not sure how to put it into words. Maybe one day!)

I think that's about it this year. I hope to write about 2018 in better terms!

See you next year.

[cbk1000]

accidental-rambler I'm yet to read it! I heard it's not as good as SoC duology though from many people and as much as I love LB's writing, she certainly didn't do due research re: Russian culture, even if judging by her usage of Russian family names/surnames alone

The surnames are fixed in the Russian translation (Alina’s last name is changed to ‘Starkova’, for instance), but kvass is still hard liquor, and their magical elite are still collectively know as Greg. lmao (A Russian reader was ranting in a Goodreads review about how it’s the equivalent of an American calling a group of elite magical soldiers The Bob; it was pretty funny.)

There’s actually a thread on Goodreads addressing the inconsistencies, and the author herself chimes in to say they were intentional, and that while she drew inspiration from Russia, it’s not necessarily supposed to be accurate to Russian culture. Which, fair enough, it’s fantasy, and I’m pretty sure Putin doesn’t have a squadron of badass magic users at his disposal (though I can’t say for sure), nor do a bunch of flying monsters converge on the hapless citizens to carry them off to gruesome deaths, but when you use Russian words and names and drinks that actually exist in our real world, and you use them incorrectly, you can’t expect people to not point that out. If she’d made up a bunch of names and beverages and words that sounded Russian but didn’t actually exist, that’s one thing, but she didn’t. Her world-building isn’t terrible, it just seems like she stumbled across some Russian things and threw them into her novel without bothering to actually look them up so she could better understand how to incorporate them. 

The mistakes are mostly funny to me, although I can see Russian readers being annoyed or even offended that she nicked pieces of their culture and didn’t bother to use them correctly. There are also several complaints about how one of the characters is basically named after a Russian cuss word, which confused me, till I realized it’s spelled differently in the actual Russian; obviously to get around that pesky little hey-so-this-lady’s-last-name-is-actually-a-very-crude-term-for-male-genitalia. 

It’s not bad; I’m honestly enjoying it so far, and I’ll reserve full judgement till I finish it.

[izzyspussy]

ALL 50 QUESTIONS BITCH

HECK

1: Age Group   For fic tbh whatever, I know a lot of people in fandom are underage and are exploring and figuring out what they like, etc. Plus not all my stuff is explicit, and some of the stuff that is still isn’t porn so. As for original stuff that will likely all be explicit as well, so an adult market audience.

2: Genre   Usually fantasy, sometimes science fiction.

3: Big Idea or Detail Oriented Outlining   binch i cant outline for absolute shit. I guess big picture but like…. ?? the biggest possible picture, almost to the point of being useless lmfao. someone help me.

4: Line Editing or Plot Revision   I prefer line editing for fics because I’m lazy and it’s for free, but overhaul type revision results in a better finished product so I use that for original stuff (and commissions).

5: With or Without Deadlines    With deadlines, definitely. I can crank out 1k in an hour if I have a deadline, but without one it can take me 2 years to write just as much (see: Zwangsneurose, started the second I got home from seeing The Winter Soldier, still not finished, word count at ~800 lmfao).

6: The Biggest Compliment   I love it when people mention details that they noticed! Or if god forbid I was funny once.

7: Current WIP Length   I have 12 fic WIPs right now and the longest one is 7.7k. I have 4 original WIPs right now, but they are all in development stages, with no word count yet.

8: Author Comparison Goal   @neil-gaiman 110%. He is my ultimate goals and a huge inspiration, not to mention just a plain cool guy. I also would love to be compared to Rick Riordan or Gillian Flynn.

9: Biggest Struggle   Foreshadowing probably. I sort of wing it as I’m writing, and I can’t do a very good outline like I said, so it’s tough to get good hints and clues as to what’s coming. That’s part of the reason my originals are taking so much development (not just because I have to fill in all the worldbuilding that is already mostly done for fic).

10: Brainstorming With Others or Alone     I like to do a bit of both. I really appreciate input, plus talking things out can really get the creative ball rolling. But I like to get into Deep Shit on my own too, especially with worldbuilding. I’ll always share with others though, even the stuff I wanted to come up with all on my lonesome.

11: Characters Based on Real People     I’m sure there are aspects of people I know, and of myself, in every character I create, and likely even in characters that have already been created. What you know will always leak into your writing. However, I don’t usually base a character fully (or purposefully) around one real person. I do namesakes though, but they’re almost never modeled after that person, it’s just a shoutout to someone I find inspiring in some way.

12: Writing Space Clean or Cluttered     cluttered af binch u been here & seen it smh make me drag myself in front of everyone……

13: Character Driven or Plot Driven     Always character driven!! what kinda question

14: Favorite Writing Related Quote     “Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which sometimes pay the rent.” - guess who lmao

15: My Characters in Someone Else’s World     I would transport my characters into (brace yourselves for a shock lol jk) American Gods, primarily so that they could get some good old fashioned “help” from the Big Guys.

16: Movie or TV Show     Well two of them have pretty finite endings. The romance legend could be a tv show but with a limited amount of renewal, ala A:TLA (but I’d like it better as a graphic novel). The vampire tragedy has a very finite ending so that would make a better movie. And the witch noir and girl gang are both a bit neverending-WIP-ish so they’d make pretty good shows.

17: Soundtracks     Yes! They help keep me focused and writing in a cohesive tone when I have to leave and come back. Y’all can listen to the playlist I have for witch noir here. Eventually I’ll split it up for character and/or scene mood, and I might add some scene suitable ambient noise tracks too.

18: One Song to Sum It Up    witch noir - Temptress, S.J. Tucker    romance legend - Take Me to Church, Neon Jungle    vampire tragedy - Bodies, Celia Pavey    girl gang - Weapon, Bastille & Angel Haze & FUGZ & Braque

19: Me There or Characters Here     …me there, I guess? In the romance legend, vampire tragedy, and girl gang not anything would really be different, but in the witch noir I’d probably have inherited some sweet powers. Not many of my characters are very friendly tho lmao.

20: Most Wanted Adaptation     Probably (a piece of) the witch noir. It’d be neat to actually see all those neat film noir lighting tricks.

21: Finish     Uh. I finish one shot porn a lot? lmao. Other than that, damn… no.

22: Made Myself Cry     lol yah

23: Proud or Anxious     usually I’m more proud, but sometimes when it’s something that’s very deeply personal or controversial I can get anxious.

24: When Did I Become a Writer     tbh sometimes I think I came out the womb that way. I don’t remember not being a writer, and I know I had legit novel ideas as early as like 3rd grade, and was making shit up with pretty words even earlier.

25: Must Reads in My Genre     three guesses what i’m bout to say y’all. Literally anything by Gaiman. Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart series. Any Pratchett. Donna Gillespe fucked me up with The Light Bearer. Bear Daughter by Judith Berman (although that is kind of a tough read, so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for everyone).

26: My Genre Needs More…     Diversity in general, specifically more people of color, queer people, and people with disabilities (that aren’t magically erased). Also in my opinion there needs to be more things in between grimdark and go-lucky fairytale.

27: Inspiration Source     History, anthropology, and pseudoscience.

28: Character Naming Stress from 1-10     Probably about a 2 or a 3. I use behindthename.com which can be searched for meanings, sound patterns, usage, and origin, and has a handy “name themes” search algorithm. I also recently found the legit U.S. census thanks to @peppersandcats helping me out with search terms, and that can be sorted by ethnicity, gender, time period, and geographical location. So I’ve got names pretty well covered!

29: Underwrite or Overwrite First Drafts     It could go either way, but generally speaking unless I have a word limit I usually like to add more during editing. Except when something is confusing or too complicated, then I’ll cut it.

30: Calming or Stressing      Not really either tbh. I enjoy it a lot, but it’s mostly exciting! Not calming or stressful, but either a fun adventure or a challenging puzzle.

31: Favorite Trope     Tough to pick just one tbh. I love tropes when they are done “right”. Even tropes done classically can be great (as long as they’re not -phobic of some sort), but I especially love when they are done satirically or inverted.

32: Backstories for Side Characters     Guilty af. Even characters that might not even make it into the finished book have backstories, personalities, and quirks.

33: Characterize Before Writing or Develop with The Story     A little bit of both. I like to have a solid character to work with at the beginning, but for in-text character development I like to let that unfold with the plot and the other characters.

34: Old Writing in One Word     Prolific

35: Villains or Heroes     I like them both pretty well, but my favorite characters of all time are always a little ambiguous so if I had to pick just one kind that’s what I’d go with.

36: B&W Morality     No way! I live in the gray area.

37: Advice     Have fun! Be proud of yourself for what you come up with and celebrate your creativity even if you think it doesn’t compare with other writers. The happier you are to create, the more creative you’ll get. Also, like with any other kind of art, pick a couple role models to emulate and that will help you develop your own solid style.

38: Advice I Fail At     The first draft doesn’t have to be perfect. I spend too long line editing while I’m writing my first draft and that makes it a lot harder to finish anything.

39: Importance of Positive Reinforcement     I’d say reasonably important. Definitely helpful. But I know I’ll keep writing even without it.

40: Question for Favorite Author     How much difference is there between how his creation is in his head versus how it came out in the words, and does he ever think about rewriting things that are long finished?

41: Distracting to Read While Writing     Actually, no. Reading other comparable works helps keep me motivated, inspired, and focused.

42: Motivated or Discouraged by Critiques     Tbh I don’t think I have ever received a real in-depth critique so I’m not certain? I’ve had idle “I liked this, but I didn’t like/understand that” type of feedback, and that has usually been pretty helpful and appreciated. If nothing else it lets me know what parts of the story might not be as accessible to an audience.

43: Protagonists in My Likeness     Yes, there’s a little of me in very many of my protagonists, and often even in fic characters that I write. But, like with other real people, they’re not usually modeled after me, we just have some stuff in common because I leak over into them (and sometimes they leak over into me) when I’m writing them.

44: Choosing An Idea      This is something I struggle with, really. My process is usually to try writing a bit of it, and if I hate it it’s probably not viable.

45: Harder or Easier While Stressed      It’s usually a harder to write when I’m stressed, and what I do manage to write doesn’t have as much quality.

46: Sort Protagonists      !!! There are too many!! these are just the Big Ones (so far) in witch noir      Gryffindor - toots, eddie, maddie, anca, seth      Hufflepuff - lily, charisma, s.j., angel, iris      Ravenclaw - fred, ariel, dido, father piero      Slytherin - evelyn, jessica, sloan, clara-claudia, aixa

47: Five Year Goal     Hopefully I will have fucking finished something. Maybe published? Or maybe getting my manuscript looked at. (I have a humble-ish time frame, I think. Writing is a lot of work, and five years is a lot less time than it sounds like.)

48: Co-Writing     I’m a huge control freak, so probably not. At least not with original characters. Maybe for fic tho, because that can be much lower stakes lmao.

49: Fast or Slow     When I’m in The Zone I speed thru, but it can take me a while to get started and I come up on blocks pretty often so I’m a slow finisher.

50: Worldbuilding or Characters     Shit man, that’s a tough choice. I guess characters? I don’t know.

[anghraine]

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t care for much of the Space Spanish trend (Swedish actress = hundreds of thousands of words of headcanons, Latin American actor = Google Translate).

But if you are going to do it, a whole ton of interesting questions do crop up.

I mean, if the likes of the Organas and Andors and Damerons are all speaking Space Spanish, then 

1) Are there significant dialectical differences? 

If you care about official/EU canon, all of these people come from different planets. Does Poe ever get confused by idioms in General Organa’s Alderaanian Spanish? Are there any words that are used literally/neutrally in one dialect but hilariously inappropriate slang in others? Are all hispanohablante planets on the same plane wrt the State of the Pronoun, or is Cassian taken aback when Kes uses tú but also capitán?

Those are relatively minor things, but are there more divergences—things that might seriously impair mutual comprehensibility? Or are there less? Has there been any effort to impose some sort of galactic standard/~purify~ the language à la the Real Academia Española? (I mean. I wouldn’t put it past the Empire.) 

2) Where does it actually come from?

Languages aren’t going to spread from star system to star system on their own. And these planets aren’t geographically—er, astrographically—near at all. Alderaan is a Core planet. Yavin IV is on the Outer Rim. What happened?

Since the Bey-Damerons aren’t actually from Yavin, you could probably fanwank that. But as far as I’ve seen, the usual assumption is that Spanish is the primary language on Yavin itself (Space Guatemala!), not just among Poe’s family. Given the general dynamic between the powerful Core planets and the Outer Rim, it seems most probable that it would have originated in the Core and been carried to the other planets by ... colonists? Conquerors? What?

I mean, does Alderaan have some imperialist history we don’t know about? Something authorized by the Republic or merely permitted? Is it recent or remote history? 

3) What is the language called?

I’ve rarely seen anything other than [Planet]-ian depending on which character is speaking at the moment, but if it’s a functional common language, you’d think there would be a generally recognized name for it. Even if there are also other ones used more frequently in specific regions—how is it listed in Republic/Imperial records, say?

(Is there any approximation of español vs castellano?)

4) Does it belong to a linguistic family?

Yes, this is going a bit afield, but is it related to any of the attested languages? Is there anything like Italian that the hispanohablantes can understand fairly well but it’s deeeefinitely not the same thing? 

Is the relationship between Space Spanish and Basic pretty much Spanish--English? That is, shared membership in a general family + a lot of similar vocabulary thanks to Basic’s history with a related language, but significant differences in grammar/basic vocab? Are they actually more closely related, more along the lines of Spanish-French or even Spanish-Portuguese? Or much more distant, like ... Romanian and Frisian or something. Or just completely different! Are there cultural ties to other hispanohablante planets, or others that speak closely related languages?

5) What about usage?

Speaking of Basic, is it common to speak both? All the characters we see appear to, but we don’t see much of the galaxy’s population or a necessarily representative one. 

Are there planets(or even countries/regions) where Basic would generally be an acquired language or even relatively uncommon? Or the opposite, areas where Basic, or a standardized S!Spanish variant, is supplanting/fusing with the local dialect—something like Navarrese getting swallowed up in Castilian? 

Also, what would be the effect of Alderaan’s destruction? Surely the preservation of Alderaanian Spanish would be hugely important. How would it actually be done, or at least attempted? If Alderaanian survivors have been gathered, does it survive among them? Or was it a lingua franca on Alderaan at all or confined to a smaller group that renders it a minority language even among Alderaanians? Is it prospering or dying out in TFA? 

Is Lor San Tekka actually speaking to Kylo the-last-Organa Ren in Alderaanian? Is that why nobody seems to react to what he says? 

...anyway. SO MANY POSSIBILITIES. I’m sure there are dozens more that I haven’t even considered. It would be genuinely interesting to see those explored. Even just in passing! 

 And, well, the contrast between direct Earth imports and everything fans do with Tatooine/Mandalore/etc would be a lot less bitter that way.

[heavenwheel]

5 Important Copywriting Tools Every SEO Pro Needs

You’re an SEO. You’ve found an incredible keyword gap for your client that their competitors aren’t ranking for.  

Thrilled, you develop title tag and on-page copy recommendations for your client and are sure that your advice will propel their organic traffic forward.

Copywriting tools? For on-page recommendations and a title-tag?  Your writing is fine as is. Or so you think.

See, you didn’t use copywriting tools to make sure your language was actionable, invoked emotion and had perfect spelling and grammar. Users didn’t click on your client’s result because they felt indifferent and unmotivated while reading your title.

But here at Distilled <> Brainlabs, we can help you with that.

In case you missed it, we’ve merged!

While an SEO’s job can include mapping keywords or making content recommendations, these actions won’t matter if we can’t attract users to click on and read our results. The perfect keyword can exist, but if we can’t position it and attract a user to it, we could be left wondering where we went wrong.

Because of this, I’ll share with you five important copywriting tools that ensure your title tags, headers, and on-page copy stand out from the crowd and attract your target audience.

1. Avoid any costly spelling mistakes - Grammarly

When writing, we can think of the most enticing and encouraging language to get users to click on our results. This is a goal that we should strive for, except when our titles or copy have egregious misspellings or hard-to-ignore grammatical errors. 

A persuasive title with a spelling error is pretty much user-repellant.

Users are looking for results that display:

authority

expertise

trust

Misspellings and grammatical errors scream the opposite of authority. We need to make sure our content is cleaned up. 

Want to know how we can do this?

Using Grammarly, a free digital writing tool that uses artificial intelligence and natural processing language to check grammar and spelling. 

It would be really disappointing if the first tool we recommended to you is a glorified spell-checker. 

Luckily, Grammarly is more than that. It also makes recommendations based on vocabulary, clarity, brevity, and tone. You can insert Grammarly into your optimization arsenal as a first line of defense, whether you prefer editing as you write or towards the end of your work. 

Grammarly has an online editor on their website and browser extensions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. Having Grammarly installed will also improve your writing anywhere on the web quickly and seamlessly, without ever having to open another tab.

Grammarly’s algorithms help raise issues that may be present in your writing, and give the reasoning behind any potential correction, which help you make informed and thoughtful decisions while editing your work.

Grammarly also offers functionality in Microsoft Office on Windows and a Grammarly Keyboard for IOS or Android. They also offer a Gmail plug-in, so when you’re communicating with your client or colleague, you can draft up that 4:55 pm email knowing you’re in good hands. 

2. Improve hard to read sentences - Hemingway

We want our writing to be error-free and grammatically correct. But sometimes we need that extra push to make our writing more concise. Many writers find themselves constructing difficult and hard to read sentences. This can lead to writing at a comprehension level higher than your target audience.

Enter the Hemingway editor.

Hemingway Editor is a free writing tool that helps make your writing clear and bold. It can help with improving the style of your writing and letting the reader focus more on your message. 

Think about being a reader yourself. Do you want to spend time having to re-read a sentence to understand its meaning? 

You can enter your copy directly into the Hemingway Editor and watch as it dissects your text for adverb usage, use of active voice, and hard to read sentences. 

For SEO professionals, another valuable aspect of Hemingway is its built-in readability score.  After you enter text or copy into Hemingway, it uses the  Automated Readability Index, which basically informs you what “grade level” your writing is at.  

Why is writing for grade level important?

We want to consider who we’re writing for, as SEO professionals, content writers, and writers in general. 

Writing to capture traffic for a direct-to-consumer electronic company should look and read differently than a B2B cloud migration company. 

Studies have shown that the average american reads at an 8th-10th grade level. So if your copy starts to creep up to 12th or 13th grade level, consider whether this level of reading comprehension makes sense for the users you’re trying to cater to.

The next time your client asks you to review a blog post, or you’re constructing title tags and meta descriptions, you can rest assured that your recommendations will include robust and readable copy.

Hemingway is available for your browser. They also offer a paid version–the Hemingway Editor 3 for Mac and PC. This version works without an internet connection and lets you publish directly to WordPress or export directly to HTML or Microsoft Word.

3. Keep readers engaged with your content - Bucket Brigades

We now have two free tools to make sure our writing is grammatically correct, bold, and easy to read. 

Think about how much value you can now provide your clients with:

Their content will be punctual and powerful, and they’ll have you to thank drawing all of this new organic traffic to their website and resulting in a 15% increase in conversions. 

Except you can’t keep users on the page. 

Your blog post is boring her. She’s now headed to your competitor’s site.

Now: how can we draw the reader in?

Using a classic copywriting technique called Bucket Brigades. 

As SEO’s, we know that average time on page can directly affect a result’s ranking potential. And while bounce rate doesn’t necessarily indicate a decrease in ranking potential, wouldn’t users be more likely to convert if they were drawn in by and attracted to our content?

Think about it: we want to keep users on our client’s pages. We can’t do that if they stay on the page for less than 15 seconds.  

A bucket brigade is traditionally defined as a human chain, used to transport items from one person to the next (think firefighters passing a bucket of water).

Thankfully, we’ve invented fire trucks.

In writing, a bucket brigade is a phrase that motivates a user to continue reading. Of course, writers being the creatives we are, had to steal this concept and make it about ourselves.

It does make sense though. As writers, we want our reader’s attention to easily “pass” from one sentence to the next, and bucket brigades help accomplish this.

As an SEO, whether you’re reviewing a blog post for a client or trying to create attention-grabbing headers, including bucket brigades is a simple and free way to improve users’ time on-page and improve a client’s conversion rate. 

Whether you’re working in-house or for an agency, one idea to keep in mind is your client’s brand voice and to ensure the language you recommend ties in accordingly. If they employ a more conversational approach to content, using bucket brigades would be a welcome addition to their strategy.

If your client’s content exudes a more formal tone of voice, bucket brigades are still an acceptable strategy, but it may be beneficial to limit your usage to avoid coming across as too informal. 

Some classic Bucket Brigades include:

Want to know..

Now:

It gets better/worse:

But wait..

Think about it:

On the other hand,

Here’s why:

You could use some of these examples or get creative and develop attention-grabbing bucket brigades yourself. 

This is incredible. You now know how to write powerful, error-free, and captivating copy.

But how can we ensure users will even click on your result in search engines?

4. Improve dull and unexciting headers - CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer

Any SEO professional will tell you that a title tag can make or break a piece of content. How can you improve a client’s organic traffic if you can’t even get users to click on your result in the search engine? 

Luckily, Distilled’s own Dominic Woodman recently discussed how to write an incredible title tag where he goes into defining a title tag, what your goals should be when constructing one, and how to write different kinds of title tags and expectations one should have.

  When constructing headers or title tags, many copywriters like to brainstorm and write down as many as they can, and this is something SEO professionals can benefit from by implementing into their title tag creation process. It can help get the creative juices flowing and explore different title or header structures one might not have thought of at first.

What should we do when we decide on two to three that we love? 

We can use CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer.  

After briefly filling out a call-to-action, you can use this free tool to help you write headlines that will drive traffic, shares and search results.

The Headline Analyzer has a couple of useful features.

It measures a header’s “word balance”, which includes how many common, uncommon, emotional and powerful  words are used in great headlines. They recommend a strong header has the following balance:

Common words - 20-30%

Uncommon words - 10-20%

Emotional words - 10-15%

Powerful words - at least 1 powerful phrase or word

While I wouldn’t be too alarmed if you aren’t hitting every single target here (writing title tags and headers is hard!) this part of the tool is helpful to consider your usage of powerful and emotional words. 

In addition, CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer includes a length analysis feature that measures if your headline is the proper length and uses an ideal amount of words.

All in all, this tool can assist in giving thoughtful insights for titles and headers that you may not have previously considered. Feel free to use this during any part of your title tag or header ideation process! 

5. Find out what your users are really searching for - AlsoAsked.com

Last but not least, we’d like to introduce you to  AlsoAsked.com, a new SEO research tool that focuses on informing users on how questions are topically grouped. It isn’t necessarily a copywriting tool, but provides us with valuable insights into what we should actually be writing about. 

This free tool takes your search term and displays related questions from other users. It uses “People Also Ask” data, rather than Google’s Autosuggest, which is a main reason why we use this tool to create relevant headers and write copy that helps our readers.

We know what questions users are searching for and what language they’re using. Why not use it to our advantage?

To use the tool, you simply plug in a keyword you’re targeting, select the language you’d like results for, and choose the region you’re trying to target. 

Let’s say we want to know what questions users have about meta descriptions.

We just plug “meta description” into the search bar, choose the language and region of our choice, and let AlsoAsked do the rest.

You can see below that we’ve now been given an overview of different types of questions users have, and how those questions can lead to even more specific searches. 

With these findings, we now know what answers users are looking for, and can create content that satisfies them.

For example,  if you’re writing a blog post about meta descriptions, some topics we may want focus on include:

Defining what a meta description is

Giving a meta description example

How to write a meta description

Google’s usage of meta descriptions

All in all, AlsoAsked is a useful tool that can help inform your content strategy and give you new ideas to write about or recommend!

We’d like to hear from you! 

At Distilled <> Brainlabs, we’re constantly testing out new and old tools alike, seeing what helps us deliver valuable client work and grow and improve our clients’ visibility. We hope you find some of these tools and tips helpful in your future content goals.

What are some of your favorite engaging words or phrases to use? What’s the most captivating title you’ve ever written?

from Digital https://www.distilled.net/resources/copywriting-tools-for-seo/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[dillenwaeraa]

5 Important Copywriting Tools Every SEO Pro Needs

You’re an SEO. You’ve found an incredible keyword gap for your client that their competitors aren’t ranking for.  

Thrilled, you develop title tag and on-page copy recommendations for your client and are sure that your advice will propel their organic traffic forward.

Copywriting tools? For on-page recommendations and a title-tag?  Your writing is fine as is. Or so you think.

See, you didn’t use copywriting tools to make sure your language was actionable, invoked emotion and had perfect spelling and grammar. Users didn’t click on your client’s result because they felt indifferent and unmotivated while reading your title.

But here at Distilled <> Brainlabs, we can help you with that.

In case you missed it, we’ve merged!

While an SEO’s job can include mapping keywords or making content recommendations, these actions won’t matter if we can’t attract users to click on and read our results. The perfect keyword can exist, but if we can’t position it and attract a user to it, we could be left wondering where we went wrong.

Because of this, I’ll share with you five important copywriting tools that ensure your title tags, headers, and on-page copy stand out from the crowd and attract your target audience.

1. Avoid any costly spelling mistakes - Grammarly

When writing, we can think of the most enticing and encouraging language to get users to click on our results. This is a goal that we should strive for, except when our titles or copy have egregious misspellings or hard-to-ignore grammatical errors. 

A persuasive title with a spelling error is pretty much user-repellant.

Users are looking for results that display:

authority

expertise

trust

Misspellings and grammatical errors scream the opposite of authority. We need to make sure our content is cleaned up. 

Want to know how we can do this?

Using Grammarly, a free digital writing tool that uses artificial intelligence and natural processing language to check grammar and spelling. 

It would be really disappointing if the first tool we recommended to you is a glorified spell-checker. 

Luckily, Grammarly is more than that. It also makes recommendations based on vocabulary, clarity, brevity, and tone. You can insert Grammarly into your optimization arsenal as a first line of defense, whether you prefer editing as you write or towards the end of your work. 

Grammarly has an online editor on their website and browser extensions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. Having Grammarly installed will also improve your writing anywhere on the web quickly and seamlessly, without ever having to open another tab.

Grammarly’s algorithms help raise issues that may be present in your writing, and give the reasoning behind any potential correction, which help you make informed and thoughtful decisions while editing your work.

Grammarly also offers functionality in Microsoft Office on Windows and a Grammarly Keyboard for IOS or Android. They also offer a Gmail plug-in, so when you’re communicating with your client or colleague, you can draft up that 4:55 pm email knowing you’re in good hands. 

2. Improve hard to read sentences - Hemingway

We want our writing to be error-free and grammatically correct. But sometimes we need that extra push to make our writing more concise. Many writers find themselves constructing difficult and hard to read sentences. This can lead to writing at a comprehension level higher than your target audience.

Enter the Hemingway editor.

Hemingway Editor is a free writing tool that helps make your writing clear and bold. It can help with improving the style of your writing and letting the reader focus more on your message. 

Think about being a reader yourself. Do you want to spend time having to re-read a sentence to understand its meaning? 

You can enter your copy directly into the Hemingway Editor and watch as it dissects your text for adverb usage, use of active voice, and hard to read sentences. 

For SEO professionals, another valuable aspect of Hemingway is its built-in readability score.  After you enter text or copy into Hemingway, it uses the  Automated Readability Index, which basically informs you what “grade level” your writing is at.  

Why is writing for grade level important?

We want to consider who we’re writing for, as SEO professionals, content writers, and writers in general. 

Writing to capture traffic for a direct-to-consumer electronic company should look and read differently than a B2B cloud migration company. 

Studies have shown that the average american reads at an 8th-10th grade level. So if your copy starts to creep up to 12th or 13th grade level, consider whether this level of reading comprehension makes sense for the users you’re trying to cater to.

The next time your client asks you to review a blog post, or you’re constructing title tags and meta descriptions, you can rest assured that your recommendations will include robust and readable copy.

Hemingway is available for your browser. They also offer a paid version–the Hemingway Editor 3 for Mac and PC. This version works without an internet connection and lets you publish directly to WordPress or export directly to HTML or Microsoft Word.

3. Keep readers engaged with your content - Bucket Brigades

We now have two free tools to make sure our writing is grammatically correct, bold, and easy to read. 

Think about how much value you can now provide your clients with:

Their content will be punctual and powerful, and they’ll have you to thank drawing all of this new organic traffic to their website and resulting in a 15% increase in conversions. 

Except you can’t keep users on the page. 

Your blog post is boring her. She’s now headed to your competitor’s site.

Now: how can we draw the reader in?

Using a classic copywriting technique called Bucket Brigades. 

As SEO’s, we know that average time on page can directly affect a result’s ranking potential. And while bounce rate doesn’t necessarily indicate a decrease in ranking potential, wouldn’t users be more likely to convert if they were drawn in by and attracted to our content?

Think about it: we want to keep users on our client’s pages. We can’t do that if they stay on the page for less than 15 seconds.  

A bucket brigade is traditionally defined as a human chain, used to transport items from one person to the next (think firefighters passing a bucket of water).

Thankfully, we’ve invented fire trucks.

In writing, a bucket brigade is a phrase that motivates a user to continue reading. Of course, writers being the creatives we are, had to steal this concept and make it about ourselves.

It does make sense though. As writers, we want our reader’s attention to easily “pass” from one sentence to the next, and bucket brigades help accomplish this.

As an SEO, whether you’re reviewing a blog post for a client or trying to create attention-grabbing headers, including bucket brigades is a simple and free way to improve users’ time on-page and improve a client’s conversion rate. 

Whether you’re working in-house or for an agency, one idea to keep in mind is your client’s brand voice and to ensure the language you recommend ties in accordingly. If they employ a more conversational approach to content, using bucket brigades would be a welcome addition to their strategy.

If your client’s content exudes a more formal tone of voice, bucket brigades are still an acceptable strategy, but it may be beneficial to limit your usage to avoid coming across as too informal. 

Some classic Bucket Brigades include:

Want to know..

Now:

It gets better/worse:

But wait..

Think about it:

On the other hand,

Here’s why:

You could use some of these examples or get creative and develop attention-grabbing bucket brigades yourself. 

This is incredible. You now know how to write powerful, error-free, and captivating copy.

But how can we ensure users will even click on your result in search engines?

4. Improve dull and unexciting headers - CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer

Any SEO professional will tell you that a title tag can make or break a piece of content. How can you improve a client’s organic traffic if you can’t even get users to click on your result in the search engine? 

Luckily, Distilled’s own Dominic Woodman recently discussed how to write an incredible title tag where he goes into defining a title tag, what your goals should be when constructing one, and how to write different kinds of title tags and expectations one should have.

  When constructing headers or title tags, many copywriters like to brainstorm and write down as many as they can, and this is something SEO professionals can benefit from by implementing into their title tag creation process. It can help get the creative juices flowing and explore different title or header structures one might not have thought of at first.

What should we do when we decide on two to three that we love? 

We can use CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer.  

After briefly filling out a call-to-action, you can use this free tool to help you write headlines that will drive traffic, shares and search results.

The Headline Analyzer has a couple of useful features.

It measures a header’s “word balance”, which includes how many common, uncommon, emotional and powerful  words are used in great headlines. They recommend a strong header has the following balance:

Common words - 20-30%

Uncommon words - 10-20%

Emotional words - 10-15%

Powerful words - at least 1 powerful phrase or word

While I wouldn’t be too alarmed if you aren’t hitting every single target here (writing title tags and headers is hard!) this part of the tool is helpful to consider your usage of powerful and emotional words. 

In addition, CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer includes a length analysis feature that measures if your headline is the proper length and uses an ideal amount of words.

All in all, this tool can assist in giving thoughtful insights for titles and headers that you may not have previously considered. Feel free to use this during any part of your title tag or header ideation process! 

5. Find out what your users are really searching for - AlsoAsked.com

Last but not least, we’d like to introduce you to  AlsoAsked.com, a new SEO research tool that focuses on informing users on how questions are topically grouped. It isn’t necessarily a copywriting tool, but provides us with valuable insights into what we should actually be writing about. 

This free tool takes your search term and displays related questions from other users. It uses “People Also Ask” data, rather than Google’s Autosuggest, which is a main reason why we use this tool to create relevant headers and write copy that helps our readers.

We know what questions users are searching for and what language they’re using. Why not use it to our advantage?

To use the tool, you simply plug in a keyword you’re targeting, select the language you’d like results for, and choose the region you’re trying to target. 

Let’s say we want to know what questions users have about meta descriptions.

We just plug “meta description” into the search bar, choose the language and region of our choice, and let AlsoAsked do the rest.

You can see below that we’ve now been given an overview of different types of questions users have, and how those questions can lead to even more specific searches. 

With these findings, we now know what answers users are looking for, and can create content that satisfies them.

For example,  if you’re writing a blog post about meta descriptions, some topics we may want focus on include:

Defining what a meta description is

Giving a meta description example

How to write a meta description

Google’s usage of meta descriptions

All in all, AlsoAsked is a useful tool that can help inform your content strategy and give you new ideas to write about or recommend!

We’d like to hear from you! 

At Distilled <> Brainlabs, we’re constantly testing out new and old tools alike, seeing what helps us deliver valuable client work and grow and improve our clients’ visibility. We hope you find some of these tools and tips helpful in your future content goals.

What are some of your favorite engaging words or phrases to use? What’s the most captivating title you’ve ever written?

from Marketing https://www.distilled.net/resources/copywriting-tools-for-seo/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[ronijashworth]

5 Important Copywriting Tools Every SEO Pro Needs

You’re an SEO. You’ve found an incredible keyword gap for your client that their competitors aren’t ranking for.  

Thrilled, you develop title tag and on-page copy recommendations for your client and are sure that your advice will propel their organic traffic forward.

Copywriting tools? For on-page recommendations and a title-tag?  Your writing is fine as is. Or so you think.

See, you didn’t use copywriting tools to make sure your language was actionable, invoked emotion and had perfect spelling and grammar. Users didn’t click on your client’s result because they felt indifferent and unmotivated while reading your title.

But here at Distilled <> Brainlabs, we can help you with that.

In case you missed it, we’ve merged!

While an SEO’s job can include mapping keywords or making content recommendations, these actions won’t matter if we can’t attract users to click on and read our results. The perfect keyword can exist, but if we can’t position it and attract a user to it, we could be left wondering where we went wrong.

Because of this, I’ll share with you five important copywriting tools that ensure your title tags, headers, and on-page copy stand out from the crowd and attract your target audience.

1. Avoid any costly spelling mistakes - Grammarly

When writing, we can think of the most enticing and encouraging language to get users to click on our results. This is a goal that we should strive for, except when our titles or copy have egregious misspellings or hard-to-ignore grammatical errors. 

A persuasive title with a spelling error is pretty much user-repellant.

Users are looking for results that display:

authority

expertise

trust

Misspellings and grammatical errors scream the opposite of authority. We need to make sure our content is cleaned up. 

Want to know how we can do this?

Using Grammarly, a free digital writing tool that uses artificial intelligence and natural processing language to check grammar and spelling. 

It would be really disappointing if the first tool we recommended to you is a glorified spell-checker. 

Luckily, Grammarly is more than that. It also makes recommendations based on vocabulary, clarity, brevity, and tone. You can insert Grammarly into your optimization arsenal as a first line of defense, whether you prefer editing as you write or towards the end of your work. 

Grammarly has an online editor on their website and browser extensions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. Having Grammarly installed will also improve your writing anywhere on the web quickly and seamlessly, without ever having to open another tab.

Grammarly’s algorithms help raise issues that may be present in your writing, and give the reasoning behind any potential correction, which help you make informed and thoughtful decisions while editing your work.

Grammarly also offers functionality in Microsoft Office on Windows and a Grammarly Keyboard for IOS or Android. They also offer a Gmail plug-in, so when you’re communicating with your client or colleague, you can draft up that 4:55 pm email knowing you’re in good hands. 

2. Improve hard to read sentences - Hemingway

We want our writing to be error-free and grammatically correct. But sometimes we need that extra push to make our writing more concise. Many writers find themselves constructing difficult and hard to read sentences. This can lead to writing at a comprehension level higher than your target audience.

Enter the Hemingway editor.

Hemingway Editor is a free writing tool that helps make your writing clear and bold. It can help with improving the style of your writing and letting the reader focus more on your message. 

Think about being a reader yourself. Do you want to spend time having to re-read a sentence to understand its meaning? 

You can enter your copy directly into the Hemingway Editor and watch as it dissects your text for adverb usage, use of active voice, and hard to read sentences. 

For SEO professionals, another valuable aspect of Hemingway is its built-in readability score.  After you enter text or copy into Hemingway, it uses the  Automated Readability Index, which basically informs you what “grade level” your writing is at.  

Why is writing for grade level important?

We want to consider who we’re writing for, as SEO professionals, content writers, and writers in general. 

Writing to capture traffic for a direct-to-consumer electronic company should look and read differently than a B2B cloud migration company. 

Studies have shown that the average american reads at an 8th-10th grade level. So if your copy starts to creep up to 12th or 13th grade level, consider whether this level of reading comprehension makes sense for the users you’re trying to cater to.

The next time your client asks you to review a blog post, or you’re constructing title tags and meta descriptions, you can rest assured that your recommendations will include robust and readable copy.

Hemingway is available for your browser. They also offer a paid version–the Hemingway Editor 3 for Mac and PC. This version works without an internet connection and lets you publish directly to WordPress or export directly to HTML or Microsoft Word.

3. Keep readers engaged with your content - Bucket Brigades

We now have two free tools to make sure our writing is grammatically correct, bold, and easy to read. 

Think about how much value you can now provide your clients with:

Their content will be punctual and powerful, and they’ll have you to thank drawing all of this new organic traffic to their website and resulting in a 15% increase in conversions. 

Except you can’t keep users on the page. 

Your blog post is boring her. She’s now headed to your competitor’s site.

Now: how can we draw the reader in?

Using a classic copywriting technique called Bucket Brigades. 

As SEO’s, we know that average time on page can directly affect a result’s ranking potential. And while bounce rate doesn’t necessarily indicate a decrease in ranking potential, wouldn’t users be more likely to convert if they were drawn in by and attracted to our content?

Think about it: we want to keep users on our client’s pages. We can’t do that if they stay on the page for less than 15 seconds.  

A bucket brigade is traditionally defined as a human chain, used to transport items from one person to the next (think firefighters passing a bucket of water).

Thankfully, we’ve invented fire trucks.

In writing, a bucket brigade is a phrase that motivates a user to continue reading. Of course, writers being the creatives we are, had to steal this concept and make it about ourselves.

It does make sense though. As writers, we want our reader’s attention to easily “pass” from one sentence to the next, and bucket brigades help accomplish this.

As an SEO, whether you’re reviewing a blog post for a client or trying to create attention-grabbing headers, including bucket brigades is a simple and free way to improve users’ time on-page and improve a client’s conversion rate. 

Whether you’re working in-house or for an agency, one idea to keep in mind is your client’s brand voice and to ensure the language you recommend ties in accordingly. If they employ a more conversational approach to content, using bucket brigades would be a welcome addition to their strategy.

If your client’s content exudes a more formal tone of voice, bucket brigades are still an acceptable strategy, but it may be beneficial to limit your usage to avoid coming across as too informal. 

Some classic Bucket Brigades include:

Want to know..

Now:

It gets better/worse:

But wait..

Think about it:

On the other hand,

Here’s why:

You could use some of these examples or get creative and develop attention-grabbing bucket brigades yourself. 

This is incredible. You now know how to write powerful, error-free, and captivating copy.

But how can we ensure users will even click on your result in search engines?

4. Improve dull and unexciting headers - CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer

Any SEO professional will tell you that a title tag can make or break a piece of content. How can you improve a client’s organic traffic if you can’t even get users to click on your result in the search engine? 

Luckily, Distilled’s own Dominic Woodman recently discussed how to write an incredible title tag where he goes into defining a title tag, what your goals should be when constructing one, and how to write different kinds of title tags and expectations one should have.

  When constructing headers or title tags, many copywriters like to brainstorm and write down as many as they can, and this is something SEO professionals can benefit from by implementing into their title tag creation process. It can help get the creative juices flowing and explore different title or header structures one might not have thought of at first.

What should we do when we decide on two to three that we love? 

We can use CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer.  

After briefly filling out a call-to-action, you can use this free tool to help you write headlines that will drive traffic, shares and search results.

The Headline Analyzer has a couple of useful features.

It measures a header’s “word balance”, which includes how many common, uncommon, emotional and powerful  words are used in great headlines. They recommend a strong header has the following balance:

Common words - 20-30%

Uncommon words - 10-20%

Emotional words - 10-15%

Powerful words - at least 1 powerful phrase or word

While I wouldn’t be too alarmed if you aren’t hitting every single target here (writing title tags and headers is hard!) this part of the tool is helpful to consider your usage of powerful and emotional words. 

In addition, CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer includes a length analysis feature that measures if your headline is the proper length and uses an ideal amount of words.

All in all, this tool can assist in giving thoughtful insights for titles and headers that you may not have previously considered. Feel free to use this during any part of your title tag or header ideation process! 

5. Find out what your users are really searching for - AlsoAsked.com

Last but not least, we’d like to introduce you to  AlsoAsked.com, a new SEO research tool that focuses on informing users on how questions are topically grouped. It isn’t necessarily a copywriting tool, but provides us with valuable insights into what we should actually be writing about. 

This free tool takes your search term and displays related questions from other users. It uses “People Also Ask” data, rather than Google’s Autosuggest, which is a main reason why we use this tool to create relevant headers and write copy that helps our readers.

We know what questions users are searching for and what language they’re using. Why not use it to our advantage?

To use the tool, you simply plug in a keyword you’re targeting, select the language you’d like results for, and choose the region you’re trying to target. 

Let’s say we want to know what questions users have about meta descriptions.

We just plug “meta description” into the search bar, choose the language and region of our choice, and let AlsoAsked do the rest.

You can see below that we’ve now been given an overview of different types of questions users have, and how those questions can lead to even more specific searches. 

With these findings, we now know what answers users are looking for, and can create content that satisfies them.

For example,  if you’re writing a blog post about meta descriptions, some topics we may want focus on include:

Defining what a meta description is

Giving a meta description example

How to write a meta description

Google’s usage of meta descriptions

All in all, AlsoAsked is a useful tool that can help inform your content strategy and give you new ideas to write about or recommend!

We’d like to hear from you! 

At Distilled <> Brainlabs, we’re constantly testing out new and old tools alike, seeing what helps us deliver valuable client work and grow and improve our clients’ visibility. We hope you find some of these tools and tips helpful in your future content goals.

What are some of your favorite engaging words or phrases to use? What’s the most captivating title you’ve ever written?

from Digital Marketing https://www.distilled.net/resources/copywriting-tools-for-seo/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[davidrsmithlove]

5 Important Copywriting Tools Every SEO Pro Needs

You’re an SEO. You’ve found an incredible keyword gap for your client that their competitors aren’t ranking for.  

Thrilled, you develop title tag and on-page copy recommendations for your client and are sure that your advice will propel their organic traffic forward.

Copywriting tools? For on-page recommendations and a title-tag?  Your writing is fine as is. Or so you think.

See, you didn’t use copywriting tools to make sure your language was actionable, invoked emotion and had perfect spelling and grammar. Users didn’t click on your client’s result because they felt indifferent and unmotivated while reading your title.

But here at Distilled <> Brainlabs, we can help you with that.

In case you missed it, we’ve merged!

While an SEO’s job can include mapping keywords or making content recommendations, these actions won’t matter if we can’t attract users to click on and read our results. The perfect keyword can exist, but if we can’t position it and attract a user to it, we could be left wondering where we went wrong.

Because of this, I’ll share with you five important copywriting tools that ensure your title tags, headers, and on-page copy stand out from the crowd and attract your target audience.

1. Avoid any costly spelling mistakes - Grammarly

When writing, we can think of the most enticing and encouraging language to get users to click on our results. This is a goal that we should strive for, except when our titles or copy have egregious misspellings or hard-to-ignore grammatical errors. 

A persuasive title with a spelling error is pretty much user-repellant.

Users are looking for results that display:

authority

expertise

trust

Misspellings and grammatical errors scream the opposite of authority. We need to make sure our content is cleaned up. 

Want to know how we can do this?

Using Grammarly, a free digital writing tool that uses artificial intelligence and natural processing language to check grammar and spelling. 

It would be really disappointing if the first tool we recommended to you is a glorified spell-checker. 

Luckily, Grammarly is more than that. It also makes recommendations based on vocabulary, clarity, brevity, and tone. You can insert Grammarly into your optimization arsenal as a first line of defense, whether you prefer editing as you write or towards the end of your work. 

Grammarly has an online editor on their website and browser extensions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. Having Grammarly installed will also improve your writing anywhere on the web quickly and seamlessly, without ever having to open another tab.

Grammarly’s algorithms help raise issues that may be present in your writing, and give the reasoning behind any potential correction, which help you make informed and thoughtful decisions while editing your work.

Grammarly also offers functionality in Microsoft Office on Windows and a Grammarly Keyboard for IOS or Android. They also offer a Gmail plug-in, so when you’re communicating with your client or colleague, you can draft up that 4:55 pm email knowing you’re in good hands. 

2. Improve hard to read sentences - Hemingway

We want our writing to be error-free and grammatically correct. But sometimes we need that extra push to make our writing more concise. Many writers find themselves constructing difficult and hard to read sentences. This can lead to writing at a comprehension level higher than your target audience.

Enter the Hemingway editor.

Hemingway Editor is a free writing tool that helps make your writing clear and bold. It can help with improving the style of your writing and letting the reader focus more on your message. 

Think about being a reader yourself. Do you want to spend time having to re-read a sentence to understand its meaning? 

You can enter your copy directly into the Hemingway Editor and watch as it dissects your text for adverb usage, use of active voice, and hard to read sentences. 

For SEO professionals, another valuable aspect of Hemingway is its built-in readability score.  After you enter text or copy into Hemingway, it uses the  Automated Readability Index, which basically informs you what “grade level” your writing is at.  

Why is writing for grade level important?

We want to consider who we’re writing for, as SEO professionals, content writers, and writers in general. 

Writing to capture traffic for a direct-to-consumer electronic company should look and read differently than a B2B cloud migration company. 

Studies have shown that the average american reads at an 8th-10th grade level. So if your copy starts to creep up to 12th or 13th grade level, consider whether this level of reading comprehension makes sense for the users you’re trying to cater to.

The next time your client asks you to review a blog post, or you’re constructing title tags and meta descriptions, you can rest assured that your recommendations will include robust and readable copy.

Hemingway is available for your browser. They also offer a paid version–the Hemingway Editor 3 for Mac and PC. This version works without an internet connection and lets you publish directly to WordPress or export directly to HTML or Microsoft Word.

3. Keep readers engaged with your content - Bucket Brigades

We now have two free tools to make sure our writing is grammatically correct, bold, and easy to read. 

Think about how much value you can now provide your clients with:

Their content will be punctual and powerful, and they’ll have you to thank drawing all of this new organic traffic to their website and resulting in a 15% increase in conversions. 

Except you can’t keep users on the page. 

Your blog post is boring her. She’s now headed to your competitor’s site.

Now: how can we draw the reader in?

Using a classic copywriting technique called Bucket Brigades. 

As SEO’s, we know that average time on page can directly affect a result’s ranking potential. And while bounce rate doesn’t necessarily indicate a decrease in ranking potential, wouldn’t users be more likely to convert if they were drawn in by and attracted to our content?

Think about it: we want to keep users on our client’s pages. We can’t do that if they stay on the page for less than 15 seconds.  

A bucket brigade is traditionally defined as a human chain, used to transport items from one person to the next (think firefighters passing a bucket of water).

Thankfully, we’ve invented fire trucks.

In writing, a bucket brigade is a phrase that motivates a user to continue reading. Of course, writers being the creatives we are, had to steal this concept and make it about ourselves.

It does make sense though. As writers, we want our reader’s attention to easily “pass” from one sentence to the next, and bucket brigades help accomplish this.

As an SEO, whether you’re reviewing a blog post for a client or trying to create attention-grabbing headers, including bucket brigades is a simple and free way to improve users’ time on-page and improve a client’s conversion rate. 

Whether you’re working in-house or for an agency, one idea to keep in mind is your client’s brand voice and to ensure the language you recommend ties in accordingly. If they employ a more conversational approach to content, using bucket brigades would be a welcome addition to their strategy.

If your client’s content exudes a more formal tone of voice, bucket brigades are still an acceptable strategy, but it may be beneficial to limit your usage to avoid coming across as too informal. 

Some classic Bucket Brigades include:

Want to know..

Now:

It gets better/worse:

But wait..

Think about it:

On the other hand,

Here’s why:

You could use some of these examples or get creative and develop attention-grabbing bucket brigades yourself. 

This is incredible. You now know how to write powerful, error-free, and captivating copy.

But how can we ensure users will even click on your result in search engines?

4. Improve dull and unexciting headers - CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer

Any SEO professional will tell you that a title tag can make or break a piece of content. How can you improve a client’s organic traffic if you can’t even get users to click on your result in the search engine? 

Luckily, Distilled’s own Dominic Woodman recently discussed how to write an incredible title tag where he goes into defining a title tag, what your goals should be when constructing one, and how to write different kinds of title tags and expectations one should have.

  When constructing headers or title tags, many copywriters like to brainstorm and write down as many as they can, and this is something SEO professionals can benefit from by implementing into their title tag creation process. It can help get the creative juices flowing and explore different title or header structures one might not have thought of at first.

What should we do when we decide on two to three that we love? 

We can use CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer.  

After briefly filling out a call-to-action, you can use this free tool to help you write headlines that will drive traffic, shares and search results.

The Headline Analyzer has a couple of useful features.

It measures a header’s “word balance”, which includes how many common, uncommon, emotional and powerful  words are used in great headlines. They recommend a strong header has the following balance:

Common words - 20-30%

Uncommon words - 10-20%

Emotional words - 10-15%

Powerful words - at least 1 powerful phrase or word

While I wouldn’t be too alarmed if you aren’t hitting every single target here (writing title tags and headers is hard!) this part of the tool is helpful to consider your usage of powerful and emotional words. 

In addition, CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer includes a length analysis feature that measures if your headline is the proper length and uses an ideal amount of words.

All in all, this tool can assist in giving thoughtful insights for titles and headers that you may not have previously considered. Feel free to use this during any part of your title tag or header ideation process! 

5. Find out what your users are really searching for - AlsoAsked.com

Last but not least, we’d like to introduce you to  AlsoAsked.com, a new SEO research tool that focuses on informing users on how questions are topically grouped. It isn’t necessarily a copywriting tool, but provides us with valuable insights into what we should actually be writing about. 

This free tool takes your search term and displays related questions from other users. It uses “People Also Ask” data, rather than Google’s Autosuggest, which is a main reason why we use this tool to create relevant headers and write copy that helps our readers.

We know what questions users are searching for and what language they’re using. Why not use it to our advantage?

To use the tool, you simply plug in a keyword you’re targeting, select the language you’d like results for, and choose the region you’re trying to target. 

Let’s say we want to know what questions users have about meta descriptions.

We just plug “meta description” into the search bar, choose the language and region of our choice, and let AlsoAsked do the rest.

You can see below that we’ve now been given an overview of different types of questions users have, and how those questions can lead to even more specific searches. 

With these findings, we now know what answers users are looking for, and can create content that satisfies them.

For example,  if you’re writing a blog post about meta descriptions, some topics we may want focus on include:

Defining what a meta description is

Giving a meta description example

How to write a meta description

Google’s usage of meta descriptions

All in all, AlsoAsked is a useful tool that can help inform your content strategy and give you new ideas to write about or recommend!

We’d like to hear from you! 

At Distilled <> Brainlabs, we’re constantly testing out new and old tools alike, seeing what helps us deliver valuable client work and grow and improve our clients’ visibility. We hope you find some of these tools and tips helpful in your future content goals.

What are some of your favorite engaging words or phrases to use? What’s the most captivating title you’ve ever written?