#the only reason this blog still exists is cause I can’t find my password

[numberstans]

So what happens to the numberjacks if the family decides to get rid of the sofa??

[salty-cs]

Chickensmoothie Fake Banner Dog

Hey, I don't know who made the fake banner dog, but it was posted on my friend's old account. We're assuming it was hacked because he wasn't very careful with his passwords in the past, as that's really the only plausible explanation. We have some ideas of who it could be, but unfortunately one of those people doesn't even play CS and the other hasn't been active since 2017, so it doesn't matter if they get caught. We are assuming this was some kind of revenge plot, but we can't say for sure. It could also be a completely random hacker, but again, we don't know. It went like this. He has the outcomes thread subscribed to, so it emails him when someone posts on the topic so he can see new outcomes. He gets an email and checks the thread, notices almost immediately that it's his old account. Confusion obviously ensues. We didn't even think twice about the banner dog because we didn't realize it was fake at the time, and getting another banner pet was obviously the least of our concerns. He messages me about it to ask for advice, I kind of shrug. It was an old account that he only used for a week at most before creating a new account (same one he uses to this day) so there was nothing great on it. Like one common pet in total, no posts, etc., so we kept an eye on it but didn't know what to really do about it. We figured it would be best to get a help ticket in, but he didn't want to get in trouble for multi accounting, so he hesitated. The user who was in that account was only posting what we thought was harmless stuff—a forum game post here, a post in the trade thread there, a post about how they liked one of the PPS eggs, you get the gist—but since it was a dumb old account, we left it alone, again just keeping an eye on it. Then we come to find out the dog they posted in the outcomes thread was confirmed to be fake. At this point my friend was getting incredibly anxious. It became apparent that whoever was on the account was doing something malicious instead of harmless like we initially thought. He feared that if he sent in a ticket NOW, that staff would surely think he was lying to cover himself. I told him to send one anyway just to be safe, but I don't think he did. I wasn't able to talk him into it before the account got banned as far as we know (it no longer exists) but his account was still fine, so he stopped worrying about it. A while after though he DID receive a board warning for the incident, and since the warning came from Nick himself, I'm sure there was some technical stuff somewhere in there that linked the account's IPs since my friend did log into that account at one point and therefore had that IP even if it was in a different location at the time of the incident itself. He's scared to resolve it because he doesn't want to "talk back" to a higher-up in fear that he's just going to be banned if they think he's trying to lie his way out of a warning, so a warning on his record would be better than a full ban. It's a crazy situation, the two of us are still extremely confused, but that's the events as I can recall them. I know this is a salt blog and people here aren't going to care much, but please avoid spreading rumors about the dog and especially PLEASE don't post about being the "creator of the dog" followed by bragging and things such as you encouraging others to break CS rules. Whether you created it or not may be true, but right now CS staff think that my friend is the sole one responsible for the dog, so posting things like that or causing further uproar can get him in more trouble than he is already in. He's lucky he avoided a ban, only barely, and got a pretty big board warning on his account instead. The only reason I even know of this blog is because some users let him know he was posted about here (for a dumb reason) and I've been skimming the blog on occasion to make sure no rumors start because he's a dear friend of mine and hasn't done anything to warrant that. I came across the banner dog posts and here we are. Chickensmoothie is the one place where he is happy right now, it gives him a place to escape real life problems and just collect some pixel pets for a little while. When he posts his art there VS any other site or platform, he gets a lot of positive feedback, whereas usually he gets nothing. He's even done some commissions on there for the first time ever and for once he's gained confidence in himself through how kind people have been to him. This incident alone has made him spiral into a panic because he's afraid to lose what he's been building for himself on there, even if it doesn't sound like much to everyone else. All I ask is that you please, please be respectful and put the subject to rest. Thank you.

[zachnovak]

@thiskryptonite hmmmmm.... I’m torn right now. Don’t know why I even care or making a post at all let alone on this account I barely remembered the password to. But for some reason, I’ve been missing our friendship quite a lot. Even though I always had the feeling I was second best compared to everyone else on Corinth in your eyes. We chatted a lot, everyday and had fun plotting or just making up head canon stuff with Atlas and my Noah or Markus and Noah. But I’m terrified now and know I deserve it because I couldn’t make any of you happy by existing.

To this day I still don’t understand why after everything you so easily and instantly turned your back and ghosted me after Corinth. Worse, allowed others on there to then send me hate, spread lies, drag up ancient drama that was long proven to be lies and through in all the ‘ist’ words they could think of for that chef’s kiss of trying to cancel someone. But at the same time, I’m not surprised by it either. When I was posting just on invisionfree forums I had a buddy named Ryan who I was great friends with and I coded a lot of RPs for. Only for him to not like some of the members and some how I had mad drama with them. Then with him and then ultimately kicked out of the group I made. Later he told me he would tell them I was saying stuff about them and trying to get them kicked out of the RP. The more drama they stirred and the more I defended myself he hopes they’d leave but if the drama got to bad he’d gladly kick me out of the group as he knew no matter what he did or caused, I’d always come back to him and wanna be friends. I still wanna talk and post with him to this day.

Griffin did the same thing to me. A guy I, like with you, talked to everyday for hours. Personal stuff, random crap, our characters, plans for the threads we had whatever. He didn’t like that I preformed too many actions in a post to progress it so he begun telling people I was power playing and forcing him into things. He knew they took that in the worse possible light and not that I simply made my character do more than say a response and make one action. Ultimately he got the whole RP to ignore me, ridicule me if I popped up in the OOC and even tell me to kill myself and that everyone hated me. And I did try to do as they suggested. I still wanted to talk to and post with him though.

Then Sam, she was a friend who trolled the previous mentioned RP. She knew they believed I was trolling them and sending nasty anon hate to them and members. She knew this and ramped up what she did solely because the admin pissed her off and if they thought it was me, well, who could it hurt? Jay (not Corinth jay but another one) did much the same. He stole many of the ideas, coding, and interactive elements of my first RP. Told members many lies to get them to leave my RP to join his instead. I still let him back on my RP as I missed my friend and RP buddy.

I have a history of trusting the wrong people. Of opening up to them and investing in an actual friendship with them only for them to abuse me in the end as they know I’ll always come back. Even now as I am finishing up the revamps to my RP I’m finding myself wondering what you’d think and if you’d enjoy RPing there. Why do I do that to myself? I know I have episodes due to being bipolar and that I have abandonment issues like no other. That I always try to please everyone even at the cost finically, emotionally, and even physically, of myself. I wonder if I hate myself so much that I just do that to myself. I do sometimes think I deserve all of this, to be told to end myself, to have the friend I allow in to stab me in the back . To be used, abused, and then tossed into the bins. I even find myself thinking of it’ll make people happy that I just disappear and am never heard from again that I should do it. I fail at so much, making my online friends happy, keeping them, why did I fail to do what they wanted and end it?

I’m such a glutton for punishment I actually did rejoin Corinth around Halloween. Used one of my aliases just as Nolan is one. No one suspected and I was actually well liked and all I did differently was talking regularly to more than three people. It still wasn���t for me though, far too much of a clique. I left RPing on tumblr after that. I felt so great zero drama and no one playing Mean Girl games just because they knew I existed still. But now I’m almost done revamping my RP, I want to try it again. I hate that I allowed toxic people to get to me and feel like shit just because they have issues their immature minds tell them it’s ok to destroy someone with mental issues and end something they put so much hard work and planning into just because.... someone got a message from them I guess. I don’t want any drama this time. I just want to stick to my group and the couple I’m currently RPing in, in peace. But at the same time, I wanna run everything passed you and get your input like when I was first making it. I’m nervous, jittery, and feel like I wanna throw up. But not because I worry for the RP lasting or getting members. But because I’m waiting for when your Corinth buddies will attack my RP and me again. When whatever drama they have somehow is my fault again even though I don’t even know who those people are let alone their blogs or what they do. But I know it’s going to happen. That type of person can’t let it not happen. They have to destroy someone, anyone to make themselves feel better. I’m scared and not because I know this will happen again. It’s because I know I’m going to to fail and the first attack from them is going to make me feel like I failed them and need to end either my RP or myself just to make them happy and leave me alone again. Well this turned into a ramble. Guess I’ll sign off this account. I got that off my chest. Don’t think it’ll help, it’ll probably be ignored really and my little prophecy will come to pass. But at least I got it down for when it does.

[southern-belle-outcasts]

🎖- What is it that attracted you to your muse? & ⚓️ - What fatal error means you will instantly drop a thread?

@mynameisanakin

//I have...multiple muses. Sooooo, get comfy.

Obviously (not so obviously?), my brain children didn’t have anything in particular drawing me to them. They were just born, and they’re constantly revealing new shit as I write more, and pulling slick ones on me. I cannot be held responsible for anything these assholes do. They’re doing their own thing and I’m just along for the ride. Nilza is 9-10 years old (depending if you want to count the year I dabbled with her on goodreads before tumblr) and I’m still learning new shit. Farrar is months old and I’m high key still pulling out information from him. I don’t make the rules. They do.

I got drawn into Rogue, brace yourselves you new peeps that are comic snobs, via Wolverine and the X-Men tv show on being on Netflix at the time. Yes. I got into Rogue off a cartoon that wasn’t the original tv show OR the comics. Suck my left tit. I don’t care. After that I watched the XMCU movies, and then as I developed my blog on here, I started reading the comics, watching The Animated Series, and just researching via wiki and 616 rp blogs. So if you want to get bent out of shape, bet I had you fooled. I was running a movie/cartoon based blogs for years before I officially switched it to TAS, and then finally now just canon divergent 616. But I digress, what actually hooked me beyond Rogue’s power being badass (who the hell wouldn’t like the idea of being able to steal other powers or memories as needed?), I really liked her relationship dynamic with Logan where he wasn’t forcing her to be all happy sunshine and rainbows over her inability to touch people, but neither was he encouraging her to not accept her power. He was basically “yeah kid it sucks, so figure it out and use it as best you can”. She’s introverted, with good fucking reason, yet not shy of back talking anyone. Her moral leaning is to that of good but she’s also not going to let rules stop her. The eye roll at the insufferable goody two shoes people in her life, I feel on a spiritual level. Basically, I relate to Rogue a lot minus all the powers. Which I am constantly given shit for liking Rogue for the fact she’s OP as shit in the comics, and I’m just sitting here like “the Rogue I started off liking didn’t have all these bonus features, dude. I didn’t know they existed. No I’m not writing them away but I will better explain them or why I think she wouldn’t be thrilled to have them or use them excessively. Die mad about it, idk.”

Padmé was for the fact she’s so damn self assured and doesn’t have a hidden agenda. Don’t @ me about her using decoys and not telling people. That’s not deception that’s staying alive when you have active hits on you. It’s not the same and the people that want to bitch and moan about her being sneaky, blah blah blah, no one needs that in their life. Go away. Like for a politician to get into politics, and stay in politics, and be legitimately concerned about continuing to hold up her peoples’ best interests while at the same time having the rest of the welfare of the galaxy also held into consideration, and just be flat out honest up and front about it...even as a little kid I was immediately recognizing “this chick doesn’t give two shits- she’s not playing the game, and they’re trying to KILL her for it, and she just sticks to her guns harder. I’m in love.” So everyone that was like “waah Anakin couldn’t possibly be like ‘wow she’s incredible I want to marry that, he was too young for that’, hi 👋🏼 it me, I’m Anakin. I watched that shit when I was 8. And yeah, instacrush. Also looking back and realizing the Bi was strong in this one, it just wasn’t labeled as that yet 🙃 And I’m fully aware I am not, nor will I ever be, the confident badass that she is, and I’m okay with that. That’s what writing is for. Much easier to explore that with characters since they tend to write themselves, and not try to emulate things in real life since that doesn’t go well. And I never really dropped her so much as I went on hiatus on all my blogs, for over a year because life was poop, and THIS DUMBASS BEING KNOWN AS MYSELF...forgot what the fuck random email and password I used. I tried so many combinations. No success. So I’m just locked out forever, and since I have so few people for the fandom following Rogue’s original that I turned into my multi, I just relegate her to by request only.

As for what fatal error will cause me to drop a thread...there’s a few. Constantly write at me vs to me. If I’m giving you stuff to work with and react to, and I’m constantly being given next to nothing to actually engage with, I’m going to drop it. I’m not carrying a thread. That’s a chore, I’m not here to work. If you start attempting to fuck my muse out of nowhere. I’m not talking flirtations, I’m not paranoid, but like actually hands down pants, making out out of nowhere, etc with no interaction lead up and no discussions, nope. That tells me you didn’t read my rules, or you were like fuck it, and I just, can’t vibe with either. And it’s not like I don’t make my rules readily available by reblogging them on a weekly basis, pinning them to the top of my blog, etc. (I’m fully aware my theme is outdated af which is why I’m constantly telling people I will send character bios and rules in both asks and in posts so that people aren’t stuck clueless. I’m stuck on the app with no good functioning netbook, let alone a laptop. It’s been my pain for years now.) Most anything else is a failure to find muse for lack of plotting for the thread. Them’s the main reasons.

[laldila-menu]

l’aldila#1

01:30ish I think 

こんにちは

You once wanted to start each journal entry with hello in a different language. i’m adding this after signing it but maybe you’ll still appreciate it. kisses

I didn’t even know the meaning of l’aldila before I started this blog. Apparently its a French horror movie. Maybe we’ll watch it together some day. I think I’ll rant here. About you. No one else will probably see it. It was three months ago when M recommended I do something like this. I shouldn’t have ignored her and gone with her advice. Maybe we wouldn’t be here today.

I’m not necessarily upset with the way we are now. I just find it upsetting the way you make me feel. I feel trapped yet free. I feel confused yet have faith. I’m sure but I’m not sure. Before, we named our descendants, cried, and did a crap ton more together. Now,  I’m writing this at a time where we’ve both taken different directions. I thought I would be closer to you right now even though I’m supposed to be farther, half way across the country. However, I’ve never felt farther to the person I felt the closest to. I hope that this is all just an act and that truly underneath everything still exists. I’m holding on to hope but I don’t know if I should move on. I want to ask you but I don’t know if you’ll understand wrong and tell me to just move on when that’s the last thing I want. I understand we can’t be a thing right now. And that’s why I understand why you maybe said all that stuff to end the toxic thing we had. But what if you didn’t and I’m wishfully thinking. Just give me a sign so I can be sure. Who knows whats written for us. One of the most impactful moments with you was when I was telling you about Fatima. From The Alchemist. Maybe I just need to be patient like Fatima. Wait for the wind to bring you back to me. That one word, “maktub”. I said it to you more than I said “I love you.” Maybe my actions should match with my words. What if I stopped talking to you because of the way I feel. Whenever I do, I feel like crap. The reason why I also put “menu” in the name of this blog was because once you sent me an Instagram photo of yourself since you refused to use snap. The photo said something along the lines of something something me-n-u. I thought it was the cutest thing. I still think its the cutest thing. You’re the cutest thing. I messed up really fracking hard. From the beginning I told you I couldn’t trust myself and no one ever really can. I know you forgave me but from that day on I felt the change. I could never expect you to trust me again. But I’m changing by the will of God. I said I would always try my best regardless and I will. I promised you on that plane that I would never leave you and by the will of God I never will. i told myself “l’aldila-, don’t B.S. this promise later on by saying, “yeah yeah I meant I was never going to leave you as a friend” you’re never going to leave her period.” It’s crazy. I hope I was wrong. I hope I’m wrong right now. At first M recommended that first, I stop talking with you, but before that I share the username and password for this blog so that you and I could write on here whenever we missed each other. I should’ve listened to her. Because if I had, maybe you would’ve understood that I don’t need to talk to you 24/7 to be in love with you. You’re going to tell yourself “No but that’s what I was telling myself.” Don’t. You know why? Because I never would. You stopped talking to me for ten days, I didn’t say anything. But I messed up during that time. And you have no idea how bad I felt. But I didn’t want to tell you because I was scared you’d leave forever. But trust me, I loved you more than ever and still do from that moment to this moment. I never felt anything towards those people. You’re going to leave this blog post by leaving me saying: “I don’t want to be in your life if I make you feel trapped.” That’s the thing, maybe it’s not you, but it’s me. The other day I saw a TikTok. This girl apparently went to her therapist and her therapist told her that some narcissists (people who only care about themselves if you didn’t know) actually hide themselves as em-paths (people who empathize). They only care about you caring about them, not actually caring about you. And I thought to myself, maybe that is me. Maybe I’m a narcissist disguised as an em-path. That’s what I became along the way, I wasn’t that at the beginning. Then the clouds happened. I cracked my back. And I said today was going to be a good day. And that day I became a narcissist. But after we all left. I turned back. I truly cared. I still do. But I don’t know if you do. I know you talk to a million more people on the phone than you talk to me and I think that’s what also makes me sad. That you can just ignore me. I swear every time I messed up, I felt you detach from me. It’s my fault. I just hope you can trust me again that much and that one day, you’ll really be back in my life and you’ll never leave God willing. We’ll never know what’s in our destiny. What’s maktub for us. So as I’m sitting here on this small ass desk with my arms being marked by the sharp edge of this table, typing on my desktop, I hope you’re on the other side of my feelings. I hope I get closer to God. Cause I know the only way I’ll truly be happy with you, is if I’m happy with everyone. Sometimes you can make me so angry shorty. You are shorty. I don’t know if I’ll send this to you. Maybe I’ll just send the link to the blog along with the password if one day you make me really sad. But today you made me confused enough to start this. Today is the day you decided which path to take and you asked me. 

-l’aldila

p.s. menu I really hope you actually write in this blog one day and understand how much you mean to me as a person. Never loved you for the physicality. Those things almost meant nothing. Loving is a committment. It’s the days where it gets really tough to keep loving a person to not quit and stick with them. So I’m not quitting on you, and I’m sticking to you. I wish I could show you how much I care about you through my actions since you like actions more than words but I have no fricking idea how I can show you without telling you. Afterall, it is called “show AND tell”

I think this has been way too long for a p.s. message. fr tho stay safe, and I’ll be patient. 

Thank you for your time and consideration ma’am. 

sincerely, lovingly, and respectfully,

-l’aldila

japanese- “konichiwa”

01:57 ---- 9/4/2020

[daemon-knight]

Well folks, it’s time for me to once again shake off all the conflicting feelings and nagging thoughts I’ve had about Tumblr RPing and the general community. Yup, another semi-off-the-cuff Rambling. And I’m using the tiny text this time, so you know it’s big. 

I… honestly don’t feel comfortable calling it off-the-cuff given how many times I’ve edited and organized this, but it breaks my usual rules of a Rambling due to how blunt it is, so… here we are. I want to say this will be the last time I make an off-the-cuff post like this, but I also know I’m going to be doing posts like this for as long as I continue to RP, especially on Tumblr. My gripes will never cease, and I always have something to whine about.

But with that all said…

Nitpicks that Bug Allen

I’m going to just knock out the smaller issues I have with the RPC now before I really start rant and rave about the issues I want to get to. For those who have been following me long enough to know about my ramblings and gripes these are probably issues you’ve heard me talk about once or twice… or thrice. In any case here are the short ones, or at least the ones I can summarize in a sentence or two:

People still have very long bios and rules pages and it needs to stop. I’ve talked about these five times and I the fact I’m bring it up again  just makes me mad.

Speaking of continuing issues, passwords are still a thing too. Get rid of them. You wouldn’t need them if your rules page was short to begin with.

Also gonna’ say this again, but musing and aesthetic posts do nothing to show your character’s personality, traits, or themes, you’re writing does.

I’m starting to see blogs with half-finished or non-existent about pages promoting     themselves. No. Stop that. Finish the blog or drop it, don’t do it halfway and expect to be rewarded.

Probably gonna’ be its own section in this giant Rambling but stop trying to world-build outside of your character. That’s annoying and it makes more work for your partners that’ll be a wasted effort if you yourself only     adhere to it when it works for you.

Dash Commentary. It’s either funny or it’s metagaming. If you aren’t making a comment about something happening to be funny, then don’t post it, that gets very annoying in more plotted storylines.

Pretty sure judolette/Lita covered this at some point, but canon blogs depending on wiki links for bios… no.

Power Levels are still a thing that piss me off, but I’ll go into this later, for now just watch this, this, and this to get an idea of what power levels mean in terms of writing. The short version is that you don’t have the luxury of a universal power scale on     Tumblr, so you have to actually show strength instead of imply it.

…

…

…

Well, I just said the P-word, so I guess I’ll just get to meat of it now…

Power Levels and Fight RPs

Apparently, I can’t talk about this without going on a rant, so here we are. Okay, quick question for anyone that’s been following and reading Claudia’s stuff for a while.

How strong do you think Claudia is?

Take a moment to think about that. On a scale of one to ten, where do you think Claudia stands? Feel free to message me the answer if you want. If you want some context she’s canonically fought a dragon, a ninja, an alien mercenary, a monster hunter, a vampire-hunting vampire, and so on.

Okay, have your answer? Good.

You’re wrong. Claudia is as strong or weak as she needs to be for the plot to have stakes. Her strength in terms of value is irrelevant so long as its believable.

Claudia is strong enough to match her super alien girlfriend, but weak enough to be hard countered by the four-foot inquisitor. Strong enough that she can face off against the six-foot dragon gatekeeper barehanded, but weak enough for the creepy space witch from space to scare her despite her brave face. Strong enough to 1v1 an actual dragon, but weak enough to get overpowered by her little sisters.

You get the point?

Is it clicking?

I’m not even talk about things that happened off screen, Claudia has fought against all these threats and people in canon. When it comes to fight RPs my logic on if an attack hits or misses is simply what reaction creates the best reply. This is why Claudia consistently gets wrecked by Nero but is having an epic kung fu battle with Meiling, it’s interesting and cool. It’s why Temma and Claudia’s sparring matches are low-key and simple while Syn’s fights are bombastic and having them throw each other through buildings like a DBZ fight.

Again, is it clicking? This is basically how a lot of pro-wrestling works. 

Granted, I’ll admit I don’t plot a lot of the RP fights on this site because I see Tumblr RPing as a lot more free-formed than in the forums where nearly everything is a plot line to an extent. This place tends to have a lot of on-and-off RPs that can go quiet and dead for weeks and months before getting started again. That… makes me hesitant to plot anything that isn’t silly or nonsensical because the chances of it truly playing a role in a plotline can get wrecked the moment someone goes dark for a month.

But speaking of Tumblr RPing...

How Allen Views RPing

I think this is the main thing that gets my goat for a lot of the things that go on with the RPC here on Tumblr. To me, role-playing is just that, playing a role. The main idea behind it being to make a character and write them in whatever wacky adventures you and your partners can think up while keeping some thread of continuity and stakes. To that end the biggest thing I like to see as a writer in this type of medium is convincing and interesting characters that would mesh well with the characters I’ve written, be it their personality, background, mannerisms, writing style of the writer, etc.. 

Or you’re a shipping/smut blog that just wants to kiss and bang. No judgement either way that’s just not what I’m into, at least not on Tumblr.

But back to my point, this type of writing is very character driven. It depends a lot on making an interesting character in background, premise, personality, and actions, as well as showing those things through the writing. 

I know I make it sound complex, but for me, if I find a character that can punch Claudia in the face and will, in fact, do so if challenged then that’s enough to at least get me interested in a plot of some kind. Granted, there are some nuances for that, but I’m a pretty simple guy at the end of the day.

You see my point, right? A lot of RPing revolves around the character and making them feel real, or at least probable. This is a part of story writing too, but it’s not the only thing to worry about when writing a story, and it doesn’t have to be the focus unlike RPing.

This also plays into why I don’t partake in nor appreciate things like musings or aesthetic posts. Those don’t sell people on the character, what you write sells people on the character. Pictures, quotes, and other aesthetics do little to show how your character behaves and acts, they’re a shortcut to skip out on writing a character, and I refuse to partake in it.

Essentially, it’s a lot telling and not much showing, and that pisses me off.

I know I sound like a bit of a hypocrite since I occasionally post my drawings of Clauds and her musings, but in my defense most of my posts involve actual writing and her musings are writing in character to her specifically.

And on that note...

Allen’s Views on Canon Blogs

A lot of what I said about writing your character and show their personality and traits through said righting mostly applied to OC blogs and OCs. I won’t go into the nitty-gritty of character writing, but the basics are to just write a character, a premise/goal for that character, and keep the personality and behavior consistent with what you’ve previously established.

Canon characters are a different story.

Well, not completely. I see canon blogs in a similar way, but under much more scrutiny. With an OC you just need to make sure your character is within the grounds of what you’ve written in their profile. So long as it’s probable it’s not OOC or cheating.

Canon characters don’t get that much leeway.

The same principle of selling your character applies, but now with a character that already has an established background, personality, and expectations by fans of the series. This is the reason I think a lot of canon blogs in the RPC get into drama. The fact that these characters already have established backgrounds and expectations can cause a lot of people to get in a fit when those expectations aren’t met. When someone veers off too much from established canon without good reason it breaks the emersion and people get annoyed by that. This is also why when I use to be involved in Canon blogs I usually went with side characters or main characters from very small/unnoticed properties.

Like I said, the idea of selling the character still applies, but that also means the musing and aesthetic postings I mentioned before annoy me even more for canon blogs. The fact that there’s already a lot that we know about these characters to begin with means there’s no real reason to try and cheat by using musings or aesthetic post to get an idea of the character, we already know them or there’s a wiki page that explains them. Or your profile did what it was supposed to and gave us a basic idea of what the character is about. The only case I would see for a reason to cheat would be if your character was diverting from canon in an extreme way.

Which is a nice segue to…

Canon Divergent Blogs

I see two main types of Divergent blogs.

The first type are the blogs that pop up because a character was killed off in canon or put in some state of incapacity like a coma or warped to another dimension, or… just written out of the media for some reason. In this case I think a divergent blog is fine. There might be some narrative issues that would lead to certain characters not evolving or developing because of the sacrifices made or the attempts at realism within the story might ring hallow, but that’s overall harmless in the grander scheme of things and there are some writing tricks to make a fake-out death just as meaningful as a real one. 

However... the second type has me worried. 

The second type is usually some variation of “this character was written poorly by my standards and I’m rewriting them to what they should properly be.” As someone writing their own story and has attempted to write several stories in the past, I’ll tell you straight up that story writing is hard as hell and RPing is a cakewalk by comparison. Making a story from scratch with consist and entertaining characters that have unique character designs and personalities is probably one of the hardest things to do. And that’s just writing, I can’t even imagine the trials animators and professional comic/manga artists go through in order to do the same for all the work it takes to have a series, let alone a successful one.

This stuff isn’t easy, though I do understand the mindset. If character X got shafted and you want to give them a better shake, fine. But… be wary when you assume the version of the character you’re writing is the better one or what was supposed to be, especially for children’s media/anime. Just… remember that you’re writing for a character that was probably made for kids and not an older adolescence crowd, no matter how dark or deep the writing got. When a canon character deviates so far from the original Canon can you really say they’re the same person?

That said, as an OC blog that doesn’t follow a particular canon universe, I myself have no real stake if Sasuke Uchiha from Naruto starts acting like a happy-go-lucky ditz, or if Jin Kisaragi from Blazblue actually starts to visibly care about people other than Ragna and Tsubaki. Claudia has nothing to do with character, so what they do and her reactions to their interactions is... eh, negligent at best in the grand scheme of things.

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I… don’t have a good segue to this next topic, so…

Shipping

A bit random, but I wanna’ get my opinions on shipping out the way while I’m here. This is something I’ve never really understood, neither in RPing nor in fandom. 

From a writer’s perspective, a romantic subplot is tricky because it an easily become the focus and create a huge genre shift that will annoy your main demographic. As such, when two characters get together it’s usually at the end of a story and end it there, because writing a continuous relationship with ups and downs can be difficult when you’re an action series about explosions and punching people. However, the general rules of writing a relationship is usually to keep the character... well, in character. I’ve talked about this before as well, but Claudia dating Syn doesn’t change a lot about their personalities, or at least Claudia’s. She’s still a tomboyish girl that likes fighting, she still picks fights with essentially everyone, she still... acts like Claudia. The only addition is that she’ll occasionally mention she has a girlfriend, and even then she’ll admit that their relationship isn’t the greatest. Syn is always on missions or jobs off planet that just leave Claudia to hang out with her robot maids. Syn is noticeably stronger than Claudia and that ruffles her pride a bit. Syn does a lot of dirty jobs that could harm Claudia’s reputation further if political enemies learned about Claudia’s relationship with her. Hell, Syn is substantially older than Claudia by hundreds of years and that age gap itself creates issues of perspective. This is just a series of things to touch and write about.

Ah, but I was talking about how this played into RPing. 

Again, from a writer’s perspective my main question is does the ship make some form of sense and will the ship create a genre shift that turns what I was originally watching/reading into some romantic series. If the pairing can make sense and the tone/genre remain steady, then I see no issue with it. In terms of RPing, so long as the ship doesn’t lead to you never replying to other RPs and keeping your character consistent with your original premise then I see no issue with it.

So I’ll never understand why people get so riled up about this. Folks need to realize that these are fictional characters that aren’t real. Who they date won’t affect you, and unless it cripples the writing, I don’t think it needs complaint. But then again, romance is my weakest point as a writer next to smut, so… who knows, maybe I’m off base with this one.

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I… also don’t have a good segue for this one either, so let’s talk about…

Multi Muse Blogs

To every multi-muse blog following me right now. I want you to do me a favor and pick out your top five characters, the top five that you always like writing for and playing as. You got them figured out?

Okay, delete everyone else from your blog.

Take it from a guy that ran a Multi-Muse blog for three years, don’t just add every random muse that pops into your head. Figure your top five and if you need to have more then make them side muses and specify on your blog somewhere, they’re side muses. Remember all that talk I gave about keeping things in your profile short and simple? Well now you have +5 characters, so that because a requirement if you want to keep your blog running smoothly. Everything I said before about running a blog, aesthetic posts, and so on just become five times more important now because you making five times the work for anyone coming to your blog.

Here’s a quick rundown of how I managed my multi-muse blog:

It’d be best to keep every character within the same world/universe or following a similar theme, my OC mutli-muse was focused on mercenaries and my canon multi-muse had all the characters from the same organization for an example.

Make your profiles short and simple. This is very important because you have 5+ characters and we need to get an idea about them very quickly.

Again, try and keep the limit around five. If another OC pops into your head do me a favor and write a short story about it if you really need to write them, keep them away from your blog unless they’re absolutely needed.

Wouldn’t hurt to get a page code from theme-hunters and have a small blurb about each character either. I know that’s a lot of work, but it really helps when it comes to summarizing a character at a glance.

That’s all I can really say on the matter.

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And yet another bad segue…

World Building and Verses

Pretty sure I talked about this several times before, but let me put it in basic terms:

If it’s not relevant to your character, it’s not relevant to us. Your world’s 5 deities mean jack if your character isn’t religious and not actively worshiping one of them while warring with the other four. That long 5-page essay about your world’s magic means jack if your character doesn’t use magic, and even if they do just describe it in a way that’s relevant to your character. Your character’s ancient sword passed down from the great hero king means jack if that king isn’t King Arthur or someone of actual world renown. Hell, this is why a canned the lore of Claudia’s spear in her profile, it wasn’t that relevant to Claudia as a character nor did a play a part in any RP, so it was pointless text and I removed it.

Again, I’ve said this before, but Tumblr RPing doesn’t work like a group/forum RP. Your character’s world is automatically fuses with everyone else’s unless there’s a specific verse for it like RWBY. That world has a lot of specific rules and systems relevant to it, but nearly every other universe is just a spin on modern fantasy, which I be glossed off with a bit of creativity. This is how Claudia’s Soul Eater verse works. Soul Eater is within a modern world, but has supernatural elements like people that can fly and shoot lasers and the like. Claudia’s canon world has those things too, but not cars and other modern devices. At the same time, the Soul Eater verse can keep Claudia as a normal human with some decent fighting skills and keep her skills relevant.

Let’s be real, being able to wield a spear or other melee weapons is pointless in our modern world, but if said weapons were the only way to kill demons and other monstrosities, then people that can master those weapons have worth and can beat up said monsters and other threats with melee weapons without people batting an eye at it. The Soul Eater verse isn’t there just for the sake of Soul Eater, but for the sake of Claudia interacting with characters in a Modern setting that won’t destroy her premise of low-born noble joining military to no suck dick.

Actually, I’ve been talking a lot about writing, and I think that’s the last of things that truly annoy me about RPing on this site, so I think I’ll concluded this with…

Something of a Disclaimer

Now that I got all that out of my system let me say this while I have your attention, because I know I probably ruffled some feathers with this post.

Don’t take what I said to mean I think Claudia is being written with the idea of exploring deep themes, complicated relationships, or anything like that. Claudia is a Black, lesbian knight from Medieval-RPG-Fantasy -France that wields a black spear that can transform into other phallic weapons and is dating a cannibal alien mercenary from outer space while sparring with her robo-maids. She is currently training/mentoring an android that was made/adopted by a hyper-sexual dimensional space witch from space. Her circle of friends consists of a ninja, two catgirls, a vampire, ghost skeleton, and her samurai uncle. And need I remind you of all the times I’ve even taken my potshots at her. Trust me, I’m not saying my character is a stream of good writing.

For example, I’m trying to write my own original story. It was originally going to be about forest ninjas solving a civil war/political schism, but that got canned when I started to work on the world-building and realized writing out a solid civil war plotline was too difficult for someone of my skill. So, I changed it over to kung fu girls and that’s slowly turning into a series of vignettes with an over-arcing plot about a turf war in the background, something in the vein of K-On in terms of structure (a little ironic given the main character is named Kyo-Annie). 

This isn’t even my first time trying to write about the kung fu girls or the ninja girls, this is my third attempt at both over a year’s time. Writing, especially for a story, is hard. You need a well-made plot, decent world-building, entertaining characters, good sentence structure, unique writing style, and so on. Not to mention understand enough about the very language you’re writing in to make sure all the words flow properly. I honestly have no idea how you multi-lingual folks do it, I’m truly impressed by you guys.

But the point is, writing a story and writing a character are very different things, and I’m someone that’s been leaning more towards story-writing as time goes on than character writing. Writing Claudia’s character involves me making sure her dialogue and actions match up with what I’m presenting as a tomboyish, competitive jock that likes fighting and wants to maybe be a princess. Writing Claudia’s story involves me delving into things like upward social mobility, researching medieval politics and warfare, talking about themes of conservative tradition vs. progressive advancement at the cost of identity, whether losing oneself for the sake of their goals is worth it, and the list just goes on. 

It's like I said in my views of RPings, I see this as a very different form of writing and when doing a story, especially on Tumblr. You don’t have the luxury of icons to show expressions, or a profile to get a basic idea of a character. A lot of world-building needs to be done properly and carefully integrated into the story. You can’t just randomly add character upon character without it getting called out as impulsively hopping POVs. There’s just… a lot to keep in mind, and as I start writing these stories and get more involved in writing off Tumblr, the more… Tumblr annoys me.

Ugh, this got depressing. I think I’ll talk about something positive next time. Anyway folks, this 3000+ word Rambling is done. Hopefully I’ll talk about something more fun later.

Like fight RPs and fight narratives, those are always fun.

[globalmediacampaign]

Aurora multi-Primary first impression

For what reason should I use a real multi-Primary setup? To be clear, not a multi-writer solution where any node can become the active writer in case of needs, as for PXC or PS-Group_replication. No, we are talking about a multi-Primary setup where I can write at the same time on multiple nodes. I want to insist on this “why?”. After having excluded the possible solutions mentioned above, both covering the famous 99,995% availability, which is 26.30 minutes downtime in a year, what is left? Disaster Recovery? Well that is something I would love to have, but to be a real DR solution we need to put several kilometers (miles for imperial) in the middle.  And we know (see here and here) that aside some misleading advertising, we cannot have a tightly coupled cluster solution across geographical regions. So, what is left? I may need more HA, ok that is a valid reason. Or I may need to scale the number of writes, ok that is a valid reason as well. This means, at the end, that I am looking to a multi-Primary because: Scale writes (more nodes more writes) Consistent reads (what I write on A must be visible on B) Gives me 0 (zero) downtime, or close to that (5 nines is a maximum downtime of 864 milliseconds per day!!) Allow me to shift the writer pointer at any time from A to B and vice versa, consistently.    Now, keeping myself bound to the MySQL ecosystem, my natural choice would be MySQL NDB cluster. But my (virtual) boss was at AWS re-invent and someone mentioned to him that Aurora Multi-Primary does what I was looking for. This (long) article is my voyage in discovering if that is true or … not. Given I am focused on the behaviour first, and NOT interested in absolute numbers to shock the audience with millions of QPS, I will use low level Aurora instances. And will perform tests from two EC2 in the same VPC/region of the nodes. You can find the details about the tests on GitHub here Finally I will test: Connection speed Stale read Write single node for baseline Write on both node: Scaling splitting the load by schema Scaling same schema  Tests results Let us start to have some real fun. The first test is …  Connection Speed The purpose of this test is to evaluate the time taken in opening a new connection and time taken to close it. The action of open/close connection can be a very expensive operation especially if applications do not use a connection pool mechanism. As we can see ProxySQL results to be the most efficient way to deal with opening connections, which was expected given the way it is designed to reuse open connections towards the backend.  Different is the close connection operation in which ProxySQL seems to take a little bit longer.  As global observation we can say that using ProxySQL we have more consistent behaviour. Of course this test is a simplistic one, and we are not checking the scalability (from 1 to N connections) but it is good enough to give us the initial feeling. Specific connection tests will be the focus of the next blog on Aurora MM.  Stale Reads Aurora MultiPrimary use the same mechanism of the default Aurora to update the buffer pool: Using the Page Cache update, just doing both ways. This means that the Buffer Pool of Node2 is updated with the modification performed in Node1 and vice versa. To verify if an application would be really able to have consistent reads, I have run this test. This test is meant to measure if, and how many, stale reads we will have when writing on a node and reading from the other. Amazon Aurora multi Primary has 2 consistency model: As an interesting fact the result was that with the default consistency model (INSTANCE_RAW), we got 100% stale read. Given that I focused on identifying the level of the cost that exists when using the other consistency model (REGIONAL_RAW) that allows an application to have consistent reads. The results indicate an increase of the 44% in total execution time, and of the 95% (22 time slower) in write execution.  It is interesting to note that the time taken is in some way predictable and consistent between the two consistency models.  The graph below shows in yellow how long the application must wait to see the correct data on the reader node. While in blue is the amount of time the application waits to get back the same consistent read because it must wait for the commit on the writer.    As you can see the two are more or less aligned. Given the performance cost imposed by using REGIONAL_RAW,  all the other tests are done the defaut INSTANCE_RAW, unless explicitly stated. Writing tests All tests run in this section were done using sysbench-tpcc with the following settings: sysbench ./tpcc.lua --mysql-host= --mysql-port=3306 --mysql-user= --mysql-password= --mysql-db=tpcc --time=300 --threads=32 --report-interval=1 --tables=10 --scale=15  --mysql_table_options=" CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin"  --db-driver=mysql prepare sysbench /opt/tools/sysbench-tpcc/tpcc.lua --mysql-host=$mysqlhost --mysql-port=$port --mysql-user= --mysql-password= --mysql-db=tpcc --db-driver=mysql --tables=10 --scale=15 --time=$time  --rand-type=zipfian --rand-zipfian-exp=0 --report-interval=1 --mysql-ignore-errors=all --histogram  --report_csv=yes --stats_format=csv --db-ps-mode=disable --threads=$threads run Write Single node (Baseline) Before starting the comparative analysis, I was looking to define what was the “limit” of traffic/load for this platform.  From the graph above, we can see that this setup scales up to 128 threads after that, the performance remains more or less steady.  Amazon claims that we can mainly double the performance when using both nodes in write mode and use a different schema to avoid conflict.   Once more remember I am not interested in the absolute numbers here, but I am expecting the same behaviour Given that our expectation is to see: Write on both nodes different schemas So AWS recommend this as the scaling solution: And I diligently follow the advice. I used 2 EC2 nodes in the same subnet of the Aurora Node, writing to a different schema (tpcc & tpcc2).  Overview Let us make it short and go straight to the point. Did we get the expected scalability? Well no: We just had 26% increase, quite far to be the expected 100% Let us see what happened in detail (if not interested just skip and go to the next test). Node 1 Node 2 As you can see Node1 was (more or less) keeping up with the expectations and being close to the expected performance. But Node2 was just not keeping up, performances there were just terrible.  The graphs below show what happened. While Node1 was (again more or less) scaling up to the baseline expectations (128 threads), Node2 collapsed on its knees at 16 threads. Node2 was never able to scale up. Reads Node 1 Node1 is scaling the reads as expected also if here and there we can see performance deterioration. Node 2 Node2 is not scaling Reads at all.  Writes Node 1 Same as Read Node 2 Same as read Now someone may think I was making a mistake and I was writing on the same schema. I assure you I was not. Check the next test to see what happened if using the same schema.   Write on both nodes same schema Overview Now, now Marco, this is unfair. You know this will cause contention. Yes I do! But nonetheless I was curious to see what was going to happen and how the platform would deal with that level of contention.  My expectations were to have a lot of performance degradation and increased number of locks. About conflict I was not wrong, node2 after the test reported: +-------------+---------+-------------------------+ | table | index | PHYSICAL_CONFLICTS_HIST | +-------------+---------+-------------------------+ | district9 | PRIMARY | 3450 | | district6 | PRIMARY | 3361 | | district2 | PRIMARY | 3356 | | district8 | PRIMARY | 3271 | | district4 | PRIMARY | 3237 | | district10 | PRIMARY | 3237 | | district7 | PRIMARY | 3237 | | district3 | PRIMARY | 3217 | | district5 | PRIMARY | 3156 | | district1 | PRIMARY | 3072 | | warehouse2 | PRIMARY | 1867 | | warehouse10 | PRIMARY | 1850 | | warehouse6 | PRIMARY | 1808 | | warehouse5 | PRIMARY | 1781 | | warehouse3 | PRIMARY | 1773 | | warehouse9 | PRIMARY | 1769 | | warehouse4 | PRIMARY | 1745 | | warehouse7 | PRIMARY | 1736 | | warehouse1 | PRIMARY | 1735 | | warehouse8 | PRIMARY | 1635 | +-------------+---------+-------------------------+ Which is obviously a strong indication something was not working right. In terms of performance gain, if we compare ONLY the result with the 128 Threads : Also with the high level of conflict we still have 12% of performance gain. The problem is that in general we have the two nodes behave quite badly. If you check the graph below you can see that the level of conflict is such to prevent the nodes not only to scale but to act consistently. Node 1 Node 2 Reads In the following graphs we can see how node1 had issues and it actually crashed 3 times, during tests with 32/64/512 treads. Node2 was always up but the performances were very low.  Node 1 Node 2 Writes Node 1 Node 2 Recovery from crashed Node About recovery time reading the AWS documentation and listening to presentations, I often heard that Aurora Multi Primary is a 0 downtime solution. Or other statements like: “in applications where you can't afford even brief downtime for database write operations, a multi-master cluster can help to avoid an outage when a writer instance becomes unavailable. The multi-master cluster doesn't use the failover mechanism, because it doesn't need to promote another DB instance to have read/write capability” To achieve this the suggestion I found, was to have applications pointing directly to the Nodes endpoint and not use the Cluster endpoint. In this context the solution pointing to the Nodes should be able to failover within a seconds or so, while the cluster endpoint: Personally I think that designing an architecture where the application is responsible for the connection to the database and failover is some kind of refuse from 2001. But if you feel this is the way, well go for it. What I did for testing is to use ProxySQL, as plain as possible, with nothing else then the basic monitor coming from the native monitor. I then compare the results with the tests using the Cluster endpoint. In this way I adopt the advice of pointing directly at the nodes, but I was doing things in our time.   The results are below and they confirm (more or less) the data coming from Amazon. A downtime of 7 seconds is quite a long time nowadays, especially if I am targeting the 5 nines solution that I want to remember is 864 ms downtime per day. Using ProxySQL is going closer to that, still too long to be called 0 (zero) downtime. I also have fail-back issues when using the AWS cluster endpoint. Given it was not able to move the connection to the joining node seamlessly.  Last but not least when using the consistency level INSTANCE_RAW, I had some data issue as well as PK conflict: FATAL: mysql_drv_query() returned error 1062 (Duplicate entry '18828082' for key 'PRIMARY')    Conclusions As state the beginning of this long blog the reasons expectations to go for a multi Primary solution were: Scale writes (more nodes more writes) Gives me 0 (zero) downtime, or close to that (5 nines is a maximum downtime of 864 milliseconds per day!!) Allow me to shift the writer pointer at any time from A to B and vice versa, consistently.    Honestly I feel we have completely failed the scaling point. Probably if I use the largest Aurora I will get much better absolute numbers, and it will take me more to encounter the same issues, but I will. In any case if the Multi muster solution is designed to provide that scalability, it should do that with any version. I did not have zero downtime, but I was able to failover pretty quickly with ProxySQL. Finally, unless the consistency model is REGIONAL_RAW, shifting from one node to the other is not prone to possible negative effects like stale reads. Because that I consider this requirement not satisfied in full.  Given all the above, I think this solution could eventually be valid only for High Availability (close to be 5 nines), but given it comes with some limitations I do not feel comfortable in preferring it over others just for HA, at the end default Aurora is already good enough as a High available solution.  references https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0C0jakzYuc https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/aurora-multi-master.html https://www.slideshare.net/marcotusa/improving-enterprises-ha-and-disaster-recovery-solutions-reviewed https://www.slideshare.net/marcotusa/robust-ha-solutions-with-proxysql https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/aurora-multi-master.html#aurora-multi-master-limitations   http://www.tusacentral.com/joomla/index.php/mysql-blogs/225-aurora-multi-primary-first-impression

[elmehdihmiche]

9 tips  to start with your website

When you open a store in the real world, the name is not the first thing you need. It helps to have the name first, but it isn’t essential. In the hosting world, though, the site name, known as the domain name, is the first thing you need to decide on. You can’t buy hosting and start designing your site until you have decided on a name and have purchased the domain name. See Chapter 2 for an explanation of how to pick a name. Finding the right location (and landlord) As I explain earlier in this section, you should picture your website as a store regardless of whether you’re actually selling anything. Remember that in this analogy, your hosting is like a building that your store is in, and your website is the decor, products, and everything else 2- that goes inside the store.

When you first open a store, you need to find a building you can lease in a good location at the right price. You may want it in the local shopping mall, but that has its drawbacks because then you’re restricted by the mall’s opening hours and by its rules and regulations about what you can and can’t do. Alternatively, you may want to lease some property of your own or get some space in a strip mall. With the strip mall, you have more freedom but are still somewhat restricted; if you lease a piece of land, you’re free to do whatever you like on it (providing the city council allows you). Finding somewhere to host your website is the same. You can go for a hosted website as described earlier in the chapter, but a hosted site is like being in a mall. The plethora of restrictions might outweigh the benefits. You can locate your site in the web-hosting equivalent of a strip mall — a shared server. There, you’re fairly free to do what you want, but you’re sharing the space with possibly hundreds of other sites, and some things you do might affect them (and vice versa). The final option is to lease your own server. Like leasing your own plot of land, nobody can tell you what you can and can’t do on your own server. Don’t try to go too big too fast; your web hosting can grow with your website. Unless you know you will be getting thousands of visitors from the get-go, you don’t need top-of-the-line hosting right from the start. With a physical store, not only do you have to find the right location, but (unless you buy the land yourself) you need to make sure you have a landlord you can work with. Your landlord leases you the building and is responsible for the physical building. It’s his responsibility to make sure the walls are sound and the roof doesn’t collapse, but beyond that, everything is up to you. If one of your racks or product display stands breaks, it isn’t your landlord’s responsibility. It’s yours. The same is true of your hosting. The web hosting company you buy hosting from is renting you space on a computer connected to the Internet. It’s the web host’s responsibility to make sure the computer keeps working and the Internet connection stays live, but beyond that, it’s all up to you. Most store owners only contact their landlords to pay the rent or to tell them when there is a problem with the building. Likewise, website owners only need to contact the web hosting company to pay the hosting charge or to report that the server seems not to be working correctly. Ask around online to find out how good your chosen web host is as a landlord — in other words, how good the host’s service, response time, and communication are. Hiring the right staf Before paying for hosting, think about who is going to keep the website updated. If you were opening a business, you’d have to think about what staff you are going to have in the store, whether you’ll sell enough to pay them, and whether you’ll ever get any sleep with all the work you’ll have to do.

2-Keeping a website updated is very similar.

Whether you’re creating a site for your community group, a blog, or even an online store, who is going to keep it updated? It always sounds easy, but the challenge of writing every day or remembering to update the website with new events or even adding and deleting products can soon drive even the most patient person to insanity. Stocking the shelves It is not enough to open a store and stock the shelves once then never restock them. The stock on the shelves needs to be replenished regularly or people will have nothing to come back to buy. Likewise, unless the content on your website changes regularly, there is nothing new for people to come back to your site for. Not all websites need to be updated daily, but regular new information gives your visitors a reason for continuing to return on a regular basis. Your hosting plan and your website are not the same thing. Your hosting plan is the facility that gives you a location in which to house your website. The website itself is comprised of the files, databases, and pages that create something viewable to Internet users. If you picture a store, you generally think of a building with products inside. What you’re seeing, though, is two separate parts: a building and the decor/products. If you take the decorations, racks, products, and everything else out — and even take the sign off the front — the building is still there. Hosting is the building. It’s empty; it simply provides space for you to work in. Your website is everything that’s inside the building. Delete your website and the computer it was hosted on still exists (and you’ll still be charged for your hosting plan whether you’re using it or not). Every store needs an office. Somewhere where you can sit and relax without being in front of customers. Somewhere you can do all the background administration the store needs. For the hosting plan, that’s called the control panel or the dashboard. Your control panel is where you administer the hosting, set up passwords and e-mail accounts, and do all the back-end stuff that is related to the hosting but not specifically the site. With most hosting companies, you can run multiple sites under one control panel, like having a central office doing the administration for a chain of stores. You need a lock and keys to keep your office safe, and that’s your control panel’s username and password that your host will have provided for you when you registered for hosting. Stores need a way to get stock in and out, so where possible they have a loading bay. The loading bay is typically at the back so the customers don’t see the deliveries being made and can’t interfere with them. FTP provides a loading bay for your website. Any time you need to update the site in any way, FTP is the tool you need to do that. It’s like a delivery driver. You tell it which files you want delivered and where you

3- want them delivered and the FTP does the rest.

Finally comes the part everyone hates — insurance. Nobody likes making insurance payments until something goes wrong, and then they’re really glad to have insurance and wish they had paid a little more to get even better coverage. Website owners face the same problem. Nobody wants to pay for daily backups — or even weekly or monthly ones — and many people choose not to, but then their website goes down and they really regret not having paid for the backup service. Just as I would suggest that any company get insurance, I absolutely recommend that website owners get a good backup system.

4- Avoiding Misconceptions and Missteps

Building websites and purchasing web hosting are things that are still new concepts to most people. Knowing who does what and who is responsible for what does not come naturally. A few things trip up many people . The next sections describe these things so you don’t fall into the same mistakes. Know what to expect from hosting support Your web host will offer support in some manner. Some hosts offer phone support or an online chat option, whereas others might only offer support through an e-mail or ticket system. Either way, there are limits to

5-what your host can do for you.

As I mention in the section Finding the right location (and landlord), your host’s responsibility is to provide you with a computer connected to the Internet to host your website on. Generally, the hosting support desk will work with you to ascertain whether the problem is with your site or the hosting plan. If it turns out to be your site that is causing the problem, most hosts will tell you to find someone to help you fix it, or they may offer to help fix it for an extra charge. It would be unreasonable to assume that your host would be an expert in whatever language or script your site is hosted with and would have staff available to fix every problem you come across with the site you are creating. Make sure that you identify in advance other ways to troubleshoot problems that arise with your site for those situations where your host cannot help. Knowing where to turn in an emergency can be a great comfort in itself. Recognize that you’re the owner and you’re the responsible party Whenever anything goes wrong at home, I always look for someone else to blame. My poor kids get the blame for everything! The same is true online. Whenever something goes wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault. I never do anything wrong — at least, not that I’ll admit. The problem with that attitude, though, is that it gets me nowhere when something goes wrong with my website. What I’ve learned, the hard way, is that a website is the owner’s responsibility. You put a lot of time, work, effort, creativity, and money into creating the site, and, ultimately, if the worst happens and you lose it all then you’re the only one who can re-create it. Re-creating it will take a long time. You must take responsibility for your site and ensure that you have a good, recent backup of it at all times. In case the server blows up or your host goes bankrupt or some teenager with nothing better to do on a Friday night hacks in and deletes everything you need, you must be sure you have a recovery plan. Shouting at your host might feel good, and if the problem is the host’s fault, suing the company might be successful, but neither of those actions will get your site back. A website requires simply too much of your valuable time and talent for you to not do everything you can to ensure that you can recover it when disaster strikes.

6- Don’t fall foul of your host’s terms and conditions

Did you read the seemingly endless pages of your host’s terms and conditions when you signed up? I didn’t think so — I never do either. Web hosting terms and conditions make for interesting reading, though. You’d be amazed at what they say. Every host’s terms and conditions are slightly different, but here’s the general gist of them: “We’ve listed a thousand things that we could class as being unacceptable, and if we find you doing any one of them we will most likely suspend your account immediately and possibly even delete it without any notice.” Yes, seriously, your host is like a landlord, but there aren’t many laws covering what it can and can’t do. This means the host can, if it wants, change the locks right now and never give you access to your stuff again — for pretty much any reason. Now, most hosts won’t do that, but they generally give themselves the option should they need to. Things that will normally get you in trouble with your host are pornography, illegal content, and phishing sites (where you mimic a bank or other website to try to steal people’s login details). If your site does get suspended, contact your host immediately. You’ll probably have to do a little convincing that your site got hacked or you genuinely didn’t realize that what you were doing was wrong, but most often your host will at least let you collect your files before deleting the account. Don’t delay in contacting your host, though, because delays can be seen as proof that you knew you were in the wrong and you’re not going to fight to get your stuff back.

[probably-enjolras]

Enjolras’ Anon Chapter 9

ughhhh i wanted it to be longer but i’m in too much pain to write more, like yeah it’s 1.6k but i wanted to get to 3k, alas

support me on AO3 cause it’s easier to reply to you that way!

Enjolras went home from his it’s-a-date-but-it’s-not-a-date smiling. As soon as he realized that he did in fact like Grantaire, everything felt so much lighter. There wasn’t a constant sense of dread and misery aviating over him.

He also knew where Grantaire lived. He thought about all the times that he was late, but now he could see R running down his stairs. Enjolras smiled at the thought. Grantaire wants to be on time, he really does. He wants to be present.

Enjolras flopped onto his bed, butterflies fluttering in his stomach. He felt like a teenager again, blushing while thinking about his crush. He had half the mind to scold himself for being so emotional, but it felt too good to stop.

Enjolras pulled out his phone and sent a text to Courfeyrac and Combeferre.

Enjolras: it’s settled, i like him

Courfeyrac: eyy congrats

Combeferre: this leaves the question of ‘what now?’

Enjolras: i mean… dating?

Courfeyrac: that would be the logical step

Courfeyrac: you like him, he likes you, you two go off and fuck like bunnies!

Enjolras: great talk, let’s put that plan in action

Combeferre: yes, and do you have any plan of how to ask him out?

Combeferre: because saying ‘i know you like me because you’ve been talking to my blog on anon for a while and i went on a hunt to find you’ doesn’t seem like the best thing

Courfeyrac: i mean, why not?

Enjolras: ferre is right, he would want to know why i didn’t just ask him right away

Enjolras groaned and pushed his face into his pillow. Why did this have to be so hard? He just wanted to go out with Grantaire, but this whole scheme of how he even figured out it was R was so elaborate it would seem at best a dick move, and at worse a stalker move.

Courfeyrac: dammit why isn’t ‘hey i like you, let’s go fuck’ not enough

Enjolras: when have i ever been anything but extra

Courfeyrac: fair point

Combeferre: you’ll need to get him alone, and at a pretty nice place

Enjolras: not a restaurant

Enjolras: and it can’t be something he likes too much because then he won’t pay attention to me

Courfeyrac: i think you underestimate his ability to pay attention to you

Courfeyrac: hell, i think he underestimates his ability to pay attention to you

Combeferre: how about a picnic? Simple yet romantic

Enjolras: but i don’t want him to know i want to ask him out

Courfeyrac: movies?

Enjolras: nah, it’s dark and not a place for talking

Combeferre: lunch + a walk to that cafe with cats and books?

Enjolras: yes! I can ask him out during the walk and then we can go do whatever, and if it goes bad we can play with cats

Courfeyrac: ok, it won’t go bad, but it’s nice to have a backup plan

Enjolras: thanks for the advice, I’m gonna go talk to him now

Enjolras put his phone down, staring at the messages. He could do this, right? He liked Grantaire, and he had for a while, even if he didn’t realize it. Grantaire challenged his ideas like no one else, and he did it so nonchalantly. He was someone who bettered Enjolras in ways no friend could.

Enjolras sighed, laying down and looking at his ceiling. How do you ask out the man that betters your existence without even trying? Enjolras rolled over, looking at his desk. His computer was charging on top of a pile of books.

Enjolras sat up and grabbed his computer. He entered his password and logged onto Tumblr. He smiled when he saw that he had asks. The first three were random people and Enjolras deflated for a second, but the final one started with a phrase he had come to recognize on sight.

(passionate anon) we went out today, i mean, not in a proper date, but it did feel like it. he was so cute, and it was so easy to talk to him, i wasn’t expecting that, i thought we would only be able to talk when he had some alcohol in him. i hope we can do that again

Enjolras grinned widely, unable to hold in the sudden rush of joy. He rushed to post the messages and grabbed his phone. He took a deep breath, calming the last of his nerves, before opening up his messages.

Enjolras: hey, had a nice time today, wanna go for lunch again tomorrow? i don’t have anything going on

Enjolras held his breath as he watched the speech bubble in the left hand corner. It can’t take that long to answer a simple question, can it? After what Enjolras could only assume was an eternity, Grantaire responded.

Grantaire: yeah! do you have a place in mind?

Enjolras let out the breath he was holding and smiled to himself.

Enjolras: well i know this place, they serve great muffins and sandwiches, and then maybe that cafe with the kittens?

Grantaire: that sounds great! does noon work for you?

Enjolras: yeah, meet you there!

Grantaire: can’t wait

Enjolras laughed, he couldn’t help it. He had set up a time and place for him to ask Grantaire out. He flopped back down, smiling up at the ceiling.

“I’m really doing this,” he whispered. Enjolras sat back up and looked out the window. It was starting to get dark and he could see his reflection in the glass.

His cheeks were bright red and his hair was mess from his pillows, but he had the largest grin on his face. “I’m gonna do this!” he said to himself, louder this time. Enjolras laughed again, standing up to clean up after his day. He kept repeating that phrase to himself, in awe of what tomorrow has in store.

After he showered and brushes his teeth, Enjolras got into bed. He knew it wasn’t late, it was only 8:30pm, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t wait. Enjolras sighed, closing his eyes and willing sleep to come, and after a few minutes it did.

Sleep left after about six hours. If he had gone to bed at midnight or one, maybe that wouldn’t be such a problem. It would be six or seven, and that’s a reasonable time to start the day. Enjolras could get work done before he went out and he wouldn’t have to work on anything during the day.

But he hadn’t gone to bed at midnight, he had gone to bed at 8:30, and here is was, wide awake at 2:30am wide awake. Enjolras tried to go back to sleep. He got up, made some tea, read a little bit, and laid back down, ready to get some sleep.

Enjolras looked up at his ceiling, sighing to himself. He knew that it was the anticipation that was keeping him awake. It had happened all his life. On the first day of school, he would always wake up early and be ready for the bus an hour early than needed. The same thing happened on holidays and birthdays. His mind was ready to get stuff done, while his body just wanted to sleep.

Enjolras kicked off his blanket, cursing softly. He tried to get as comfortable as possible, but nothing helped. He groaned, pouting to himself. There was nothing he could do, but that didn’t make it any less frustrating.

There was a chance that his friends were still awake. Most of them stayed awake until they passed out around three am. That gave him a solid thirty minutes to talk to someone. Enjolras considered it, but decided against it. He didn’t want to explain to his friends how he already got six hours. Some would call him old, some would want to know why he went to sleep at that time, and Courfeyrac would manage to do both.

Enjolras unlocked his phone and, against his better judgement, looked for Grantaire’s instagram account. Being awake late at night and looking through his crush’s instagram was a perfectly normal thing to do, right?

Grantaire didn’t post often, but it was still filled with photos. Some of them were of his artwork or photographs of what he found beautiful. Enjolras smiled, Grantaire was a true artist.

Other photos were photos of his friends. There was one of Joly and Bossuet, clearly not knowing that the photo was taken as they held hand and smiled at each other. Another was of Eponine, smiling at the camera and raising a glass in its direction. The one after that was of Bahorel and Courfeyrac the day they decided to have a rollerskate race down the street. The image depicted the moment Courfeyrac crossed the finish line. It didn’t show the moment after, when Courfeyrac fell when he tried to stop. Enjolras smiled, making a mental note to screenshot all the photos so he could keep them for himself.

But the majority of the photos were of him. Some were of Enjolras giving speeches, others were him talking with friends, or just him on his phone. Enjolras couldn’t believe he never noticed Grantaire take these. He put his phone down, looking at the window.

It still reflected his image, but Enjolras didn’t see himself anymore. He didn’t understand what about him made Grantaire take such beautiful photos. He felt like he didn’t deserve the attention.

Enjolras looked down at his hands and put his phone on his bedside table. He sighed and closed his eyes, but his mind kept running. Maybe if it ran far enough, he would be too tired to think anymore.

Enjolras’ wish to sleep was finally granted around four am, and he drifted off into less than peaceful sleep.

find that les mis lyric! it’s not hidden too well, whoops

[alwayscitsitra-blog]

icloud login finder

It’s really hard to come to grips with the basics of using iCloud login finder. Less prestigiously working out how to login to iCloud a great obstacle for many. But, get until this. It’s nowhere near as difficult when you grasp some key concepts about ways to use iCloud and how iCloud deals with your data, photos, mail and more. And, we started this site you want to do exactly that – to help anyone understand how unit iCloud (and we even wrote the number one guide on them that you can usually get here. In this article we’re going showing you exactly easy methods to login to iCloud, how to set-up iCloud (if you haven’t already) and we’ll also answer the questions that confuse so many Apple users who struggle with iCloud. You can delve far more deeper into what we cover in this particular introduction to iCloud by checking out the blog, where we regularly post in-depth ‘how to’ articles about understanding iCloud too as the right way to get one of the most out of one's iPhone or iPad. You can check out a few examples of our own blog posts here: iCloud storage post – http://www.icloudlogin.com/icloud-storage-full iPhone storage post – http://www.icloudlogin.com/iphone-storage-full But, leave that until later. For now, we’ll help put you up to hurry with iCloud. Let’s investigate further. iCloud Login finder – Let’s Clear Up the Most Basic Cause of Confusion Many frustrated iPhone and iPad owners come to this site interested in the respond to ‘How to login to iCloud?’ or ‘How must get to my iCloud account?’ or possibly a variation on that decoration style. So, we’ll start generally there. News flash: You probably don’t wish to ‘login to iCloud’ almost all! iCloud is designed to seamlessly store, synchronise and backup your many forms of data without you needing to login….possibly out of them all. If you’re thinking ‘How do I access my iCloud?’, you’re thinking within the whole iCloud system the way. In effect, once you’ve set up an iCloud account on any device, that set up is ‘logged in’ all time. It’s not a ‘login’ on the inside way you’d normally appear it (and we’ll explain more because read on) but your device (iPhone, iPad and computer) is to connected back to your iCloud account and exchanging information. And you don’t in order to ‘log in’ or a single thing at all to reach that goal once you’ve set it up initially. So, it’s highly likely that you’re thinking you have to login to iCloud when, in fact, all you need to attempt to do is ensure that the settings that you can choose for iCloud on your iPhone, iPad, Mac or PC, accomplish what a muscular from iCloud. But, fair enough. If you do need to login to iCloud via the web by stopping by the iCloud.com website, we’ll see that swiftly. iCloud – Why You Don’t Require to Log With regard to! When you decide look at iCloud in your own iPhone or iPad – you can’t! (well you can, as we’ll cover below, but it’s really not easy!) But you can look at what data you have stored there, which you will almost always see only if it is going to be displayed with an app or function at your iPhone, iPad or computer. What you're capable of on your iPhone or iPad is go to: Settings > iCloud and choose what you permit iCloud to perform (don’t worry, we’ll a person how to try this later on if you’ve never activated iCloud). For we seem to what we have set up iCloud achieve will mean the no less than storing Contacts, Reminders and Calendar entries in iCloud (perhaps effectively data while Photos or Mail) and, maybe, using iCloud to backup your entire device. You is able to see what the steps you can control your existing settings on your iPhone appear to in people below. A person store that data within your iCloud account (which is related to your Apple ID) it will probably be pushed to any other device that you've got connected for one's iCloud akun. One method think concerning this is by looking at the example of the Contacts. These may begin off trapped in your iPhone but but if an iCloud account these kind of are actually gone after and thereafter stored inside your iCloud account and seamlessly synchronised after that to additional device which you've got linked your iCloud checking account. So, you will have the same Contacts data on your iPad, against your Mac or PC and, yes, stored on the world wide web at iCloud.com. What Does iCloud Try? Let me guess. You haven’t got a clue what iCloud does along with the way or why it can it. I learn the feeling. It confused me too for a long time. But, just keep reading and I’ll do my best additional medications sense of it for most people. iCloud is Apple’s system that ties your information and data together across multiple devices – should you have them and if you switch it with regards to. It takes information through device (iPhone, iPad or computer) and transfers it to cloud based servers that Apple supplies. You haven't anything to use this end of this system and it’s invisible the particular you do on your device. The data that began on your set up is then either stored with your iCloud account on the Apple servers or is synched from there or saved to them. There’s a subtle difference between those terms and that’s where accomplished struggle recognize what is occurring and why it aspects. So, what is the difference with the ‘sync’ of data via iCloud and the ‘Backup’ of internet data to iCloud? They will vary things along with also is made more baffling by the simple fact some settings choices means you are utilising iCloud like main storage location, so that those merchandise is never ‘backed up’ after they live permanently in iCloud (and to be able are, effectively, already and permanently secured there without you doing anything more). You can only sync email if you employ the iCloud e-mail (that could well be ‘yourname@icloud.com’ or whatever where you will put right before the ‘@’ symbol). In that case, in fact, all your valuable email is at and stored on iCloud in your bank account and is synced from there. If you might have another email address contact information (such 1 provided at the or a Gmail or similar), this isn’t duplicated or synced via iCloud but is either on your device (if POP3) or on a server (if IMAP). This email shouldn't be backed to your iCloud account. Only ‘…@icloud.com’ email is with your iCloud account. If you have iCloud Photo Libary switched on you’ve actually changed areas for their storage to iCloud for good. If you haven’t done that (iCloud Photo Library is fired up in Settings > Photos & Camera > iCloud Photo Library – and toggle to green for ‘On’), they are backed upwards of iCloud in the event that you switch ‘Backup’ on in iCloud settings. Similarly, if you have set Contacts and Calendars to ‘sync’ with iCloud, you have, in fact, set these types of be input into iCloud. So, they aren’t backed up there but stored there permanently. Again, it’s the doing the laundry iCloud Drive – when you have it on, that wherever those documents are stored and then they are synced to your devices from iCloud. It’s extremely important that you simply understand that every the music and video in your iTunes is rarely backed up unless you plug in and communicate with iTunes on your hard drive. ‘Backup’ to iCloud only backs up music, videos and apps that bought from apple itunes! All other music and video isn’t backed up unless you should a full backup to iTunes using your pc (and functioning at than a bit more in the guidelines.) The key thing to understand is that toggling on (to green) in iCloud settings on your iPhone or iPad is fixing the location of where that information is stored to iCloud – from where it is synced to devices. Anything stored and syncing from iCloud is as nice as a backup, since that data is stored there anyway, although it’s technically different! So, toggling on ‘Backup’ in the iCloud settings does backup your device to iCloud so that you can restore from there, but this doesn't include non-iCloud email, and also music and video. iCloud Login using the iCloud Website Now, as promised, we’re going to reply the question that some Apple users still ask – ‘How do I access my iCloud?’ or ‘How can i get to my iCloud account?’ actually ‘What’s my iCloud membership?’. They all amount towards same detail. Now you understand what iCloud is doing, you’ll appreciate in which you normally won’t need to login to iCloud to be able to any of the things for that it was designed. Nonetheless, you will hear occasions an individual have might in order to. Reasons which you are required to login to iCloud include: Accessing and your ‘@icloud.com’ email address when just have to be able to a computer that isn’t your own – perhaps on holiday abroad; Downloading photos to a drive or computer that isn’t already synchronised with the iCloud account; Using your iCloud account to ‘Find ‘iPhone’ if you’ve lost it; Updating or adding Contacts or Calendar entries should you have no access to your iPhone or iPad; Working remotely in one of the iCloud Apps – Pages, Numbers and Keynote; Retrieving or working by using a file residing in iCloud Build. It is, of course, clear that some of the reasons would actually only be necessary if yourrrve been not able to use your own iPhone or iPad or computer – assuming that you’d activated iCloud using your laptop as most certainly. In most situations this might be when the away in your own home using your working personal computer in a web-based cafe, expensive hotels or perhaps that of a friend because had few others device. Like I believe that – in today’s world, that isn’t very ordinarily! Enter your Apple ID and password in the fields. (note that including details make use of on your iPhone or iPad in order to apps or anything by means of iTunes store). Underneath that login box you have the choice to tick a box next to ‘Keep me signed in’. This may keep you logged in for apple you’re using for 2 weeks. Obviously, only tick this if you’re together with your own workstation. Don’t tick this on a public or shared computer! Also, on this screen a person are retrieve a lost or forgotten password for your Apple ID which goes here. So, you’re fine now to determine what is in your iCloud account if you’ve logged in on the computer or laptop and you’re exploring your iCloud account available. But visualize you’re trying see on your own iCloud account from an iphone or tablet? This is what you see if you browse to https://icloud.com each morning Safari browser on your iPhone or iPad. There is really a way to log directly into the iCloud website if you’re using Safari, but we’ll look during this below. Using works, however it might not do you much perfect. As you’ll see, navigating around the iCloud.com website on your iPhone isn’t much a blast! But, logging into sites to iCloud on your iPhone happens to be fairly simple in itself. Initially you’ll think nothing has changed as you’ll still view the device version of the page. Don’t worry, something is different. Nonetheless, you can enter your Apple ID and password, just because would on the browser on your computer, and log within your iCloud account. However, that’s where enjoyment ends. It can be done, and as a last resort, this may be a way to log in your iCloud account directly whilst benefits of iPhone or iPad. You you must look at what is inside each app, but it really really will take a lot of pinching and squeezing and trial and error. You in order to warned. Just…don’t expect too much! iCloud Login on iPhone using Safari in iOS You do the exact same thing in Safari but it’s sometime a little less reliable in displaying the iCloud login page. That said, we will always made it appear after a few refreshes! Click that and you’ll come to be sent straight to the desktop icloud login page. Possibly not necessarily quite! If not, then, acquiring Chrome, input just ‘icloud.com’ in the browser bar and rekindle. In Safari this requires several efforts to make the desktop version of icloud.com appear, but persevere whilst it will exercise! Once again, you in order to be stuck having a hard to navigate version on your small device but at the you can access it this option. iCloud Login finder on iPhone – Method? Is that the only way, though? Sure, this could be the way that Apple absolutely wants in order to access iCloud on your iOS device, but it’s not what you’d call ‘logging in’ in any traditional concept of that statement. If you own iCloud account activated on an iOS device it’s effectively permanently logged in as it exchanges and syncs the knowledge that anyone might have asked it to, seamlessly and phone. So when you attend Settings > iCloud your iOS device you simply see all of the options that you must control just what being stored and synced by iCloud. In order to see what is within each guys native apps (such as Contacts or Calendar or, indeed, Photos if you utilize iCloud Photo Library) you simply must open the related app to determine the information or pictures stored on that point. There isn't an access to the contents every app from the inside of this area of Settings stored on your iOS device. Sometimes you’ll hear people stating that you can login to iCloud inside your iPhone or iPad just by accessing ‘iCloud’ in the main Settings menu of iOS. And, they’re right – you can ‘access’ iCloud’ by doing that – but you’re not ‘logging in’ to iCloud. So, no way. Not really. By going on your iOS device to Settings > iCloud you’re simply accessing the settings in the iCloud app on your iOS reader. Take dress yourself in approach as set out above for doing this in Chrome. When find the device page displayed with the URL at icloud.com/iphone_welcome/ pull down round the page in order for the lower menu bar appears and then click the ‘share’ star. This gives up the share options and if you scroll across to proper way hand end you’ll see ‘Request Desktop Site’. You’ll realize that you’re now inside your iCloud.com account, logged in to it on the net. All good. But, on an iPhone (and, to previous legislation if lesser extent, a good iPad) it’s now way too tricky to navigate up to. The screen is zoomed in too close, it doesn’t in order to resize it also jumps to start apps while you try to scroll on the screen to get what you’re looking the following. Now, type in ‘icloud.com’ globe browser bar and then hit ‘Go’ and ultimately you will be shown the desktop version of icloud.com. We’re just about sure why this works but would seem to need that second effort to obtain past the device page which Apple wants you to employ a to login using their Apps. What’s happening would be the you’re still being show page that is actually at icloud.com/iphone_welcome/ in the beginning you ‘request desktop site’ and only once you say hello to the icloud.com front-page URL do you get the icloud login page it's poker room. You’ll need to have the Chrome browser installed (although this works in most browser Apps even just like native Apple Safari App on your iPhone or iPad having a bit really an a problem!). If you don’t have that, you can click here to handle the installation. Go on, you associated with it now – I’ll wait that. When a person Chrome installed, open it and pay a visit to https://.icloud.com – and you’ll see identical things as in Safari! However, Apple knows you’re using their browser (Safari), on definitely their devices, so they try to force the options that make use of your iPhone or iPad Apps: Startup iCloud inside of this device Open Find My iPhone Open Find Friends and neighbors All elements that you may believe you required to login to iCloud to be able to but Apple only offers you an ‘on-device’ solution. And that’s the aim. If you should do those things, Apple is forcing you down the path of using iCloud the way they designed it and give . using an App that could read the data from your iCloud account – you don’t have to have to login to iCloud you need to do those things if you’re using an iphone or iPad at that very moment. But, suppose you could do something else and you think you should be logged to the your iCloud account find a quote? Bear with me, because I’m gonna be show you ways! Sounds easy enough, right? iCloud Login finder on iPhone (or iPad) Unfortunately, the simple truth is Apple doesn’t want you to! You may wonder why that is – motive do we have. That’s why we’ll show you operate can be achieved! Stick with us here and I’ll set you considerably as view iCloud.com from your iOS equipment. Or, if you have had never had an Apple ID could certainly click camp fire . link on that screen entitled ‘Don’t have an Apple I would? Create yours now.’ which will can help you set one up very easily. You cannot access or create an iCloud account without an Apple Id. (On that page, clicking the link to create an Apple ID opens a pop-up nevertheless, you can also create an Apple ID here. Once get entered your Apple ID and password, click consist of arrow. his takes one to another screen that is the ‘behind the scenes’ settings of your iCloud fund. Here you will be able to find much of one's free (or paid) iCloud storage happen to be using along with what apps, which devices you have connected into the iCloud account (your iPhone, iPad and then computers) and several other functions such as who inside a Family Sharing group, if you have that arrange. If in order to previously develop two-step authentication, you will probably need to click on ‘Verify’ towards the top. If not, you are going to logged by. Clicking on any of the icons when logged into iCloud.com will need to the region for every single and every. If you possess an @iCloud.com email address, the cursor ‘Mail’ usually takes you for online version of that email account with full functionality. Similarly, the native tools you find on iOS – Contacts, Calendar and Reminders – are replicated in your icloud.com account (since, as we saw above, they are stored there). From this main iCloud.com screen you can do pretty much anything how the native Apple apps upon your device can do in their online versions of the apps. In five good right of screen you can click the drop down next into a name and access the ‘iCloud Settings’ screen’. If necessary, complete two-step verification by sending a code to a previously arranged trusted device by subsequent steps on screen.

[janiedean]

There's this guy I used to talk to in 2009 (!) but we never met, cause he lives in a far away state. We were only on friendly terms and after 2009 we never spoke again - I also only saw like 2 pictures of him in my life. We had no friends in common, he doesn't know my adress nor my phone number and I have changed my email ever since. Somehow in 2012 he found my tumblr, and I have no idea how he managed to, I was creeped out and just ignored his message.

(ii) then some time later I deleted my tumblr for personal reasons. 6 months later I made another one, and then I deleted and made yet another one. I never even once told him I had a tumbr, as in 2009 I didn't even know tumblr existed. Anyway, this guy found me on instagram and I had no idea how because my username is not my name but his tumblr was listed in the description, so I went to check it out and well... while he doesn't follow me, I'm sure I've seen him on my notes once or twice (iii) I realized that must be how he found my instragram, for I have reblogged a post about my mutuals not following me on instagram and put my username on the tag... So this means he checks my tumblr regularly even though he doesn't follow me. Anyway, I'm sorry for coming to you, but I'm CREEPED OUT. How did he manage to find my tumblr?? He has no idea what my email is, and even if he did, I checked out the option that lets people find your tumblr through your email. (iv) Even if he knew my full name (it's possible, but it would be weird as fuck if he does remember that) nothing comes up on google that could lead him to my tumblr. I also never ever posted my name or surname on tumblr, though there are many pics of me. How the hell did he find my tumblr? And how do I keep him from reading my stuff? I don't think blocking him and changing my url would work, since he seems to find me everytime. But I talk about personal shit, it's just weird. Thank you!!!

uuuuhm okay so

re how did he find your tumblr I have no idea, he might have ran into it by chance and noticed that it was you, or if you don’t have friends in common maybe you have mutuals in common and he might have asked one of them? are you sure you’re not on any other social media he might run into? anyway, regardless of how he found you:

1) if he’s still looking at your stuff since 2009... yikes. I mean, that’s creepy

2) blocking him can’t hurt as in, he wouldn’t be able to reblog your posts or like them, though he could look at your blog, that’s unavoidable

3) I could tell you to try and contact the staff and asking them if they can make sure he can’t contact you at all even on anon, but... errrrrrrr tumblr staff is really not the best in this sense, like the one time I tried to report people on anon their answer was ridiculous but still, you could try filing a report and maybe you’d get to talk to a human being behind the system

4) I’m afraid that if the guy always somehow finds you either he has very good leads so he knows someone you know or something similar which is not really a good thing, but tldr: you can’t stop people from reading your tumblr unless you password it, though you can stop them from interacting with it to a degree. the only thing you could do is go to the police with it I guess but I understand it’’s really not a lot of evidence when it comes to online harassing especially if he just reads your posts and doesn’t interact with you :/ I’d get something like ghostery that hides your IP though just in case, and I’d block him preventively so he couldn’t show up in your notes or reblog your things, and then if you get anons from him you can get statscounter and try and block his IP which should prevent him from interacting with you at all but that’s about everything I have, sorry :( I hope you manage to solve this!

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Hi r/startups! This is a 3,000 word blog post I wrote on early stage marketing. I've formatted it for Reddit below, but there's a much better reading experience (with images) available on Medium.Since I began working on my startup I’ve read a lot of articles and books about creating something from nothing. They usually have excellent advice, but are light on the details of how you actually go about creating a product startup. The focus is often on challenges that are quite far down the startup journey, covering exciting sounding topics like ‘scaling’, ‘hiring’, and ‘building culture.’But the reality is that these things will feel like distant problems in the first 12–18 months. As a founder, you will have different challenges to deal with right now like I did: researching your idea, building an MVP with outsourced contractors, finding a technical co-founder, getting initial traffic to your website, settling on a pricing model, evaluating customer feedback, and making hard decisions about when to pivot. This is the third post in a series of five. Read the first two: Discovering and vetting your startup idea and Outsourcing your startup’s MVP.You’ve discovered an idea and built a Minimum Viable Product. Now you need to launch it, get it in front of your target audience, have them sign up, and give you feedback so you can throw away a bunch of code and no doubt ‘pivot…!’ This was the stage I was at with Dovetail in September 2016. I’ll go through the strategies I used to drive traffic to our website and how I measured what was effective.First things first: choosing a nameWhen choosing a name, use an existing, pronounceable word — even if the obvious domain names are taken — instead of making up a new word because its .com is available. Resist the temptation to create something that sounds like it’s straight out of Rick & Morty. The name you choose is very important because that (plus a logo and some colour) forms your entire brand early on. In general, you your name to to be short, unique, and something that’s not easily mispronounced. Naming things is hard.People love the name Dovetail but they’re concerned “it’s taken already.” There are plenty of other companies, agencies, and organisations called Dovetail. As long as these companies are not in the same industry as you, you needn’t worry too much. Dovetail happens to be a woodworking joint, a non-profit mental health organisation in Queensland, and a co-working space management app. The only practical problem you’ll face is that you have to compete with these in search rankings. However, the world is a big place, and people usually know to simply add ‘research’ to the end of their query if they can’t find us when searching ‘Dovetail’ on its own. Obviously don’t pick a name that is a copy, or close to a copy, of a competitor in the same space as you. You might find a copyright infringement notice in your letterbox earlier than you expected.You should be looking at available domains while brainstorming a name. Prepare for disappointment and compromise. Unfortunately for us, dovetail.com and dovetail.io were already taken. I initially compromised on getdovetail.io, before recently moving us to dovetailapp.com which is slightly better. Novelty domain names like del.icio.us were cool a few years ago but it turns out people tend to forget where the dots go. As a former designer on Delicious, I can attest to the trouble that domain caused, hence why the company began to use delicious.com instead.The takeaway here is that naming is hard.Let’s ship a thing to the internet!For the initial launch I built a responsive splash page in HTML & CSS and deployed that. I also asked a freelance illustrator if she could create some illustrations for the website. Custom illustrations might seem like an odd thing to spend money on at this stage, but first impressions are crucial. Even if you’re just making a splash page, it has to look fantastic, because everything potential customers see is a representation of your brand. Brand-building starts from day one.The website reiterated our value proposition (Improve your product with simple, contextual research) and included a summary of the features:Run market or customer research via SMS or emailGet in-the-moment responses from participantsAnalyse your data and centralise all insightsShare what you learned with your team and stakeholdersThere was a form to ‘request an invite’ which took a name, company, and email address. To same time I used a hack: the form response was submitted to a hidden, embedded Google Form connected to a spreadsheet.I set up a custom domain for our Medium blog, wrote this introduction post, and shared it on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. There wasn’t a lot interest, but after a few days, I got a flurry of sign ups from high quality companies. It turns out Dovetail was mentioned in an email newsletter for researchers. I emailed everyone who signed up, thanked them, and asked them a simple question:What do you hope to use Dovetail for?This question gave me more knowledge about them, their company, and their use case. It also tested whether they understood the product based on the marketing lingo I used on the splash page.At the same time I was preparing the product for its first users. The app had an admin interface which allowed me to send invites. I started sending invites in batches in October. I was very stressed. I had low confidence in the stability of the product, in part because I didn’t understand the code well, and I knew the outsourced developers I used were not going to win any prizes for code quality. In the end it took me three months before the anxiety subsided and I felt comfortable with the stability of the app.Letting people sign up themselvesUntil late December, the only way to sign up was to request an invite. We’re not a consumer app and there’s no need to ‘reserve your username’ so the reason for this approach was not to stir up excitement and demand. Instead, the reasons are boring:The product didn’t have a self-serve sign up flow with email confirmation, password reset, and so on. I don’t think we even had the ability to send transactional emails to new users.These first people were high quality leads. They hadn’t come from AdWords; instead they were word-of-mouth. I wanted to personally onboard them to make a great first impression. Even if the product was an MVP, our customer support was not.The code was unproven beyond my own testing with friends. I needed to send out a batch of invites, watch the logs, fix bugs, and repeat before I felt confident to allow anyone to sign up without my hand-holding.If you sign up for Dovetail now, you’ll notice that you can’t proceed without confirming your email address. Whether you have email confirmation in your onboarding flow is a subject of much debate. You can make your own decision, but I’ll offer some of the reasons why we have it in Dovetail:Like Atlassian’s sign up flow (which I talked about in my first post), having some friction on the marketing site helps to weed out low quality leads who would never purchase anyway.Dovetail allows users to send SMS messages and emails in bulk. Verifying email on sign up helps prevent people using our service to spam others.Email verification is a standard pattern for SaaS products now, so the funnel drop-off is negligible. After removing fake email addresses, our email confirmation step only accounts for a ~2% drop-off.At first, users saw a sample data set that showed a ‘finished’ study in Dovetail. After looking through the analytics and talking with customers, I found that almost everyone created another study called ‘test study’ and added themselves as a participant. Of course! Researchers wanted to see what the experience was like for participants on the other side. I modified the sample data to be an active study called ‘Sample study’, with the researcher entered as a participant. The study emailed them questions that said “This is what a question looks like for participants.” I productised what users were already doing, and retention improved.Another behaviour I noticed is people preferring to change the sample study rather than creating a new one. Even if there is little real friction in actually doing so, the perceived friction in creating a ‘new thing’ is quite high.The takeaway here is to ship a first version of your onboarding and observe user behaviour to make continual improvements. You won’t get it right the first time. Our onboarding experience still has problems, and we’ll get around to working on it later this year.Marketing channelsQuora, StackExchange, and RedditA lot of our quality traffic has come from Quora. My strategy was to search for a problem that our product solved (e.g. “what tools exist for diary studies”), find the Quora question, and post an answer. I linked to our product and included a disclaimer that I was the founder. This strategy has worked very well. Quora questions are high on Google search ranking. Our potential customers have Googled a problem, clicked on the Quora link, seen my answer, and visited our site.To a lesser degree, posting in Research, Design, and UX StackExchange sites and subreddits has sent a few page views our way, but I don’t go out of my way to submit to these sites since that’s not really where our audience is.Content marketingIntercom, Invision, and Hubspot have demonstrated that content marketing can be an effective way to drive traffic to your product. It’s free if you write the content yourself, lasts forever, and helps to boost your search ranking. Good content marketing can establish your brand as a reputable source of knowledge.My first attempt involved writing a few blog posts about diary studies on Medium. Our Medium blog used to be on a subdomain (blog.getdovetail.io), and I read somewhere that it’s better for SEO to have posts on your main domain instead. I copied the research posts from Medium over to a new section on our website called ‘Guides’, and wrote a couple more. Our blog is now focused on product news and non-research posts like this, while research content lives on our main site.I wasn’t sure how the guides I wrote would perform, but they seem to be doing well. After a few weeks they appeared in the top 5 results for searches like ‘diary studies’, ‘qualitative vs quantitative data’ and ‘participant recruitment.’ Bounce rates and session duration look good, and sign ups increased as a result of traffic to the guides.SEOI configured Google Search Console early on to measure our search ranking. I don’t know much about SEO, but I do believe a lot of the time it simply comes down to relevant, quality content. Google even have a section in their help documentation that says the same thing:“Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site.”Other factors to consider are site performance and mobile experience.I highly recommend making quick-win performance improvements like loading JS asynchronously, minifying assets, and using sprites or inline SVGs for images. PageSpeed Insights is great for seeing what Google’s verdict is on your performance. It’s a checklist of things to do, so just make sure you do all of them (some may be harder than others) and it’ll help your search ranking, especially on mobile.Speaking about mobile, both our website and product are responsive because quite frankly, there’s no excuse for websites not to have mobile support in 2017. At the very least your marketing website needs to be responsive, then you’ll either have a responsive product, a mobile site, or native apps for your app. There are pros & cons for each, but that’s the subject for another blog post!Paid advertising with Facebook and AdWordsI have some experience with Facebook Ads and Google AdWords from a few years ago, but mostly I don’t know what I’m doing.Earlier this year I set up ad campaigns on both platforms with identical budgets. Our hypothesis was that Google would out-perform Facebook because people search for solutions to problems on Google, and we were building a solution to a problem! We’re very lucky that researchers (like developers, designers, and other ‘tech’ people) actively look to improve the way they work. A lot of people don’t do this, and are quite happy to put up with whatever they currently use for all eternity. I’m sure you have some friends or family that fit this description.If, like me, you don’t know what you’re doing when creating online ads for your startup, there are a few terms you should understand:Impressions. This is the number of people who have seen your ad.Click-through rate. This is the percentage of people who, after seeing your ad, click on it and visit your website. It’s usually quite low; around 1 to 2%.Sign up rate. This is the percentage of people who sign up on your website. It’s usually around 5%, and if it’s higher than this, you’re doing quite well.Conversion rate. Assuming you have a free plan or trial period, this is the percentage of people who actually hand over some money, or ‘convert’ into a paying customer. This number varies wildly between companies and products.Acquisition cost. This is how much you spent to acquire a single paying customer.Average lifetime value. This is how much money you expect to get, in total, from each customer. Your lifetime value should be greater than your acquisition cost otherwise you’re losing money when trying to acquire customers. (This may be okay if you’re building a social network or a ride-hailing service where the race to a critical mass of users is important. We’re not.)With these five key metrics, we can map out a typical scenario.With AdWords and Facebook, you can pay per impression, click, or conversion. There are pros and cons to each which I won’t go into here. Let’s say you choose to pay per impression. You get 10,000 impressions on your search ad, and a 2% click-through rate. Google or Facebook have charged you $300. Along with understanding why these companies are so wealthy, you now know that 200 people have visited your website from the ad. On your website, your sign up rate is 5%. So 10 of those people sign up for an account. Out of those 10 people, 2 of them decide to convert, making your conversion rate 20%. So you have spent $300 to acquire two paying customers. $150 per customer. Now, let’s say you charge them $50 per month. Each customer has to stick around for 3 months for you to break even. Any more than that and you’ll turn a profit, however of course this is not factoring in any company expenses.You then realise how great content marketing is.Product Hunt and other aggregator sitesFrom day one people would sign up, take screenshots, and list Dovetail on aggregator sites like nicelydone.club, sansfrancis.co, and hypershoot.com. Mostly the creators of these sites. We got a few sign ups from these sites, but mostly these they’ve been of little value.I had high expectations for Product Hunt but was disappointed. The audience is mostly designers, developers, and other startup founders who are looking for trendy software to use themselves or as inspiration.If you’re not building a chatbot, Slack add-on, or a design prototyping tool, then don’t bother with Product Hunt. B2B products in a specific market don’t do well there. Product Hunt is a waste of your time if you are not building for this audience. Instead, find out where your audience hangs out and go there. In our case, that’s Quora, Twitter, Medium, and email newsletters.Internal referrals through team invitesLastly, another strategy we employ is in-product invitations. We needed to build ‘teams’ anyway in order to become a collaborative product. A nice side effect is user growth from researchers inviting the rest of their team. One person at a company might refer 5 or 6 of their colleagues.Because our pricing model is not based on the number of collaborators you have (more on that in a later blog post), there is hardly any friction when inviting teammates.However, in saying that, the product today doesn’t do enough to incentivise users to invite their colleagues at opportune moments. The feature is kind of tucked away in team settings. So there’s work to do there.Measuring marketing successAs an early stage startup, you will spend a lot of time experimenting with different marketing strategies until you find reliable ‘marketing channels’ that deliver high quality users at an acquisition cost less than their lifetime value. Marketing channels differ between industries and products. Beauty and clothing startups might have a lot of success on Instagram, but your highly technical data warehouse solution probably doesn’t lend itself to hipster, filtered photos.When you experiment, you need to measure. Measuring different marketing strategies is the only way to find channels that work for you. With Dovetail, I made sure our analytics story was solid from the beginning. We use Mixpanel primarily for in-product behavioural analytics, and Google Analytics for page view and demographic data. I also learned that it’s a great idea to also install a Facebook Pixel on your site even if you’re not planning on marketing via Facebook yet. It can start building a custom audience of website visitors which is great for remarketing later on.With Mixpanel specifically, you will most likely need to do some work to connect the JavaScript library with your backend so you can link anonymous users browsing the website to the actual user ID in the database when they sign up. This means you can track someone’s journey from the website all the way into the product. Mixpanel then has some neat features that help you figure out the ‘aha!’ moments that cause people to convert.Don’t leave analytics instrumentation too late. Add it as part of your regular development so you can start collecting data and learning from it straight away. With Google Analytics connected to AdWords, you can see what ads are generating paying customers. Likewise with Facebook. Optimise for conversion rather than clicks or impressions since that’s closer to revenue.In summaryChoose a pronounceable name. Make your website fast and mobile-friendly. Iterate on your sign up flow. Add analytics from day one. Go where your audience is. Forget about Product Hunt. Experiment with marketing channels. Measure what works and double down on that.Original post on Medium

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Amazon Aurora Multi-Primary First Impression

For what reason should I use a real multi-primary setup? To be clear, not a multi-writer solution where any node can become the active writer in case of needs, as for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) or Percona Server for MySQL using Group_replication. No, we are talking about a multi-primary setup where I can write at the same time on multiple nodes. I want to insist on this “why?”. After having excluded the possible solutions mentioned above, both covering the famous 99.995% availability, which is 26.30 minutes of downtime in a year, what is left? Disaster Recovery? Well, that is something I would love to have, but to be a real DR solution we need to put several kilometers (miles for imperial) in the middle. And we know (see here and here) that aside from some misleading advertising, we cannot have a tightly coupled cluster solution across geographical regions. So, what is left? I may need more HA, ok, that is a valid reason. Or I may need to scale the number of writes, which is a valid reason as well. This means, in the end, that I am looking to a multi-primary because: Scale writes (more nodes more writes) Consistent reads (what I write on A must be visible on B) Gives me 0 (zero) downtime, or close to that (5 nines is a maximum downtime of 864 milliseconds per day!!) Allow me to shift the writer pointer at any time from A to B and vice versa, consistently. Now, keeping myself bound to the MySQL ecosystem, my natural choice would be MySQL NDB cluster. But my (virtual) boss was at AWS re-invent and someone mentioned to him that Aurora Multi-Primary does what I was looking for. This (long) article is my voyage in discovering if that is true or … not. Given I am focused on the behavior first, and NOT interested in absolute numbers to shock the audience with millions of QPS, I will use low-level Aurora instances. And will perform tests from two EC2 in the same VPC/region of the nodes. You can find the details about the tests on GitHub here. Finally, I will test: Connection speed Stale read Write single node for baseline Write on both node: Scaling splitting the load by schema Scaling same schema Test Results Let us start to have some real fun. The first test is … Connection Speed The purpose of this test is to evaluate the time taken in opening a new connection and time taken to close it. The action of the open/close connection can be a very expensive operation, especially if applications do not use a connection pool mechanism. As we can see, ProxySQL results to be the most efficient way to deal with opening connections, which was expected given the way it is designed to reuse open connections towards the backend. Different is the close connection operation, in which ProxySQL seems to take a little bit longer. As a global observation, we can say that by using ProxySQL we have more consistent behavior. Of course, this test is a simplistic one, and we are not checking the scalability (from 1 to N connections) but it is good enough to give us the initial feeling. Specific connection tests will be the focus of the next blog on Aurora MM. Stale Reads Aurora multi-primary uses the same mechanism of the default Aurora to update the buffer pool: Using the Page Cache update, just doing both ways. This means that the Buffer Pool of Node2 is updated with the modification performed in Node1 and vice versa. To verify if an application would be really able to have consistent reads, I have run this test. This test is meant to measure if, and how many, stale reads we will have when writing on a node and reading from the other. Amazon Aurora multi-primary has two consistency models: As an interesting fact, the result was that with the default consistency model (INSTANCE_RAW), we got a 100% stale read. Given that I focused on identifying the level of the cost that exists when using the other consistency model (REGIONAL_RAW), that allows an application to have consistent reads. The results indicate an increase of 44% in total execution time, and of 95% (22 times slower) in write execution. It is interesting to note that the time taken is in some way predictable and consistent between the two consistency models. The graph below shows in yellow how long the application must wait to see the correct data on the reader node. In blue is the amount of time the application waits to get back the same consistent read because it must wait for the commit on the writer. As you can see, the two are more or less aligned. Given the performance cost imposed by using REGIONAL_RAW,  all the other tests are done with the default INSTANCE_RAW, unless explicitly stated. Writing Tests All tests run in this section were done using sysbench-tpcc with the following settings: sysbench ./tpcc.lua --mysql-host= --mysql-port=3306 --mysql-user= --mysql-password= --mysql-db=tpcc --time=300 --threads=32 --report-interval=1 --tables=10 --scale=15  --mysql_table_options=" CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin"  --db-driver=mysql prepare  sysbench /opt/tools/sysbench-tpcc/tpcc.lua --mysql-host=$mysqlhost --mysql-port=$port --mysql-user= --mysql-password= --mysql-db=tpcc --db-driver=mysql --tables=10 --scale=15 --time=$time  --rand-type=zipfian --rand-zipfian-exp=0 --report-interval=1 --mysql-ignore-errors=all --histogram  --report_csv=yes --stats_format=csv --db-ps-mode=disable --threads=$threads run Write Single Node (Baseline) Before starting the comparative analysis, I was looking to define what was the “limit” of traffic/load for this platform. From the graph above, we can see that this setup scales up to 128 threads and after that, the performance remains more or less steady. Amazon claims that we can mainly double the performance when using both nodes in write mode and use a different schema to avoid conflict. Once more, remember I am not interested in the absolute numbers here, but I am expecting the same behavior. Given that, our expectation is to see: Write on Both Nodes, Different Schemas So AWS recommend this as the scaling solution: And I diligently follow the advice. I used two EC2 nodes in the same subnet of the Aurora Node, writing to a different schema (tpcc & tpcc2). Overview Let us make it short and go straight to the point. Did we get the expected scalability? Well, no: We just had a 26% increase, quite far to be the expected 100% Let us see what happened in detail (if not interested just skip and go to the next test). Node 1 Node 2As you can see, Node1 was (more or less) keeping up with the expectations and being close to the expected performance. But Node2 was just not keeping up, and performances there were just terrible. The graphs below show what happened.While Node1 was (again more or less) scaling up to the baseline expectations (128 threads), Node2 collapsed on its knees at 16 threads. Node2 was never able to scale up. Reads Node 1Node1 is scaling the reads as expected, but also here and there we can see performance deterioration. Node 2Node2 is not scaling Reads at all. Writes Node 1Same as Read. Node 2Same as read. Now someone may think I was making a mistake and I was writing on the same schema. I assure you I was not. Check the next test to see what happened if using the same schema. Write on Both Nodes,  Same Schema Overview Now, now, Marco, this is unfair. You know this will cause contention. Yes, I do! But nonetheless, I was curious to see what was going to happen and how the platform would deal with that level of contention. My expectations were to have a lot of performance degradation and an increased number of locks. About conflict I was not wrong, node2 after the test reported: +-------------+---------+-------------------------+ | table | index | PHYSICAL_CONFLICTS_HIST | +-------------+---------+-------------------------+ | district9 | PRIMARY | 3450 | | district6 | PRIMARY | 3361 | | district2 | PRIMARY | 3356 | | district8 | PRIMARY | 3271 | | district4 | PRIMARY | 3237 | | district10 | PRIMARY | 3237 | | district7 | PRIMARY | 3237 | | district3 | PRIMARY | 3217 | | district5 | PRIMARY | 3156 | | district1 | PRIMARY | 3072 | | warehouse2 | PRIMARY | 1867 | | warehouse10 | PRIMARY | 1850 | | warehouse6 | PRIMARY | 1808 | | warehouse5 | PRIMARY | 1781 | | warehouse3 | PRIMARY | 1773 | | warehouse9 | PRIMARY | 1769 | | warehouse4 | PRIMARY | 1745 | | warehouse7 | PRIMARY | 1736 | | warehouse1 | PRIMARY | 1735 | | warehouse8 | PRIMARY | 1635 | +-------------+---------+-------------------------+ Which is obviously a strong indication something was not working right. In terms of performance gain, if we compare ONLY the result with the 128 Threads:Also with the high level of conflict, we still have 12% of performance gain. The problem is that in general, we have the two nodes behaving quite badly. If you check the graph below you can see that the level of conflict is such to prevent the nodes not only to scale but to act consistently.Node 1 Node 2 Reads In the following graphs, we can see how node1 had issues and it actually crashed three times, during tests with 32/64/512 threads. Node2 was always up but the performances were very low. Node 1 Node 2 Writes Node 1 Node 2 Recovery From Crashed Node About recovery time, reading the AWS documentation and listening to presentations, I often heard that Aurora Multi-Primary is a 0 downtime solution. Or other statements like: “in applications where you can’t afford even brief downtime for database write operations, a multi-master cluster can help to avoid an outage when a writer instance becomes unavailable. The multi-master cluster doesn’t use the failover mechanism, because it doesn’t need to promote another DB instance to have read/write capability” To achieve this the suggestion, the solution I found was to have applications pointing directly to the Nodes endpoint and not use the Cluster endpoint. In this context, the solution pointing to the Nodes should be able to failover within a second or so, while the cluster endpoint: Personally, I think that designing an architecture where the application is responsible for the connection to the database and failover is some kind of refuse from 2001. But if you feel this is the way, well, go for it. What I did for testing is to use ProxySQL, as plain as possible with nothing else, and the basic monitor coming from the native monitor. I then compared the results with the tests using the Cluster endpoint. In this way, I adopt the advice of pointing directly at the nodes, but I was doing things in our time. The results are below and they confirm (more or less) the data coming from Amazon. A downtime of seven seconds is quite a long time nowadays, especially if I am targeting the 5 nines solution that I want to remember is 864 ms downtime per day. Using ProxySQL is going closer to that, but still too long to be called zero downtime. I also have fail-back issues when using the AWS cluster endpoint, given it was not able to move the connection to the joining node seamlessly. Last but not least, when using the consistency level INSTANCE_RAW, I had some data issue as well as PK conflict:FATAL: mysql_drv_query() returned error 1062 (Duplicate entry ‘18828082’ for key ‘PRIMARY’)  Conclusions As state at the beginning of this long blog, the reasonable expectations to go for a multi-primary solution were: Scale writes (more nodes more writes) Gives me zero downtime, or close to that (5 nines is a maximum downtime of 864 milliseconds per day!!) Allow me to shift the writer pointer at any time from A to B and vice versa, consistently. Honestly, I feel we have completely failed the scaling point. Probably if I use the largest Aurora I will get much better absolute numbers, and it will take me more to encounter the same issues, but I will. In any case, if the multi-primary solution is designed to provide that scalability, and it should do that with any version. I did not have zero downtime, but I was able to failover pretty quickly with ProxySQL. Finally, unless the consistency model is REGIONAL_RAW, shifting from one node to the other is not prone to possible negative effects like stale reads. Given that I consider this requirement not satisfied in full. Given all the above, I think this solution could eventually be valid only for High Availability (close to being 5 nines), but given it comes with some limitations I do not feel comfortable in preferring it over others just for that, at the end default Aurora is already good enough as a High available solution. References AWS re:Invent 2019: Amazon Aurora Multi-Master: Scaling out database write performance Working with Aurora multi-master clusters Improving enterprises ha and disaster recovery solutions reviewed Robust ha solutions with proxysql Limitations of multi-master clusters https://www.percona.com/blog/2020/10/09/amazon-aurora-multi-primary-first-impression/