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scenes-in-between · 4 years

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Trust No 1 (Part three)

“Who authorizes you? I mean, what gives you the right? Who ARE you?!”

“I’m the future, Agent Scully. And I risked my life being here.”

“Well then why do it? I mean, why meet me?”

“Because you can reach Mulder. Mulder needs to know what I know or he may have no future. Perhaps no one will. Another car is parked on the main road, half a mile out. If I see that you haven’t contacted Mulder in the next 24 hours, I disappear and you never see me again. Do you understand, lady?”

Scully stalks away, seething. All of the theatrics, all of the waste, and for what? A two-minute conversation that raised more questions than it answered? What was the point of any of it?

Scowling, she pulls her phone out of her jacket pocket - because apparently it was absolutely necessary to blow up her clothes and her gun and inspect her watch, but Mr. Mysterious had no qualms about letting her keep her phone? - and punches the speed dial for Monica Reyes. Monica picks up immediately.

“Dana! Thank god. We’ve been trying to reach you all day. Where are you?”

“At the end of a very long and very stupid wild goose chase,” she grumbles. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get in touch earlier. How’s William?”

“He’s just fine. John’s in the kitchen right now heating up a bottle for him.”

“Agent Doggett stayed with you?” she asks, surprised.

“Not the whole day,” Monica says. “After that couple left, he went to the office for a while, but then he came back a few hours ago when we still hadn’t heard from you. Seriously though, where have you been?”

Scully answers with a groan, then gives an abbreviated account of the day’s events as she continues making her way back to the main road. Her foot catches on something in the dark and she stumbles, cursing. Of all the times to be without a flashlight…

When she gets to the part about the car and the remote detonation, Monica says, “Holy hell, Dana! Do you need one of us to come get you?”

“No, he said there’s another car parked up the road. I’m heading toward it now.”

“But are you sure that’s safe?” Monica presses. “What if it’s rigged to explode, too?”

“Whoa, wait, what’s rigged to explode?” Scully hears Doggett say in the background, and she shudders at the thought that she spent the entire day driving around on top of a bomb. However, the fact that she’s still alive right now is a fairly good indicator that she’ll be able to get home safely.

“If he wanted me dead, he had ample opportunity,” she says. “No, what he wants is for me to contact Mulder, which I can’t very well do if I’ve been blown up. I’ll be fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

What she’s not sure of is exactly where she is right now. It became harder and harder to track her relative location after she left the interstate. The very notion of spending who knows how many more hours on the road fills her with a mix of exhaustion and dread, and she’s angry all over again at the phenomenal waste of time today has been.

“Maybe you can help me figure out where I am, though,” she says. “It was too dark to read the street signs, the last couple of turns he told me to make, but I was on Route 17 going north for a while, somewhere between Norfolk and Fredericksburg. It’s not much to go on, but it’s all I’ve got at the moment.”

“I’m on it,” Monica tells her. “Can I use your computer?”

“Of course.”

“Here, you can talk to John while I pull up MapQuest.”

Ahead, Scully can just make out the bulk of a vehicle in the darkness. She reaches to unsnap her holster out of habit and grimaces when her fingers catch nothing but the fabric of her waistband.

In her ear, Doggett barks, “What in the heck’s going on? Where’ve you been all day, and why is Monica talking about things being rigged to explode?”

Scully sighs. “I’m going to let her fill you in on the details because I would just as soon not go through it all again right now. Short answer is that I’m fine, just tired and frustrated. I’ll be on my way home soon, hopefully. I want to thank you, though, for helping to look after William. I really do appreciate it.”

“Well, you’re welcome, but I didn’t do all that much. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

She approaches the car, again wishing she had a flashlight. It’s too dark to see anything through the rear windows, but the front of the car at least appears to be empty. Cautiously, she reaches for the door handle; it’s unlocked, and the interior light comes on when she opens the door. There’s a piece of paper on the driver’s seat.

“Son of a bitch,” she murmurs, picking it up.

“Agent Scully?”

“You can tell Agent Reyes that I don’t need her help after all. I’ve been left a map.”

“A map?” Doggett asks. “So where are you?”

Thirty miles. She is all of thirty miles from Fredericksburg. It is going to take her less than two hours to get home. It could have taken her less than two hours to get here. Of all the stupid, pointless, absolutely and completely asinine...

“Just a bit southeast of Fredericksburg,” she says tightly, glancing at her watch. “I should be home by nine.”

“All right then. Be careful.”

��Yeah.”

***

This isn’t the first time Monica has been asked to watch William, but it is the first time she’s had to try and put him to bed.

And he is not having it.

She’s never seen him like this. She’s never felt him like this; William’s energy is always vibrant -- she’s known that since the night he was born -- but it’s usually contained, like the potential energy in a compressed spring. Tonight, it’s like a storm, howling around him as he wails in her arms.

“I don’t know what’s wrong. Should we call Dana?”

John chuckles at her, evidently unconcerned, because of course he can’t feel what she feels.

“There’s nothing wrong. And there’s nothing she could do even if there was. He’s just tired.”

“No, John, I’m telling you, something is--”

“Here,” he says, holding out his hands. “I’ll show you.”

She passes the squirming baby to her partner and steps back, nerves jangling. John gathers William against his chest and starts to walk around the living room, gently bouncing him while murmuring softly. At first, Monica can’t hear what he’s saying over the sound of William’s cries, but as the boy gradually quiets, John’s words become clearer.

“There you go, easy does it, your mama’s gonna be home soon, don’t you worry, atta boy…”

He’s asleep within minutes, energy storm subsided. Monica shakes her head, a little abashed at having so comprehensively misread the situation.

“You were right,” she says quietly.

“Eh, nothing I hadn’t seen before, that’s all.” He doesn’t meet her eyes, his gaze still trained on the top of William’s head as he slows the bouncing to a gentle sway. “Luke certainly did his share of fussing.”

She didn’t know him then, of course. She’s only ever known him as a grieving father; this is the first time she’s gotten a glimpse of what he was like as a dad, and it makes her unexpectedly emotional.

“I’m gonna see if I can go put him down,” he says, and she nods, watching him go before turning to pick up the few scattered toys and take William’s dinner bottle back to the kitchen.

***

By the time she has retrieved her own car from where she left it parked this morning, after stewing on the whole drive home and running through the day’s various cryptic conversations over and over, Scully has come to three conclusions.

Number one: nearly everything that man claimed to know about her, he could have learned by bugging her apartment and going through her garbage bins. What did he really give her that was concrete? Knowing her clothing size seemed eerie at first, until she remembered the receipts she’s thrown away from a handful of recent shopping trips. Her childhood clown phobia? She and her mom were laughing about that in her living room a month or so ago. The rest of it -- resting heart rate, ATM pin, college boyfriend, et cetera -- was only specific enough to seem unnerving without actually proving that he knew any of it.

Her emails to Mulder would require some additional access, but that could be as simple as someone following her to the cafe. It’s probably one of the “regulars” that she -- blithely, it would seem -- dismissed as a potential threat.

Number two: while her apartment has definitely been under surveillance, apparently for quite a while, Mulder’s has not. The “one lonely night” the man mentioned? She’s reasonably certain he was referring to the night she asked Mulder to stay after the IVF failed, and that was not their first time together. If, as he said, the events of that night surprised him, then he could not have known about what they had already been doing at Mulder’s place. Or, for that matter, what they had been doing at her place before that night. So now she also knows approximately when the surveillance actually began.

Number three: if this man genuinely does have useful intel about super soldiers -- and that is an extraordinarily big “if” -- then it may in fact be worthwhile to call Mulder home. The idea terrifies and thrills her in almost equal measure. On the one hand, there is nothing she wants more than to have him home. Nothing. But on the other, if she has miscalculated, and calling him out of hiding only ends up getting him killed, she will never forgive herself.

In the end, it is Agent Doggett’s words from yesterday that settle the issue for her. If we know who these super-soldiers are we can go after them. This is somebody giving us a way that can make it safe for Mulder to come home.

How else are you going to get him home?

It’s a risk, possibly a big one, but ultimately, it’s one she has to take. He has been gone for almost seven months. This is the first time in those nearly seven months that there has even been a chance he might be able to come home. If she lets this chance go by, how much more time will pass before they get another one?

She walks into her apartment having made up her mind. There is a giddy, fluttery feeling in her stomach that is only temporarily eclipsed by ravenous hunger as she steps through the door and the smell of Thai food envelops her. Reyes and Doggett look up from where they’re sitting, at her kitchen table, takeout cartons amassed between them.

“Hope you don’t mind, we got takeout,” Reyes says, standing. “We didn’t know if you’d have a chance to eat, but if you’re hungry, there’s a bunch left.”

The last thing she ate was a bag of almonds from the gas station, hours and hours ago. To say she’s hungry is a massive understatement.

“Mind? I could kiss you both right now.”

Doggett’s eyebrows shoot up to his hairline, and Reyes laughs. “I’ll get you a plate.”

Scully nods. “I’m just going to change and wash up.”

On her way to the bedroom, she grabs a plastic bag from the closet. The likelihood is slim that there will be much in the way of usable trace evidence on the clothes she’s wearing, but it would be irresponsible not to even look. She opens the bedroom door quietly so as not to wake William; by the soft glow of the bedside lamp, she can see him sleeping peacefully in his crib, and she smiles, some of the tension from the day melting away. Though she would love a shower, she's too hungry, so she settles for changing into sweats, carefully folding and bagging the "borrowed" outfit, then washes her hands and face before heading back to the kitchen.

Doggett and Reyes have tidied up their dishes and are in the process of putting on coats and shoes.

"We'll let you get some rest," Reyes says, though she’s looking at Doggett when she does. “Whatever else you might have to tell us about what happened today can wait until tomorrow.”

“Unless,” Doggett adds, in a tone that sounds like he’s continuing an argument from earlier, “there’s anything you think we need to know now. Or if you don’t feel safe staying here alone, knowing that this Shadow Man may well have eyes and ears on you.”

“Is that what we’re calling him?” Scully asks, arching one eyebrow. “Look, I appreciate the offer, but I’ll be fine. As violating as it feels to be surveilled by some NSA creep--” she emphasizes the words, fully assuming that she’s being listened to right now “--I don’t have any reason to believe that William and I are not safe here.”

“Well I still don’t like it,” Doggett says, frowning. “Why don’t you let us post a couple agents out front, just in case?”

“I really don’t think that’s necess--”

“That’s a good idea, actually,” Reyes interjects, then drops her voice to a murmur. “Especially in light of what happened this morning. We know you can take care of yourself, Dana, but we also don’t know exactly what we’re up against, here. Maybe the answer is to try and watch the watchers, find out who they are, see if we can figure out who else the Shadow Man is working with.”

Scully sighs but has to admit that’s a sensible course of action. Either the knowledge that she’s being watched over will deter this so-called Shadow Man and his associates, or it won’t, in which case they could be exposed and identified.

“All right,” she agrees.

“Good,” Doggett says. “I’ll take first watch until I can get someone else over here.”

As soon as they leave, Scully makes herself a plate of food and takes it to her computer desk. If the Shadow Man is able to access her emails even when she sends them from the internet cafe, it seems pointless to wait until morning to write to Mulder. The giddy feeling from earlier comes rushing back as she types.

Mr. Hale,

I am overjoyed to tell you that circumstances appear to have changed. Exercise caution, but put the plan in motion. I cannot wait to see you.

All my love,

Dana

She clicks “send” with her heart in her throat, wondering where Mulder is and when he’ll be able to read her message. How long it might take for him to make the necessary arrangements and begin the journey home. He could be in her arms as early as tomorrow, a notion that seemed impossible just 24 hours ago.

She powers down the computer -- according to their plan, his next communication will come via text message from a burner phone -- and picks up her plate to finish eating in the kitchen. A glance out the window as she stands up reveals Agent Doggett sitting in his truck across the street, cell phone held to his ear. She sighs, regretting the additional work and worry she’s given her former partner but also deeply grateful that he’s got her back, he and Reyes both. She appreciates them more than she can say.

With any luck, all of this will soon be over. Mulder will come home, the Shadow Man will give him the information they need to take down the super-soldiers, and things can go back to… well… “normal” for them, anyway. It’s maybe too much to hope for, but right now, she will allow herself to be comforted by the fantasy, at least for a little while. When she finally crawls into bed, later, she falls asleep with her cell phone on the pillow beside her, imagining the sensation of being wrapped securely in Mulder’s arms.

***

“Holy shit,” he breathes, reading her email for the third time.

The library’s just about to close, and he had checked his email one last time before leaving, more out of impulse than any actual expectation that there would be anything there. The surprise of a new email was immediately eclipsed by the surprise over its contents.

Home. He can go home. He and Gibson both, even. No more hiding in the desert. No more ache of longing binding his stomach and keeping him from sleep. It almost sounds too good to be true, but she called him Mr. Hale, the code phrase they established before he left so he’d be able to tell a genuine summons from a trap. This is the real deal.

Which means the threat is past. Maybe Skinner cut a deal, hell, maybe Kersh did. Who knows? Who cares?! He gets to go home!

The grin on his face is massive as he logs off and heads for the door.

***

“You’re leaving," Gibson says, before Mulder has even closed the front door behind himself. "You promised you wouldn’t. But I guess I shouldn’t have expected you to keep that promise.”

It's still weird, Gibson knowing what he's thinking about before he's even said anything, but it doesn't throw him for a loop the way it used to.

“No, we’re leaving, Gibson. Both of us.”

Gibson scoffs. “You know I’m not going anywhere. It’s not safe. You might be able to outrun them if they catch us, but I--”

“Scully said it’s safe. And yes, I’m sure the message really was from her.”

Gibson stares hard at him and Mulder thinks as forcefully and loudly and clearly as he can.

We can both be free. I swear. I will protect you.

“I believe that you believe that,” Gibson says finally. “But I don’t think either of us knows for sure whether that’s really true.”

“Look, I know you’re scared. And you’re right that there are no guarantees. But for the first time since I left Washington, there is at least a chance that it’s safe for us to get out of here. If we don't take it, I don't know when another one is gonna come along. Do you really want to hide here for the rest of your life?"

"If it doesn't mean dying horribly and having my head karate chopped off by an alien replicant? Yeah. I'm fine with that."

Mulder’s thoughts flicker, involuntarily, to Dr. Parenti’s severed head in a jar, to the gash in Skinner’s forehead, to his own memory of being hurled across Parenti’s lab by Billy Miles.

“Exactly,” says Gibson. “I’m not letting that happen to me.”

“I trust Scully,” Mulder says, thinks. “She wouldn’t call me home if it wasn’t safe. She’s too smart and too cautious to take a risk like that.”

This, at last, seems to convince him, if only somewhat. He may not trust Mulder’s judgment, but he apparently trusts Scully’s, at least enough to finally sigh and say, “Okay. I hope you’re right.”

Despite Gibson’s reluctance, it takes almost no time at all to pack. They don’t have much to take, not bothering with spare clothes. Mulder shoves the stuff he printed about Mount Weather into his backpack, along with a little food, the fake IDs from the Gunmen and all of their remaining cash. They’re out the door and on the road in less than twenty minutes.

On the way to the train station, Mulder stops to gas up the motorcycle and buy four prepaid cell phones from the convenience store. Two hours later, as they’re getting ready to board the train that will take them eastward, Mulder types Scully’s number into the first phone and sends a single-word text message.

“Midnight.”

Once the message sends, he opens the back of the phone, pockets the battery, and tosses the phone in a garbage can.

#x-files fanfic #TXF: Trust No 1 #scullyfic #mulderfic #gibson praise #monica whalesong reyes #john doggett #msr #mulder on the run #a/n: this installment of scenes in between was originally going to be in two parts #and then it turned into three #aaaaaand now it's gonna be four #there are just too many gaps to fill in #hopefully no one minds ;)#i promise it won't take me as long to finish and post part four #as it did to finish and post part three

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perplexinglyparadoxialperson · 4 years

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Chances of Steve and Bucky Surviving to Meet Again

This is another theory on something in the Marvel universe, and as usual, this takes place in one of my stories, so the structure might be a bit weird! Find me on AO3 with the username of PerplexinglyParadoxialPerson

So recently I was thinking about the similarities between Steve and Bucky, and how impossible it is that they would be here, in the same time, together. In the interview they talked about the tiny chance that that would happen, and it inspired me. Me being me, I decided to actually calculate the math of it, and this is what I came up with. Of course, I don’t know the actual chances of some of these things happening, and I don’t work with statistics very often, so if I get anything very wrong, or made any weird assumptions, then please contact me so I can change it!

The structure of this might be a bit weird, but I will put my explanation for the numbers first, followed by the equation, with the answer at the end. (This will all be in percentages, that will be changed to decimals for the equation) I will try my best to make it easy to follow, even for people who don’t get math. First of all I will calculate the chances of Steve surviving to this century to meet Bucky, (because it’s slightly less complicated)

Making the equation

To become a super soldier he first had to be chosen, and from what we know of the selection process, there were twelve recruits including Steve, so the percentage is 8.3% repeating, or 0.083. Then he had to survive the serum itself, which I have no clue the chances of, but I’ll just say 50%, or 0.5. Then, for Steve to be able to survive long enough to see Bucky again, he first had to survive long enough to make it onto the Valkyrie, so I took an American soldier’s chance of surviving the war, (about 41.94%, but it might be different because only approximately one million of America’s sixteen million soldiers actually saw battle, the information isn’t very clear) then multiply it by Steve’s approximate healing rate/resilience. (I believe that it’s about six times a normal human because a while ago after a mission, he had a cast for a broken arm on for one week, where a normal human would have it on for about six weeks). But, this adds up to more than 100%, so I’ll just replace it with a one. Then, I read a post by ArgentNoelle about how Steve could have survived being frozen, which is a very comprehensive look at it, with good sources. Check that post out here! After Steve got frozen, there would be a (small) chance of him dying, maybe by animals coming to eat him or something else, I have absolutely no clue how big that chance would be, so I will say that he had a 99.999% chance of survival for each of the 66 years he was in the ice, and leave it there. Last, there’s the chances of him surviving the two years until he saw Bucky again. I’m just going to say that the chance is also about 99.999%, because modern medicine plus the super soldier serum would make it very unlikely to die, and even though Hydra probably could have made it so he died, Steve is very popular, and the public would have questions if he died. And that’s the end of Steve’s chances of death.

The equation so far

(0.083•0.5•1(0.99999/66)0.99999)

Bucky is a little more complicated, but should be doable. First, I’m assuming that he got the serum when he was captured the first time, so he would actually survive the fall that would have killed any normal human. First he had to be chosen for the experiments in the first place, but we don’t know how many soldiers there were in that factory, only how many came out of it alive, so I’ll do some guessing. There were 163 people that came out of the factory, so I will approximate that 150 died to the experiments, and 150 died from the factory conditions, overwork, etc. That makes 463 people that Bucky had to be chosen out of, so a 0.00215% chance of being chosen. Then he had to survive the experiments, because it’s well known that no one that got experimented on ever came back except for Bucky. If it’s out of 150 people, that means he had a 0.00613% chance. Then he had to survive the war, which is the same as Steve’s chances, and be more than 100%, so I’ll just use a one. Then, this all becomes more complicated when Bucky supposedly died, so I will break off here.

The equation so far

(0.083•0.5•1(0.99999/66)0.99999)•(0.00002•0.00006•1

We recently found out that Bucky “died” by falling from a train in the Alps, then was captured by the Russian team that was sent to retrieve his body. So first, the chances of him surviving the fall itself are extremely low, because for normal humans, a drop of 84 feet has a 90% chance of death. The point that Bucky presumably fell from is 196 feet (or 60 meters). Thanks to this graph I found, I was able to figure out that the rate of increase stays pretty steady after 20 meters, so I decided to just divide the midpoint (30 meters) by two, then multiply it by a healing factor of six (same as Steve’s) which was the best way I could think of to do it.

The equation so far

(0.083•0.5•1(0.99999/66)0.99999)•(0.00002•0.00006•1(0.001/2•6)

Now onto Bucky’s chances of surviving the time between him falling and getting captured. It would be unlikely that he would bleed out, even if he had sustained major wounds. The coldness of the area (from 4 to -6 degrees Celsius in February) would slow the bleeding, and his speedy healing would quickly replace blood lost, but depending on what wounds he got from the fall it could be a lot worse. I’ll go with a 50% chance for now. But for the cold part of the equation, death would be much less likely. If Bucky has the same reaction to extreme cold as Steve, (freezing solid) then how long it took for him to get “rescued” wouldn’t matter, because he would start to freeze, even if he didn’t have the time to freeze properly. I’ll just put that at a 99.9% percent chance of surviving the cold.

The equation so far

(0.083•0.5•1(0.99999/66)0.99999)•(0.00002•0.00006•1(0.001/2•6)0.5•0.999

Then, as explained by @Americas_ass1918, Bucky wasn’t made to assassinate people until 1963, and I suspect that he was being brainwashed and experimented on, and it was only when they had a solid method of control that they began to use him for assassinations. I suspect that they wouldn’t care as much if they lost him at this point, so I’ll say that he only had a 99% chance of living for each of those 18 years. Then there was the years that he was an assassin, when he would have been much more valuable to Hydra, so for the 50 years that he was an assassin he would have a 99.95% chance of living each year.

The equation so far

(0.083•0.5•1(0.99999/66)0.99999)•(0.00002•0.00006•1(0.001/2•6)0.5•0.999(0.99/18)(0.9995/50))

The last part of this equation is the chance that either of them would kill the other when they didn’t know who the other was. They are both pretty equal in terms of both being super soldiers, so for that I would say a chance of 85% for neither of them killing the other if neither of them recognized the other. But the chance of one recognizing the other and not fighting properly (like how Bucky said that Steve basically refused to fight him on the Helicarrier) is much higher. As we know how skilled Bucky is, and Steve’s idiocy when it comes to Bucky, the chance of neither of them dying if only one recognized the other would probably be about 20%.

The full equation

(0.083•0.5•1(0.99999/66)0.99999)•(0.00002•0.00006•1(0.001/2•6)0.5•0.999(0.99/18)(0.9995/50))•(0.85•0.20)

Now to solve this monster!

Solving the equation

We need to use order of operations to solve this, but since there’s only multiplication/division and brackets, things will be pretty straightforward. We start with the most inside brackets, turning this:

(0.083•0.5•1(0.99999/66)0.99999)•(0.00002•0.00006•1(0.001/2•6)0.5•0.999(0.99/18)(0.9995/50))•(0.85•0.20)

Into this:

(0.083•0.5•1•0.01515•0.99999)•(0.00002•0.00006•1•0.003•0.5•0.999•0.055•0.01999)•(0.85•0.20)

Then we turn that into this:

0.00062872•0.000000000000001977•0.17

And finally, we turn that craziness into this insanity:

0.000000000000000000211306 which is a whopping 0.0000000000000000211306% chance of Steve and Bucky making it to this century with each other. That is 211306 with seventeen zeroes in front!

In short, it was all but impossible that Steve and Bucky would survive to this century together, and I’m not even counting the chance of Steve being unfrozen when he did, because I only thought of that possibility after I finished all the math, and there is no way that I’m doing it all again!

Also, if you add the chances of one of the other Winter Soldiers replacing Bucky, the chances drop to a 0.0000000000000000042261301% chance.

#meta #theory #marvel cinematic universe #science #i did the math #its ridiculous

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unculturedmamoswine · 5 years

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AoS McKirk Recs

At the request of @fireinmywoods I’m finally getting around to making a McKirk rec post, which I’ve been wanting to do for a while. All these fics are McKirk endgame. This isn’t organized in any way whatsoever, and is also not a comprehensive list. I mostly just scrolled through my bookmarks and picked the things that weren’t outright porn. I always wish reccers would include their own notes along with the author’s summaries so... I did that. Hope y’all don’t mind. I’ll try not to be too spoilery, but I think it’s valuable to see what other fans like about a fic. Also, always heed the author’s notes, warnings, and tags. Definitely check out other fics by these authors, because I’m mostly not reccing a bunch by each person in order to keep this post slightly less long. And please consider leaving comments on the fics!

The palimpsest verse by fireinmywoods (series is 100k words)

Author’s summary (of the first fic in the series): “Skip to the point, Jim. The sooner you spit it out, the sooner I can refuse and get back to work.” “It’s really no big deal,” Jim says as the door slides closed behind them. “I just need you to come down to Hearth with us…as my husband.” The Enterprise has been sent to negotiate reaccession to the Federation with an isolationist religious group known as the Kindred. While there, Jim notices that some of the children seem to be gravely ill. The problem is, the Kindred practice faith healing and refuse to allow a doctor to be brought in. So Jim does what he does best: he improvises.

Gotta start with the gal whose fault this list is! When I read the first fic in this verse I was really at a low point in my McKirk obsession. This fic really brought me back into the fold in a big way. The whole series is just very very full of love. I ALMOST read one of the sequels first but thank god I heeded Em’s warnings to read palimpsest before reading the other fics. Seriously. You need to go into the thing unspoiled. Anyhow, if you want Jim and Bones way way super in love, for sure read this fic.(And listen, if you don’t want to read it because you hate fake marriage please read it anyway. I dislike fake marriage and I read it and loved it. Give it a shot, I beg you.)

Manhattan (Weeks Gone By) by blcwriter (8k words)

Author’s Summary: For the jim_and_bones St. Patrick’s Day challenge, because only I can turn a flash fic prompt into 8000 words. I haven't been able to stop listening to Frightened Rabbit’s “In Living Colour” from their Winter of Mixed Drinks album as I was trying to figure out what I wanted to say for my next story, and then this challenge came along, and literal writer! is literal, so, there you go.The prompt was "Manhattan," and the boys wanted to be married in modern times and run a bar in the Village with the whole gang involved. Non-happy-fun-times ensue before things sort of resolve.

I love a lot of blcwriter’s stuff, but this one is my favorite. It’s a modern day au, and Jim and Bones’s marriage is in trouble. It’s a really wonderful look at people in a long-term relationship struggling to keep it alive and wondering whether to just let it die.

Something so right by blcwriter (series is 13k words)

Author’s Summary (of the first fic in the series): "Don't say we aren't right for each other, the way I see it is.. we aren't right for anyone else."

Okay, I said I wouldn’t rec lots of things by one author and this is my one exception. I HAD to rec this one as well as Manhattan. An utterly fantastic modern day chef au. Jim and Bones knew each other at culinary school but now find each other again as real grown-ups. And the sequel is a Christmas fic! Also contains Jewish Jim, which I’m always a slut for.

That Monogamy Thing by silverlining99 (11k words)

Author’s Summary: Jim thought he was doing it RIGHT.

I also need to mention the fic The Thing About Realizing You Are In Love With Your Best Friend by JenTheSweetie because these two fics are so identical in premise I can only assume they were written for the same prompt. They’re both great, but I slightly prefer That Monogamy Thing, so it got top billing. Both fics are set during the five year mission, or at least they’re set on the Enterprise. Basically, Jim and Bones start sleeping together and Jim assumes they must be now in a Monogamous Relationship(TM) and gets with the monogamy program. Of course, at no point did anyone say they were in a monogamous relationship, so Bones is not on the same page, shall we say. It’s a classic “miscommunication causes delicious but short-lived angst” kinda vibe. You get it.

The Repairs verse by shinychimera and Yeomanrand (series is 69k words)

Authors’ Summary (of the first fic in the series): Young Jim Kirk is unstable and self-destructive, Leonard McCoy is withdrawn and wary, and the obstacles to surviving their first term at Starfleet Academy are not easy to overcome. A dark and brutal tale of the tangled borders between healing and hurting, where hard choices between emotions and ethics have far-reaching consequences; dealing with abuse and alcoholism, affection and neglect, piercings and bar fights, hot and cold sex, complicated questions of consent, and loyalty and love between people who aren't comfortable with either. A whole new spin on "I want my pain, I need my pain."

This one is kinda...whump porn. Like, read the tags. JIm is suuuper messed up and traumatized but sometimes that’s what you need in a fic, yanno? It’s an Academy fic that deals heavily with Jim having been violently abused as a child, and him growing to trust Bones while also kind of learning how to be an adult, rather than living life as the abused child he’s spent so long being. The abuse in this fic was not sexual in nature, jsyk.

En Promenade by newsbypostcard (series is 86k words)

Author’s Summary: After three months of weekend bar-hopping and a slow process of elimination -- with finding the right bar, that was, and tragically not discovering who Bones was into -- Jim was starting to narrow it down.

A very cute Academy fic that nevertheless deals with a bit of heavy shit for both Jim and Bones. Starts out with Jim bound and determined to befriend Bones by... discovering the perfect bar for them to hang out in. Has a lot of really great exploration of Bones’s character, and he’s written in a really entertaining way.

Future Imperfect by Savoytruffle (50k words)

Author’s Summary: Leonard wins the kid in a hand of poker. A hand of poker he plays in the dirty back room of a dive bar in East Bumfuck, Iowa, two weeks after his humiliating divorce is finalized, and on the sixth day of a bourbon-fueled bender that’s somehow taken him from his high-rise loft in Atlanta to a fleabag motel in the middle of nowhere.

This fic is an Academy fic, but in a pretty dark universe. Maybe not Mirror Universe dark, but it’s one where slavery is practiced on Earth. Jim is, in this fic, Bones’s slave. Not in a sexy way. He’s part of an underclass of people who weren’t designer babies. Bones goes to the Academy and tries to become a Starfleet officer, accompanied by Jim, his newly acquired slave. They grow closer as they deal with their pasts, and I guess I should stop there for fear of spoiling too much. This one talks a lot about childhood sexual abuse, so be warned. The story overall though has a hopeful ending.

Let Me Come Home by yawnralphio (7k words)

Author’s Summary: “Someone asked me what home was and all I could think of were the stars on the tip of your tongue, the flowers sprouting from your mouth, the roots entwined in the gaps between your fingers, the ocean echoing inside of your ribcage.”

For someone who theoretically dislikes modern day AU’s, there are actually a fair few that I really really love, and this is one. Jim and Bones run a travel blog together and journey around the US in a van. It’s a really lovely mix of angst and romance.

The Switch series by Ceres_Libera (series is 269k words)

Author’s Summary (of the first fic in the series): The life and times of Leonard H. McCoy MD/PhD … If Leonard McCoy's life could get any fucking weirder, it would be … Jesus, he didn't even want to think what that could possibly mean, because it's already been too fucking weird to make any kind of rational sense. A Starfleet Academy story, set in the ST:XI universe.

I don’t need any sass, people. I KNOW you’ve all read Switch, and I know you’re all tired of seeing it on rec lists and I don’t care. It’s famous for a reason! It’s not just long, it’s WONDERFUL. The big, epic Academy fic that kinda sets the Academy fic bar. Goes from Jim and Bones meeting all the way through the end of the 09 film. And that’s just the main fic. I really love that both Jim and Bones are depicted as realistically flawed people, especially earlier on in their acquaintance. Neither of them are angst sponges, they’re both just... kinda messed up dudes. But they’re good people who learn to love each other. Also I guess it’s technically slow burn?

The Greater Good by emiliglia (29k words)

Author’s Summary: Doctor Leonard McCoy thinks he's getting by, working as both a surgeon and a researcher at UCSF Medical Center. A chance encounter with Lieutenant Jim Kirk - who's changed since they first met five years before, and not for the better - forces Leonard to face reality about his own situation while trying to keep Jim from heading down the same path.

This is the only fic on here not on Ao3, as far as I can tell. Anyhow it’s modern day AU. Jim and Bones help themselves by helping each other and falling in looooove.

The aftershocks series by canistakahari (series is 30k words)

Author’s Summary: Jim Kirk turns down Pike’s challenge, and doesn’t get on the Starfleet recruiting shuttle. But neither does Leonard McCoy, who’s actually been in Iowa for six months already, doing fuck-all. Becoming drinking buddies seems like a natural progression.Sometimes the path to the stars is just a piece-of-shit dirt road. You know, the kind that’s filled with potholes and surrounded by brambles and conveniently happens to be located in the bottom of a ravine. But every once in a while, when confronted with such a twisted mess of circumstance and cracked foundation, the universe still does its very best to fill in the holes.

I haven’t read this in a long time, but I remember it being really good and kinda mindfucky. Not in a dark or stressful way, though. Jim and Bones don’t join Starfleet at all. I feel I shouldn’t say more because I don’t want to spoil things, but the tags should give you more information if you want some.

i think i’ll keep you (like a secret) by hoosierbitch (3k words)

Author’s Summary: Bones came to Starfleet with a hell of a lot of baggage. Jim came empty handed.

Some good ole Jim angst. Prominently featuring: Tarsus things! Allergic-to-everything Jim! Jim allowing himself to be vulnerable around Bones! All that good stuff. I just love me some vulnerability.

How Whales (Sorta) Brought Jim and Bones Together by highschool-facelesshellion (4k words)

Author’s Summary: For Leonard, first dates are flowers and small, homey restaurants where you talk quietly like you're sharing secrets with your potential girlfriend.They are not supposed to be at a table covered with aquarium maps and aquarium souvenirs. And they are certainly not supposed to be spent with a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy rambling about whales.(Or: Where Leonard is the only person that doesn't think Jim's too crazy for his whale obsession and Jim notices.)

Fairly goofy, slightly cracky remix of The Voyage Home (the one with the whales). It’s just silly and charming and I don’t know why I love the idea of Jim being a whale aficionado, but I really do.

Any Road Will Take You There by shoreleave (63k words)

Author’s Summary: Slow-developing K/M, beginning right after the shuttle ride and showing what happens the first year at the Academy. Told from McCoy's POV.

This fic is verrrrry good. I know I have a lot of Academy fic on here, but please treat yourself and read this one. Shoreleave is really good at both plot and characterization. I really like this fic in part because it explores the root of Jim’s complete lack of trust in authority figures, while also showing just how dangerous that lack of trust can be for him.

Seeing Stars by lindmere (1k words)

Author’s Summary: Inspired by Chris Pine's wig in Bottle Shock. Jim sneaks into Riverside for an old-fashioned Fourth of July.

A very sweet, sort of domestic established relationship fic.

His Eyes are Opened by tresa_cho (21k words)

Author’s Summary: Lt Colonel Leonard McCoy thought his service days were over. After the Great War, he was ready to disappear into the sanctuary of anonymity, but the government had other plans. Strange men whisk him away from his comfortable existence to investigate an airship crash unlike anything the United States had ever seen before. The year is 1947. The location, Roswell, New Mexico.

Despite the summary saying ‘Great War’, this fic is clearly post WWII, so I think that must be a typo. There is a dearth of McKirk fic set in the forties, and hot damn does this fic ever hit the spot if that’s what you’re looking for. Usually fics that are set in modern times or earlier take out all the sci-fi elements of Star Trek, but not this one! Just a very well done fic with a unique premise.

Investigations by AceOfSpades (series is 93k words)

Author’s Summary: The first thing Jim noticed about McCoy, and what started him on this whole messy path, was that McCoy was just a little…off.

GOD DAMN I love this fic. It’s a Doom (2005) fusion, but you don’t need to know anything about Doom to get this fic. It might even help to not know anything about Doom. God knows I don’t and I adore this fic. Academy era, with Jim simultaneously befriending Bones and trying to solve the mystery of this weird Leonard McCoy guy. Theoretically we’re getting a sequel sometime, and it can’t come soon enough in my opinion. Never fear, though, the fic is complete as-is and has lovely closure. Really really really recommended!

The Galactic Adventures of Major Zeph by winterover (14k words)

Author’s Summary: Jim is a comic book nerd who’s finally found his one true sidekick. Leonard is a convention virgin who really needs a drink. There is only one bed left in San Diego.

Academy fic! For some reason I always love fics where Jim is into some kind of craft or art, or is just generally a nerd about something. This fic provides that twice: Jim is a comic book nerd as the summary says, but also really into cosplay. And Bones just happens to look like the sidekick of Jim’s favorite comic book character. Romantic hijinks ensue.

The Man Who Held Up Atlas by thalialunacy (7k words)

Author’s Summary: Five times Leonard McCoy fixed Jim Kirk’s back, and the one time he didn’t have to.

Really really lovely 5 plus 1 fic with reverse chronology. Starts with Jim and Bones as old old men and moves back in time from there, showing little snapshots of their relationship.

and i can lend you broken parts that might fit (like this) by jeyhawk (17k words)

Author’s Summary: Academy Era. First they fall into bed. Then they fall in love.

Funny and sweet. Nothing too heavy, just loads of Jim and Bones being wildly in love with each other. And sexytimes.

#mckirk #fic rec #star trek #aos #my post

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prorevenge · 5 years

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Got my nightmare professor fired, might've indirectly gotten him deported too

Before this tale even begins, this is obviously a throwaway account. This is a big bitch of a story spanning two semesters, so I'm putting the tealdeer at the beginning and at the end for those who are short on time.

TL;DR - My French professor was so terrible that I decided to get him fired on behalf of my classmates. After he got fired, my partner that I worked with to do this tipped him off to an immigration agency to get him deported.

Last semester, I enrolled in an introductory French course at my university. This was to learn at least a little bit of French so that I could read French papers about French filmmaking techniques since I'm a pretty hardcore film student and I really love film as an art form. Plus, I needed some gen ed credit for my degree, so it made sense to take the course.

I went to the first lecture kind of dreading the course. I was in 19 credit hours, which is taking six classes in a single semester, and the class was 4 credit hours, meaning we met four days out of the week, every week. Very overwhelming schedule, indeed. Needless to say, I didn't work a single job that semester.

The professor, who will be referred to as Baguette because it's one of the few French words I actually know, began to go through the syllabus and I watched as the excitement that is usually present in students on the first day slowly left everyone's faces. Before I explain why, I have to address that this is the most basic French class that the university I go to offers and is really meant for people who never took a lick of French in high school. Like me.

Baguette announced that not only would he be teaching the entire class in fluent French with no English whatsoever, he wouldn't be answering questions in English at all, and if you asked him a question in French but got even a word or a conjugation wrong, he wouldn't answer you either. Attendance was mandatory as well, and you could only miss 4 class periods before he started dropping letter grades. Now, this attendance policy is unfair bullshit because we met for class just under 60 times that semester, meaning you would fail the course if you missed 8 class periods, which is only about 7% of the total course. I was looking around the class and people looked like they couldn't drop this class fast enough.

Then, he announced that not only would we not be using a physical book, we'd be using a free website online, a site called Francais Interactif. Now, this got some excitement back in the air. Textbook prices suck, and anything to lower the cost of education for students is great. You can even use the site yourself to practice your French skills, if you want. It's open source, knock yourself out.

That said, the site isn't meant to replace a textbook. There's a free workbook and audio files to help with aural comprehension on it, and that helped me and some of the other students pass some of the exams, but the site's equivalent to the part of a textbook that actually teaches you the material is extremely lacking, sometimes only having a couple of paragraphs about a really important concept in the language. In short, it gives you a ton of ways to practice concepts but almost no ways to learn them in the first place.

This would have been totally fine if Baguette would have explained things better in his lectures. But, as you'll recall, he gave them entirely in French, and in fast fluent French. So, picture this; you have to sit through four classes a week that you understand literally nothing of for an hour at a time while the professor rambles on in a language that you don't understand but are desperately trying to learn, and on top of all that, you can't even ask him any questions in English because he won't answer you and you can't ask him any questions in French either, because you don't know how to do that properly yet, and you won't for 3/4ths of the semester, because the unit that covers question words and phrases was arbitrarily put a few weeks after midterms, and on top of all that, you can't even really do your homework or study for exams because you have no fucking idea what any of this nasally shit means. Naturally, we, as a class, slowly started to get more and more frustrated as time went on. A few of us decided to band together and be friends and study partners to weather the storm. I'll call the important ones to the story R and S.

S was a foreign exchange student from Spain who spoke perfect Spanish and was taking the class to learn French for when she goes back to Europe. Now, we dug into what all other classes Baguette taught and found out that he taught Spanish, too. Perfect. We found a loophole. We could ask S a question in English, and she could ask him in Spanish, since it wasn't asking him in English, and he could answer in Spanish and she could translate that back to us in English. Now, you might be saying to yourself that this a fucking stupid and no self respecting educator should teach in this broken, shitty, ass-backwards way. You're right.

This worked for a bit, but he started answering S's Spanish questions in French to combat our little exploit of the rules. We were defeated and back to square one. We needed to devise a new plan, because most of us were failing at this point and we were stressed beyond belief.

R, a frat lad, and I, decidedly not a frat lad, became unlikely friends. He was a pretty naive kid, and he was a hardcore drinker. It visibly took a toll on him. He had a beer gut at 22 and addiction kind of mentally hollowed him out and made him flippant and emotional. The guy was super easy to piss off and he overreacted to everything. I felt bad for the guy and even outside of the struggle in class, I tried my best to be there for him. We were talking one day and we decided to meet up at the library and just theorize ways to crack the class to get at least a 60.

At the library, R was playing around on Francais Interactif trying to find the videos the professor would use for the aural part of the exam (basically, you'd listen to the video and copy down whatever the person was saying for credit. problem was, it was hard as shit and it was easily the part of the exams that took the biggest chunk out of the class's grade). He couldn't find them on the site anywhere and he got frustrated and gave up, so he started filling in the slots where you put answers on the homework pages of Francais Interactif with random words.

That's when we realized that when you do this, the site gives you the right answer regardless, no matter how wrong you are. Essentially, we now had access to the entire course's answers for the homework section and all we had to do was put one character into the answer boxes and, since all we had to do for the homework assignments was copy and paste our answers into a Word document and submit them online, we could theoretically do all the homework while knowing zero material whatsoever if we just changed the answers in Word. We sat for about 45 minutes and did the rest of the homework for the entire course this way in one sitting.

We agreed to not turn it all in at once so we couldn't get caught and we agreed to keep our mouths shut and only share this with people who wouldn't rat on us. Obviously, we told S.

One of the things I'll never forget about that first French class was that, during the final, one of the students started to quietly weep. Then, the weeping got louder, then louder still. The student was clutching his head in his hands and you could feel the palpable impotent frustration at his inability to do French correctly. After I finished the final, I saw him outside the class staring out a window in the hall. I asked if he was alright and what he was crying about and he told me he couldn't answer even the most basic questions asking for words for things like left and right and up and down and that was thing that finally broke him. That got to me, man.

Most of the kids failed the course, even some of the ones who used the homework exploit. R and S passed with a D and I passed with a C, surprisingly. The professor actually liked me, for some reason, and graded my exams a bit more fairly. Even still, I'm an A/B student, one in the Honor's Program at my university, so a C kind of stung my GPA. But, seeing as more than half the class failed, I counted my lucky stars that I got off easy.

I went to enroll in my classes for the next semester, and I had completely forgot that I still had to take another French class for my degree. I checked the class list and the second class you're supposed to take in the progression was only taught by Baguette. No other professor taught Beginning French II, apparently. This struck me as kind of odd, so I checked the rest of the French classes that were available. All of them, all 6 courses in the French department, were taught by Baguette. He was the only fucking teacher the department had. My stomach dropped as I realized I had locked myself into yet another class taught by the worst professor I've ever had, to this day.

This is class where the revenge begins, and I'm sorry if that preamble was too long, but I had to give context as to how horrible Baguette was. Even still, I'm frankly not doing him justice. His class was an artful trainwreck of incompetence, in the slowest slow motion available over nearly 60 class periods. And I had to do it again, only this time with harder material.

I had been keeping up with R and S over the winter break and S was going back to Spain, so she wouldn't be in the next class with me. But, I got R to enroll in the same section of Beginning French II as me.

Baguette passed out the syllabus to Beginning French II and it was the exact same as French I, down to us using Francais Interactif again, just in the higher chapters instead of the basic chapters. Now, here's the thing about learning a foreign language; you have to build from the basics, or else none of the other stuff makes sense. None of us in that class, not one person, knew any of the material past maybe Chapter 3. Most of us didn't even know how to ask questions. I did, so I asked questions for people who didn't, since S wasn't there.

Well, if you thought we bumbled through the basic material, no harder bumbling took place then when we started on things that have no direct English translation like y and en. When he asked students questions in this class, they'd just kind of look at him dumbfounded and shrug.

We got a study guide for our first exam and I was going to study my ass off so that I could get a better grade than a C. Besides a brief stint with depression my first semester that made me not be able to go to classes and fail one of my courses, a C was the lowest grade I had gotten at university. I must've studied for twenty hours over the course of a week before the exam. I hadn't even put that much effort into classes for my major. I got into class on the day of the exam, and nothing that I had spent all that time studying was on it. I bombed that test spectacularly, getting a 30%.

At this point, I was pretty much done. I was willing to go to my professor's office hours and ask him how I was supposed to study for his exams effectively, and his response is what began my quest to get revenge on him. He told me to watch YouTube videos. I don't know what it was about this that got me so pissed, but I was fired up.

But, that wasn't all that drove me to take the revenge I took on this fucker. No, what drove me to go after this guy was R calling me up crying after getting his exam back. He did worse than I did. He got a 15%. He kept repeating through sobs that he just wanted to be a good student and that he didn't want to disappoint his mom again. I'm not ashamed to admit that I cried at this. I thought back to that kid in French I after the final, about my peers and about R and something inside me snapped. I was going to get this guy fired and peacefully do anything else I could to ruin this guy's life one way or another, and R was going to be my Right Hand Man.

We met at his dorm and started brainstorming. It was about halfway through the semester, after our midterms. We both had a job, a significant other, extracurricular activities and I was taking 19 hours again this semester. We were going to need time on our side, a commodity that neither of us had, and we were going to need it quickly. We knew that the professor was going to be gone for a week at a conference right after spring break, so there was a two week window there. But, even still, we needed more time for what we started planning to do. I faked a doctor's note for two weeks absence and R agreed to use all four of his absences to meet at the same time French was supposed to occur and plan our peaceful academic coup.

Now, I knew I was eventually going to get caught from word go. But, I was so confident that I could get this guy fired before I would have a disciplinary hearing that I took the gamble, and Baguette took the bait. He excused me for two whole weeks.

So, you're probably wondering what we actually did. Well, the reason we needed so much time is that we needed time to both conduct interviews from the class as well as collect data on scores. We got a total of thirteen out of the seventeen students to make a statement about Baguette's performance in his Beginning French II class and all of them were negative. This was just in one section of the course.

Then, we asked if we could have their exam scores so that we could have some hard data to nail this guy with. All but two complied. We did some quick maths, and determined that more than half the class failed the exams, with most scoring between 30 and 50.

But, as it turns out, we didn't even need the exam scores given to us. We figured out that the online grade database site that our school uses so students can monitor their grades without asking their profs has a built in feature that shows the class average of every assignment that's put into the gradebook. Not a single assignment had a class average above a 50 except for the homework, which had a class average of around 80, no doubt thanks to the stupid exploit in the website.

Sure enough, I got tagged with a notice that I broke the discipline code of the university because obvious shop is obvious. But, it didn't matter. I had everything I needed to go to the Foreign Language department chair and sort this shit out. So, I did.

I showed the department chair all the data, let him listen to the audio from the student testimonies as well as gave my own testimony on the course. After showing him all this, he was dumbfounded. Not only did the chair not know that Baguette was a shitty teacher, almost nobody did course evaluations for French I, so he thought that Baguette was doing a decent job. He took all my evidence and gave it to the dean of arts and sciences and a couple weeks later, I get an email saying that Baguette was Bag-gone and that I was going to be withdrawn from the course along with everyone else who would've likely failed. Those who would've passed got to get a Credit Received grade without having to take the final. He got fired one semester before he qualified for his tenure.

But, that's not the juiciest fucking morsel of this tale. You're probably wondering how he got deported and how I found out that he got deported because of his firing. Well, after my disciplinary hearing got thrown out because the complainant was no longer affiliated with the university, I got more than I bargained for.

During his lectures, one of the few times he spoke English was after he introduced the syllabus on the first day. He had everyone introduce themselves and he started the exercise by introducing himself. Well, in his introduction, I remember him saying something about him being an immigrant from Venezuela. I live in the States (Etats-Unis for you Bonjour Bois), and some of you might know that we have pretty strict visa policies.

Well, R is pretty conservative. After our work got Baguette fired, we celebrated by getting some beer and shooting the shit. We talked about random aspects of the course and the fact that he was an immigrant got brought up. Apparently, R didn't know this and he was pretty upset about it. I tried to calm him down, but he went on a rant that I tried to politely nod along to while tuning out since I'm not really about that. I didn't think anything of it until a couple of days later.

He called me up and told me that he tipped Baguette off to a certain immigration agency for a "visa check" (his words, not mine) and that now all we had to do was wait. I was shocked. I didn't think this would go this far. I feigned that I was pleased with this but in reality, I was kinda bummed. Since he was probably here on an academic visa since he was a professor, he probably is going back home to Venezuela. I am glad, though, that he won't be teaching any more of my fellow students at my uni, because I wouldn't wish his classes on anyone.

edit: formatting

(source) story by (/u/ouiouirevenge)

#prorevenge #by /u/ouiouirevenge #pro revenge #revenge stories #pro revenge stories #pro #revenge #last10

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a-nonymousgirl · 6 years

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School tips

Everyone reaches some point in the school year when they realize they have over extended themselves, feel overly stressed, and just want to give up on themselves. I know I am guilty of this, especially over extending myself and then trying to cram as much into a day as possible. I get overly excited about all the options I have or under estimate how much time some of my commitments take up. There were times this year in college where I was up till two or three in the morning finishing up assignments after working almost ten hours straight. It seems almost impossible to balance between being over extended and bored out of our mind. So here are some ways I help myself keep sane and organized during the year.

Before I begin I want to ask something I ask myself every year. What in your schedule can you not live without? These are the crucial tasks that absolutely must be done today. Think of how much time each of these takes up and be realistic, don’t give yourself five hours to sleep when really you need seven or eight(i’m guilty of this but try best to avoid it). Think of how to best organize these requirements so you don’t end up overlapping and find yourself stressed.

1) Use a planner/calendar

Having a easy to see lay out of the month really helps keep me on track. I like my planners to have a monthly and a weekly view. I put all deadlines, tests/quizzes, school events, siblings events, birthdays, work schedule ect here. It helps me to be able to see everything and plan out how early I need to start homework or studying for tests so I can get the best grade(In college there is a 2 week rule my friends and I use to study for tests). In the weekly Ill put a little tid bit of what was covered in class and any specifics about an assignment that gets assigned. I know a lot of my friends have had success with using a calendar on their phone, another uses sticky notes and writes the essentials, and another uses a wall calendar. Find what works best for you and stick with that.

2) Study early

What I mean by this is start an assignment when you get it, even if its months away so the info is still fresh in your mind. It also means start studying for a test early so that you can start with studying for 30-40 minutes and work your way up to a three or four hour study session a few days before the test.

3) Find time for you

This seems like it wouldn’t have a lot to do with school and your success but stress cause people to shut down. Taking small 10-15 minute breaks after studying for two-three hours helps prevent burning out and getting overly stressed. Find a few things that make you happy and set aside some time for them. They don’t have to

4) Read the content before its covered in class

This helps with comprehension but also allows you to ask questions about the content while it is being covered

5) Make friends

This helps out a lot when there are class projects or a big test coming up. I have a short list of people I talk to all the time about almost everything we do in class. It helps a lot knowing if you miss a class they can help cover you some and its super helpful having a few people you can depend on to study together with

6) Highlight

don’t be afraid to highlight terms, important information or key concepts in your notes. This helps give a focus to the notes and gives a little reminder of what might be important to focus on when the test comes up

7) talking to your teacher/ use professors office hours

This goes for students of all ages, don’t be afraid to ask questions or seek out help. This can be in class or outside of class, for college students this is during office hours. Usually professors have few students coming in and truly want to help if they can. Meeting with the teacher can help establish a relationship which helps with grading later on and can help with finding the best way you learn.

8) record the lectures if you are allowed

This helps if you miss a section of lecture and can help you study in times where you can’t pull out a notebook or textbook.

9) sit in the front if possible

This helps the teachers remember who you are(helps when you go in to ask for help, they are often more friendly) and gives you the least amount of distractions. My chem teacher took a poll of where people sat in class and their average test scores, even those who did not participate much in class but sat in the front did better than those who sat in the back.

10) Have snacks

I have studied with many people who have skipped meals(guilty) or didn’t bring snacks. This can make studying less productive because there isn’t as much focus on the material. The snack can also be used as a reward for reaching a certain point. I liked to bring some brain foods(help memory and brain development) mixed nuts, granola bars, pumpkin seeds, etc and then a cheat snack like cheez its that I would swap out.

11) Eat brain foods

On important days treat your brain, especially those long studying days. A few great options are eggs, blueberries, tea, dark chocolate, avocado, oatmeal, nuts, etc. These foods can really help with concentration and give a little boost.

12) Don’t pull all nighters all the time

This is hard especially when it comes to college but staying up all night for many nights in a row throws your body off, slows you down and can make it harder to remember content from class. Try to get at least 6 hours of sleep every night to keep from burning out and to ensure you get the most of your day. This is hard to do(trust me I know) but it is beneficial in the long run.

13) Color code

Color coding can help your brain associate terms together and help terms stay longer.

14) Use practice exams

If your professor/teacher post practice tests use them to your advantage. Try going through them in the amount of time you would be given without any study tools. See how well you did after and then focus on the areas you did poorly on. Often at least 4-5 questions from the practices are on the test in some form whether it be the same set up or the same kind of question.

15) Move around

Research has shown moving study spots can help with memory. moving around causes our brain to form new associations with the same information so it becomes a stronger memory.

16) Write it out

If possible try to write out notes as you are more likely to remember material written than you are if its typed. For college this is harder to do with lecture, often I type out my notes then go back and review them and possibly write them out later that night.

17) learn what works best

This sounds like common sense but figure out what learning style works best for you. Personally I have to read the material and take notes over the content at the same time for me to really soak up the information. One of my best friends is more auditory and likes to watch videos and listen to videos to help her study. In college you can sometimes choose whether you would like an online text book only or a package that has an online book as well as a paper copy. I find it better to have a paper copy, but some people I study with love the online version.

18) Find your weaknesses

Through out covering the material find sections that you are not as confident on or don’t fully understand. Make a list of them as they appear then try to focus on those sections when studying.

#college #college class #high school #middle school #school #school supplies #back to school #Back to school tips #school tips #study tips #Helpful Tips #organization #procrastination #study motivation #student #stress #study #personal blog

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kkaebsongtypo · 7 years

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Still Nothing // Huang Renjun

A/N: I have T E R R I B L E writer’s block and I’m hella frustrated so here’s a little scenario of Renjun trying to help you with writer’s block but even though it doesn’t work,,,,,,,,,,, you’ll sEE THE FLUFF IS GOING TO HAPPEN

pairing: renjun x writer!reader

genre: fluff,,,, but there’s a yelling MC

notes/warnings: there’s anger, frustration, and cursing, but it’s not that bad.

word count: 1668

I don’t proof read,,,,, i just gave up on that so i’m sorry for mistakes and such

You looked up from the book you were reading and resisted the urge to throw it across your room. It was a saturday and you had a whole bunch of homework. Your procrastination level was beyond comprehensible at the moment. There was a lit circle on Monday, (yes, the lit circle for the book you were trying to read,) you had a mini exhibition Wednesday (which you were not ready for,) you were supposed to already have a project idea ready for Wednesday (but surprise, surprise, you didn’t,) there was this fucking math thing that made no sense to you, and some other stuff you just couldn’t bring yourself to think about. You just had no motivation at all. It was driving you crazy. This book was driving you crazy.

You weren’t much of a reader, which made no sense because you loved to write. You’ve always enjoyed it, but you’ve only been a serious writer for a few years now. You already had an idea for your senior thesis, you wanted to write a book about passion. It was only October and you were so overwhelmed with school work and it’s been hard for you to balance it with writing. Writing was all you wanted to do. You had most inspiration in class. It’s class though, so obviously, you can’t just write in class all day. It was the most frustrating thing.

You placed to book on your bedside table and sighed, falling against your pillows. You glanced down on at your laptop that sat, open, near the end of your bed. You sat up and reached for it, pulling onto your lap before opening up a new tab and a blank document. You started at the blinking line blankly for a few seconds before falling back once again with an exasperated groan. Writer’s block. Deciding that you needed some type of inspiration, you shuffled your playlist, hoping for an inspiring song. Sitting back up, you started typing whatever was on your mind. Feeling pretty good about what was flowing from your mind to your keyboard, you paused to read over it. It was 1 and a half paragraphs of pure shit. You slammed your finger onto the back space key, erasing the embarrassing excuse of an introduction. After letting out an anger filled “ughhhhhh’ followed by a few strained whining noises, the door to you bedroom opened. You looked up to see your boyfriend looking rather confused.

"hey, are you okay babe?” he asked as he shut your door and walked over to your bed.

You look at him and rolled your eyes.

“Yeah, Renjun. I’m G R E A T.” oh boy,,,, you were in a terrible mood.

Renjun looked at you, slightly surprised at your behavior, and use of his actual name (he was used to you calling him Jun, or Junnie, or like, babe, y'know.) He sat down next to your sprawled out figure and moved your head into his lap. Groaning as he did so.

“alright babe, what’s wrong?” he said looking down at you and stroking your hair.

“you’re rarely sarcastic with me” he laughed lightly, which made you look up at him with puppy dog eyes.

You pushed yourself up off his lap and looked at your laptop screen. Which was still blank.

“I have mountains of homework, but I have Z E R O motivation, and I really want to write, but I have writer’s block, and I’m reALLY FUCKING FRUSTRATED.” slamming your laptop shut after yelling in anger. Your boyfriend sighed and pulled you towards him. He gently shushed you and rubbed your arms.

“it’s okay babe, you’ll get inspir-” he was cut off by you standing and sighing with anger and frustration clear in your voice.

“No! Renjun! It’s not okay! Everything is due this week and I have to read this stupid book and I have to talk about my independent read on Wednesday, which I haven’t read one page of, and I’m so overwhelmed, and I’m super stressed out about it, and I can’t find any motiva-” it was your turn to be cut off, by Renjun swiftly moving to your panicked figure and pressing his lips to yours. You melted into the kiss and he moved one hand from your waist to cheek. You two pulled away after a solid 10 seconds. (Y'ALL I LOVE RENJUN.) He lifted your face to look up at him after you looked down, and he smiled with adoration.

“I was hoping that would take your mind of things” he said quietly, with a sweet, innocent smile.

“Oh my gosh babe, it’s not going to be that easy to get my mind off of everything.” you sighed as all of your work flooded your mind again. Pulling away from his hold, you started to walk back over to your laptop. You didn’t make it very far, as you were pulled back into his embrace.

“What else can I do for you sweets?” he questioned, resting his chin on your shoulder from behind after pressing a quick kiss to you cheek. You placed your hands over his and turned your head slightly to look at him. As you opened your mouth to speak, you heard the familiar piano introduction of your ‘couple song’ as you two like to call it. Your head whipped around to the speaker in the corner of your room and Renjun took your hand and spun you around to look at him.

You and Renjun met outside of the Exo'luxion concert venue, before nct was very big, and 'out there.’ You we’re on your way up the doors when you dropped your purse; spilling almost everything inside, out onto the sidewalk. When you reached to pick up your lip balm (which was rolling away,) you brushed hands with larger, warmer one. You looked up the see who the hand belonged to, and you were met by boy with a small, sweet smile. He bent down as well after handing you the lip balm and started helping you with the remaining items on the ground. You thanked him as you two stood up and he handed you your ticket. You exchanged names and continued inside. Upon reaching you seat, you soon found out that you just so happened to be next to Renjun, the friendly boy that helped you moments before. As you two waited for the show to start, you got to know each other. Starting with your favourite song. Which, for both of you, happened to be Don’t Go. The rest is history.

You giggled as he moved your hands to his shoulders and his to your waist. He returned the giggle as you two began to sway back and forth, quietly singing the lyrics back to one another. He rested his forehead on yours and lightly pecked your nose.

This situation was not a rare occurrence, but it also wasn’t an everyday thing. You two would dance together often, to anything really. It’s usually fun and goofy dancing, but Don’t Go was special to the two of you. Of course, y'all are young and all, but you know that when if you two get married, it would definitely be your first dance. (OH SHIT I FEEL A SCENARIO COMING ON)

Here you two were, slow dancing in your bedroom, your homework and writing long forgotten. All you could think about was how happy you were. As the song drew to a close, you wrapped your arms around Renjun’s neck and hugged him. He did the same, wrapping his arms tightly around your waist, lifting you off the ground slightly. You laughed lightly and pulled back to look at his face. He had the most radiant smile, and so did you. He set you down as Take You Home (Baek’s station song) started playing. He held your hand as he starting singing along, walking over to the bag he set down by your bed. You followed, lacing your fingers with his. He reached into his bag as the pre chorus sounded. Turning around smoothly, holding a yellow flower out to you as the chorus began. You laughed out loud and took the flower from his grasp. You laughed again, at him, as he started dancing like in the actually music video. He laughed with you, moving to kiss your forehead as the song ended. He smiled down at you again.

“Junnie. That couldn’t have been planned.” you laughed, shaking your head slightly.

“Oh, it wasn’t. It was just perfect timing for that song to come on.”he said back. You looked down at the flower and then back up at him as he brushed your cheek with his thumb.

“… What are you thinking about?” he asked.

“ah… just, how much I love you” you said while playing with the leaves on the flower.

“ah jeez… i love you took, cutie.” he said as he engulfed you in a bear hug.

Music continued to flow through you speaker as you and Renjun sat back down in your bed. You laid your head on his chest as he wrapped his arm around your shoulder. Setting the flower on your bedside table, you sighed and reached for your laptop. Renjun sighed as well before stroking your hair.

“any ideas for writing?” he asked as he watched you type in your password.

“… nope. Still nothing.” you whispered.

He chuckled and kissed the top of your head.

“We’ll think of something” he whispered into the top of your head before shutting your laptop and lying down on your bed. Hugging you closer to him, despite your protests about having to do homework, he shushed you and shut his eyes.

“We can think later, for now, let’s take a nap.” he said, shutting his eyes and snuggling closer to you. You playfully rolled your eyes and got comfortable in your boyfriends arms before closing your eyes as well. You may have a lot to do, but this is the perfect break.

A/N: ALRIGHT SO, THAT HAPPENED. I’m so sorry that this was kind of all over the place, but I actually did start writing this when I did have writers block, and my brain kind of expolded with ideas mid way through… also, all of that work I listed in the beginning is actual homework I have, OOPS. It’s late now anyways, so I just have to cram tomorrow. Bad choices but oh well, better now than later I guess.

I hope you enjoyed this, I had a lot of fun writing it because it broke my writers block, again, sorry for the messiness! Send in requests if you want because that would also really help with the writers block! and i’m sorry for the picture quality, pictures haven’t been working for me the past while

~ Jae☾

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erraticprojectjunkie · 6 years

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2017 Book of the Year: Sweet Sixteen

The bittersweet fun of the Book of the Year Bracket Challenge is removing competitors one by one. Today, it's the big cuts. We'll be whittling down the competition from 26 books to the Sweet Sixteen. Some books will find themselves automatically moving forward while 10 unlucky souls will be left behind. Here is where we start... Buckle up...this is a long one... You'll notice that some brackets have only one competitor. Due to the number of books competing and the inability to fully fill the bracket, six lucky contestants move on automatically through the first round. And so... The Weight of Feathers by Anna Marie McLemore, The Master Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg, The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan, Turtles All the Way Down by John Green, The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han, and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs have all earned the right to continue. That was the easy part. Now...let's get to the meat of this round... Left Side Bracket The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg vs.The Glass Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg Ah...the magic of having the randomized bracket. It's totally unfair to Holmberg that two of her novels face off against each other right off the bat, but hey...she also managed one of the freebie slots, so I'm calling it even. I debated over this one for a bit. Both of these books are good--the initial and second reads in The Paper Magician trilogy. I initially struggled to get into the series, finding a lot of parallels and fearing that the trilogy was just a ripoff of Harry Potter. But...Holmberg has her own way with things and I quickly found myself more intrigued by the world she created and wondering about certain details as I read. This distracted me from the previous apprehension, and I mowed right through the series. Each of the two books has its merit. The Paper Magician was responsible for getting me interested in the series in the first place, but The Glass Magician was impressive as a sequel in a trilogy. It wasn't dull or serving as just a tie between the stories presented in the first and third books, as so often happens. Ultimately, I had to give credit where credit is due. And so... The Paper Magician takes the win and moves on to the next round. The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolvervs.Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline The Bean Trees was given to me in a book exchange and Orphan Train has been sitting on my bookshelf for what seems like forever. The Bean Trees was a decent read, but the plot was a bit choppy in pieces. It was honest and raw writing without a feeling of melodramatics...well, not ones that drew away too much from the narrative. I wasn't wowed by it, but it wasn't a worthless read either. Orphan Train had pieces of absolutely beautiful writing and heartbreaking action. I loved half of this book...the half that was written in the past. There were two sets of narration in the book and that, for me, was the biggest downfall. The historical pieces were amazing and read swiftly. The modern sections felt like they were written by an entirely different author and just seemed forced. Both books were moderate reads that I wanted...expected...more from. But one book just left me feeling more satisfaction in the read. So even though these books were, honestly, quite evenly matched, only Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline survives this round for further competition. Slade House by David Mitchellvs.An Abundance of Katherines by John Green This is a shocking match up for more than one reason. Number one...I don't read horror. Seriously. I haven't read a horror novel since...oh...somewhere around 1994. My apologies to Stephen King. I was pleasantly surprised at Slade House, which I read as part of RIPXII. It was witty and catchy. I read it pretty quickly since it gripped me quite well. I was slightly disappointed in the ending (this happens all too frequently), but overall I really quite enjoyed it. The other reason it's shocking? Well...Slade House managed to get paired up against John Green. Oy. Seriously. Based on my reading and rating history, An Abundance of Katherines should have been a shoe-in for progressing to at least the Final Four. And yet...I enjoyed the book, but I wasn't wowed. It was a good read, but didn't seem to be as deep and hard hitting as some of his other books. And that...well, that is the short version of why Slade House manages to edge out An Abundance of Katherines to move forward in the BOTY competition. The Girl Without a Name by Sandra Blockvs.Dad is Fat by Jim Gaffigan This was a pretty odd pairing to consider. The downside of a randomized bracket, I suppose. The Girl Without a Name is a mystery and suspense novel. I don't typically read that genre, but the synopsis drew me in. The story itself was quite interesting and the writing shows some definite talent. However, there were a few glitches that caused me pause. One major glitch, in fact. The author has a medical background (she's a neurologist) and yet her protagonist repeatedly disregards the principles of HIPAA, one of the most important and basic parts of being a medical provider. Anyone in real life who acted in the way her character does would immediately be at very least suspended and more likely fired with the possibility of having a licensure review. This nagged at me so much...seriously...it almost resulted in my ditching the book altogether. However, I soldiered on due to the good writing and the promise of a solid story. Ultimately, the plot held and I didn't hate it, but some of the characters seemed underdeveloped and that glitch just rubbed me the wrong way. Similarly, I found that Dad is Fat was a bit disappointing. You must think at this point I'm just a negative reviewer, but I blame this on seeing Gaffigan's stand up routine too often. I find him highly entertaining and enjoy his anecdotes. The book just fell short of whatever bar I had set for him. Damn you, preconceived notions. Don't get me wrong, the book is still funny and I did find myself giggling on occasion. I think I just expected to be wowed a bit more. Rats. So...two books that I had high hopes for that wound up being mediocre. Ugh. This is a depressing match up. Let's just rip the band-aid off and be done, shall we? Dad is Fat moves on to the next bracket, out of the sheer merit of not ticking me off. It's Not Summer Without You by Jenny Hanvs.A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles It's Not Summer Without You was my one reread of the year. And here's where I sound like an idiot... I didn't realize it was a reread until I was about fifty pages in. I just kept reading, thinking "Geez this sounds familiar. Have I read a book with a similar character before? Dang it...I know I've heard this name." And hey, guess what? I'd read it before. Embarrassing. And yet, I still enjoyed it. It could be a good beach read. It's nice and light and quick. Not hard hitting or enigmatic, but still entertaining. I read A Gentleman in Moscow as part of a short-lived book club. It took me a bit to get into...something of a slow starter, but I really enjoyed the character development. Alexander Rostov is an interesting character with a mesmerizing background. The narrative plows through several historical events with clever detail. Russian history is not my forte, so I think I did lose a little bit through my ignorance. Additionally, the author is incredibly bright and the writing is highly intellectual. The vocabulary is complex, which occasionally detracted from the story for me. It's definitely worth the read, but I would have gotten a bit more out of it had my understanding of some of the historical references and the language been more comprehensive. In this case, I decided to judge the winner based upon which one I would be more apt to grab up again or refer to a friend. Granted, the recommendation choice would likely be dependent on which friend was in question. But...I'm going by the most likely. So...A Gentleman in Moscow moves into the Sweet Sixteen. Right Side Bracket The Lauras by Sara Taylorvs.We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge Ah...the easiest pairing you shall ever find. Well...at least in this list. I received the The Lauras from the publisher as a review copy. I had read Sara Taylor's The Shore a couple of years ago and thought she held great promise as an author. I wasn't wrong in that. The Lauras is a contemporary fiction novel that could easily fall into a young adult category. The writing is very honest. Taylor does fantastically with description and creates a very vivid narrative. There were detractors that kept this away from a 5-star review, but they aren't important for this particular match-up. So...we'll address them later. We Love You, Charlie Freeman...oh boy. This book...I really am almost at a loss for words. Almost. But let's cut to the quick...I did not like this book. Nope. Not at all. I should have thrown it straight into the DNF pile. There was a gigantic eww factor that developed for me and the narrative just fell seriously flat. Nope. Big, fat pile of nope. Obviously, The Lauras takes this pairing. Library of Souls by Ransom Riggsvs.Ceremony by Leslie Silko Marmon Library of Souls is the final book in the Miss Peregrine series. It totally holds up the series. I stayed up super late to finish it because I just couldn't put it down. That is the sign of a delightful book. Riggs is a talented author and I very much enjoyed this conclusion to the series. I read Ceremony as an assigned book for an American literature course. It's a fantastically honest Native American historical fiction novel. It's painful and raw, but beautifully written. It's a political and social commentary, but still maintains an individualized feel. It's a great journey book. This was a good pairing, but there was an obvious winner from the start. For me, a book that keeps me from sleep is always a good one and a difficult one to beat in these circumstances. Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs takes the slot and heads on into further competition. A Secret Kept by Tatiana de Rosnayvs.Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert I read A Secret Kept because I had so loved de Rosnay's Sarah's Key. I think it suffered from the fact that I had read her prior work. A Secret Kept just felt okay. There wasn't a wow factor in any capacity. It read fine and had a decent plot, but the characters didn't feel fully fleshed out and the narrative was nowhere near as hard hitting as I expected. Again, having read Sarah's Key first, I really had a bar set that just wasn't reached. Big Magic was given to me by my sister-in-law. It's technically a self-help book, which had me leery at first, but don't let that label tarnish this one for you at all. The book stresses the individualism of creativity and the need to embrace the talent that may come from it. I found its message freeing and inspiring. That sounds completely lame to say, but it's totally true. This honestly is likely a book that could demand a reread every once in a while to refresh my belief in myself. Big Magic is going to take this bracket and push forward as a member of the Sweet Sixteen. Hollow City by Ransom Riggsvs.Snow Flower & the Secret Fan by Lisa See If you're someone who picks a book based on the cover, don't tell me you wouldn't stop and seriously consider Hollow City. The good news is that the book is just as fabulous as its cover. Hollow City is the second novel in the Miss Peregrine trilogy. It breaks the mold of the sad sequel, those books lacking in originality and spice, existing only to further the narrative and extend it to a third book. Nope. This one holds its own, baby. The world Riggs created in Miss Peregrine just continues to be marvelous in its strangeness. It's fabulously fun. Snow Flower & the Secret Fan is a historical fiction novel and it's heart wrenching. I was suuuuuper close to putting it in the DNF pile after struggling to get into it for a few months. But, it turns out that the issue wasn't the book...it was me. I just wasn't in the right place to appreciate it at the time. The second attempt was the winner. It's beautiful and real and the characters are just fantastic. I definitely anticipate that I will be reading more of Lisa See's work in the future. It was a close one in this case. Either of these two books could have easily taken the win and moved into the next section of eliminations. But...we all know the rules. Only one can win. And so, Riggs takes it again and Hollow City moves into the next round. We'll Always Have Summer by Jenny Hanvs.A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman We'll Always Have Summer is the concluding novel in Jenny Han's Summer trilogy. While it does have a decent ending (which is a small miracle), I did find that this one was a bit too predictable. I don't know if it's a matter of having stretched the series out for too long rather than reading the books back to back, but I just wasn't as enthralled as I had hoped to be. On the plus side, it was a quick and light read. Fitting for a summer based series, this one (as with its companions) would be a good beach read. A Man Called Ove was an adorable read. Seriously heartwarming, but also highly entertaining in Ove's quirkiness. Ove is a curmudgeon. He's grouchy with his neighbors and stuck in his ways. But he's also the cutest old man ever. He's a sweet widower in his own right, he just doesn't show that beyond his own private moments. This one would be a good book to revive someone out of a reading slump. Another easy choice. I loved Ove so, so much. He was just so incredibly well-written. Backman did a great job at developing a plot that served well to Ove's tedious nature without allowing the narrative to succumb to the same tendencies. A Man Called Ove will be moving on. WHEW! That was a long post and took me just about forever to write. But...we're through the hardest round in terms of volume. We now have sixteen books remaining in the running for my 2017 Book of the Year. Did your favorites make the cut? Inspired to add any new reads to your TBR? Think you know who will take the ultimate prize? Next up...the Elite Eight! This post originally appeared on Erratic Project Junkie and is copyrighted by Elle. Find EPJ on Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest | Goodreads

#Books #BOTY Bracket Challenge #BOTY2017

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norihisahyuga-archived · 7 years

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The Waiting Game

Numai Mitsuru/Tsukioka Sho Battle Royale 2000~ words. Sfw.

Mitsuru wants to wait to find out who his soulmate is. Sho has long since decided that Mitsuru is well worth the wait. Fate seems to intervene to bring them back together again. Part of that hella long soulmate AU that absolutely no one asked for. Tagging @hironoshimizu and @satominoda

Mitsuru Numai had always firmly believed in what his parents always taught him growing up, when the world was still colorless except for the many shades of grey. His parents had been lucky enough to find one another when they were in college, and though his mother tried to relate to him what color looked like, how it wove its own marvellous designs beyond his comprehension, he was never really able to get it. But he believed his parents when they told him that it would be best to focus on getting through school and getting to college, figuring out who he was and what he wanted from the world, before he ever thought about looking for a soulmate.

Even when Mitsuko Souma’s hard edges are worn away and Takako Chigusa comes out of her shell, even when the quintet finds each other piece by piece, even when Shinji Mimura comes to school with an affectionate arm slung around Yutaka Seto’s shoulders… Mitsuru sees it, and he understands it, and he’s happy to see other people happy. He’s particularly thrilled for Mitsuko because he knows better than anyone that Mitsuko would have never let anyone in, not in a thousand years, but she has now, and she seems happier, and he’s glad for it.

That doesn’t really change his idea to wait until he’s out of high school, until he’s at least in college and has some of the puzzle that comprises himself figured out, has a few of the pieces cemented in place before he tries to look for his missing half. And with the Numai Family surrounding him at all times, keeping anyone away who tries to get close on request, he’s not overly worried.

The sole exception is Izumi Kanai, who slings an arm around his neck when she joins up with them in the morning, half-hanging off of him and chattering about her evening. The world doesn’t change color because of her, so Mitsuru is fine with this contact, and this alone.

Sho Tsukioka is an anomaly even as far as Shiroiwa Class 3-B goes; he’s not found his other half but he’s twice as flamboyant as the boys who have found their soulmates in another boy. But then, he’s always been this way. As soon as he realized he preferred boys to anyone else, he had been loud and proud of himself from the very beginning. It helped that his father had always been there for him, and there were plenty of regulars at his bar who were more than willing to lend a sympathetic ear to the confused teenager trying to figure himself out until he finally had all of the labels and definitions smoothed out in his mind.

The Numai Family is stretched out on the bleachers, accompanying Izumi to viewing track practice for lack of anything else to do. Sho wants to know why she’s so interested in the track team, figures it must be one of the members of it but never bothers to inquire further.

Sandwiched between Mitsuru and Ryuhei, cigarette in hand, he’s comfortable enough.

“So I’m gonna take a wild guess here,” Ryuhei finally says. “We can’t fuck with Kiriyama now.”

Mitsuru snorts in his direction. “Unless you wanna get on Kawada’s bad side? No.”

“I think I’m missing something here,” Sho says, taking a slow drag off of his cigarette and exhaling. “Why exactly aren’t we messing with Kiriyama now? I know Souma wanted us to take it easy on him, but what does Kawada have to do with anything?”

Ryuhei rolls his eyes at him. “You know, you’ve been slow on the upkeep when it comes to being in everyone’s business lately. Kiriyama got picked up by the lovey dovey quartet last week.”

Mitsuru elbows him in the side lightly. “What’s been going on with you, Zuki?”

Instead of answering, Sho just flicks ash off of the end of his cigarette and leans against the bleacher behind him. It’s enough of a signal for Mitsuru to drop the question, which he’s relieved about because he doesn’t really want to answer him. He’d promised himself a long time ago he’d never tell one of his friends if he happened to get a crush on one of them.

Especially Mitsuru. He’d been following Mitsuru’s lead for the last few years and, admittedly, the almost-pretty boy with the charismatic smile and the ability to keep their patchwork group together with few issues along the way had been the one to make him question himself.

But knowing how Mitsuru feels about the soul mate business, he knew telling him he liked him was only going to slip a wedge between them, and that was the last thing he wanted.

So, Sho did the right thing, and he kept his mouth shut.

When they graduate high school, the Numai Family splits up for the most part, which Mitsuru is not surprised by; they’d grown into different people with different futures laid out for them. The only person who ended up remaining with him was Sho. They had ended up being accepted to the same university, though Mitsuru had no way of knowing this until he and his mother were in the process of moving him into his dorm room. The sound of an all-too-familiar voice had him lifting his head, eyes widening a touch, to where the door was still wide open.

Less than a minute later, Sho Tsukioka and his father walked into the room.

“Mitsuru,” Sho says, surprised, pursing his lips. “Well, isn’t this quite the surprise?”

“Hello, Akira, dear,” Mitsuru’s mother says without missing a beat, setting out a package of hangers on top of Mitsuru’s bed. “Mr. Tsukioka, it’s nice to see you as well. It’ll be nice for our boys to have each other here, won’t it? Especially on a campus this large.”

In answer, Sho’s father laughs and grins. “Absolutely. They were close all throughout school.”

“Precisely. It’s always good to have a friend nearby, isn’t it, Mitsuru?” He almost doesn’t notice when his mother lays his hand on his shoulder, too shocked to see Sho standing here.

He gives himself a shake and nods, turning to smile at her. “Yeah, it really is.”

“I’ll just leave you to get unpacked now.” She pulls him into a bone-crushing hug. “Call, okay?”

Mitsuru promises his mother he’ll call and does his best to be non-intrusive while Sho and his father say their goodbyes. He’s more shocked than he has the words to express it with.

The awkwardness slips away as time passes and they start to talk to each other again. Without the buffer of the rest of the Numai Family around, Sho wasn’t sure how things would work out between the two of them. And secretly, he can’t help but think this has to be some kind of sign of things to come. After all, Mitsuru had been determined to wait, and Sho had assumed he would finish out high school, never getting to tell Mitsuru how he felt about him, and he would eventually move on from the crush and find whoever was out there for him in due time. He’d finally been able to let go of the scant hope that something might happen between them, telling himself he needed to be ready for university and all of the opportunities to come… And yet, here Mitsuru is.

“I’m actually really relieved to have a familiar face here,” Mitsuru tells him on their third night.

Sho looks up from the complete destruction of his bed, overrun with textbooks and notebooks as he tries to figure out some system of organization. Now that he has serious schooling to think about, he needs to find a way to structure things so he can actually get something done. Dropping out of college is not on his list of things to do in the near future, after all.

“I am, too,” he confesses, rolling his shoulders to work the stiffness out of them. “I was mildly concerned my roommate might not be a fan of gay guys in the first place, y’know.”

Mitsuru grins at him and nods, tapping his pen against the notebook sitting on his lap. “No, no, I get it. I was worried my roommate might say something about me being bi, too.”

“Bi?” Sho cocks his head to make sure he heard correctly, then hums when Mitsuru nods at him. “I knew my gaydar is never wrong. I thought I felt something pinging off of you.”

Mitsuru laughs and goes back to making notes on something he’s reading while Sho resists the urge to have a breakdown right here and now. Instead, he takes a slow breath and goes back to his books, telling himself he needs to concentrate on something safe now… And remember that Mitsuru never asked him, thank you very much, so he’s not going to do anything.

Of course he wants to. Even if it’s just something as simple as threading their fingers together to see if the world around them changes at all… But he won’t, because he knows Mitsuru wants to wait, and he has every intention of giving him as much time as he needs.

Still, that doesn’t stop him from silently hoping just the same.

“He was a jerk,” Sho says. They’re shoulder to shoulder on the floor of their room, backs against Mitsuru’s bed, watching a movie together. “I really fucking hated him. Super pretentious.”

Mitsuru throws back his head and can’t help but laugh at that. He’d noticed the way Sho wrinkled his nose every time his ex flexed his vocabulary skills where Sho could hear.

“I thought you were going to punch him, you know,” Mitsuru admits. “I could see you just itching to reach over and sock him a few times. I don’t think I would have stopped you.”

“Well now you tell me.” Sho throws his hands up in the air. “When I can’t do anything about it!”

This only makes Mitsuru laugh harder, and he presses his face into Sho’s shoulder in an effort to muffle himself, his own shoulders shaking with the force of it. Funny how he had expected breaking up with his first boyfriend to be a more emotional experience, at least a more painful one if nothing else, but Sho being here for him through it all has smoothed the pathway far more than he expected. Sho’s presence, in general, has made everything better.

Not for the first time, but certainly an urge stronger than the ones he has felt before, Mitsuru wants to reach out and take Sho’s hand in his. Just to see, because he wants to know, because he thinks he already knows, and he thinks he should have known for years, but at least he finally got there on his own. But that doesn’t really seem a grand enough gesture for this.

Sho looks down at him, eyebrow raised. “Is my shoulder that comfortable, then?”

“You’re very comfortable,” Mitsuru tells him, and he could be imagining things, but he doesn’t think he’s mistaking the way Sho’s eyes widen down at him. “Can I ask you a question?”

The way Sho cocks his head is adorable, but he nods nevertheless. “You know you can ask me anything you want to, Mitsu, I really don’t care to answer your questions.”

“I told you a long time ago that I wanted to wait to see if someone was my soulmate. I wanted to be sure of what I wanted first, y’know?” Mitsuru swallows hard around the words, but the way Sho’s eyes widen at him tells him he’s following perfectly well. “How about a kiss to find out?”

The strangled little sound that Sho makes at him has him convinced he definitely went too far in asking this, but then Sho grabs him by the front of his shirt and pulls him closer, and presses a fierce kiss to his lips that warms Mitsuru from the inside out. It takes him a minute to breathe, to actually move his lips, and by then Sho’s grip on him has softened, a hand around the back of his neck and another resting at his waist. He’s intent, passionate even, and Mitsuru smiles into a little. Even if the world doesn’t change for either of them, he’s not sure he needs it to.

He’s pleasantly surprised at Sho’s eyes when the kiss breaks, the particularly warm shade of brown that his eyes are and the pink flush in his cheeks from the force of their kiss.

#battle royale #mitsuru numai #sho tsukioka #*f: mine #*f: br #*f: sho #*f: mitsuru #*f: soulmate au

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gloverdominic92 · 4 years

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itstomwilliams032-blog · 4 years

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Guide to choose right juicer

With so many choices out there, choosing your first juicer can be somewhat of a confusing, if not outright difficult, decision. What juice yield? Do I need an ejection chute and pulp collector for my centrifugal juicer? Is this a masticating juicer, a triturating juicer, or a centrifugal juicer? What features should I look for? With this guide, you will be able to answer these questions, and we will recommend some great juicers at all budget levels.

New to Juicing? Read Our Ultimate Guide

The first thing anyone should do when they decide to start juicing is to get grounded in the basics. Thankfully, we have a comprehensive and easy to read guide (here) that will give you all the information you need to know.

Identifying Your Needs

Which juicer to get usually depends on what your needs are from the juicer. If you want fast juicing, easy cleanup and have a restricted budget, a centrifugal juicer might be the best choice. If you are looking to juice a lot at once, and drink that juice over a few days, a masticating single auger/single gear juicer may be right for your kitchen. how to make apple juice without a juicer https://www.juicingpoint.com/easy-home-made-apple-juice-recipe-without-a-juicer

We recommend identifying your needs with these following five points in mind:

Juicing speed: How fast you can get your juice from produce Juice yield: How much juice you get from the amount of produce used Ease of cleanup/maintenance: Dishwasher safe plastics, ease of disassembly, et al Budget: Realistically plan for how much you are willing to spend on a juicer, and focus your reviews and research at that budget and below Warranty: The realistic service life of your juicer. Buying cheap with a short warranty may mean replacing your juicer every few years vs a long warranty and quality construction for slightly more

Budget

One item from the five points above that many people are not sure how to organize is the listing of budget levels. What kind of budget is realistically entry level? When does it switch to mid-range, or to high-end? Here at JuicingforHealth, we separate the budget tiers as such:

Entry-level: Any juicer that is under $300. There are some exceptions where a midrange quality juicer may be sold in this range, but it is exceptionally rare Mid-range: Juicers of any type that is between $300 to $500 High-end: Juicers that are between $500 to $1000 Super high-end: Any juicer over $1000

Our Picks at Each Price

Knowing that there are many models, types, brands, etc all over the price ranges listed above, we have done extensive testing and research to find the best juicers of each type you can buy at each budget level! Centrifugal: Cuisinart CJE-1000 Juice Extractor 3 day juice cleanse recipes https://www.juicingpoint.com/3-day-juice-cleanse-recipes-at-home

A juicer that costs under $150, has 5 speeds for different types of produce, made of durable and long-lasting steel and plastic materials, large pulp container and included juice pitcher, and has an above-average warranty for this price point. One of the best centrifugal juicers currently on the market. Masticating: Omega VRT330 Dual-Stage Vertical Single-Auger Juicer

A compact, powerful juicer that has a dual-stage single auger that first crushes your produce for a first stage juicing, then presses them against a reinforced filter to extract maximum juice. It comes with an auto-cleaning system, as well as is easy to disassemble for manual cleaning. Under $200, and comes with a full 10-year warranty.

When you make a purchase via one of our affiliate links, we may earn a small commission. We buy all the ingredients and juicers for our reviews and recipe posts and rely on this revenue to maintain our website. Thank you for supporting us What Juice is Good for Gout https://www.juicingpoint.com/what-juice-is-good-for-gout-answered-plus-how-to-have-it

A powerful 1200 Watt juicer with multiple speeds, a full 3.5-inch feeder chute, and through and through stainless steel construction. Can extract up to 70 oz of juice before needing to be cleaned/emptied. Build with noise reduction in mind as well as faster juicing by not needing to cut up smaller fruits and vegetables. Masticating: Omega VSJ843QS Vertical Slow Masticating Juicer

The bigger brother of the VRT330 juicer that we recommended in our Entry Level budget, this Omega juicer nearly doubles the torque available to crush and juice your produce, as well as comes with an automatic pulp extractor.

By juicing at 43 RPM, ensures juice is cold upon extraction, maximizing juice quality. Nearly unbelievable 15-year full coverage warranty.

When you make a purchase via one of our affiliate links, we may earn a small commission. We buy all the ingredients and juicers for our reviews and recipe posts and rely on this revenue to maintain our website. Thank you for supporting us What Is The Best Juice For Glowing Skin https://www.juicingpoint.com/what-is-the-best-juice-for-glowing-skin-recipe-tips-for-best-result

You may notice that there are three Omega juicers in the under-$500 budget range. This is simply because for the price range and features included with Omega juicers, there are very few that can compete.

Twin stainless steel augers, automatic pulp extraction, high-quality materials in construction, and the industry best 15-year full coverage warranty again make Omega an easy recommendation.

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annaxkeating · 5 years

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Increase Your Landing Page Speed (By Stealing Our Homework)

If you’ve read Unbounce’s 2019 Page Speed Report (and you really should), then you already know why speed is so important this year. Slow-loading landing pages have always been an obstacle to higher conversions, and now Google is punishing poor mobile load times in its search rankings. To be successful in 2019, we—marketers—need to be thinking fast. But are we?

To find out, we polled almost 400 marketers on their attitudes around page speed and asked what (if anything) they were doing to get faster.

Just 56% of marketers are happy with their mobile load times, according to the 2019 Page Speed Report.

Almost three of every four respondents said they had taken steps to improve their page speeds over the last year, and that’s pretty good. Alarmingly, though, only half of marketers we surveyed are satisfied with their load times on mobile.

So most marketers are trying to get faster, but many aren’t where they want to be. Which begs the question: what are people doing to speed up their landing page load times?

Computer, enhance!

Only 39% of marketers have bothered to find out how fast their pages are actually loading. Not great.

Here, we start to see why marketers are somewhat pessimistic about their page speed progress. Just over half have optimized their landing page images—ostensibly one of the simplest ways to speed up your load times—and even fewer have done any of the real technical-sounding things they need to get faster. (I mean, fair, they sound pretty boring to us, too.)

Here’s a doozy, though: just one in three marketers have run a website speed test to find out whether their load times are impacting their conversions. That’s the easiest one!

And hey, we get it. Marketers are being asked to do more than ever before, often with fewer resources. If you’re a small team (or a single person, the smallest of the teams), you might feel you don’t have the time or expertise to meaningfully improve your page speed.

But I’ve gone and done the hard work for you—me, a film school graduate who, until recently, believed that his Apple computer was impervious to viruses. (Hoo boy, it is not.) I’ve spent hours talking to Unbounce developers, reading how-to guides, and generally just bombarding my brain with the most dull, technical page speed information I could get ahold of. (Apologies to said developers.) And if I can get my head around it, there’s no excuse for the rest of you.

Below, I’ve simplified some of the most effective ways to increase your landing page loading times in a guide. For each fix, I’ve indicated the technical difficulty and the estimated time it’ll take, so you know exactly what you’re getting yourself in to. Use the table of contents below to jump to what’s relevant to you, or go ahead and do it all in order.

Jump to a Landing Page Speed Fix

How to Check Your Landing Page Speed

Run a Google Speed Test (5 Minutes)

Try the Unbounce Landing Page Analyzer (5 Minutes)

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Easy Fixes

Reduce Your Page Content (15 Minutes)

Optimize Your Images (30 Minutes)

Host Your Videos Elsewhere (30 Minutes)

Audit Your Hosting Solution (30 Minutes)

Implement a CDN (30 Minutes)

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Intermediate Fixes

Minify HTML, JS, and CSS (15 Minutes)

Enable Browser Caching (15 Minutes)

Set Up GZIP Compression (15 Minutes)

Kill Needless Scripts and Plugins (30 Minutes)

Convert Images to Sprites (30 Minutes)

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Hard Fixes

Remove Render-Blocking JS and CSS (45 Minutes)

Start Hand-Coding with AMP

Ready to boost your page speed?

Get Unbounce's landing page speed checklist and follow our step-by-step guide to improve your load times in a single afternoon.

var eventMethod=window.addEventListener?"addEventListener":"attachEvent",eventer=window[eventMethod],messageEvent="attachEvent"==eventMethod?"onmessage":"message",estop=!1;eventer(messageEvent,function(e){if("inline"==e.data[2])e.data[1]=e.data[1]+11,document.getElementById(e.data[0]).style.height=e.data[1]+"px";else{if(isNaN(e.data)&&"stop"!==e.data)return;if("stop"==e.data)return estop=!0,!1;estop||(e.data=e.data+11,document.getElementById("sizetracker").style.height=e.data+"px")}},!1);

Final note: If you’ve built your page with Unbounce, you can skip a lot of this stuff—we make many speed fixes on the back-end automatically. In this post, look for the ‘Building Pages in Unbounce?‘ callout boxes to see if a given fix is something you need to implement.

Look for these callout boxes throughout this post to get Unbounce-specific tips and learn how we automatically optimize your landing pages to make them load super fast.

How to Check Your Landing Page Speed

First things first.

Before you throw on your hard hat and start hitting things with a hammer (both figuratively and literally), it’s important to have some idea of what’s working—and what’s not—on your landing page. That means running a speed audit.

It’s important to point out that, regardless of which speed test you use, you don’t want to get too hung up on your score. Achieving a perfect score is not always technically possible (and it might not even be desirable). Instead, use your results as a general guideline to improve page speed and implement the fixes that make sense for you.

Okay—let’s test them pages.

Run a Google Speed Test

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 5 Minutes

There are a bunch of great tools for testing your page speed, but why not start with the big dog itself? Google’s PageSpeed Insights is an awesome way to do a quick performance check-up with at-a-glance recommendations. (Ryan Engley, Unbounce’s VP of Product Marketing, explains how to interpret and act on your PageSpeed Insights results in this must-read blog post.) Then there’s Lighthouse, a newer tool from Google that provides a comprehensive analysis of your how your page presents to end users.

You’ll also want to run your page through Google’s Test My Site tool, which will check your speed from a mobile perspective.

Clicking on individual results in PageSpeed Insights will reveal your problematic page elements.

Running a Google speed test should only take a couple of minutes, and the results will help you identify some of the top opportunities to boost your landing page load times.

Try the Unbounce Landing Page Analyzer

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 5 Minutes

Running a speed test with Google should be your top priority, but PageSpeed Insights doesn’t give results tailored to landing pages. For that, you’ll want to run your page through the Unbounce Landing Page Analyzer, which not only provides feedback on page performance but includes a bunch of advice on creating more effective campaigns and kicking your conversions into overdrive.

Unbounce’s Landing Page Analyzer provides feedback on page speed, but also actionable advice on things like SEO, message match, and mobile-friendliness.

Building Pages in Unbounce? Then you’ll definitely want to give our Landing Page Analyzer a shot. Get best-practice recommendations for conversion optimization and see how your landing pages stack up against others in your industry.

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Easy Fixes

With your results from both Google and Unbounce, you’ll be well-equipped to move onto the actual work of making your page perform better. It’s time to pick up that hammer.

These fixes should be simple enough for anyone to tackle, regardless of their technical expertise.

Reduce Your Page Content

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 15 Minutes

We’ve marked this as an easy opportunity to increase your page speed, but it probably won’t feel like that when you start thinking about which elements on your page you can junk. Marketers love big hero shots, beautiful supporting imagery, and fun, animated explainer videos. But how much of that content is actually helping you drive conversions?

Visual content accounts for a huge portion of the size of an average web page—images account for over 20% of web page weight, as pointed out by Kinsta—and each element creates an HTTP request. That’s when your visitor’s browser pings your web server to request the files that make up the elements of your page. Too many calls can be a serious drag on your load time, so one of the simplest ways to improve your page speed is cutting down the number of elements you include.

Look at each piece of content on your page critically, then ask yourself: “Does this spark joy?” “Does this increase conversions?” If you don’t think there are pieces you can toss, try running an A/B test with a slimmed-down version of the page. The results might surprise you.

Bottom line: stick to the fundamentals of good landing page design and try to keep the number of elements (and thus HTTP requests) to a minimum.

Building Pages in Unbounce? We recommend that you keep things pretty lean, but we’d never remove content from your landing page. (Must resist… desire… to do best practices…) This is one optimization that you’ll have to tackle on your own.

Optimize Your Images

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

Once you’ve trimmed some elements from your page, you’ll want to optimize the content that made the cut. Poor image optimization is the most common reason for slow page loads, especially for mobile visitors. Fortunately, it’s also one of the easiest issues to fix.

These are some quick tips for shrinking your images and improving your page speed. The goal here should be getting images at least under 800kb, but the smaller we can make them, the better.

Resize your images

It’s easy to chuck a larger image onto your page and rely on your content management system (CMS) to compress it to the appropriate size, but it’ll still be loading at least some of those extra pixels on the back end, and your visitors are going to feel it in the load. When you add an image, make sure it’s the same dimensions that your page will be rendering it.*

*This doesn’t necessarily apply to Unbounce’s retina image support—read up on that here.

Choose the right file type

Most people don’t think too much about the format of the image they’re uploading, but it can have a dramatic effect on page performance. The file types you’re probably most familiar with are JPEG and PNG—and, yes, there are differences.

JPEG is a ‘lossy’ format, which means it’ll lose some data during compression. That typically gives you a smaller file, but it can come at the expense of visual fidelity. Generally, images with significant color variation (say, photographs) perform better as JPEGs, and any dip in quality can usually go undetected.

PNG is ‘lossless,’ so the image’s appearance won’t change when resized, but it tends to make for larger files if there’s significant color variation. PNG is ideal for simple images with defined shapes, like those with text. Saving PNGs in 8-bit (rather than 24-bit, which has a broader color palette) can help shave off some extra bites.

Here are some optimization tips for JPEG and PNG (and GIF, that villain) from Google itself.

Use compression tools

Before your weigh-in, it’s good to run images through a final round of compression. There are plenty of image compression tools on WordPress, as well as some free, standalone ones like TinyPNG. These shrinky gizmos offer a simple way to cut down your image sizes without braving the cursed labyrinth that is Adobe’s export settings. (Hey, I’m a words guy.)

Your takeaways here are:

Ensure your image dimensions match how they’ll actually be displayed

Use JPEG when a slight dip in visual fidelity isn’t the end of the world (like photography), but PNG when it is (images with text and sharp lines)

Compress images to keep the file size as tiny as possible

If you want to take a deeper dive into image optimization, we recommend that you check out this post from Search Engine Land, which goes into detail on making images smaller while keeping them beautiful.

Building Pages in Unbounce? We’ve got you covered. Unbounce’s Auto Image Optimizer shrinks your images as soon as they’re uploaded so you can focus on making the best landing page possible.

Host Your Videos Elsewhere

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

Why carry something yourself when you can make someone else carry it for you? That’s my motto for landing pages and life, and it’s why I’m no longer welcome on Unbounce’s company hiking trips.

Hosting videos on your own domain can be great for SEO purposes, but that’s not usually our goal with landing pages. We want everything to load in a flash and give our visitors the best chance to convert. Depending on your hosting solution, though, your videos might be slowing down your page speed, suffering from playback issues, and taking up an uncomfortable amount of server space.

Done properly, transferring videos to a third-party platform can shed some extra load time and help your pages render faster. Consider moving video content to Wistia, YouTube, or Vimeo, then using a light embed technique so that your videos only load heavier playback elements when your visitors actually click on them.

Building Pages in Unbounce? As a disclaimer: Using light embed codes with Unbounce (or any custom code, for that matter) will require some technical knowledge to implement and could, in rare cases, cause issues. Check out this Unbounce community post for more information.

Audit Your Hosting Solution

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

Loading speed isn’t just determined by what’s on your landing page. Your web host also has a major influence in how quickly your page rolls out to potential customers.

There are three common models for web hosting:

Shared hosting Generally the most affordable solution, shared hosting is when your website is hosted alongside other sites on a single web server. Everyone draws from common resources (like storage space and processing power), which means—you guessed it—you need to share.

Virtual private server (VPS) hosting This is essentially a mix of both shared and dedicated hosting. With VPS, your website still shares server space with others, but you’ll have dedicated resources that no one else can dip into. The result is more power and flexibility, but it tends to come with a higher price tag.

Dedicated hosting For those who’ve had a traumatic roommate experience (who hasn’t?), dedicated hosting means your website has the server all to itself. More resources, no sharing. That’s great if you’re heavy on digital content and get a ton of traffic, but dedicated hosting is also the most expensive option and requires the technical know-how to set up and maintain your server.

Low-volume websites can generally get by with the cost-effective shared solution, but once your traffic starts to rise, you might not be getting enough juice from your web host to deliver content quickly—and that’s when load times start to suffer. (Give this post from Search Engine Journal a read for a more comprehensive explanation.)

It’s also important to note that the whereabouts of your web server can have a significant impact on your page speed. If you’re not using a content delivery network (CDN; more on this below), you’ll want to make sure that traffic from foreign countries isn’t encountering too much latency.

Think your hosting solution might be impacting your page speed? Run your site through a server speed test like this one from Bitcatcha, and use WebPageTest or Pingdom to see how your quickly your landing page loads in other countries. Depending on the results, you might decide it’s time to upgrade your hosting plan (or change web hosts altogether).

Building Pages in Unbounce? You don’t have to worry about this one—Unbounce’s global hosting solution boasts 99.95% uptime and ensures that your landing pages always have the necessary resources to load super fast.

Implement a CDN

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

When your landing page gets a visitor, their web browser pings your server to get the content necessary to build out the page. Simple, right? Everyone downloads your website information from the same place, regardless of their location around the world. Well, that’s usually fine if the visitor is in or close to the country that your web server is located, but when they’re halfway around the globe, chances are they’re going to encounter some latency.

To avoid that, you should look into deploying a CDN, which caches your website across a network of data centers and proxy servers all over the planet. Say your own server is in the United States and someone from Lithuania is trying to visit your landing page. Instead of downloading your content from across the Atlantic, that visitor can pull a cached version from a server nearby.

Setting your website up with a CDN is pretty straightforward and—depending on your traffic—generally affordable. Here’s a list of some popular CDN providers from Mashable.

Building Pages in Unbounce? We’ve got five global data centers supporting the Unbounce CDN, which means your landing pages will load in a flash regardless of where they’re being accessed from.

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Intermediate Fixes

These next speed fixes are a little trickier, but they should be manageable for marketers with a little technical know-how. Still, a mistake here could mean actual damage to your landing page.

Our recommendation? Do some research, make a backup, and—if you can—consult briefly with a developer on your team. It never hurts to have an experienced colleague to turn to if you get in over your head.

Building Pages in Unbounce? We talk a lot about WordPress through this next section. If you’re using our plugin to publish Unbounce landing pages to a WordPress domain, some of these recommended speed fixes can actually cause technical issues. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us for clarification if you’re ever unsure.

Minify HTML, CSS, and JS

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 15 Minutes

All those lines of HTML, CSS, and JS code that make up your landing page? They’re packed with spaces, line breaks, and other bits of formatting that make it more legible and easier for us to interpret, but each makes your load time just an eensy bit slower—and the web browsers your visitors are using to render your page don’t particularly need them.

With minification, the goal is to cut out all of that extra junk and condense your code so that browsers can read it faster. Here’s an example snippet of Javascript code from Wikipedia:

var array = []; for (var i = 0; i < 20; i++) { array[i] = i; }

After minifying, that code would look something like this:

for(var a=[i=0];++i<20;a[i]=i);

There are plenty of free online tools that will do this for your landing page, like Minify Code, as well as a bunch of WordPress plugins. Be sure to check out this post from Elegant Themes, which is an awesome resource that dives into the many options at your disposal.

Building Pages in Unbounce? Do we minify? We practically invented minifying. (Editor’s note: We did not.) Unbounce compresses all of your code automatically, making your landing page as slim as can be. No coding your pages from scratch and no minifying that code in the background? We’re making this too easy for you.

Enable Browser Caching

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 15 Minutes

The goal with any landing page should be getting prospects to convert the first time they visit, but the reality is that not everyone will. Sometimes, visitors will need some time to think about it: they’ll bounce, do more research, check out some competitors, then come back to your original offer. Browser caching ensures that when they return, your page will load even faster—and that’ll make them more likely to convert.

Not sure if you’ve already got caching enabled? Before you start, run a quick caching check using a tool like this one from GiftOfSpeed.

If your site is built on WordPress, enabling caching is as easy as adding a plugin.* (WordPress is almost too easy, huh?) Check out this list of caching plugins, most of which include quick instructions for getting set up.

*If you’re publishing Unbounce pages to a WordPress domain, these caching recommendations could create big problems. Check with us first.

For those not on WordPress, enabling browser caching on your own is pretty simple if you’re willing to get your hands dirty. For example, on Apache web servers, it comes down to inserting a little bit of code into the .htaccess file on your web host or server: <IfModule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/jpg “access 1 year” ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access 1 year” ExpiresByType image/gif “access 1 year” ExpiresByType image/png “access 1 year” ExpiresByType text/css “access 1 month” ExpiresByType text/html “access 1 month” ExpiresByType application/pdf “access 1 month” ExpiresByType text/x-javascript “access 1 month” ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash “access 1 month” ExpiresByType image/x-icon “access 1 year” ExpiresDefault “access 1 month” </IfModule>

This article from Varvy provides a great how-to, as does this one from WinningWP (which discusses enabling browser caching from a WordPress perspective but is applicable more broadly).

If all of this makes you nervous, there’s likely a simpler method for you to set up browser caching. Most web hosts will enable caching for you if you ask. Depending on your hosting solution, it might be as easy as making a phone call. (Although, now that I think about it, that might be more daunting for some of us.)

Building Pages in Unbounce? Seven-day browser caching is enabled on all Unbounce-built landing pages, so this is a speed fix you can comfortably skip. Maybe use this free time to treat yourself to some self-care? You’ve earned it.

Set Up GZIP Compression

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 15 Minutes

When a visitor reaches your landing page, their browser pings your web server to request the files that make up the page and the server transmits them back. Naturally, that process moves faster if the information being sent is compressed to be as small as possible. Here’s where GZIP compression comes in.

(You’ll want to check to see if GZIP compression is already enabled before you get started.)

As with browser caching, the difficulty of setting up GZIP compression is going to be determined by how your website was built. If you use WordPress, you’re in luck: many WordPress plugins will enable GZIP compression for you almost automatically. If you don’t use WordPress, well, we’re headed back into your server.

This article from GTmetrix provides a quick overview of the importance of GZIP compression and how to enable it. With Apache web servers, you’ll need to add this chunk of code to your .htaccess file. <IfModule mod_deflate.c> # Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml

# Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers) BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html Header append Vary User-Agent </IfModule>

And again, if this is beyond your comfort zone, your web host will probably help you set up GZIP compression if you ask nicely.

Building Pages in Unbounce? You don’t have to ask us nicely, because we’ve already done it. All Unbounce landing pages are automatically compressed during data transfer. (But be nice to us anyway, alright?)

Kill Needless Scripts and Plugins

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

WordPress is wonderful in its simplicity. As we’ve seen throughout this article, page speed fixes that might require a front-end developer on a static website can often be achieved by simply installing a WordPress plugin. Want to enable browser caching? Boom, W3 Total Cache.* Need to minify your scripts? Pow, Autoptomize.* Developer, shmeveloper.

But because it’s so easy to add functionality through plugins, WordPress websites have a habit of collecting a lot of them—along with all the of the bits and bites of code that make them work. Those add up.

Take a look at the scripts and plugins you’ve added to your website and decide whether they’re essential to your visitor experience. If they’re not, junking them could help cut some extra seconds off of your load time. (And guess what? There’s a plugin for that.) You can also disable plugins one at a time, then retest your page speed to determine which ones are problematic.

*If you’re publishing Unbounce pages to a WordPress domain, these plugins in particular might start a fire.

Building Pages in Unbounce? This is more of WordPress fix, but it also applies to Unbounce customers that have inserted a bunch of custom scripts onto their landing pages. Learn how the Unbounce Script Manager helps you keep things tidy.

Convert Images to Sprites

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

If your landing page includes a series of similar-sized images (say, for a client logo bar), you can shorten your load time by combining them into an image sprite, then use CSS to display specific chunks of that sprite at a time. This post from WebFX provides a great step-by-step guide for creating CSS sprites.

Joining smaller images into a larger file might seem counterintuitive, but again, the idea here is to reduce the number of HTTP requests on your page and ultimately make it faster. Each individual image requires its own call—combining images into a single CSS sprite means your page only needs to make one.

Building Pages in Unbounce? We don’t build CSS sprites for you, but you can certainly use them on your Unbounce-built landing pages. Check out our documentation on custom JS and CSS with Unbounce.

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Hard Fixes

We’re into the scary stuff now.

These are fixes you should absolutely not attempt unless you know what you’re doing or you’ve consulted extensively with a front-end developer. (We even had one of the Unbounce devs fact-check this article, and we’ve never felt smaller.) Proceed with caution.

Remove Render-Blocking JS and CSS

Difficulty: Hard / Estimated Time: 45 Minutes

Those CSS and JS scripts that make your landing page beautiful and enable cool, dynamic functionality? They could be one of the major reasons that your page is loading so slowly. (Bad news for my flashing, neon visitor counter.)

When a web browser runs into CSS or JS in the head of your document, it’ll wait to download and process that content before continuing to render your page’s HTML. That might sound like a good thing from a user experience perspective—after all, we want people to see our landing page as it was intended—but it actually means that visitors can be left waiting on a blank screen while everything loads in the background.

To avoid this, we need to implement techniques for preventing render-blocking CSS and JS on our landing page. (Refer back to your Google PageSpeed Insights results to check if any scripts are slowing down your page load.)

Reduce render-blocking CSS

There are a couple of ways that we can neutralize render-blocking CSS. One option is to defer all CSS until after the HTML has loaded. That’ll certainly improve page speed, but it will also present non-styled content when the visitor first reaches our page. Not ideal.

The other, more preferable option is to defer most style rules until the HTML has been rendered, but inline the CSS necessary to correctly display content above the fold within the HTML. That way, visitors will see the properly-styled content as soon as they hit the page while the rest will load out of view. Pretty sneaky. This is a great tutorial using a real-life example from codeburst.io.

Another page speed opportunity for you here is combining your CSS files. By moving your style rules from several files to just one (or maybe two, tops), you can reduce the number of times that visitors need to ping your web server and improve your landing page load time. Here’s a good resource from GiftOfSpeed on combining and compressing you CSS scripts.

Eliminate render-blocking JS

Like CSS, JS scripts can prevent your landing page from rendering as quickly as you might like. We can avoid that by deploying the defer and async attributes. The former tells the browser to wait until your HTML is rendered before it begins pulling in JS scripts, while the latter asks that JS be downloaded simultaneously without interrupting the HTML download.

An important note is that not all JS scripts are equal: some are critical to the rendering of your page and need to be addressed right out of the gate, so they’ll have to stay at the top. Dareboost does a good job of explaining how to distinguish between critical and non-critical JS, as well as how to implement deferred and asynchronous loading.

Building Pages in Unbounce? Unbounce optimizes for most Google PageSpeed Insights recommendations, including the removal of render-blocking elements. That means you can skip this one.

Start Hand-Coding with AMP

Difficulty: Very Hard / Estimated Time: ∞ Hours

Alright, “∞ hours” is an overstatement, but implementing AMP is no small task. Developed by Google, the AMP project is an entirely new framework with which to build your web pages. The goal? Dramatically improve page speed, especially for mobile users.

AMP is made up of three core components: AMP HTML, AMP JS, and AMP Cache. That means you’ll need to learn new markup, as well as understand the framework well enough to get your landing pages validated and make sure they actually work.

We won’t get into the nitty-gritty of building with AMP here, but the AMP website has a bunch of resources (including tutorials) to help you get started.

Building Pages in Unbounce? No hand-coding AMP pages for you—Unbounce makes it easy to drag and drop together AMP experiences. Choose one of our AMP-optimized templates, load your content, get validated, and start publishing lightning-fast landing pages right away.

Improving your landing page speed can sound intimidating, but even small tweaks will make a big difference for your load times. Tackle the easy stuff first, then move onto more challenging fixes as you get comfortable. And above all, keep testing: seeing your improved speed results after each undertaking will give you the confidence and motivation to move forward.

Or, you know, just build with Unbounce. We automatically handle most of the speed fixes listed (or at least makes them super easy), which saves a ton of time. That means you can focus on what matters: getting more conversions and improving ROI.

Want to get faster? Here’s some more awesome Unbounce content that speaks to the importance of page speed and provides actionable strategies for how to address it:

What page speed means for your conversion and bounce rates: 7 Page Speed Stats Every Marketer Should Know

Why AMP is so important (and how to start using it): Get Near-Instant Mobile Loads with AMP Landing Pages

How page speed became one of the biggest opportunities for marketers: 2019 Is the Year of Page Speed

from Digital https://unbounce.com/landing-pages/increase-landing-page-speed/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

#digital marketing

0 notes

samanthasmeyers · 5 years

Text

Increase Your Landing Page Speed (By Stealing Our Homework)

To find out, we polled almost 400 marketers on their attitudes around page speed and asked what (if anything) they were doing to get faster.

Just 56% of marketers are happy with their mobile load times, according to the 2019 Page Speed Report.

So most marketers are trying to get faster, but many aren’t where they want to be. Which begs the question: what are people doing to speed up their landing page load times?

Computer, enhance!

Only 39% of marketers have bothered to find out how fast their pages are actually loading. Not great.

Here’s a doozy, though: just one in three marketers have run a website speed test to find out whether their load times are impacting their conversions. That’s the easiest one!

Jump to a Landing Page Speed Fix

How to Check Your Landing Page Speed

Run a Google Speed Test (5 Minutes)

Try the Unbounce Landing Page Analyzer (5 Minutes)

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Easy Fixes

Reduce Your Page Content (15 Minutes)

Optimize Your Images (30 Minutes)

Host Your Videos Elsewhere (30 Minutes)

Audit Your Hosting Solution (30 Minutes)

Implement a CDN (30 Minutes)

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Intermediate Fixes

Minify HTML, JS, and CSS (15 Minutes)

Enable Browser Caching (15 Minutes)

Set Up GZIP Compression (15 Minutes)

Kill Needless Scripts and Plugins (30 Minutes)

Convert Images to Sprites (30 Minutes)

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Hard Fixes

Remove Render-Blocking JS and CSS (45 Minutes)

Start Hand-Coding with AMP

Look for these callout boxes throughout this post to get Unbounce-specific tips and learn how we automatically optimize your landing pages to make them load super fast.

How to Check Your Landing Page Speed

First things first.

Okay—let’s test them pages.

Run a Google Speed Test

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 5 Minutes

You’ll also want to run your page through Google’s Test My Site tool, which will check your speed from a mobile perspective.

Clicking on individual results in PageSpeed Insights will reveal your problematic page elements.

Running a Google speed test should only take a couple of minutes, and the results will help you identify some of the top opportunities to boost your landing page load times.

Try the Unbounce Landing Page Analyzer

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 5 Minutes

Unbounce’s Landing Page Analyzer provides feedback on page speed, but also actionable advice on things like SEO, message match, and mobile-friendliness.

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Easy Fixes

With your results from both Google and Unbounce, you’ll be well-equipped to move onto the actual work of making your page perform better. It’s time to pick up that hammer.

These fixes should be simple enough for anyone to tackle, regardless of their technical expertise.

Reduce Your Page Content

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 15 Minutes

Bottom line: stick to the fundamentals of good landing page design and try to keep the number of elements (and thus HTTP requests) to a minimum.

Optimize Your Images

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

These are some quick tips for shrinking your images and improving your page speed. The goal here should be getting images at least under 800kb, but the smaller we can make them, the better.

Resize your images

*This doesn’t necessarily apply to Unbounce’s retina image support—read up on that here.

Choose the right file type

Here are some optimization tips for JPEG and PNG (and GIF, that villain) from Google itself.

Use compression tools

Your takeaways here are:

Ensure your image dimensions match how they’ll actually be displayed

Use JPEG when a slight dip in visual fidelity isn’t the end of the world (like photography), but PNG when it is (images with text and sharp lines)

Compress images to keep the file size as tiny as possible

Building Pages in Unbounce? We’ve got you covered. Unbounce’s Auto Image Optimizer shrinks your images as soon as they’re uploaded so you can focus on making the best landing page possible.

Host Your Videos Elsewhere

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

Audit Your Hosting Solution

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

Loading speed isn’t just determined by what’s on your landing page. Your web host also has a major influence in how quickly your page rolls out to potential customers.

There are three common models for web hosting:

Implement a CDN

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

Setting your website up with a CDN is pretty straightforward and—depending on your traffic—generally affordable. Here’s a list of some popular CDN providers from Mashable.

Building Pages in Unbounce? We’ve got five global data centers supporting the Unbounce CDN, which means your landing pages will load in a flash regardless of where they’re being accessed from.

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Intermediate Fixes

These next speed fixes are a little trickier, but they should be manageable for marketers with a little technical know-how. Still, a mistake here could mean actual damage to your landing page.

Minify HTML, CSS, and JS

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 15 Minutes

With minification, the goal is to cut out all of that extra junk and condense your code so that browsers can read it faster. Here’s an example snippet of Javascript code from Wikipedia:

var array = []; for (var i = 0; i < 20; i++) { array[i] = i; }

After minifying, that code would look something like this:

for(var a=[i=0];++i<20;a[i]=i);

Enable Browser Caching

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 15 Minutes

Not sure if you’ve already got caching enabled? Before you start, run a quick caching check using a tool like this one from GiftOfSpeed.

*If you’re publishing Unbounce pages to a WordPress domain, these caching recommendations could create big problems. Check with us first.

This article from Varvy provides a great how-to, as does this one from WinningWP (which discusses enabling browser caching from a WordPress perspective but is applicable more broadly).

Set Up GZIP Compression

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 15 Minutes

(You’ll want to check to see if GZIP compression is already enabled before you get started.)

And again, if this is beyond your comfort zone, your web host will probably help you set up GZIP compression if you ask nicely.

Kill Needless Scripts and Plugins

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

*If you’re publishing Unbounce pages to a WordPress domain, these plugins in particular might start a fire.

Convert Images to Sprites

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

Building Pages in Unbounce? We don’t build CSS sprites for you, but you can certainly use them on your Unbounce-built landing pages. Check out our documentation on custom JS and CSS with Unbounce.

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Hard Fixes

We’re into the scary stuff now.

Remove Render-Blocking JS and CSS

Difficulty: Hard / Estimated Time: 45 Minutes

Reduce render-blocking CSS

Eliminate render-blocking JS

Building Pages in Unbounce? Unbounce optimizes for most Google PageSpeed Insights recommendations, including the removal of render-blocking elements. That means you can skip this one.

Start Hand-Coding with AMP

Difficulty: Very Hard / Estimated Time: ∞ Hours

We won’t get into the nitty-gritty of building with AMP here, but the AMP website has a bunch of resources (including tutorials) to help you get started.

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/landing-pages/increase-landing-page-speed/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

#Digital Marketing

0 notes

jjonassevilla · 5 years

Text

Increase Your Landing Page Speed (By Stealing Our Homework)

To find out, we polled almost 400 marketers on their attitudes around page speed and asked what (if anything) they were doing to get faster.

Just 56% of marketers are happy with their mobile load times, according to the 2019 Page Speed Report.

So most marketers are trying to get faster, but many aren’t where they want to be. Which begs the question: what are people doing to speed up their landing page load times?

Computer, enhance!

Only 39% of marketers have bothered to find out how fast their pages are actually loading. Not great.

Here’s a doozy, though: just one in three marketers have run a website speed test to find out whether their load times are impacting their conversions. That’s the easiest one!

Jump to a Landing Page Speed Fix

How to Check Your Landing Page Speed

Run a Google Speed Test (5 Minutes)

Try the Unbounce Landing Page Analyzer (5 Minutes)

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Easy Fixes

Reduce Your Page Content (15 Minutes)

Optimize Your Images (30 Minutes)

Host Your Videos Elsewhere (30 Minutes)

Audit Your Hosting Solution (30 Minutes)

Implement a CDN (30 Minutes)

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Intermediate Fixes

Minify HTML, JS, and CSS (15 Minutes)

Enable Browser Caching (15 Minutes)

Set Up GZIP Compression (15 Minutes)

Kill Needless Scripts and Plugins (30 Minutes)

Convert Images to Sprites (30 Minutes)

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Hard Fixes

Remove Render-Blocking JS and CSS (45 Minutes)

Start Hand-Coding with AMP

Look for these callout boxes throughout this post to get Unbounce-specific tips and learn how we automatically optimize your landing pages to make them load super fast.

How to Check Your Landing Page Speed

First things first.

Okay—let’s test them pages.

Run a Google Speed Test

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 5 Minutes

You’ll also want to run your page through Google’s Test My Site tool, which will check your speed from a mobile perspective.

Clicking on individual results in PageSpeed Insights will reveal your problematic page elements.

Running a Google speed test should only take a couple of minutes, and the results will help you identify some of the top opportunities to boost your landing page load times.

Try the Unbounce Landing Page Analyzer

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 5 Minutes

Unbounce’s Landing Page Analyzer provides feedback on page speed, but also actionable advice on things like SEO, message match, and mobile-friendliness.

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Easy Fixes

With your results from both Google and Unbounce, you’ll be well-equipped to move onto the actual work of making your page perform better. It’s time to pick up that hammer.

These fixes should be simple enough for anyone to tackle, regardless of their technical expertise.

Reduce Your Page Content

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 15 Minutes

Bottom line: stick to the fundamentals of good landing page design and try to keep the number of elements (and thus HTTP requests) to a minimum.

Optimize Your Images

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

These are some quick tips for shrinking your images and improving your page speed. The goal here should be getting images at least under 800kb, but the smaller we can make them, the better.

Resize your images

*This doesn’t necessarily apply to Unbounce’s retina image support—read up on that here.

Choose the right file type

Here are some optimization tips for JPEG and PNG (and GIF, that villain) from Google itself.

Use compression tools

Your takeaways here are:

Ensure your image dimensions match how they’ll actually be displayed

Use JPEG when a slight dip in visual fidelity isn’t the end of the world (like photography), but PNG when it is (images with text and sharp lines)

Compress images to keep the file size as tiny as possible

Building Pages in Unbounce? We’ve got you covered. Unbounce’s Auto Image Optimizer shrinks your images as soon as they’re uploaded so you can focus on making the best landing page possible.

Host Your Videos Elsewhere

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

Audit Your Hosting Solution

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

Loading speed isn’t just determined by what’s on your landing page. Your web host also has a major influence in how quickly your page rolls out to potential customers.

There are three common models for web hosting:

Implement a CDN

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

Setting your website up with a CDN is pretty straightforward and—depending on your traffic—generally affordable. Here’s a list of some popular CDN providers from Mashable.

Building Pages in Unbounce? We’ve got five global data centers supporting the Unbounce CDN, which means your landing pages will load in a flash regardless of where they’re being accessed from.

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Intermediate Fixes

These next speed fixes are a little trickier, but they should be manageable for marketers with a little technical know-how. Still, a mistake here could mean actual damage to your landing page.

Minify HTML, CSS, and JS

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 15 Minutes

With minification, the goal is to cut out all of that extra junk and condense your code so that browsers can read it faster. Here’s an example snippet of Javascript code from Wikipedia:

var array = []; for (var i = 0; i < 20; i++) { array[i] = i; }

After minifying, that code would look something like this:

for(var a=[i=0];++i<20;a[i]=i);

Enable Browser Caching

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 15 Minutes

Not sure if you’ve already got caching enabled? Before you start, run a quick caching check using a tool like this one from GiftOfSpeed.

*If you’re publishing Unbounce pages to a WordPress domain, these caching recommendations could create big problems. Check with us first.

This article from Varvy provides a great how-to, as does this one from WinningWP (which discusses enabling browser caching from a WordPress perspective but is applicable more broadly).

Set Up GZIP Compression

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 15 Minutes

(You’ll want to check to see if GZIP compression is already enabled before you get started.)

And again, if this is beyond your comfort zone, your web host will probably help you set up GZIP compression if you ask nicely.

Kill Needless Scripts and Plugins

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

*If you’re publishing Unbounce pages to a WordPress domain, these plugins in particular might start a fire.

Convert Images to Sprites

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

Building Pages in Unbounce? We don’t build CSS sprites for you, but you can certainly use them on your Unbounce-built landing pages. Check out our documentation on custom JS and CSS with Unbounce.

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Hard Fixes

We’re into the scary stuff now.

Remove Render-Blocking JS and CSS

Difficulty: Hard / Estimated Time: 45 Minutes

Reduce render-blocking CSS

Eliminate render-blocking JS

Building Pages in Unbounce? Unbounce optimizes for most Google PageSpeed Insights recommendations, including the removal of render-blocking elements. That means you can skip this one.

Start Hand-Coding with AMP

Difficulty: Very Hard / Estimated Time: ∞ Hours

We won’t get into the nitty-gritty of building with AMP here, but the AMP website has a bunch of resources (including tutorials) to help you get started.

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/landing-pages/increase-landing-page-speed/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

#SEO

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josephkchoi · 5 years

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Increase Your Landing Page Speed (By Stealing Our Homework)

To find out, we polled almost 400 marketers on their attitudes around page speed and asked what (if anything) they were doing to get faster.

Just 56% of marketers are happy with their mobile load times, according to the 2019 Page Speed Report.

So most marketers are trying to get faster, but many aren’t where they want to be. Which begs the question: what are people doing to speed up their landing page load times?

Computer, enhance!

Only 39% of marketers have bothered to find out how fast their pages are actually loading. Not great.

Here’s a doozy, though: just one in three marketers have run a website speed test to find out whether their load times are impacting their conversions. That’s the easiest one!

Jump to a Landing Page Speed Fix

How to Check Your Landing Page Speed

Run a Google Speed Test (5 Minutes)

Try the Unbounce Landing Page Analyzer (5 Minutes)

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Easy Fixes

Reduce Your Page Content (15 Minutes)

Optimize Your Images (30 Minutes)

Host Your Videos Elsewhere (30 Minutes)

Audit Your Hosting Solution (30 Minutes)

Implement a CDN (30 Minutes)

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Intermediate Fixes

Minify HTML, JS, and CSS (15 Minutes)

Enable Browser Caching (15 Minutes)

Set Up GZIP Compression (15 Minutes)

Kill Needless Scripts and Plugins (30 Minutes)

Convert Images to Sprites (30 Minutes)

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Hard Fixes

Remove Render-Blocking JS and CSS (45 Minutes)

Start Hand-Coding with AMP

Look for these callout boxes throughout this post to get Unbounce-specific tips and learn how we automatically optimize your landing pages to make them load super fast.

How to Check Your Landing Page Speed

First things first.

Okay—let’s test them pages.

Run a Google Speed Test

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 5 Minutes

You’ll also want to run your page through Google’s Test My Site tool, which will check your speed from a mobile perspective.

Clicking on individual results in PageSpeed Insights will reveal your problematic page elements.

Running a Google speed test should only take a couple of minutes, and the results will help you identify some of the top opportunities to boost your landing page load times.

Try the Unbounce Landing Page Analyzer

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 5 Minutes

Unbounce’s Landing Page Analyzer provides feedback on page speed, but also actionable advice on things like SEO, message match, and mobile-friendliness.

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Easy Fixes

With your results from both Google and Unbounce, you’ll be well-equipped to move onto the actual work of making your page perform better. It’s time to pick up that hammer.

These fixes should be simple enough for anyone to tackle, regardless of their technical expertise.

Reduce Your Page Content

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 15 Minutes

Bottom line: stick to the fundamentals of good landing page design and try to keep the number of elements (and thus HTTP requests) to a minimum.

Optimize Your Images

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

These are some quick tips for shrinking your images and improving your page speed. The goal here should be getting images at least under 800kb, but the smaller we can make them, the better.

Resize your images

*This doesn’t necessarily apply to Unbounce’s retina image support—read up on that here.

Choose the right file type

Here are some optimization tips for JPEG and PNG (and GIF, that villain) from Google itself.

Use compression tools

Your takeaways here are:

Ensure your image dimensions match how they’ll actually be displayed

Use JPEG when a slight dip in visual fidelity isn’t the end of the world (like photography), but PNG when it is (images with text and sharp lines)

Compress images to keep the file size as tiny as possible

Building Pages in Unbounce? We’ve got you covered. Unbounce’s Auto Image Optimizer shrinks your images as soon as they’re uploaded so you can focus on making the best landing page possible.

Host Your Videos Elsewhere

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

Audit Your Hosting Solution

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

Loading speed isn’t just determined by what’s on your landing page. Your web host also has a major influence in how quickly your page rolls out to potential customers.

There are three common models for web hosting:

Implement a CDN

Difficulty: Easy / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

Setting your website up with a CDN is pretty straightforward and—depending on your traffic—generally affordable. Here’s a list of some popular CDN providers from Mashable.

Building Pages in Unbounce? We’ve got five global data centers supporting the Unbounce CDN, which means your landing pages will load in a flash regardless of where they’re being accessed from.

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Intermediate Fixes

These next speed fixes are a little trickier, but they should be manageable for marketers with a little technical know-how. Still, a mistake here could mean actual damage to your landing page.

Minify HTML, CSS, and JS

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 15 Minutes

With minification, the goal is to cut out all of that extra junk and condense your code so that browsers can read it faster. Here’s an example snippet of Javascript code from Wikipedia:

var array = []; for (var i = 0; i < 20; i++) { array[i] = i; }

After minifying, that code would look something like this:

for(var a=[i=0];++i<20;a[i]=i);

Enable Browser Caching

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 15 Minutes

Not sure if you’ve already got caching enabled? Before you start, run a quick caching check using a tool like this one from GiftOfSpeed.

*If you’re publishing Unbounce pages to a WordPress domain, these caching recommendations could create big problems. Check with us first.

This article from Varvy provides a great how-to, as does this one from WinningWP (which discusses enabling browser caching from a WordPress perspective but is applicable more broadly).

Set Up GZIP Compression

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 15 Minutes

(You’ll want to check to see if GZIP compression is already enabled before you get started.)

And again, if this is beyond your comfort zone, your web host will probably help you set up GZIP compression if you ask nicely.

Kill Needless Scripts and Plugins

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

*If you’re publishing Unbounce pages to a WordPress domain, these plugins in particular might start a fire.

Convert Images to Sprites

Difficulty: Intermediate / Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

Building Pages in Unbounce? We don’t build CSS sprites for you, but you can certainly use them on your Unbounce-built landing pages. Check out our documentation on custom JS and CSS with Unbounce.

Improve Your Landing Page Speed: Hard Fixes

We’re into the scary stuff now.

Remove Render-Blocking JS and CSS

Difficulty: Hard / Estimated Time: 45 Minutes

Reduce render-blocking CSS

Eliminate render-blocking JS

Building Pages in Unbounce? Unbounce optimizes for most Google PageSpeed Insights recommendations, including the removal of render-blocking elements. That means you can skip this one.

Start Hand-Coding with AMP

Difficulty: Very Hard / Estimated Time: ∞ Hours

We won’t get into the nitty-gritty of building with AMP here, but the AMP website has a bunch of resources (including tutorials) to help you get started.

Increase Your Landing Page Speed (By Stealing Our Homework) published first on https://nickpontemrktg.wordpress.com/

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