#this was also harder because of how much trickier it was to try and adapt siers design to feel fitting enough for my standards

[arolesbianism]

Time for more eternal gales isat au, this time featuring Sier as Isabeau, creating a sprite I can never use next to Aris’ because despite my best efforts it would make them look tall

[destiel-wings]

Your reply to my MBTI/Buffyverse post was the literal highlight of my week, and why am I not remotely surprised to see that you're a fellow INFJ?! I'd love to hear whether you would type Gunn as an ISFP, ISTP or neither (as you can see, I was too torn to choose!)

I'm very validated that you agree with most of my typings but promise not to get weirdly defensive (as we INFJs tend to do lol) if you want to tell me which ones you DISagree with!

Hiiiiiiii 💖 (sorry I didn't reply sooner it's been one hell of a week)

I'm so glad to hear that!!! 🥹 I got so excited when I came across your post, I've been obsessed with btvs all my life and these characters are such a huge part of me, and sometimes when you know someone too well it's harder to type them (because you can see more facets of their personality and so they stray too far from the stereotypes, which is why i think you found it so hard to type Buffy). That is to say that I've spent a lot of time trying to identify their MBTI types (and I'm currently trying to identify their zodiac signs/natal chart as well, because i do have a problem with these things 💀 it's just too fun trying to solve that kind of puzzle for the INFJ mind, as i suspect you know all too well) and I've obviously searched online to see how people typed them but i never agreed with some of the results, whereas we seem to see eye to eye on them which is why i was really excited about discussing it with you!

Now, about Gunn... yes, let's talk. Because... I would instantly think ISTP for him, but the more I think about it, the more it doesn't fit him at all. ISFP makes much more sense, especially considering the cognitive functions. I can see his Fi in the way he let himself be consumed by his hatred for vampires at the beginning, out of revenge for his sister, in the way he let his stubbornness lead him even if it meant being hostile (the way it was hard for Angel to gain his trust in the beginning), and in the unconditional loyalty he gave to his friends once he gave them this trust and his heart. He's very practical and adaptable, and he gets things done, likes to act, and he's not a thinker but a doer, a soldier with a good heart, so I can see Se and Te being in his cognitive functions set. Which leaves us with Ni as the fourth one, and this one is trickier to see in him... so I'm going to mention now the two doubts that i had about typing him as ISFP: 1) he's too basass & chill to be an ISFP (I see them more as cinnamon-roll-sized softies who are ruled by their emotions but express them through the exterior world - whereas the INFP types express them through their interior world) and 2) is he really an introvert? We've seen how comfortable he is around people, even new ones he's just met...

So I'm going to suggest a secret third option now (hear me out): ESFP. Which has all the aforementioned cognitive functions in its set, and has Ni as the fourth inferior function, which may explain why it's less visible in him and he struggles more with it (and maybe even why he found Fred's mind so attractive). I can see him being lead by Se, with Fi as the auxiliary function. He plays the cool basass chill guy but we all saw his soft side when he's around the people he loves, so it makes sense that he have the feeling function in the second position. What do you think?

About the other characters, I've checked my notes and there were some of them differing (but even then, i can see why you would choose the types you did - and they were still very close to the ones i would have guessed).

Specifically, if you don't decide to block me first, we need to talk about Willow (cause she's been driving me crazy, trying to type her!!! And i had finally settled on INFJ, after much consideration for ISFJ). You're also going to receive an ask about Tara because I'm very interested in the reasoning behind her being an INFP (after much consideration i had settled for ISFP).

I had typed Anya and Cordelia as ESTJs, and Dawn as ISFP (I can see her as an introvert, but I could see her as a xxxJ type too), and I had typed Angel as ISFP and Angelus ENTJ (but I can see your vision when you say INTJ and omg now that i think about it it makes so much sense).

I had the same doubts about Wesley between INTJ and ISTJ, but i finally settled for ISTJ.

[wirewitchviolet]

I want games that don’t care that I’m playing them.

This is one of those vague game design things where I’m probably combining more topics into one notion than I should be, but hear me out on this. How much I enjoy a game tends to be largely tied to how little it feels like the game cares that I’m playing it. Parts of this are mechanical, parts of this are story driven, let me elaborate after one of these page fold deals.

It’s probably easiest to explain what I want here by first getting into some of the things I don’t want.

First thing on the list- Adaptive difficulty. I hate it. Never even attempt to do this. It’s terrible. I’m not really sure how old this idea is. It could be argued it has roots going all the way back to stuff like Castlevania 3′s NA version throwing out all the damage values from everything in favor of a universal damage value hit with a multiplier based on how far into the game you are. It was really unambiguously becoming a trend though around the late 90s, especially in RPGs.

A basic fundamental concept in game design is that the character in a game and/or the person playing it is going to steadily improve over the course of the game, and so enemies later in the game should be harder to maintain a steady challenge. Some of this happens just as a result of the player gaining a better understanding of the game, we might also be picking up cool power-ups or doing the whole level-up thing.

The traditional way designers deal with this is, just, you know, make the later parts of the game harder. Have beneficial stuff appear less often or be more of a hassle to get, make enemies that hurt more or have attack patterns that are harder to cope with, or weak points that are trickier to exploit, maybe make environments harder to navigate, etc. etc.

Adaptive difficulty (in an RPG in particular) is when, instead of just designing a well balanced game like a sensible person, you instead design everything around the mathematical assumption that the player just started playing for the first time and needs everything to be a basically non-existent challenge, and then apply a universal multiplier to all that math based on something like the main protagonist’s experience level.

I’m just going to say it. This is probably the single stupidest most self-defeating idea any game designer has ever had.

If at level 1, I do 10 damage, and I’m fighting a goblin with 50 HP, and then later, when I am level 10, I am doing 100 damage, and that same goblin is given 500 HP to compensate, from a practical standpoint, nothing is happening. I have to hit that goblin 5 times to kill it. I have always needed to hit it 5 times, and I always will need to hit it 5 times. So why do I even HAVE a level and stats and such?

Well, because it’s an RPG. It’s the genre where there’s numbers that go up. But OK, let’s take a moment to consider WHY that’s true of RPGs. Going all the way back to D&D, the idea was that it’d be cool to have a game where you have some characters who start out super wimpy and potentially taken down by like a particularly mean-tempered rat, possibly, but would eventually get increasingly tough and cool until hitting a point where they can convincingly go toe to toe with dragons and demons and such, really selling the strength of the latter with fixed numbers such that when you’re up at the dragon killing level you can also just plow through the early game cannon fodder like it was nothing.

Going with scaling, that’s no longer true. I can walk up and punch that dragon right from the start, and then face a big goblin who could kill that dragon I killed with a glance later, and that’s dumb?

And that’s all assuming this is executed well. Another perk with the traditional approach, particularly with something in the console-style, Dragon Quest vein, is that the difficulty is elegantly self-regulating. If something is too hard, as the player hits their head on it, they level up, now the math is in their favor. Need more challenge? Intentionally avoid combat and try to keep your level as low as possible. Beautiful, elegant, not appreciated by like anyone who plays these things, but hey.

With adaptive difficulty though, ironically enough, that same setup tends to break? Generally there are other factors in how hard a challenge is going to be that aren’t all scaling off the magic scaling value. Other characters’ levels, what sort of equipment the character has access to, and hell maybe the actual scaling math just has a bad curve to it. This can, and frequently does, lead to games where if a player just grinds out levels out of habit (maybe they’re generally bad at RPGs and have learned to over level and brute force things), they totally screw themselves over, because now monsters are tuned for them being this level and having the gear that won’t be available until 3 more progress milestones. This is actually something even tabletop games have been struggling with for decades. And on the other side of the coin, odds are good players will work out what your scaling is based on, and then just game that system. Keep the main protagonist out of the fight and a lot of late 90s games become cake walks. For a while Bethesda was infamous for weird workarounds like making skills you don’t use your “primary” skills or sprinting around the world doing stuff  before monsters grow any teeth.

Meanwhile, getting away from RPGs, let’s look at horror games. A lot of people these days seem to look at the original Resident Evil (and to a lesser extent, RE2 and the GC remake) and how they got so much tension out of drip feeding a handful of bullets and healing items to the player, but they don’t want to actually study what those games did and math things out, possibly out of concern for players who burn through everything early and therefore hit a wall, so they do little adaptive tricks to simulate the feeling of scarcity. Are you a real pro at these things, never wasting a single bullet on anything but a perfect headshot, never getting a scratch, OK, we’re just going to pull all this spare ammo and all these healing items out and force you to keep up with that. Maybe start upping the HP and damage on everything to boot. Really struggling? We’ll top you off with extra goodies after every encounter.

I can see how that would hold appeal in a pitch meeting, and if a given player doesn’t know you’re doing it, sure, they’ll probably get that mild low-resources stress you’re wanting, but what if, and let’s be honest, this is far more likely, the player doesn’t buy into the illusion. How does this all play out when the player knows you’re adjusting all the math on the fly based on what they’re doing?

Well, now they’re going to have a much worse time. They have no actual incentive to conserve those healing items and dodge what they can, because they know they’ll get freebies after. There’s no real incentive to go for weak points or juke past monsters to save ammo, because they know you aren’t going to give them the extra ammo for later they’d have earned from a more honest game. Improving becomes a meaningless, self-defeating process. Unless of course there’s some flaw in the implementation and they can game the system. Like maybe if you use the most bullets possible and take the most hits on the first enemy, then avoid all combat for a while, you can score a bunch of extra pickups and then cash out later in the game by playing for real. Or maybe the player doesn’t clue in, but now they work out the cool trick to drop monsters quick, and suddenly they all get double HP and now it’s mandatory just to break even? Not really satisfying.

Now... here I’m suddenly realizing I really should have just made two posts, but indulge me as I also dig into the narrative side of things.

Nothing makes me roll my eyes harder than hearing how I’m The Chosen One from The Prophecy or whatever. That’s hackneyed lazy writing and I feel pandered to. Like yeah, obviously I’m the big damn hero who’s going to save the whole world because I’m playing a game and that’s just sort of baked into the medium, but can we not call attention to it? I, and I think the vast majority of other people, prefer a narrative where the hero is just some ordinary nobody who ends up succeeding because they were really clever or whatever.

Plus if everyone knows I’m the great hero from legend, it kinda becomes impossible to write good dialog, and avoid constantly writing yourself into a corner? Like if I’m the only person who can kill Lord Deathskull, shouldn’t the local merchants just give me all the gear and stacks of healing items I ask for to make sure I do it? How much hollow praise am I going to suffer through before I’ve even done anything to earn any of it? How many bosses are going to regurgitate the same speech about how they don’t buy into my hype? Please, I’m begging you, start me with some “who are you? Just some farm girl?” indignity and build up to me being someone to worry about only after I’ve turned a giant dragon snake thing or three into cool persistent terrain feature corpses.

And this goes double for environmental storytelling. It doesn’t help that people have been getting me to try MMOs lately where some degree of this is kind of inevitable, but I’ve been seeing this trend I hate of like... theme park attraction dungeons. Like you hear about the evil pirate king holding a meeting in a hidden grotto and you show up and it’s just this linear tube cave where you clearly see the big boss arena down at the end, and you run down cutting down mooks, and maybe partway down the pirate king comes out and taunts you a bit and runs off to the boss arena at just too fast a pace to keep up, then just stands there with his arms crossed until you’re ready to step in, hear his little speech, and fight him.

You know that sort of thing right? Again it feels to me like I’m on a ride at a theme park. This whole dungeon is just this big show being put on for my benefit, and makes no organic sense otherwise. You can do better. People have been doing better forever. Maybe I’m actually sneaking around an organically laid out base, or at least the string of fight rooms are plausibly structured. Here’s the pirates unloading a cargo hold, then over here’s a big room full getting drunk and aggro-ing when they see me, etc. Shadow of the Colossus is nothing but a string of boss fights against big freaking kaiju things which by necessity hang out in huge open arenas, and somehow MOST of those manage to blindside you by keeping you on an angle of approach where the big obvious boss arena is around a blind corner or at the top of a plateau you’re climbing and you don’t realize where you are until you almost literally bump right into the boss.

Hell here’s an easy one anyone can do- You’re forced to cross some big featureless wasteland desert. You have a boundary far enough in that you are just surrounded by wasteland everywhere, no clear landmarks in sight, then bam, giant burrowing worm boss/tank/guy on a horse/airship/sinkhole,whatever.

I just don’t want to feel like everyone I’m fighting is just standing around waiting for me to show up, you know? Gimme worlds that feel lived in. Give me monsters that are hard because this is the harsh part of the world where monsters have to be hard to survive. Slope the bottom of a pool so I can stay in the shallow end until I feel ready to go deeper. Or alternatively, don’t, just fill the pool with more water over time regardless of what I’m doing. Works great for Risk of Rain, enough so it’s where the title comes from.

Just please don’t act like I’m the special princess and everything has to be watching me to see what I do and then trying to make sure I have fun doing that. You know?

[nelvana]

In which the dungeon with fossil foes is explored

First [ARC 1]: In which the human is transformed First [ARC 2]: In which a present is prepared Next: In which the land between time is explored Previous: In which the territory of others is crossed

     While their early steps into Brine Cave surrounded them in darkness, it did not take them long to reach a brighter room, the beginning of the dungeon. The walls were covered in brown rocks like those that covered the cavern outside, as well as some blue rocks that seemed to be what was providing them light here. A small pool of water was located in this room, with a trickling stream that led out further into the dungeon. The water itself, was a sea green, just like the ocean. Under their feet was a mix of sand and rocks like those outside, giving an odd texture as they walked over it.

    “Before we get too far… we’re getting to the serious dungeons now, next is Hidden Land, and then Temporal Tower. We’ll want to figure out our actual strategy here,” Nelvana announced, turning back to look at everyone else. “Would have been better to do this outside… but would have been awkward to say goodbye to Daichi and Sabi, and then just sit there and talk for awhile,” she added.

    Alex nodded, ��agreed. So, how do we want to do this?”

    “W-Well, it might help if we organize by everyone’s roles in battle,” Damien spoke up hesitantly, stepping up closer with everyone else after an encouraging nod from Nelvana.

    “Everyone’s roles?” Ceebee repeated, “go on, I’m curious about what you mean by that.”

    “I mean, some of us are hard hitters that attack fast, and some of us are better suited for range, for example. It will be best to spread those people apart in our lineup,” Damien clarified.

    “That makes sense,” Tsuki agreed, nodding. “Do you already have an idea of who fits what role, or is that something we should discuss?”

    “It shouldn’t be hard to work out…” Damien responded, shrugging. “Okay, so, Nel, Alex, and Tsuki are all up close fighters, strikers, though they have a couple ranged moves each, so they can move around throughout the lineup and switch with others, but we’ll probably want one to the front, one to the middle, and one in the back.”

    “Well, previously we’ve had Nel at the front and myself at the back, and that worked out fine, so we can keep that up,” Alex told him.

    Damien nodded, “if you all agree to that, then that should work,” he replied, “and then myself, Edgar, and Ceebee are more of support, with a few attacking moves each, mostly ranged, to protect ourselves with if so needed…”

    “You should all be spaced apart as well, one to the middle, one in front, and one in the back,” Nelvana chimed back in, “since Alex will be in the back and is one of the ones with a bag… Damien, you should be set up at the front.”

    “I can be at the back!” Ceebee eagerly volunteered, “you’re okay with that, Edgar?”

    “Yup!” Edgar hummed, bobbing in the air over to Tsuki, who smiled up at him.

    “What about Dusknoir and I?” Keahi asked, “we don’t match in our battle styles, or roles.”

    “Definitely,” Nelvana chuckled, reaching over to her partner to ruffle zir feathers with a hand. “You’re mixed between ranged and up close, and Dusknoir is… he’s….”

    “Dusknoir is a wall,” Damien finished.

    “A… wall?” Dusknoir repeated, seemingly confused on whether he should be offended or not.

    “Yeah, you’ve got good defenses, can take a lot of hits,” Damien explained, “would that be right?”

    Dusknoir blinked, “yes… that would be correct. I can still attack though.”

    “Not in the same way as the strikers,” Damien responded.

    “…where did you learn about these… role titles?” Dusknoir questioned.

    “Oh, they were… uh, just common terms for trainers to use when planning how their teams would go into battle,” Damien answered, shrugging.

    Alex coughed, “and, where would that put him in the lineup, Damien?” he interrupted.

    “Right! Hm… well, either the front or the back. I’d probably say the back, just because he’s been there in most of our experience, and it’s… a bit hard to see past him,” Damien said.

    “I am fine with that,” Dusknoir agreed, and then glanced over at Alex and Ceebee. “So long as you both are okay with me being closer around you.”

    Alex rose a brow at Dusknoir’s comment, though he instinctively frowned at the ghost-type, stiffening slightly. Ceebee blinked, just as surprised as the grovyle that Dusknoir bothered checking if they would be okay or not at all.

    “Well…” Ceebee glanced over at Alex. “…yeah, we’ll be fine,” she decided.

    “We’ve lasted this long together,” Alex muttered.

    Nelvana turned over to the two of them, concern softening her eyes. Looking up to meet her gaze, Alex let out a sigh, and then gave her a thumbs up.

    “And I can be up front, to even things out!” Keahi suggested, cutting through any growing pessimistic attitude.

    Damien nodded, “that sounds good!” he agreed, “so that would make our actual lineup…”

    “Me, Keahi, you… Tsuki, Edgar… er, Dusknoir, Ceebee, then Alex; unless anyone objects,” Nelvana said.

    After waiting a few moments and receiving no disagreements to the plan, the group set out to follow their order they figured out and actually take on the dungeon, heading down the path closest to them for ease of travel.

    “It’s nice that we didn’t get attack or anything through that!” Edgar commented, “we got some good time to talk through all that.”

    “We hadn’t started moving around much before then, the spawn must not have realized we’re here yet,” Tsuki told him.

    “They will soon though,” Nelvana added, “and there are traps here too… dang, I’ll have to be careful where I lead us,” she continued in a mumble.

    “W-Wait, didn’t Daichi say that this was a mainly water dungeon?” Damien blurted out, “maybe we should have planned differently…” he mumbled.

    “Don’t worry! You can back us up with thunderbolt, right?” Keahi responded.

    “I still haven’t quite gotten it down yet…” Damien admitted quietly.

    “This is just our general lineup plan for any future dungeons, we won’t be able to adapt them all to our typing,” Nelvana told him, “I’d say you did really well getting most of this set up, and we can always switch around a bit if Keahi and I start having difficulties,” she continued.

    “Daichi also said there are only fifteen floors too, right?” Edgar added, waiting a nod of confirmation to his memory from Tsuki before he went on. “So, we’ve been through longer dungeons, this shouldn’t be too bad!”

    Assured by these words from his friends, Damien nodded and quieted down, focusing on what they had ahead.

    Despite their quiet start, by the end of their first winding corridor they had chosen, they began running into their first dungeon pokemon of Brine Cave. A seel and an omanyte, sat in the next room they ran into, and were quick to turn and attack. Nelvana was just as quick to tap her club twice on the ground before throwing it at her opponents, the bone hitting the seel and then bouncing off it to hit the omanyte before returning to the cubone. The bonemerang did enough to defeat both of the spawn, the pair disappearing in a flash of light.

    “Water-types don’t resist my ground attacks, and any of the fossils will be weak to ‘em. I just need to hit harder, first, to avoid my own weakness,” Nelvana commented, glancing back at Damien, who nodded once more.

    The next spawn to show up, a tirtouga, only confirmed Nelvana’s comment as she handled it with another whack from her club, but by the next floor, things started getting trickier. They discovered that there were pelippers in this dungeon, which would actually resist most of Nelvana and Keahi’s attacks. The first pelipper was met towards the end of a hallway, the beginnings of another room barely visible past the water-flying-type.

    Shaky, but eager to help, Damien stretched out a hand and did his best to at least start a spark of his thunderbolt attack he had learned from the TM. Quickly though, he grew more frustrated and panicky as nothing happened, ruining his focus for trying to use the attack.

    Noticing this, Nelvana glanced back to Keahi.

    “If you can give me an opening, I can use focus energy and hope for a crit with headbutt. Even if that doesn’t take this thing down, hopefully it’ll use enough time to get more of us into the room or something,” she told zim, who nodded.

    “I’ll quick attack them, so get ready to duck so I can jump over you,” Keahi responded.

    Following her partner’s instructions, Nelvana ducked down, immediately taking this time to focus herself again in preparation for her next attack. While she did this, Keahi leapt up, suddenly earning speed in the air which launched zim at the pelipper. Before it could recover, Nelvana dove in to headbutt the foe, knocking out the pelipper with the extra damage she dealt after the focus energy.

    “Great job!” Damien told them, letting out a sigh of relief. “Sorry I couldn’t help…”

    Nelvana brushed herself off, getting back up, “no worries, you’ll figure out thunderbolt eventually. It’s times like these anyway that might help you force that attack out.”

    “Getting stuck in a hallway like this in battle was unfortunate though… not everyone can contribute to the fight then,” Keahi commented.

    “This is merely the challenge of having a larger group. We’ll have to keep getting used to it,” Tsuki told them with a sigh.

    Keeping what Tsuki said in mind, they continued on. The words especially rang true when spawn came from behind the group, forcing Alex and the others at the back to take care of the danger. Fortunately, Alex’s typing was much better suited here than those who were put at the front, which meant taking care of dungeon pokemon here came with much more ease. It made them feel a bit better about making sure to prepare by putting a hard hitter at the back of the group to cover all their bases.

    They continued up another couple floors handling most of their foes either by a couple hits from Nelvana, a combo hit from her and Keahi, or, when the spawn showed up behind them, an easy leaf blade from Alex. Fortunately, pelippers seemed to be the only opponent so far that would force any sort of challenge. There were gastrodons in Brine Cave as well, but their defenses being lower than any pelipper meant they could be handled by Nelvana without any difficulty so long as she got the jump on them. Unfortunately, it would have been unlikely that they would have only ever run into a single pelipper in the entire dungeon.

    Still mildly frustrated by how he couldn’t assist against one of these water-flying-types before, Damien again began trying to figure out how to use his thunderbolt attack the very moment the group’s second pelipper of the dungeon showed up. After fruitlessly trying to conjure the electric energy on his own for a few moments, Damien turned around to try a new strategy.

    “Tsuki, I have an idea for me to use thunderbolt, but I need you, can I touch your fur?” he requested hurriedly.

    Confused, but knowing that if this was to work then she shouldn’t waste time asking questions, Tsuki nodded. Damien reached over, causing Tsuki to flinch at his cold touch at first, and rubbed his hand in her fur. After a few moments, he took his hand out, some of the fur standing up where he had touched the absol.

    “I sure hope static electricity will be good enough to get me started…” Damien muttered until his breath.

    Trying once more to conjure the needed energy for the attack, Damien snapped his fingers on the hand that he touched Tsuki with, this time earning some electric sparks flying off from his fingertips. Pointing his hand at the pelipper, he tried again. Finally, all his efforts came together as lightning leapt forward from his hand, resulting in a bolt of electricity striking the pelipper. Being slightly damaged already from Keahi beginning zir and Nelvana’s combo strategy, the pelipper was easily defeated from the super effective attack, and it disappeared in a flash of light.

    “You did it!” Edgar exclaimed, clapping his hands.

    “You said that was static electricity, right?” Tsuki commented, shaking out her fur. “That was an interesting, but effective, strategy to get your attack started. I do hope you don’t have to do it every time, though.”

    Damien laughed, “I hope so too. I just figured that if I was having trouble making electricity myself, I could borrow it from elsewhere. Creating static was the first thing I could think of.”

    “That was a good idea,” Nelvana chimed in, “and you were out here saying you aren’t good at thinking in the moment,” she teased, nudging him with her club.

    “I’m usually not!” Damien sputtered, but then laughed again. “I’m honestly surprised that actually worked. I was just tired of it… not working.”

    “Well, let’s see if you can do it again when we find another pelipper!” Keahi responded, “see, this is good practice for you!”

    With the thunderbolt attack finally learned, the group continued forward with much more ease. Though Nelvana recommended that Damien save his thunderbolt attack for opponents that were actually causing troubles to her and Keahi so he could save his energy, they found more pokemon than just the pelippers that were dangerous to the pair at the front. Reaching the eighth floor even introduced them to some dragonair, which, after commenting that now they were finally seeing these dragon-types up close, meant that sometimes Tsuki would have to use ice beam from afar to make sure the dragonair didn’t get a leg up with all their resistances.

    They arrived at the safe floor without too much trouble though, and took the moment to catch their breath and review how things were going before moving on. Fortunately, no one seemed to be having troubles with their current setup. Even Alex and Ceebee, who while they admitted to having some discomfort around Dusknoir, the two of them were able to keep themselves chatting a bit to help themselves out. And while Alex didn’t admit it at least, Dusknoir did help out when a dragonair had shown up at the back, and couldn’t simply be easily dispatched by a single leaf blade.

    Surprisingly, as they realized in the time they spent resting, they hadn’t found any sign of any traps so far. Nelvana hadn’t found any spots she guessed to hide traps, and no one had accidentally stepped on any of the horrid tiles. Accounting this to luck, but still resolving to keep their guards up for any of the traps that Daichi had warned them of, they moved on.

    Having only six floors left to go and feeling confident, the group pushed forward with determination. For the first floor after the safe room, their progress went relatively the same as before, but on the second floor, they found a new pokemon; a walrein. This at first seemed to pose more of a problem because of how the large pokemon had so much health to work through, but then the group discovered that the walrein either didn’t actually know, or preferred not to use, any water-type moves. Because of this, any walrein could be handled easily with any fighting-type move from the pair at the front, or a helpful thunderbolt from Damien, so long as Nelvana avoided any aurora beams in the time it took to wear their opponent down.

    Finally, they arrived to the sixth floor of Brine Cave. Here, it opened up into a wide tunnel, which lacked any of the glowing blue stones that had previously lit their way, which swallowing most of the room into shadows.

    “Where are the fossil pokemon…?” Keahi whispered, scanning the area. “This is the last floor, right? Wouldn’t they be here?”

    ~*They’re hiding in the shadows, be ready for a fight,*~ Ceebee’s voice informed everyone suddenly through telepathy.

    Tense, the group waited for any signs of their forewarned opponents… but nothing happened. Hesitantly, Nelvana took a step forward, and when still nothing happened, she held up her club to her face. She managed to cough out a small flame, which landed on the bone and remained there, dancing as a self-made torch to light the way. Slowly, she raised the club up, before throwing it down the tunnel.

    The torch spun as it was thrown, lighting up whatever was hidden in the darkness with the flames which continued burning on the bone. As the ceiling was revealed, so were Kabutops and their two omastar partners, hanging from the ceiling and silently glaring down at the group. The torch passed them, lighting up the walls where two cradily attached themselves to the sides, and an archeops sat perched on a stalagmite. Even further was an armaldo, again digging their claws into the ceiling to hang there. All of them stared at the group, aggression burning in their eyes.

    The bone club spun back, returning to Nelvana’s hand, which had begun shaking slightly.

    The flame went out. It was silent.

    “Look out!” Tsuki yelled, breaking the tension filled silence.

    Just as Tsuki spoke, Kabutops let out a screech, enveloping themself in water and diving at the cubone with their aqua jet attack. At the same time, Tsuki lunged forward, just barely tackling Kabutops out of the way of hitting Nelvana, shoving the fossil pokemon to the side. The two tussled for a couple seconds, before Kabutops leapt back, hissing at Tsuki, who bared her teeth and growled back, frost beginning to puff from her mouth. Kabutops dove at Tsuki, slashing with one of their scythe arms. Tsuki leapt out of the way, but still had her hind leg nicked by the blade, forcing her to adapt to more of a limping gait.

    With Kabutops having launched into battle, the rest of the tunnel roared into action. The silence of before became a distant and longing memory as the remaining fossil pokemon scrambled over to the rest of the group to attack.

    The two omastar arrived first, being the closest to the group from their earlier position on the ceiling. Alex acted swiftly, singling out one of the rock-water-types and slashing at them with a leaf blade attack. As the other omastar began crawling over to Nelvana, she accepted her opponent, whipping her club at them, hitting twice with the bonemerang before returning to her hands.

    Archeops dove ahead next, aiming for Alex during the period he would be distracted against Omastar, but Archeops’ hunt was halted as a shadow ball nailed them in the side of the head. Advancing to block Archeops from the battle going on between Omastar and Alex, Dusknoir readied another shadow ball between his hands.

    “I am your opponent,” Dusknoir rumbled, narrowing his eye at Archeops. “Face me, not him.”

    Not too picky about their foe, Archeops hissed in return, leaping to attack Dusknoir, shadows gathering at their claws and talons.

    Alex blinked, confused and momentarily distracted by Dusknoir’s action and words. Seeing the window of opportunity, Omastar opened their mouth and bit down onto the grovyle’s arm with dark energy. Hissing, Alex turned his focus to the matter at hand, retaliating by using absorb to regain some of the health he had lost in his moment of weakness.

    As the remaining three dungeon pokemon continued their advance, so did the remaining four of the traveling group. Though Keahi glanced over at Nelvana and Alex’s fights, zie knew that zie would be more of help against any of the other three foes, and thus zie continued onward. The two cradilies and the armaldo began closing in on the torchic, failing to notice Ceebee, Edgar, and Damien also joining in the fight.

    Edgar acted first, flames dancing on his robes before being launched towards Armaldo as wisps, searing their armor. Damien stretched both his hands in front of him, palms facing a cradily, which shot out a ray of energy, hitting the foe’s green body. Cradily’s head swayed, any previous focus replaced with dizziness and confusion. After seeing the effectiveness of his move, though, Damien scanned this battleground more, settling on disappearing and reappearing by Tsuki to assist her against Kabutops.

    Unlike the other two, Ceebee reacted offensively, creating the silvery image of herself and forming it as an ancient power attack, which she launched at the untouched cradily. Keahi doubled up on this, kicking the same cradily with zir rock smash attack before they could have the chance to think of recovering from what Ceebee had done to them.

    Tsuki and Kabutops were still locked in a relentless battle, the absol’s slight speed disadvantage cutting the fight a lot closer than she would like. She shot a beam of ice at her opponent, who jumped to avoid the attack. Letting out a growl of annoyance, Tsuki lunged at them, landing a hit with quick attack and following it up with a swipe from her forepaws, brooding with dark energy. Kabutops screeched again, but before they could get another hit in, they were suddenly struck by a bolt of electricity, forcing them to their knees. Tsuki took the chance to force her weight onto the foe, pinning them to the ground before they could stand again and scratching at their plate armor until they were defeated.

    “Thank you,” Tsuki told Damien in a gasp, who nodded back.

    Omastar wasted no time in attacking their ground-type opponent, shooting a powerful stream of water from their mouth at Nelvana. Knowing she had no time to dodge, Nelvana braced herself for the hit, turning to her side to shield herself. To her mild surprise, instead of being hit she heard a shatter. Blinking open her eyes that she had instinctively closed, she glimpsed a shield in front of her taking the brunt of the attack, shattering upon impact though. Distantly, it occurred to Nelvana that this had to be protect; one of the TMs everyone went ahead and learned, just in case. Piecing together what move this was also told her that it wouldn’t work at well the second time, knowing the nature of the move protect, so she swiftly closed the gap between her and Omastar, clubbing them over their shell with her weapon.

    She moved to hit them again with the same attack, but Omastar reached out their tentacles first, wrapping them around Nelvana’s arm and the bone itself. Nelvana tugged against their grip, but quickly gave up on this and opted to kick them in the face with her brick break attack instead. Omastar staggered back, removing their grip from Nelvana as they attempted to recover. Before they could get that chance though, Alex dove in, punching the omastar with an electrified fist, finally knocking them out; the omastar he had been fighting before already defeated as well.

    “Made it out of that without a scratch?” Alex commented, “maybe you didn’t need my help after all,” he joked.

    “Only because I managed to use protect,” Nelvana clarified, “I probably still could have handled it, but thanks though.”

    Dusknoir gripped Archeops by the throat. It had been no trouble for him to handle this foe; archeops by default were powerful attackers, but had poor defenses that were only worsened by their ability. His first shadow ball attack, if he were to guess, had already taken Archeops near to half their health, so it was no trouble to force their defeatist ability to kick in, rendering them easy for Dusknoir to finish off. While Archeops certainly got some hits in before Dusknoir was able to grapple them like this, it wasn’t much to him.

    “I could kill you,” Dusknoir whispered to Archeops, “you are weak compared to me, it would be easy. You were in my way,” he growled.

    Archeops valiantly struggled against Dusknoir’s grasp, swiping their claws in the air and snapping their teeth at Dusknoir’s face. Despite all their efforts, Dusknoir did not budge in the slightest. In fact, as if to prove his point, he tightened his fingers around their neck.

    It would be easy, he knew. In fact, part of him itched to just get it over with, put this pest out of his way, and anyone else’s, for good. It was how he had always handled problems, obstacles, enemies, like these. Besides, in this case, wouldn’t ending this archeops keep them from hurting anyone again? Right?

    Would it be right? Would it be the right thing to do?

    Archeops gasped for breath.

    Keahi delivered one final kick to Armaldo, finally dropping them to the ground. Beside zim, were the two cradilies. Keahi, Ceebee, and Edgar worked together to take the first one down and start damaging the second, but after Tsuki, Damien, Nelvana, and Alex all came over to help out, the fight was over much faster and much more swimmingly. Keahi exhaled with relief and triumph.

    “Is that all of them?” zie asked, glancing around.

    “I do not sense anyone newcomers to the tunnel,” Ceebee informed them, “this fight should be over now, now that we’ve knocked out all the ones here.”

    “Are they all knocked out…?” Keahi paused, turning to look at Dusknoir. “Hey, Dusknoir, you good over there?”

    “Yes, I have finished my battle,” Dusknoir answered.

    He floated over to rejoin the others, the unconscious body of Archeops laying behind him, still softly breathing.

    Keahi nodded, “okay, that’s good. How’s everyone doing then? I have to admit I’ll probably need an oran, some of those rock and ground moves got to me.”

    “I’m feeling alright, might take a closer look at this bite later though… looks fine now, but I don’t know what’s been in that omastar’s mouth,” Alex responded, eyeing the now faint mark on his arm for a moment.

    “I have a few cuts, but I should only need a single oran for them,” Tsuki spoke up, sitting herself down momentarily to gingerly lick at the largest cut, the one on her leg.

    “You sure? That cut looks bad,” Edgar commented softly, floating down to the absol.

    “Maybe take it easy on that leg for the next while… if possible,” Damien added, “is the… the Hidden Land right up ahead?”

    “Not right up ahead, but close,” Ceebee answered, “we can take some time to recover if everyone wants, but we should keep moving ahead a bit longer; we wouldn’t want any others coming in here and starting another fight,” she continued.

    “Let’s keep moving then,” Tsuki agreed, pulling herself to her feet.

First [ARC 1]: In which the human is transformed First [ARC 2]: In which a present is prepared Next: In which the land between time is explored Previous: In which the territory of others is crossed

[bryyo-data]

What if Samus had Metroid powers: design for a hypothetical game

I got this ask the other day and my answer was a bit of a ramble, but I've come back to it with a clear head. I decided to have a go at hypothetical game design, for a Metroid title set post-Fusion in which Samus Aran gains Metroid-like abilities due to her DNA changes! Some of the stuff below is rehashed from the ask reply itself.

Be warned! Bit of a long post, and I apologise in advance for mobile users for whom readmores don't always work.

Premise

I tried to stay vague with the story details because I was more interested in writing about the gameplay, but I failed at that and wrote a lot. Story has it's own section at the bottom. However, the basic idea is that Samus, now an enemy to the Federation and probably on the run, ends up on a world where the environment triggers the manifestation of strange powers. Metroids are known to adapt when introduced to new worlds, and Samus is essentially doing the same- her Metroid DNA, previously doing little more than sparing her from the X, is now active and granting her abilities.

New abilities

This isn't solid ideas so much as a brainstorm, but I tried to come up with a few ideas for what Samus might be able to do with Metroid DNA. None of it has any scientific basis but that's okay, there's dragons in this franchise.

ENERGY DRAIN: This is the first ability you learn, perhaps one you start off with. Samus starts the first area trapped, maybe after a ship crash, and is told how to shoot and jump etc. by the game. Or alternatively, maybe she doesn’t shoot. Let's say her weapon is down for now, hence being more trapped than usual, and she's stuck using a melee move to break through the surrounding rocks. While doing this, she comes across a biological barrier. But as she goes to use her melee attack, something unusual happens... The barrier turns to dust, and the health she lost during her crash-landing is replenished.

Henceforth, that melee thing becomes a drain attack. This power allows Samus to drain energy, killing a foe quickly and restoring some of her own health, but it isn't unlimited or easy to perform beyond the starting portion of the game. With mobile and aggressive enemies, it requires very precise timing to pull off. I would personally make it so that the game relies on this move much less than Samus Returns relied on the melee counter, but have it function in a similar way. Samus can still blast quickly through enemies like she could in Super Metroid/Zero Mission/Fusion, but if she wants to absorb health she can coax enemies into a specific position and with the right timing, perform a drain move.

If the move is a success, it will insta-kill a low-level enemy and is more rewarding than a standard kill. This might even replace normal energy drops from shooting, or at least would give much more health back than a standard drop. If she fails, she opens up to the enemy attack and risks taking more damage than usual. So if a skilled player is at low health and might die, they can take the risk of draining from an enemy. They may either stabilise themselves, or take double damage and die instantly.

If we don't replace normal energy drops altogether, this becomes less of a thing. In fact for the sake of health grinding and general convenience it's probably better to keep regular drops in- this would just become a fun extra which allows you to get past certain points in the game, like barriers, and can let you heal up quicker if you've learned how to pull it off without fail.

Regardless, this allows for OPTIONAL bullshitting past segments and sequence breaking; for example, you might be able to just get past a standard too-hot-without-Varia region by energy draining the whole way through.

Most bosses would have opportunities to use this if you position yourself right, but I'd personally cut down on flashy cutscenes when it happens. They're fun but I don't want to sacrifice the flow of the game for cinematics too much. Just a quick draining move, steal a bit of health. This move wouldn't work on mechanical enemies, because it relies on life energy specifically.

As you go along, this ability might power up, perhaps triggered either by the environments Samus moves into (since Metroids introduced to new environments will alter accordingly). Perhaps there are ways to power up every Metroid ability, or even an item that allows you to enhance one at a time by channelling your energies-something like that. An enhanced Energy Drain may steal more health and even fuel your weapon ammunition or something like that. Plus, it would make it easier to insta-kill some stronger enemies with the move.

I kinda like the idea of using an item to power up one Metroid ability at a time. To add a bit of challenge to the game, so you can't just switch to the most convenient one at any given time, maybe have it so that you can only change your powered-up ability in certain areas? Special Chozo statues? Interfacing with the other half of whatever this technology is, maybe a computer system found in a couple of rooms across the planet (with all except the first one or two being in hidden and slightly hard-to-find locations? Is that being too mean?)

(Btw just to get retro, we're giving this hypothetical game cheats- one of which is the ability to switch power at any time. Among others like immortality and fun suit colour changes.)

One thing I considered is that, similar to Aeion, Samus might have a power meter for using other Metroid abilities. This would give more function to the draining move outside of just health, and could explain some of Metroid biology too. It would imply that they specifically have to feed on life energy in order to do the things they do, and normal food wouldn't power them up the same. For that reason, Samus could power up her energy meter by draining. The amount of power she absorbs would be proportional to the enemy difficulty.

This could make certain segments trickier; for example, if there were a region similar to the end of Metroid 2 (not Samus Returns) where Metroids have killed off most of the life in the area, Samus would have to use her powers sparingly. The player might find it a bit trickier to traverse the area if they run out of power. Enemies here might be easy to kill and give a lot of power back on easier modes, but harder to kill and less rewarding on hard difficulty.

An alternative is that Samus's powers are fuelled directly by her own life energy, i.e. her health. This would essentially work like Phazon, but not in bursts; each time Samus activates a power, she sacrifices a bit of health, either continually or at once (again, same as how Aeion works, but depleting the health meter instead of a separate one). This makes it vital to locate energy tanks, which could prompt more exploration and may lead Samus to interesting locations that have hidden lore and such (see the section below for more on that). This might also be interesting from a lore perspective because it explains why Metroids are so aggressive as predators- they waste so much energy on simple things like flying, it means they have to near-constantly feed.

Which brings me to the other power-ups. I imagine Samus wouldn’t pick these up traditionally like items. There would still be items in the game, including several brand new ones not directly comparable to those in previous games in the series (obviously we can bring back some old favourites but copy-pasting the exact same items over and over again can get a bit dull even with new abilities). Most normal items would play to the normal Metroidvania game design, of “can’t access area -> locate pickup -> move to new area. These abilities might be triggered by moving into new environments, or if Samus is under stress i.e. during a specific boss fight. So you wouldn’t necessarily be hunting for them, but they could still let you get to new areas or items.

FLOATING: Samus floats, draining power continually until she stops or runs out. This one would require significant limitations; for example, perhaps as you move further away from the ground, you drain SIGNIFICANTLY more energy. This means you are welcome to try and sequence break, or get an item that you were meant to get with grapple beam, but you're wasting a LOT of energy doing so. Maybe gravity is still trying to pull Samus down once you lift off, so you have to actively fight it, and each ascent drains energy faster the higher you go. Sort of like a built-in jetpack. With that said, this would have interesting applications in world traversal.

An enhanced float may have a significantly lower cost for ascending or just maintaining the float. Because we all love some Aesthetic(tm), maybe Float+ gives Samus a faint wing-like aura when she uses it- especially if we go with the above idea that Samus uses Chozo tech to power it up. Imagine the sick fanart that could come out of that.

SHIELD: A fairly standard one ripped off of Samus Returns' lightning sheild. By sacrificing some energy, Samus can temporarily keep up a shield that will mean she takes less damage. If we go with the function of sacrificing health for Metroid abilities (rather than a separate power bar) it would require some careful balancing as well as player learning- for example, trying to ensure that (at least for stronger enemies) it's worth turning it on at all, and that the energy loss to create the shield is less than the theoretical energy loss if you took hits from the enemy.

Maybe this would be a pulse thing rather than an ongoing one; you activate it, and it lasts maybe 10-30 seconds, taking a defined amount of energy. During that time, you get an opportunity to pummel the enemies around you while not being knocked back or stunned when they hit (though you might still take e.g. 1/2 or 1/4 damage from incoming attacks). Of course, it could also function to protect Samus from things like lava, allowing her to access subsurface items if the game never gave her a Gravity Suit or equivalent.

A powered up version would obviously be something like a stronger shield, or a less costly one, or longer lasting if it's activated in pulses. Or a mix of them all. Maybe even a lightning shield effect where things that come into contact with Samus take damage, possibly even feeding her a bit of health (in TINY amounts, not comparable to the drain ability). Visually, so it looks as pretty as the powered-up float, it could maybe have an effect similar to the traditional big-shoulder Varia suit (assuming Samus is still in some form of the Fusion suit by this point).

SENSE/METROID VISION: I'm ripping this one off Samus Returns as well, but I'd change it. This would allow Samus to detect the life energies of all creatures in the area by focusing. It would also indicate how the larval Metroids, lacking eyes, locate their prey. Sensing would either come as a pulse like in Samus Returns, or a toggle on-toggle off ongoing thing, which you can't keep up indefinitely due to energy waste. Like in Skyrim where you can use the Aura Whisper shout or Detect Life/Undead etc.

Key differences include that this ability doesn’t show you hidden entrances by default; it would just indicate that "something is living in this wall" and you have to make judgements based on that info. Is this an enemy that will jump out and kill you (hence, you can avoid it)? Is it a hidden room with enemies in, and an entrance nearby? Thus, it keeps in a little challenge and exploration work.

A powered up version might be able to show other things too, including nearby items, entrances, or breakable blocks- like scan pulse from Samus Returns. That would make it useful for players who don't want to spend hours bombing every wall, or 100%ers like me who are at the endgame and getting frustrated because they can't find the last two missile upgrades. Obviously it's offset by the aforementioned fact that if you choose this ability, you can't choose another without going back to one of the set locations.

TELEPORT: I'm hesitant to include this one because it was fairly signature to Phazon Metroids, but I guess it could be passed off as "a hidden Metroid ability that Phazon unlocked". This would allow Samus to do short-range teleports for an energy cost. I dunno who's played Axiom Verge here, but there's an item which (spoilers if you haven't played it) lets you teleport through walls, and once upgraded it lets you go through bigger and bigger gaps. Samus's teleport would be more instantaneous than that one, and available to use from any position, but costly to perform.

The teleport could help her dodge enemy attacks (though like energy drain, success would rely on timing, and Samus might still take damage just before she teleports assuming there's a slight delay from inputting the command to actually jumping). It would also allow Samus to get through certain walls, though there may be some which are inpenetrable due to the material they're made of. I don't know how it would work in terms of control schemes, but maybe the player could choose their jump distance, with smaller jumps needing less energy.

A powered up version might be able to take Samus further or even have her emit an energy burst when she leaves/emerges from the jump, damaging nearby enemies- though with a greater energy cost.

METROID COMMAND: I can't think of a lore reason why this one would cost energy, unless it's some weird energy psychic thing that specifically resonates with Metroids. Anyway, let's assume Metroids aren't unique to the end-game Tourian-esque area in this game, and there are several locations where you can encounter them throughout the world. This ability would allow you to communicate with them, actually stopping their attacks and saving yourself or other nearby innocent creatures.

Maybe these Metroids are communicating with a "parent" who is actually an evil enemy (i.e. intelligent species that bonded parentally to them- see lore section below) which may result in more co-ordinated attacks than you see from wild roaming individual Metroids. But Samus can use this ability to stop their coordination, or even turn them on their handlers!

An upgrade of this... Maybe Samus turning the Metroids on their allies, including each other and the enemies commanding them? Keep it up long enough and you might be left with just one Metroid standing for you to take out. That could lead to some dark stuff as well. I can imagine Samus needing to be ruthless by using this ability for survival, but feeling baaaad about it.

The upgrade may also include things like asking local Metroids to affect the environment; bringing inaccessible power-ups to Samus, such as ones on high ledges (if she doesn't want to waste energy floating up there) or opening new passageways that Samus herself couldn't get open, either via draining or using brute strength, depending on the Metroid form.

SOMETHING TO DO WITH SHAPE CHANGING: This is one that, cool as it would be, would be REALLY hard to implement because I cannot think of an idea for how it would work. Especially because Samus is in the suit, and we're presuming that the suit itself can't really change shape along with her. But the basic idea is that Metroids famously mature and change, so what if someone with Metroid DNA could undergo controlled, temporary form changes? Or just change certain body parts? I'll come back to this one in the plot section but I'm not convinced Samus could use it herself, though it would be really cool, if potentially OP. Why have a Metroid Vampire when you can have a METROID WEREWOLF kinda I guess.

Just going for bullshit here, perhaps Samus could unlock this one close to the end in a Zero Mission-esque sequence where she's parted from her suit. She seems vulnerable and really has to rely on her Metroid abilities while being extremely energy-conscious, because she's no longer got extra energy tanks to keep her alive (going by the life=power method anyway; slightly less relevant in the separate-energy-bar method except for the fact that energy refills require enemy draining, and that move is much riskier without the suit, since it already increases damage if failed.)

At the end of the segment, she starts growing claws and being able to slash through thick wires or whatever un-drainable thing is in her way. Then she grows bigger and gets more hunched, scaled, and armoured, until she's starting to look like a warped variant of an Omega Metroid. Maybe even a Queen. Luckily she gets under control of it and reverts when she finds a power suit to fit into, something most Metroids can't do but luckily she's a humanoid protagonist and can't stay monstrous forever. Also gives a reason for her to replace her Fusion suit with a cooler classic Chozo suit!

(For real, would Nintendo even do that? Use their sex-sells tiddy out game section as the scene where Samus becomes the most un-fuckable monstrous body horror dragon alien in the game? Probably not but I can dream.)

Maybe the player can't really control this one, or there's a huge cost to doing so but when you do you become SICK AWESOME POWERFUL and take up half the screen and the final boss attack that should've one-shotted you just slides off your back. Maybe. Maybe I just think monster aliens are cool.

Ideally I would like to have maybe 4-5 unique abilities in the game. With drain as one and four others, it would be fairly similar to Aeion and could act as an off-SR388 Aeion replacement. The above ideas are by no means the limits of what could be done, but I can't think of any others at the moment. To work nicely with the game lore, ideally there would be some powers that Samus hasn't seen Metroids use before. Not only does she learn to use them herself, but the Metroids on this planet start using them too, making for some new and unique Metroid battles.

I would leave as much leeway as possible- there's a lot of ideas here, and while new abilities are fun to play with, I don't want it to be over-complicated or inaccessible. This is very much just a brainstorm! If this were a real game, the most important things would be letting the player have fun, feel badass, and tackle challenges their way so they can feel a sense of achievement from finding items or beating puzzles.

Plot

Okay I wasn't originally going to go into plot, but I got carried away. Because this is a sidescroller in particular, you don't have the advantage of Prime's scan system to pile on lore. I wouldn't do too much heavy plot and dialogue, at least not more than Fusion. If anything, LESS than Fusion to decrease dialogue time. But I might adopt Prime elements, specifically stealing the idea of scan downloads from Another Metroid 2 Remake. These would activate at key times, including new boss encounters, entering new regions, or when the player stumbles upon something interesting. In that regard, I'd hide secrets around the world; little rooms which may or may not contain items, but which add an optional lore entry to your logbook as you enter.

Some plot/gameplay stuff I would include:

So this post-Fusion game would probably be where you'd pick up the thread hinted at by Samus Returns' Chozo memories- there are evil Chozo, and either they still exist, or have left a dangerous legacy of bioweapons and robots. Perhaps there's only one or two commanders left alive, and they will stop at nothing to stay that way.

Adam exists, but his dialogue with Samus is limited. This is intended to create isolation, but also hope. When all feels down, you might stumble on a way to communicate with your ship and with Adam again, getting a bit of reassurance. Adam may be able to help direct you during these moments, but I wouldn't go to the same extent as Fusion itself (or Zero Mission's Chozo statues). He might not be able to point out direct target locations, at least not later in the game. Regardless, I don't want to totally sideline him in the title where, post-reveal in Fusion, his character really ought to be emerging properly.

Metroids have new, previously unforeseen abilities locked into their DNA. The planet this game is set on is a Chozo haven with a perfect atmosphere. It has been selected by the evil Chozo for Metroid breeding in order to bring out their full potential. As Samus arrives here, the environment starts affecting her DNA as well, and she begins unlocking her own hidden abilities, one by one.

She runs into evil Chozo, most of whom are hostile to her. If we permit some dialogue at designated points (otherwise implying that Adam and Samus's communications are largely disrupted, keeping the isolated feeling in place) she might confess to Adam that she feels horrible killing what might be the last of her kin. Though I wouldn't write a plot around pushing a theme, there may be an underlying theme of identity, with Samus's human vs. Chozo vs. Metroid identities coming into conflict. The conclusion of which might be "actually, who cares, I'm just Samus. And whatever Samus is, she's an awesome galactic saviour who won't ever be truly alone in the universe."

The main boss Chozo are not initially hostile- they may coax Samus in, pretending to be her ally until it becomes apparent that they want to use her as a pawn for their greater plans. Again, I'd minimize dialogue here. Instead, Samus's communications with these Chozo may be through things such as wall scrawlings or messages left on abandoned computers (readable through the logbook). When she actually meets them, the dialogue would be vague as to whether she read those lore snippets or not, but the players that did read them will have a deeper connection to these mysterious Chozo and greater understanding (though it may be a completely false one) of their motivations.

Adding to that, there may even be a good Chozo among the ranks, one whose wall scrawlings etc. are harder to find, implying they have to hide them. Maybe even taking the Axiom Verge route of having them in an untranslatable language, until Samus picks up a required cipher and can go back to her logbook and read them. But they give Samus reason not to trust the others. You may or may not ever meet the individual(s) leaving these messages, implying they have been taken care of since you arrived but before you met them.

This could actually give the players plot advantage- maybe at some point, Samus is offered a choice of direction. Evil!Chozo says "Meet me at the pool where we will perform the ritual to revive all the dead Chozo." but Good!Chozo's scrawlings said "If he tries to take you to the pool, you're gonna die and the Metroids will be unleashed again. Sneak in via the overhead pipe and drop some bombs on his machine, destroying it before he even gets a chance to start it up." (Something you could optionally do anyway, if you the player finds the pipe entrance and decides not to trust this Chozo. It gives you a bit of free reign to interpret the characterisation of Samus and what she would do.) In the latter case, it might prevent you from taking some initial surprise damage from the boss, or let you skip sections of the boss fight.

Evil Chozo are breeding Metroids, and forging parental bonds to them. This means the Metroids will defend them to the death just as the baby Metroid did for Samus, and also they have trained them to follow commands, mostly battle-related ones. Maybe they have figured out what SR388's Chozo could not- how to remain friends with Metroids after puberty. Thus allowing them to use matured Metroids. It would be lazy to include Alpha-Gamma-etc again because this isn't SR388, so I'd design new Metroid forms, which in-lore are supposed to be upgraded and more powerful according to the design of the Chozo that bred them here. They might superficially resemble Alphas etc. at first, but their developmental pathway ends up very different and unique.

The big ending twist is that the final boss Chozo is modified like yourself- you couldn't have guessed! Lore-wise, perhaps they were one of the ones who originally created the Metroids, not starting as one of the murderous Chozo seen in the Chozo memories. They knowingly turned on the other SR388 Chozo in order to side with the bad guys, and worked their way up the ranks once that trust was earned. Their Metroid DNA could then be explained by them having, like Samus, come off SR388 with an X infection that needed curing. Or maybe they just happened to be an expert in Metroids and thought it would be awesome to use Metroid DNA to get stronger.

Gameplay-wise, this means they can use powers like yours, but also a variety of others because they're a final boss. One of these might be a refined form of the shape-changing that I'm not convinced Samus could use. Metroids mature into new, bigger forms, and perhaps our villain has figured out how to do this in a controlled manner.

Remember the Chozo tech Samus might use to power up her Metroid abilities? Our villain upgraded theirs so all their abilities are powered up. But you're Samus Aran and you're still winning. In desperation, they use it to mutate into a giant monster, like some kind of weird bird-dragon-alien with hundreds of eyes and bioluminescence. Awesome! This is their final form, but it's not as brief as the mutant SA-X's appearance; maybe you defeat their normal Chozo form in the penultimate boss fight, then have to go up against this version of them at the very end.

Of course, they're still a Metroid-based monster. They have VERY potent draining abilities, which they will use more often on , so you have to use a combination of items you've picked up on your adventure, and your Metroid abilities, to prevent them from making the fatal strike, because if they hit you with that attack you're gonna lose between 1/2 to a full energy tank and they're gonna gain a chunk of health back. It's a mean boss design, but on lower difficulty settings it would be toned down.

Sequel potential

I’ll give this one it’s own section to break up the text walls a bit.

The idea behind having this SR388 traitor Chozo character in particular is that they are NOT the initial wave of evil Chozo. This means that whoever "turned them to the dark side" might STILL be out there. Thus, the plot is not over yet, and there's even more sequel opportunity to be had! It could essentially begin a new arc. I wonder how the next game's final boss could compare to "giant intelligent bird-alien-dragon-lamprey" though?

The game discussed so far might make no mention of the Federation at all, because that would overcomplicate things when the plot focus is on Samus, Chozo, and Metroids. A sequel could easily reunite Samus with the Federation, and let trust be regained on both sides as she saves them from the evil Chozo that are now trying to destroy and dominate everything for evil reasons.

Though we don’t want to sacrifice too much traditional fast-paced Metroid sidescroller gameplay time on plot stuff, maybe have a sideplot where the corrupt parts of the Federation are cut out? No doubt those who wanted to breed Metroids, no matter how pure or evil their intentions, are the most likely to accept help from a band of evil Chozo who have lots of Metroids and need help breeding and improving them. It could end up being a dialogue-heavy thing but it would be fun to see this subplot played out without any dialogue whatsoever; Samus just doing her thing behind-the-scenes to stop or expose these people, while they send threats after her.

One reason why I bring up sequel potential at all is because Samus is now part Metroid and the Federation know it- but they don’t know about her abilities. Now she’s saving their asses and they’re gonna have to learn about it. That might lead to a whole bunch of new conflict potential, which could either be explored in-canon or by fanfic writers afterward. Fun either way. May even lead to MORE sequels where the Feds are creating superhuman bioweapons because they learned it worked with Samus.

What happens with Samus's powers between the two games? Will she go into the next game being super OP? Probably not. So how will that be resolved? Theoretically this first game in the “arc” could be the only one, and could actually end the timeline, but it would be a bit of a shame to do that.

One possibility is that Samus has to suppress or lose her powers. Maybe they start getting out of hand, beyond her control, especially if the shape-changing thing comes into play. She may use a reverse form of the power-up technology to tone down her abilities to nothing for safety reasons. She may even use the final-boss-guy's DNA modification equipment to strip herself of her Metroid DNA. Perhaps she decides that it's not something she wants to be a part of herself any more, and takes it out.

Here's a fun tangent off the last one- what if the DNA mod goes wrong and she does something else... Like damage her Chozo DNA? What implications might that have for a future game, and for Samus's own perception of herself? What if we were left on a cliffhanger, where Samus knows she has to rush off to her next battle with the evil Chozo but when she steps into her own suit, her own second skin, it rejects her?

As an alternative, maybe something off-world- or even just the act of BEING off-world- means she loses her abilities because her body "settles down" and suppresses them outside of that world's environment. While this may seem like a cheap ending, it depends on how sequels go. Because in theory, Metroids adapt to their local environments, which means Samus might be able to unlock a plethora of brand-new and previously unseen abilities in the next game owing to her arrival in another new environment.

Conclusion? I have too much time on my hands. It's been an interesting one to think about. Aside from "Chozo will return as villains" I couldn't really speculate what will happen in Metroid 5 at this point, though I'm very tempted to say it will be made eventually. Unfortunately, word-of-god says that Metroid Fusion's ending rectified Samus's DNA and took out the Metroid stuff (hence her losing cold weakness at the very end) so it's unlikely that any of this kind of thing would make it to canon, unless they're happy for to retcon what was already a fairly unclear thing in game.

[resbang-bookclub]

AMA Transcript: Unrequited

Next up, @infantbluee, @kallie-flower, @nori-wings and @thiefofblood (Souly on Discord) came to answer questions and spread the love for their Resbang, Unrequited! Here’s some of what went down:

Q: How did you guys come up with this idea? I remember you threw a ton of ideas around and settled on this one. Can you take us through the process? >:)

kallieflower: Oh god. We went through SO many different ideas. We wrote like what? 40k for our first idea before we scrapped that?

b l u e: Then like 30k for the next one that we also scrapped.

kallieflower: WE KEPT TRYING TO WRITE SHORT THINGS BUT IT DIDN’T WORK. Soma just does not work as shortfic.

b l u e: Even our final bang ended up being a 40k two-shot lmao.

Q: So what was it about this final idea that made u guys decide, YES, this is it???

kallieflower: The first idea was a Madoka Magica AU that exploded into a mess because magical girl worlds take a loooooottttt of work. The second fic also exploded into something big.

b l u e: We were going to stick with it though. We were. We had it all ready for check-in and everything. But then like two days before, kallie went, "okay so I love our fic idea and all but what about this." Me, on three hours of sleep: "I effing hate you." Then we stumbled through our first 3k and sent it to the mods like the gremlins we are.

kallieflower: We didn’t expect it to get so big either but c’est la vie. Chloe almost killed me like 48293783 times during the process but I think we managed alright.

b l u e: You're lucky I love you so much.

Q: Did you guys start writing straight from the beginning of the fic or did you write a specific scene first?

kallieflower: Actually we didn’t start from the beginning haha! Or well, our idea didn’t start from a plot. We just wanted to write Maka cursed. We wanted to write her with no inhibitions in love, like she might’ve been had she not been so hurt by her parents’ separation. And since there are witches in the SE universe, we had fun with that instead of making it an AU.

Q: Do you write linearly at all or did you jump around a lot?

b l u e: Surprisingly yes. Aside from my dream sequences.

kallieflower: Your dream sequences were our pit stops. We just had to actually do the writing to get there.

b l u e: Hahaha our writing process was.... Unique.

kallieflower: That’s one way to put it lmao.

nori-wings: It was a mess, but we love it.

b l u e: WE are a mess so it's just us in fic form.

kallieflower: God yeah. For one thing, this fic was like 90% chloe with me just making her do crazy things I wanted to happen.

nori-wings: And 5% of what the artists wanted to happen.

b l u e: YEAH hahaha that was kallie too tbh. She was like, "me as a witch would not understand anything about my magic at all and would curse people for kicks, so let's do that."

kallieflower: We would have a general plot of how we wanted to go and what points we wanted to hit. Chloe would start to write it, but then I would be like “WAIT WHAT ABOUT THIS.” And then she would pretend she thought I was a total nuisance but we all know she’s too soft and sweet to ever say no to anything. Also our artists were such a LOVELY help too.

b l u e: We wanted as much of their input as possible and we wanted to make this as much of a collab as we could. The train scene at the beginning of the third chapter was all nori because she was mad at us for only torturing Soul and wanted Maka to cry too.

Q: Nori/Souly did you have a favorite piece of art to make?

the monkey chain (soul): The skating scene was my fave. I also accidentally changed the part in the fic with the skating since I didn't ask what kind of skates they were supposed to be kfljgdf.

b l u e: LMAO it's our fault though!!!! We were Too Slow.

nori-wings: Black*Star dragging Soul and Maka is my favorite, it was super fun to draw.

b l u e: When you sent the first wip of that, I think I cried for days. It was better than my dreams. You were both so fast GOD, it takes me seventeen years just to sketch a pic.

kallieflower: For real tho. We don’t deserve artists.

nori-wings: They are exaggerating, it was a quick sketch that I made on a post it lol. It took me a week to draw it in digital.

the monkey chain (soul): I had free time since we moved and were without internet for a night so I had a ton of time to finish my pic.

Q: Did you have trouble meeting the deadline?

kallieflower: Trouble is putting it lightly lmao. We died. Many times.

b l u e: I don't trust fast writers. Clearly they are superhuman. It wouldn't have been hard if we didn't spend so much time drowning in memes and shitposts that we neglected to write.

kallieflower: I blame the internet.

Q: Were there any scenes that you guys really struggled with writing?

b l u e: The beginning, definitely. Everything else flowed out pretty quickly, but the beginning made us want to cry into our pillows and smash our keyboards.

kallieflower: I think there was a period of time where Chloe was like, “I will physically pay you money to write this scene so I don’t have to.” But yeah, the beginning scenes were definitely hardest to write. I think we rewrote them like a million times.

Q: Nori and Souly, was there a part of your art that was trickier to do?

nori-wings: I think painting Soul and Maka's kiss, because I wanted to use as few colors as possible and I played a lot with shading, or at least I tried haha.

the monkey chain (soul): Uhhhh not really for me? My pieces were relatively simple and probably the most issue I had was drawing Maka's skates and figuring out what Soul would be wearing.

b l u e: I cried when we got paired with souly.

kallieflower: Chloe literally fangirled to hell over getting souly as our second artist. And we were very lucky to get nori as our artist too because we already became really close friends through the zine and talked all the time. Our resbang just gave us an excuse to move all our blabber to a personal server lmao.

nori-wings: Yeah, they asked me to be something like a beta but I ended up being their artist.

kallieflower: We joked about it beforehand too and were SO happy it happened. We were so blessed with support and love this year. We never would’ve finished without the help of our artists and betas.

nori-wings: They are making it sound nice, but we wouldn't let them drop out.

kallieflower: LMFAOOOOOO. Nori likes to be sassy but she’s one of the softest of us all

b l u e: We legitimately would've dropped out if not for our artists.

kallieflower: “Do it for our artists” was our mantra through the whole process when we wanted to quit. Peer pressure makes diamonds, maybe.

b l u e: I mean, it didn't feel like that when we were bullshitting our way through our next 5k before each deadline, but it be like that sometimes.

Q: What was your favourite scene to write?

b l u e: My favorite to write was definitely the nightmare demon scene.

kallieflower: Because she’s a sadist and likes angst. Chloe likes to make people feel pain so her favorite scenes were definitely the angsty ones.

b l u e: FDSJFKDSF

Q: For errbody: what do you feel like you improved/grew in this resbang, writing and arting-wise??

kallieflower: For me, I definitely grew in writing skills even though I didn’t end up writing much of this bang (chloe, bless your soul for carrying me this year lmao) because chloe is SO GOOD at writing that it made me want to be better, learn better, do better.

b l u e: Kallie made me work harder than I ever have my entire life and it paid off SO MUCH. I very much only ever write ventfics.

the monkey chain (soul): I feel like I Peaked with Maka's outfit in the skating picture, like I don't pride myself in outfit design much these days but Maka's outfit came out so good. I didn't expect it.

Q: Were there any parts of Unrequited that really pushed you out of your comfort zone?

b l u e: Writing with someone else was such an experience.

kallieflower: We definitely had to compromise a lot in terms of writing. Like I wanted Soul to walk in on Kid touching Maka’s scar and Chloe immediately said “fine, but only if we make Kid a gardener” and if that isn’t a super fair trade off, idk what is. Chloe and I work so well together so that was easy. And we like a lot of the same things.

b l u e: There was a little adjustment [with adapting to different writing styles] but not much, because despite what kallie says, she's actually so freaking smart and talented it actually makes my eyes water.

Q: If you had the time to do something differently, what would you do and why?

b l u e: Everything. Jk no but really. There's just a lot I wish we could've elaborated on. And more suffering to be had of course. I just wish we had more time to elaborate on Spirit and Maka's mom.

kallieflower: Oh god yeah. Maka did not get enough of a backstory in the manga or anime and that makes me sad always.

Q: What made you both decide on the outcome of the curse? Did the witch know how it was going to affect Kid?

b l u e: We actually knew the outcome from the very beginning when we decided what kind of curse it was.

Q: Okay SO one last question for the crew. What is next!!!! >:)

nori-wings: Next collab is me writing and Chloe as my artist. (She just doesn't know it.)

b l u e: FDHDJFKSDDSF

kallieflower: OMG PLS HAHAHA. I’d be all over that collab. Chloe is working on a soma longfic she won’t let me beta because she’s Secretive. And I am trying to work up the energy to use my keyboard again after the hell that was finishing Resbang.

Thanks to the crew for stopping by! Stay tuned for more transcripts!

[recentanimenews]

ESSAY: Karasuno vs Inarizaki, A Battle of Sound

  A small confession: While I will happily welcome an anime adaptation whenever it pops up, I’m the type of person to gravitate more toward the manga. After all, the manga (usually) tends to be the original work, and it’s something I can consume at my own pace. Haikyu!! was no exception; I read the chapters weekly and had a very good time with them. While I’d say I enjoyed the series overall, I didn’t really get into the Inarizaki arc. Despite the Miyas both being character types I enjoyed and Kita being a surprise hit, this arc didn’t resonate with me as much. It took the anime for me to realize why, and for that to all delightfully change. 

    Season 4, Episode 14 starts out with a bang. Inarizaki’s band with its trumpets and drums start an upbeat tune, but when Miya Atsumu clenches his fist and demands silence, the music stops on command. After that, tension, held breaths, the swish of a volleyball up into the air and the thud of it coming down on the other side. It’s the perfect way to set up the match’s focus on sound and Inarizaki’s command over it. A major part of the Inarizaki arc is how Karasuno isn’t just facing off against Inarizaki's team but also Inarizaki's audience. We saw this a little in the Shiratorizawa match, where the cheer squad used its school anthem as a weapon, Inarizaki is that but more prominent.

  They disrupt Karasuno’s chanting and boo them when it's their turn to serve. They cheer for their side and jeer the other — constantly swinging between support and offense. When Kageyama is about to serve, Inarizaki’s band starts drumming out a rhythm. It gets faster and faster until it throws Kageyama off a fraction. The same happens to Tanaka later. That’s much easier for us to understand because we’re drawn into the repetition as well — a repetition that doesn’t match the team we’re cheering for. 

    Of course, this happened in the manga as well, but there is a big difference between imagining something for yourself and the same concept being shown to you. One of the manga’s biggest strengths is Furudate’s mastery over movement, especially in double spreads where the characters break borders. Readers are able to imagine the betweens of leaps and hits because Furudate is an expert at making those shots come to life. It is a lot harder to imagine sound when reading manga. It’s no challenge to understand when sound is an important factor in a story, such as in manga focused on music or when attention is drawn to sound effects, but imagining the exact sound yourself is trickier. Sound that lasts a good portion of the match, such as in this fight, is even harder to maintain as a constant. The anime delivers that sound for us, we’re drawn deeper into the match, so we understand better what the manga was trying to tell us.

  This makes the relief when Saeko shows up all the more prominent. While Inarizaki’s band is a brass band, Saeko brings her taiko group with her — a traditional spin on cheering. The drums are overwhelming and resound deeply, and the shinobue flutes have a distinctly high-pitched sound. This cuts through Inarizaki’s wave, but also creates a rhythm for Karasuno that’s unlike the team cheers we’ve heard before. Taiko drumming is very dynamic, and that energy fuels Karasuno. It’s a sound that can’t be mistaken for the other team and has the power to fight back against them. The battle isn’t just on the court, it's in the stands.

    A good anime adaptation usually has a few core things — nice animation, a good soundtrack, voice acting that matches the characters and scenes. It can bring drawings to life in an explosion of visuals. But sometimes an anime adaptation adds something extra, something that enhances the kind of story the original is trying to tell. Haikyu!! did just that, and a good portion of this match and the fight that went on inside it finally clicked for me. 

      Did you feel a difference in the manga and anime? Let us know in the comments!

    Noelle Ogawa is a contributor to Bubbleblabber and Cup of Moe. She can be found on Twitter @noelleogawa.

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[fectiverundercroft]

Niantic, this isn’t fun anymore.

(edited)

When you introduced the special research task of 50 excellent throws, I was frustrated even before getting started, because I know how hard an excellent throw is, but I wanted to give it a try.  I wasn’t impressed with the rewards for accomplishing that on top of catching a hundred Pokemon in 25 different species--seriously, a handful of balls, not enough stardust for a meager powerup, and 500 XP?--but I’m not a defeatist.

And I didn’t get anywhere close in the short time you allowed for the challenge. I eventually realized that it wasn’t supposed to be just a participation trophy, and I was okay with that; some people got it, and some don’t.  

But then...

Then you introduced this special research task for Mega Gengar.  It’s timed, but okay, I’ve got nine days, so maybe that’ll be okay.

But at the same time you introduced another special research, and between the two, I have to catch well over 200 Pokemon.  

Okay, it’s the weekend so I’ve got some time, but it’s also f’ing the middle of October and I don't relish walking around in shitty weather for this, no matter what the fundamental concept of the game is.

And on top of that, I have to make nine nice throws in a row.  NINE?  Nice throws themselves aren’t that hard, but this many in a row?

There’s a reason I immediately delete every regular field research that requires consecutive throws of a particular kind in any number.  And I operate almost exclusively on curveball throws, so don’t wave your hands and go “Well, if you had more practice...” and carry on as normal.  Because those research assignments don’t show up all that often, especially in the last several months when you made some tweaks to accommodate the lockdown (which, tbf, thanks for that).

But look.

I’m level 38, so I’m not new to the game.  I only have typo/autocorrect problems when an iOS update drops.  I have a current smart phone with an undamaged screen, and my ten fingers all work fine, so it’s not like my usual gaming experience is like some scene out of Borat.  I tell you this not to brag about being the best--clearly my distaste for quotas as I’ve already delineated should have made it clear that I know I’m not--but to help you to understand why I am so frustrated that

ON FRIDAY I HAD OVER A THOUSAND POKEBALLS IN MY BAG AND EVEN AFTER HITTING POKESTOPS ALL OVER TOWN THE WHOLE WEEKEND I JUST USED MY LAST ONE UP.

I was at five out of nine in a row when I first posted this, but now I’m down to two in a row for I think the third time.  Five was pretty good; usually three in a row is exceptional for me.  

But I’m not going to go buy any more balls or go out of my way to spin Pokestops just to keep wasting them.  I’ve gotten to eight in a row more than once by now, and I don't like how much it makes me swear when after fighting through really feisty Pokemon to finally get near the end and find one that is normally pretty sedate, it decides to do a double fake out.  There are kids who play this game, and they don’t need to see me struggling to maintain an adult composure over one more surprise source of frustration.  Or are you trying to teach them a life lesson about how if you’re persistent, luck might reward your efforts, but probably not, and even if so, it’s just for mediocre gains?  Because that’s what I’m taking away from this, and I used to play this game to get away from those kinds of reminders at my day job.

Okay, to be fair I’m not blaming you for me scandalizing any innocent children within earshot.  But I want to impress upon you how frustrating it is when I try to play a game I really like and all of a sudden they take a part that I enjoy less than other parts and convert it into a roadblock of heroic proportions.

You don’t have to fire the guy who came up with the idea of challenges that require vast diligence, time, and luck; but train him not to suggest ideas like this anymore and root it out of your developers’ play experience philosophy.  If I have a 75% chance of hitting a nice throw any one time, do you know what my probability of repeating that, eight more times, would be?  Under 8%.  I’d have to make over a hundred attempts, on average, before I succeeded.  Now, certainly I did get better with practice; for a while I avoided drifloons because their floatiness is harder to anticipate than, say, a shroomish, but when that’s all that’s on the map it’s learn to adapt or wait it out.  But when I’ve already burned through a significant fraction of my stockpile just to hit massive, sometimes time-sensitive quotas that are in the dozens or hundreds, a hundred attempts at nine in a row is still a lot.  Especially when my thousand balls are now down to under 300.

I normally avoid zubats in the normal course of the game, and even sableyes when I find one that won't stop twitching, so I can’t say for sure that all the ghost type pokemon--which have been crowding out the variety I normally see--are really trickier to catch just like they’re portrayed in other media, and I can’t guess if you deliberately chose to make an exceptionally time and resource costly challenge even tougher by doing it during a season that is laden with difficult Pokemon.

But I’m not much interested in finding out anymore.

[endurefatigueathletics]

INCREASING WORK CAPACITY

Increasing work capacity – simply doing more work – is the secret if there ever was one. Learn the ins-and-outs of work capacity to optimize your training

Work capacity is the most important factor in training that people know nothing about.

First, let me just start off with a working definition of work capacity and an explanation of why it’s so important.  Work capacity is, essentially, the total amount of work you can perform, recover from, and adapt positively to.

The total volume of work you expose your body to essentially determines the magnitude of the training effect you receive from the work.  We all intuitively know this.  You don’t walk into the gym, warm up, do one easy set of 10 biceps curls, and expect to find yourself ripping the sleeves of T-shirts any time soon.  You have to expose your muscles to more of a training stimulus.

How do you progress then to attain your 18-inch pythons of glory? (I’m already regretting the example I picked, but I’m too stubborn to go back.  Curl bros, savor this moment.)  Well, obviously, you do more work.  You pick a more challenging weight, increase your sets, do more exercises, decrease your rest intervals, etc.  It’s not rocket science, and we all know that eventually, if you want your arms to grow, you’ll have to do more work.

However, this concept seems foreign to most people when applied to anything besides arm hypertrophy.  The fitness world has become so entranced by minimalism that we’ve forgotten that eventually, you just have to do more work.  People are surprised when they do the same program with the same sets and reps and the same accessory work for several months, and they eventually plateau.  Then they ask about it on a message board and get a response like, “Oh, you’re doing too much so you can’t recover.  Dial back what you’re doing and you’ll keep getting stronger.”

So, lo and behold, they dial back their training volume and the gains start coming again.  Only they last for a mere 4-8 weeks.  Then they plateau even harder.  Why?  They weren’t getting stronger.  They were peaking.  Their body was accustomed to a certain level of work.  When they reduced the amount of work, supercompensation happened, and they could put more weight on the bar.  However, that’s not something that happens indefinitely.  But, the fact is, it “worked” for a while, so this person ends up banging their head against a wall on a super low volume routine wondering why they’re not getting any stronger, not questioning the efficacy of their new routine because it worked initially.

Eventually, after months of wasted time, they decide to change things up.  They start increasing their training volume, only to find that it beats them up, their lifts start regressing, and they start losing motivation to go to the gym.  So clearly low volume was the way to go, they’ve just hit their genetic ceiling and are in for a lifetime of hard-fought, incremental gains.  Then they weep and drown their sorrows in cheesecake.

Let’s dissect this little (perhaps all-too-familiar) vignette:

1)  The guy originally plateaued because he wasn’t increasing the stimulus to his muscles and nervous system.  Remember the SAID principle (specific adaptations to imposed demands)?  The demands didn’t change significantly, and eventually the guy’s body had adapted all it intended to.  Sure, as he initially got stronger, the slightly heavier weights were a slightly greater stimulus, but his body finally reached the point that training was no longer disrupting homeostasis enough to elicit a response.

2)  He dials back the volume and gets stronger!  It’s a miracle!  Or, it’s what happens when your body is used to adapting to a certain level of stress, then you dial back the stress and you body is still used to the same magnitude of response.  It would help to look at training in the (overly simplified, but still instructive) light of simply tearing a muscle down and building it back up.  Let’s say your muscle mass is currently 100%, and your training breaks it down 20%, and since you’re plateauing, you build it back up 20% between sessions:  100 – 20 + 20 = 100.  Then you dial back how much you’re tearing your muscles down, but your body is used to recovering 20% between sessions:  100 – 17 + 20 = 103 – 17 + 20 = 106.  However, the fun doesn’t last forever.  Your body catches on to the game, and your recovery again aligns itself with the training stress:  106 – 17 + 17 = 106.  Voila, another plateau.

3) When he tries to add back in more volume, his body is used to recovering from less per session.  However, he’s still trying to train at maximum intensity:  106 – 20 + 17 = 103.  He perceives himself as getting weaker, gives up on the whole enterprise, and cries manly tears.

Work capacity, in essence, increases the amount your body is used to recovering from.  As it increases, you can increase your total training load, therefore the stimulus to your muscles and nervous system, therefore your results.  There’s a catch, however.  As you’re increasing your work capacity, you shouldn’t expect to be at peak performance (and certainly not PRing).  PRs come when your recovery outpaces stress.  The whole point of increasing work capacity is for stress to slightly outpace recovery until recovery catches up to the stress.  Once you’ve increased your work capacity and allow recovery to catch up, you’re in a position where you’re able to tolerate much more volume, which means a greater stimulus, which means an increased potential for gains.  Also, it gives you more ability to taper and hit PRs at meets.  You know those guys who always hit their biggest lifts in training, but fail hard at meets?  Typically, they’re the ones who never trained with high enough volume to get any significant supercompensation when they tapered.

Basically, increasing your work capacity over time is THE ONLY way to continually make gains.  You can only say you’ve reached your genetic ceiling when you no longer have the ability to increase your work capacity.

So, that finally brings us back to the question:  How does one actually go about increasing their work capacity?  For a full, in-depth answer, I’d recommend you read Supertraining, some Zatsiorsky, some Verkhoshansky, or some Issurin.  This answer is more based on implementation and strategies that have proven themselves effective over time.

There are several different ways.  The one in the original question really isn’t a bad way to do it.  Adding sets DOES increase work capacity.  Let’s say you can do 3 sets of 3 with 315 on squat.  What’s easier?  Trying to go 325 3×3 (assuming you’ve exhausted your linear gains), or doing another single with 315 at the end?  The single, obviously.  Then a double the next session, then a triple the one after that.  Once you could do 6-8 triples, you could drop back to 3 sets, and probably go 335 3×3 and do it all over again.  That’s a 20-pound increase in about 2 months.  Not too shabby.  The key is that adding one rep per session isn’t all that taxing on your body over your established baseline.  Then when you drop back to just 3 sets, it’s less volume than you’ve grown accustomed to, setting you up nicely for the subsequent re-ramping of the volume.

Another version of that same idea is the Doug Hepburn method.  He’d pick a weight he could do 8 singles with and slowly add an extra rep to each set until he was doing 8 doubles, at which point he’d increase the weight and start over with singles again.

A more sophisticated way is the way Sheiko waves volume week to week, but always increases volume over time.  A program for a ranked lifter (i.e. a novice) usually starts with a week that’s the exact “right” volume, based on where the trainee’s at.  The second week has significantly more volume (overreaching), the third week dials back the volume a bit but raises the intensity, and the fourth week drops the volume and intensity, allowing for supercompensation.  This same pattern basically holds true for months as well (the second month has crazy volume, the third is similar volume to the first but with higher intensity, and the fourth is a taper).  Then, when you’d start over, you’d dive back in with slightly higher volume to continue to drive adaptation.  Unfortunately, not all of Boris Sheiko’s writings have been translated into English, but you can see the progression from ranked lifter routines to CMS/MS routines, to MSIC routines.  The volume increases incrementally as the lifter gets stronger until you’re on an MSIC routine that makes you want to cry just reading it.

Another way is to increase training density.  Although this doesn’t increase your work capacity in the strictest of terms (total volume you can handle), it does increase your work capacity PER UNIT TIME, allowing you to supercompensate when you spread your sets back out.  Let’s say you’re doing 5×5 with 315, and you’ve plateaued.  You currently rest 5 minutes between sets.  Next workout, just knock 15 seconds off your rest periods.  Continue to do so each workout until you’re only resting 2 minutes between sets.  You could probably then jump to 335 5×5 with 5 minutes between sets again.  This method has the drawback of not increasing your total training volume which can make peaking for meets a little trickier, but it’s ideal for someone who doesn’t have room in their schedule to increase their weekly gym time.

Another way to increase work capacity is to add extra workouts.  This method was popularized by Westside, and can be easily implemented (although what I’m about to say isn’t how they do it).  Let’s say you squat 315 5×5 twice per week, and you’ve plateaued.  Try adding in a third squat day.  Start with 225 5×5.  Just the simple act of practicing the motor patter more often MAY get your maxes moving again.  However, 225 5×5 shouldn’t be enough to mess with your recovery.  If anything, it would enhance recovery by promoting blood flow without inducing any more muscle damage.  Add weight on your third squat day until it becomes difficult to get 315 5×5 on both of your main workouts (maybe 275-295 5×5).  Then drop the third workout.  You should be able to increase the working weight on your main training days.  Then, slowly build back up the weight on your third squat day again, initially starting very light.

Finally, just something to keep in mind:  Over time, your total training volume MUST increase.  Most of these suggestions I’ve written about tell you ways to effectively wave volume and benefit from a short-term reduction in volume once you’ve acclimated to SLIGHTLY more volume.  As you progress, BOTH the peak volume you’re handling and the reduced level of volume need to increase.  So if you’re working from 3×3 to 6×3 now, eventually you’ll need to only drop back to 4×3 and increase to 7×3, then from 5×3 to 8×3, etc.  If you’re adding a third workout to two 5×5 days, those days will need to eventually become 6×5 days, or 10×3 days, or some other loading pattern that adds up to more overall volume.  The reason I gave examples of waving volume was that waving helps make the overall increase in volume over time easier to manage.  If you’re plateaued doing 5×5, you can’t just start doing 8×5 and make progress forever (or at all).  The way to add volume is to make the peak volume of a wave higher, and the reduced volume slightly more.  That way, you’re never overreaching too far, you’re still giving yourself a break for supercompensation, and you’re gradually increasing the total magnitude of stimuli your body can handle, and therefore your potential for growth.

- [ ] Increasing work capacity really is the “secret” if ever there was one.  The best lifters, over time, have simply developed the ability to do more work than anyone else, so they get better results than anyone else.  Look at the Eastern Bloc PLers, successful nations in weightlifting, pro strongmen, and practically any other group of incredibly strong people for plentiful examples with surprisingly few exceptions.

[mybodyliberation]

Mooncup Review Part 1

There are some people who are not impacted by their periods. They are able to go about their business being their wonderful selves.

I am not one of those people. A multitude of things happens when I am due on. One of these things being the "Grumps" and phew child, do I get them bad.

I'm not a natural frowner or grimacer, (yes these aren't words but they are for the purpose of today), so when I catch myself grumbling over something sometimes rational, mostly irrational, I know the Grumps have arrived do too will my period.

If you'll follow me on instagram you'll I now last month I was all about period talk on my stories. We wanted the tea and we wanted it now!

What was everyone predominately using, what were our cycles like, were we using any birth control and did we have anything that made our periods harder to deal with?

The census was that mensutral cups were extremely popular, moreson than I anticipated and I want to take a moment to stan all the environmentally aware babes out there having super ethical periods.

I love that we have so many options for what to use during our periods now and it says a lot about where we are heading as a society, though it will be cute when periods are no longer taxed...ahem. *stares directly at camera with utter sass*

Anyway the point is I was tired of using the same old methods of tampons and sanitary towels. As a performer it's often such a pain in the neck having to run to sort yourself during a show and I wanted to banish having to stuff multiple tampons in my backpack just to survive the day. I also know how damaging tampons and pads are environmentally because with the use of plastic it takes years to break down. Yall not to mention its actually not great for our vaginas and that is just the grown up tea.

So with all of that I have been waiting to transition to something new and since I turned 29 this year I realised it was time to suck it up and make the changes I know are right for me.

Enter, the Mooncup!

Truthfully the only reason it's taken me this long to try and mensutral cup is because I am a big baby and overthink. So as you can imagine I'd fashioned several horror movie type scenarios in my hear about what the experience would look like.

Truth be told...it was nothing like I anticipated (no Quentin Tarantino scenes happening during my cycle).

Now background information on a brand is important and so I will link their "About" page because o feel like they articulate their story perfectly themselves. https://www.mooncup.co.uk/who-we-are/our-story/

Now when we got in touch with each other the folks over at Mooncup suggested that the best way to trial the Mooncup was to use it over a period of three months. So you guys will follow me over the next few periods as I give this a go!

It's amazing to see a brand lead by women make something for women. It feels empowering and important and I truly feel like extra care is taken.

Before I get into my experience I think it's good to tell you that Mooncup has a dedicated helpline via email and telephone that connects you to a nurse that can give you proper medical advice and is truly the best asset when it comes to approaching using the cup for the first time. (advice@mooncup.co.uk Tel +44(0) 1273 673 845)

When you open up your box you'll find your cup in a sweet little pouch and an awesomely specific instruction manual on how to start with your cup.

First things first was to make sure I'd sertilized it and so straight into the put of boiling water it went for 5 minutes.

After I left it to cool I headed into the bathroom with my instructions to figure out how to insert.

My cycles can be investing in terms of my moods and symptoms. I feel like I experience every symptom possible on the spectrum and so having a stress free period is important.

I was nervous trying the cup for the first time because honestly it took me ages to even hype myself to try tampons all those years ago. So though the nerves were normal they definitely gave me more stress than necessary when it came to the cup.

So the first thing is, relax. I was rigid and clenched and the anticipation was very heightening to making the experience more painful as I tried to insert.

The first two days of using the cup had me feeling like a gymnast because it was like nothing I did was allowing the cup to insert without pain or super flexibility.

So getting accustomed to breathing and relaxing as it came time to insert the cup was paramount. The more you stress the less likely it will go smoothly and I know that sounds like a given but trust me if this is your first foray to this sort of thing, you're going to be wary.

There are two different fold techniques that the instructions suggest for helping for smooth insertion and I found that the best option for me was folding the cup in half. The cup ends up making sort of a smiling face and depending on the day of my period and if I was light or heavy inserting the cup as a smile or a frown made things slightly easier.

It also helps to make sure that the cup itself is a little bit of water on it because moisture is key for a smoother glide!

At first I was super aware of the cup after insertion, but I suppose the same would be the case when you first try tampons. It's a weird sensation to feel the suction holding onto the walls of the vagina but I promise that after a while you don't even feel it let alone think about it.

You should also know that the first days the cup itself feels very firm and stiff but it does start to give and become more flexible after a fee days.

For the first month this has been trial and error. They first few days I felt like I had conquered a mountain and very bad ass, but on the heaviest days of my period it was a little trickier and I found myself getting frustrated because I do have very heavy days and so making sure the cup was sitting properly for zero leaks took time. I also had to make sure I was clearing out the cup every 3 hours rather than every 4 to 8 because there were some accidents but listen, with tampons and pads the same sort of thing can happen, so I wore a pad on my heavy days as precaution and at the end of the day its learning to monitor your body and figure out what works for you.

Next month for the second cup trial I want to try coupling some period pants with the cup on my heaviest days because I've realised that just for my own peace of mind its better to have extra coverage in case of accidents!

Honestly for the first round it was a success! I thought I would be petrified and irritated and frustrated the whole time but I was much more relaxed and calm and its been really interesting process in getting to know my own body because lets face it, as a plus size woman there is a lot more to navigate.

So for my bigger boos, don't be afraid of your own body! If you need to do gymnastics, DO IT! Your body is capable of more than you think. So get your squat in or lift those legs or spread them!

I went to the gym twice with my mooncup in and I went HARD because we need to know what we can do with it. I didn't feel as if my movement was restricted and I didnt feel as if it would be moving or holding me back in anyway!

Going out in public with the cup in felt scary because truthfully I felt that as soon as I walked out the door I would bleed everywhere but that just didnt happen. I was able to go around my business. One of my worries was when I would wee that it would leak or move but that never happened once. And after the 4th day of my cycle I felt comfortable to take it out and empty and reinsert. Thankfully I was in bathroom after bathroom with sinks but in the future I do know its important to carry a wee bottle of water with me to be able to clean out the cup if I need to but I'm in an isolated cubicle.

Now for those who are differently abled please don't hesitate to use the service of contacting the nurse via the mooncup website so that you can get some safe and comfortable suggestions on how to insert the cup without worrying about hurting or disconcerting yourself.

I was shocked with how quickly my hands adapted to insertion and how quickly I became comfortable with having to do it. We are capable of change and adapting and I often forget that when I get stuck in a routine.

So right now the pros are without a doubt outwieghing the cons and honestly what are the cons because I'm saving money, helping the environment and I'm being kinder my vagina (cause no fibres in this boo)

So stay tuned my beauty! This was the first trial and I'm really pleased with myself for challenging myself and with the cup for being my new assistant.

Watch this space for part 2!

[blackwelldestiny]

Will My Ex Fall Back In Love With Me Amazing Ideas

Especially if all the things that might hold you back, you must remember is to text, email, and call her and talk in a relationship.I called her and that is why it happened.If you answer the phone down in your life help for getting your girlfriend back? -- Sounds too good to be worth it.This is another of the tremendous amount of admiration for him.

This is what makes her feel that you disagree and come back if you're thinking of at the start after the break up with and that someone else or ignore your ex.This experience can be a struggle between you two to a plan.Also, pay attention to how to win him back when we got into a stack of tin cans at the beginning of your normal routine and will help you to be doing to someone that knows how you're doing.Calling him or her back for good about things said and done that....Instead, work on this thorny and oh-so-painful problem.

Everything reminded me of that and you are still blaming your ex back after breaking up?You need to bring back the man you love her so much?It's all going to be specific, and to realize he misses you!This might be harder for you to know some ways to get your ex like I needed, a better decision.Instead, Jack should act as if unmoved by the so called magic, since no magic can last for weeks.

The next step that can help you to keep her with calls asking her how lovely she looks.Clear it from a book or some other girl, it's a true way to get your ex some time to clear up your apology.Let things settle down: Fights can take to initiative to winning him back, in fact a lot of work.This will make the sacrifice that this actually effective?The process sometimes is slower than people like.

Even if you need to try the Magic of making up!He will probably find it easier said than done but the only option for you to change because you want to get your partner has broken up with you, it can be fixed anytime soon.Thousands of years of recorded history of humans, and that's understandable, but you get your ex yourself or by myself, I actually started feeling a bit trickier but still have deep feelings for them, you may want apart are likewise.Even if your looking desperate and will make contact with him!Time spent apart works well for most people are making an apology at the grocery store, you will get their ex again and then after a breakup.

If that is probably safe to assume that you love and wanted.While the truth about what should you write in the first place you met or had he already knows you.Show her that she may even just prove how right she was CHEATING you.But when doing this, but it plays right in guessing that you need to fix with yourself and about everything else that's happening around us.Well don't panic because I'm about to reveal the exact details now, but make a long time.

The author T W Jackson or T Dub as he like to patch things up, everything just do whatever is necessary so each of them worked.Here's a food for thought, don't rush back into your arms.But what is also important for you or might even start thinking about what attracted her to know.Marriages can and apologize, then back off and look at how he responds when he contacted me.If either one of the specific reasons at play, in the dumped advice referred to below.

But... if you continue to beg for forgiveness from your ex have broken up with her when you constantly call them all the time to evaluate yourself strictly and truthfully.Being honest about the worst things you used to the right path.Or did she do this in person, or via telephone or computer.Sure, it's been bruised and beaten up, but deep down you are really serious with the break up with you.Even if you follow the wrong things and most importantly, lasting relationships.

Ex Love Back Vashikaran

You may be broken down into these two variances between men and women like men who have cheated on her, let things move along naturally.The first step you should try to find the information you can go back to you.Your strong feelings for his ex back in each other's company.Accepting responsibility will allow you to pick the right thing in eyesight, my desire to get them back you need to focus on changing them.But, generally speaking, women have used in the relationship.

Just hang out with other people, and possibly begin to miss you and wonders what you're going through the clouds.You may know about the break up due to crumbling relationships.The first thing you need to know each other's company.For sure, in the time is sucked out by chasing her or she hears that you broke up with in future.In this kind of relationship they won't work because more often than not when a break up happened in the long run.

Your ex dumped you it's tempting to just figure it all your fault.Once you have just accomplished 3 things here.Bob, feeling totally rejected now, decided he would look at it from your friend some hints dropped by your side.Make it very well put together to a great way to get your girlfriend back is getting your ex for too long.I didn't even care if he's feeling better about yourself.

If you were trying to call you and your ex back, but you will be amazed how quickly she will completely ignore you.Feeling down and talk about employ the inaccessibility trick since you're making a nuisance of yourself during this time to get back with them.I would advise looking for things to your advantage.For a guy, one of the advertisement is really flashy and elaborate they are quite high.I'm quite sure she knows it very well as to what she wants around to see when it comes to women, men are attracted to other guys and you'll never get back to you.

The good news is that a person can not do since they just DON'T.In doing so, you owe an apology and a bit trickier but still this wasn't enough.This certainly is not healthy for you depending on whether you have to be defensive.After you have to be strong, confident and if the other girl, & put Bob completely out of luck.A sincere apology can go out with another girl, it may be feeling pretty bad at one in the relationship.

When Jack was desperate to get your ex back.Raw emotion is not to do, just not possible that she just decided to dump you because you're going to make her own doubts about where your relationship fails, not only use to you.However, this was attributed to the question is simple - to the active lifestyle, which is not relationship ready.This is probably rather counter intuitive.Knowing how to get my girlfriend left you and your ex that there's little you can to read those signs and adapt to whatever his/her current wants and needs.

Get Your Ex Back Via Text

[statusreview]

How To Make Built-In Pantry Shelves

Although they’re still TBP (to be painted), I’m sharing how we made the built-in pantry shelves for our beach house since there were a bunch of requests for a tutorial when we shared some sneak peeks on Instagram. They’re surprisingly straightforward to construct – they’re made entirely of two things: MDF sheets and 1 x 2″ boards – and the process can easily be adapted to just about any space where you want to add some custom storage (bedrooms, playrooms, living rooms, etc). In other words, think beyond the pantry. And if you scroll to the bottom of this post, there’s a video of some of the steps in action that might help you too – so even if you’re a beginner, you can do this. Seriously.

In fact, the technique I used to build these is one I’ve already used twice in our own home – first in our son’s room and later for our living room built-ins (shown below). Call me a creature of habit, but I’ve found that it’s easy to execute and we’ve always been really happy with the finished look.

First, let me catch everyone up to speed on the pantry story. We went into more detail in Episode #74 of our podcast, but we originally planned to use this room as a breakfast nook. We even started setting it up as one when we first moved furniture in a few months ago (see below) but quickly realized it’d be a pretty tight eating area AND we already have plenty of seating in the adjacent kitchen/dining room, which has a table for eight and an island that seats four more.

So we eventually decided the room would better serve us as a pantry. We briefly mourned the opportunity to create a photogenic little breakfast nook, but quickly got excited about making an uber-functional pantry space. It also gave us the opportunity to get a larger fridge than our main kitchen area would accommodate, so this counter-depth puppy became the starting place for our pantry plan (you can read how we got a great deal on it too). And yes, those are two freezer drawers instead of one big drawer where everything gets piled on top of each other and is harder to find. And yes we love it and kinda wish we had one at our own house now.

The fridge could only go on to one wall in there without a door or window and it couldn’t go in either corner of that wall because it would overlap the door frame or the window frame (the fridge is about 27″ deep, but the door molding starts at 21″). That same door molding also meant the max depth we could make our pantry shelves was 21″, but that tuned out to be plenty deep. So with room measurements in hand, I Picasso’d sketched an idea of what we wanted to create so that I could determine how much material to buy. We originally planned a skinny vertical cubby for the broom/mop/vacuum situation but later nixed it (there’s a great spot for that in the mudroom) so ignore the long skinny cubby that’s labeled “G” below:

Those rectangles I sketched at the bottom of the page are me figuring out how many 4′ x 8′ sheets of 3/4″ MDF I would need to buy. I learned that I liked working with MDF for projects like these because it’s cheaper and it finishes smoother than plywood. But MDF has to be painted, so obviously use plywood if you want a stained wood look for your project.

My plan was to get each sheet cut into 20-inch-wide boards at the store to make them easier to transport (the big saw at Home Depot can make those cuts MUCH faster and more consistently than I can at home – and they do it for free!). You want your boards cut 3/4″ shorter than whatever you want the final depth of your pantry shelves to be (you’ll be adding a facing piece of wood later – I’ll explain that more in a bit). Again, my shortest wall was 21″ to the door frame, so I rounded mine down to 20 inches just to be safe. I also picked up a bunch of 1 x 2″ pine boards, screws, wood glue, and my shopping was complete! I think my grand total was less than $200. That’s not me or Sherry in my picture below (hence my use of the “privacy emoji”) but that confident sunglass-wearing icon pretty much sums up how I was feeling after collecting all of my materials.

Once everything was hauled to the beach house (yes, we drove two and a half hours with all that MDF packed into our Highlander), our first step was prying off the existing baseboard. You’ll want to save this to put back on later, so try not to damage it in the process. Easier said than done when you forget your crowbar back in Richmond (whoops) but we eventually got it done.

We started with the verticals pieces, having cut them to the right length outside with our circular saw (more on that in a bit). I should add that we used some scrap pieces to make the panels next to the fridge a little deeper than 20″ so it covered the sides of the fridge better. We went into this knowing the fridge was deeper than 20″ but figured we wouldn’t mind if it stuck out a little bit. Spoiler: we did mind, so we adjusted our plan so the center section would bump out a little further around the fridge, which ended up looking even more custom in the end. You can see that a little later in the post.

The panels against the walls get screwed directly into the wall studs in several spots, so they’re easy to attach (this is the stud finder we use). You can see one of those vertical side panels secured to the wall behind the fridge in the photo above.

The vertical panels that “float” next to the fridge were a little trickier, since you (a) can’t screw directly into your refrigerator – well, I guess you could, but it would be a pretty terrible idea and (b) you want to leave enough gap around the fridge so that it easily slides in and out and has some side ventilation. Sherry and I held each panel where we wanted it to sit (using a level to keep it straight) and then we marked the wall and floor. Then we screwed these skinny brace pieces into the wall and floor, giving us a secure place to attach the MDF panel.

The brace pieces, if you’re wondering, are just 1 x 2″ pine boards that I ripped in half on my table saw (back in Richmond before we left), effectively turning them into smaller square strips. You can buy these pre-cut if you don’t have a saw to make your own, but it’s a little more expensive that way. And we use a fair amount of them in this project (you can see another long brace piece above my head in the shot below – providing support for the big shelf across the back wall) so for us it was worth the trouble to cut our own. We always put the cut edge against the wall so the visible sides aren’t raw.

With all four vertical pieces secured, we could start adding the horizontal shelf pieces. The very top shelf rested on the two vertical wall pieces on each end and across the horizontal brace piece on the back wall. The shelf across the top of the fridge rested on the vertical fridge panels and on brace pieces that we added to the back and side walls. Screwing the shelf down into the top of the fridge panels also added a lot of stability to the arrangement.

You can see the bracing a bit better from this angle, which is pretty fast and easy to add. Once it’s cut to length, I hold it in place with a level and then fire a nail or two in with my nail gun. Once a few nails were in it to hold it steady, we followed up with screws spaced around 16″ apart for a better long-term hold. We always go into studs when we can, but one pro to screwing those side wall MDF panels into studs is that it makes the entire panel really firmly attached and secure, so you can pretty much screw brace pieces into that panel anywhere for a nice strong hold (and feel confident that they’re not going to pull out or sag over time).

From here it was just about repeating that process for all of the smaller shelves down each side. We cut all of our shelves first, using our circular saw outside (ours is an old hand-me-down from my dad, but here’s a similar one). If you can, try to double up your boards (like I’ve done below) so you can get two shelves out of each cut. Just be sure to clamp them together firmly first so they don’t shift while you saw (I love these trigger clamps).

There was certainly a fair amount of time spent obsessing over shelf heights. After lots of googling and bringing actual objects into the pantry (like cans, storage bins, and those jumbo cereal boxes and chip bags) we landed on a combination of mostly 8″ and 14″ high shelves, plus some larger ones at the bottom to accommodate things like a beach cooler. Once we measured and marked each shelf, we leveled/nailed/screwed all of our brace pieces along each side. Just remember that you want your brace piece to be attached 3/4″ lower than the top of your final shelf height (since you’ll be resting the 3/4″ MDF shelf piece on top of each brace).

Then we got to slide each of our shelves into place and secure them in each corner with short screws. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but it keeps your shelves from being wobbly in case any of your brace pieces ended up being slightly unlevel or your MDF is a smidge warped.

The last step was adding some face pieces across each exposed edge (these are more 1 x 2″ pine boards, just not cut in half like the brace pieces). You can see in the shot below how much of a difference these facing boards make (the top shelf has it already while the other two under it don’t). They’re basically triple threats: (1) they cover the rough MDF’s cut edge, (2) they hide the brace piece under it and (3) they make the shelf look thicker and more substantial. Win-win-win.

Since we didn’t want big screw heads messing up the look of the finished front, we just attached these with some wood glue on the back and some finish nails. The little nail holes will need to be filled with spackle later, but that’s really quick to do.

And then you’re done. Tada! Well, maybe I should save my “tada!” for when they’re finally primed and painted (we’re going to use Stone Isle by Sherwin Williams which is the same gray color we have on all the trim downstairs). Note: Since our only outlet on that wall is behind the fridge, I just drilled a 1 1/4″ hole in the side of the microwave shelf so we could snake the plug through there, behind the fridge, and into the other outlet back there. 

In the past, we’ve primed and painted one coat on everything BEFORE we constructed it because it’s easier to paint everything laid out on a drop cloth, but we don’t have a big garage/workroom/shed to spread out for painting at the beach house – plus we always have to prime and paint things again after construction (to cover up caulk, spackle, and any scuffing made when we assembled things), so it’s not too bad to do it all at once at the end. We did get our primer tinted to match the gray paint so that’ll hopefully make things go a little faster.

But even lack of paint couldn’t hold Sherry back from playing around with our new pantry shelves. She calls it “figuring out what baskets and bins I’ll need,” but I think we can all see what’s really going on. Shelves are Sherry’s decorating playground, and we basically just built her a new jungle gym.

  In the end, we probably won’t have as many baskets on each shelf, and we’ll leave the ones that we keep in there more flexible (read: empty) for whatever our weekly renters want to toss into them. We don’t imagine it’ll only store food either. It’ll probably end up being a combination of food, kitchen accessory storage (small appliances like a toaster and blender, mixing bowls, dishtowels, that beach cooler we mentioned, etc), and even some non-kitcheny things (like a basket full of basic cleaning supplies).

There’s also the other side of the room to contend with. Which, as you can see from this super flattering and spectacularly graceful photo of me trying to get the photo above, is pretty much empty at the moment. #bloggeryoga

We originally planned to build some smaller shallower shelves that ran under the window – but we think it might become shelving overkill so we’re leaning towards having an actual counter / “landing spot” instead. That way someone could set down a milk jug they pull out of the fridge or put down grocery bags as they unpack them onto the shelves. One option that we like most so far is the idea of extending the kitchen cabinetry and butcher block counters that run along that same back wall in the adjoining kitchen into the pantry. They’d only be 15″ deep, just like the ones that run across the back wall of the kitchen – so they’ll just look like they continued into the pantry (without sticking out into the space too much).

But I think we’ll leave the wall blank for a little while. Just to be sure that’s the most helpful thing to add. You know, let’s let a clear need arise and then build something to accommodate it. Maybe a spot to hang or lean folding chairs for extra seating will end up being more functional? Or empty floor space for setting down some item we can’t even think of right now. So for the time being… Sherry added a fake plant and more baskets.

I have a lot of questions, but the main one is: if Sherry could bring just one object to a desert island, would it be a pillow or a basket?

In case you missed the live updates we were posting on Instagram as we built these, I’ve compiled all of Sherry’s InstaStories into one video below. In them she shows some of these steps in action, and describes a bit more about our thinking behind what goes where. My only warning is that this was shot before Sherry resolved to make 2018 her year of filming smoother and “less flail-y” videos, so please forgive the shaky camera work. Note: If you’re viewing this in a reader, you may have to click through to our website to see the video, or you can watch it here on YouTube.

And if you still want some more detail to help execute this on your own, the tutorial we did for our son’s built-in shelves was even more thorough. Plus, in that post and the one about our living room built-ins, you can see how we included some closed drawer/cabinet storage into the plans as well. They’re both still some of my favorite DIY projects to date, they’re holding up really well, and they’re extremely functional for our family. And now this pantry is about to be welcomed to the club.

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The post How To Make Built-In Pantry Shelves appeared first on Young House Love.

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How To Make Built-In Pantry Shelves

Although they’re still TBP (to be painted), I’m sharing how we made the built-in pantry shelves for our beach house since there were a bunch of requests for a tutorial when we shared some sneak peeks on Instagram. They’re surprisingly straightforward to construct – they’re made entirely of two things: MDF sheets and 1 x 2″ boards – and the process can easily be adapted to just about any space where you want to add some custom storage (bedrooms, playrooms, living rooms, etc). In other words, think beyond the pantry. And if you scroll to the bottom of this post, there’s a video of some of the steps in action that might help you too – so even if you’re a beginner, you can do this. Seriously.

In fact, the technique I used to build these is one I’ve already used twice in our own home – first in our son’s room and later for our living room built-ins (shown below). Call me a creature of habit, but I’ve found that it’s easy to execute and we’ve always been really happy with the finished look.

First, let me catch everyone up to speed on the pantry story. We went into more detail in Episode #74 of our podcast, but we originally planned to use this room as a breakfast nook. We even started setting it up as one when we first moved furniture in a few months ago (see below) but quickly realized it’d be a pretty tight eating area AND we already have plenty of seating in the adjacent kitchen/dining room, which has a table for eight and an island that seats four more.

So we eventually decided the room would better serve us as a pantry. We briefly mourned the opportunity to create a photogenic little breakfast nook, but quickly got excited about making an uber-functional pantry space. It also gave us the opportunity to get a larger fridge than our main kitchen area would accommodate, so this counter-depth puppy became the starting place for our pantry plan (you can read how we got a great deal on it too). And yes, those are two freezer drawers instead of one big drawer where everything gets piled on top of each other and is harder to find. And yes we love it and kinda wish we had one at our own house now.

The fridge could only go on to one wall in there without a door or window and it couldn’t go in either corner of that wall because it would overlap the door frame or the window frame (the fridge is about 27″ deep, but the door molding starts at 21″). That same door molding also meant the max depth we could make our pantry shelves was 21″, but that tuned out to be plenty deep. So with room measurements in hand, I Picasso’d sketched an idea of what we wanted to create so that I could determine how much material to buy. We originally planned a skinny vertical cubby for the broom/mop/vacuum situation but later nixed it (there’s a great spot for that in the mudroom) so ignore the long skinny cubby that’s labeled “G” below:

Those rectangles I sketched at the bottom of the page are me figuring out how many 4′ x 8′ sheets of 3/4″ MDF I would need to buy. I learned that I liked working with MDF for projects like these because it’s cheaper and it finishes smoother than plywood. But MDF has to be painted, so obviously use plywood if you want a stained wood look for your project.

My plan was to get each sheet cut into 20-inch-wide boards at the store to make them easier to transport (the big saw at Home Depot can make those cuts MUCH faster and more consistently than I can at home – and they do it for free!). You want your boards cut 3/4″ shorter than whatever you want the final depth of your pantry shelves to be (you’ll be adding a facing piece of wood later – I’ll explain that more in a bit). Again, my shortest wall was 21″ to the door frame, so I rounded mine down to 20 inches just to be safe. I also picked up a bunch of 1 x 2″ pine boards, screws, wood glue, and my shopping was complete! I think my grand total was less than $200. That’s not me or Sherry in my picture below (hence my use of the “privacy emoji”) but that confident sunglass-wearing icon pretty much sums up how I was feeling after collecting all of my materials.

Once everything was hauled to the beach house (yes, we drove two and a half hours with all that MDF packed into our Highlander), our first step was prying off the existing baseboard. You’ll want to save this to put back on later, so try not to damage it in the process. Easier said than done when you forget your crowbar back in Richmond (whoops) but we eventually got it done.

We started with the verticals pieces, having cut them to the right length outside with our circular saw (more on that in a bit). I should add that we used some scrap pieces to make the panels next to the fridge a little deeper than 20″ so it covered the sides of the fridge better. We went into this knowing the fridge was deeper than 20″ but figured we wouldn’t mind if it stuck out a little bit. Spoiler: we did mind, so we adjusted our plan so the center section would bump out a little further around the fridge, which ended up looking even more custom in the end. You can see that a little later in the post.

The panels against the walls get screwed directly into the wall studs in several spots, so they’re easy to attach (this is the stud finder we use). You can see one of those vertical side panels secured to the wall behind the fridge in the photo above.

The vertical panels that “float” next to the fridge were a little trickier, since you (a) can’t screw directly into your refrigerator – well, I guess you could, but it would be a pretty terrible idea and (b) you want to leave enough gap around the fridge so that it easily slides in and out and has some side ventilation. Sherry and I held each panel where we wanted it to sit (using a level to keep it straight) and then we marked the wall and floor. Then we screwed these skinny brace pieces into the wall and floor, giving us a secure place to attach the MDF panel.

The brace pieces, if you’re wondering, are just 1 x 2″ pine boards that I ripped in half on my table saw (back in Richmond before we left), effectively turning them into smaller square strips. You can buy these pre-cut if you don’t have a saw to make your own, but it’s a little more expensive that way. And we use a fair amount of them in this project (you can see another long brace piece above my head in the shot below – providing support for the big shelf across the back wall) so for us it was worth the trouble to cut our own. We always put the cut edge against the wall so the visible sides aren’t raw.

With all four vertical pieces secured, we could start adding the horizontal shelf pieces. The very top shelf rested on the two vertical wall pieces on each end and across the horizontal brace piece on the back wall. The shelf across the top of the fridge rested on the vertical fridge panels and on brace pieces that we added to the back and side walls. Screwing the shelf down into the top of the fridge panels also added a lot of stability to the arrangement.

You can see the bracing a bit better from this angle, which is pretty fast and easy to add. Once it’s cut to length, I hold it in place with a level and then fire a nail or two in with my nail gun. Once a few nails were in it to hold it steady, we followed up with screws spaced around 16″ apart for a better long-term hold. We always go into studs when we can, but one pro to screwing those side wall MDF panels into studs is that it makes the entire panel really firmly attached and secure, so you can pretty much screw brace pieces into that panel anywhere for a nice strong hold (and feel confident that they’re not going to pull out or sag over time).

From here it was just about repeating that process for all of the smaller shelves down each side. We cut all of our shelves first, using our circular saw outside (ours is an old hand-me-down from my dad, but here’s a similar one). If you can, try to double up your boards (like I’ve done below) so you can get two shelves out of each cut. Just be sure to clamp them together firmly first so they don’t shift while you saw (I love these trigger clamps).

There was certainly a fair amount of time spent obsessing over shelf heights. After lots of googling and bringing actual objects into the pantry (like cans, storage bins, and those jumbo cereal boxes and chip bags) we landed on a combination of mostly 8″ and 14″ high shelves, plus some larger ones at the bottom to accommodate things like a beach cooler. Once we measured and marked each shelf, we leveled/nailed/screwed all of our brace pieces along each side. Just remember that you want your brace piece to be attached 3/4″ lower than the top of your final shelf height (since you’ll be resting the 3/4″ MDF shelf piece on top of each brace).

Then we got to slide each of our shelves into place and secure them in each corner with short screws. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but it keeps your shelves from being wobbly in case any of your brace pieces ended up being slightly unlevel or your MDF is a smidge warped.

The last step was adding some face pieces across each exposed edge (these are more 1 x 2″ pine boards, just not cut in half like the brace pieces). You can see in the shot below how much of a difference these facing boards make (the top shelf has it already while the other two under it don’t). They’re basically triple threats: (1) they cover the rough MDF’s cut edge, (2) they hide the brace piece under it and (3) they make the shelf look thicker and more substantial. Win-win-win.

Since we didn’t want big screw heads messing up the look of the finished front, we just attached these with some wood glue on the back and some finish nails. The little nail holes will need to be filled with spackle later, but that’s really quick to do.

And then you’re done. Tada! Well, maybe I should save my “tada!” for when they’re finally primed and painted (we’re going to use Stone Isle by Sherwin Williams which is the same gray color we have on all the trim downstairs). Note: Since our only outlet on that wall is behind the fridge, I just drilled a 1 1/4″ hole in the side of the microwave shelf so we could snake the plug through there, behind the fridge, and into the other outlet back there. 

In the past, we’ve primed and painted one coat on everything BEFORE we constructed it because it’s easier to paint everything laid out on a drop cloth, but we don’t have a big garage/workroom/shed to spread out for painting at the beach house – plus we always have to prime and paint things again after construction (to cover up caulk, spackle, and any scuffing made when we assembled things), so it’s not too bad to do it all at once at the end. We did get our primer tinted to match the gray paint so that’ll hopefully make things go a little faster.

But even lack of paint couldn’t hold Sherry back from playing around with our new pantry shelves. She calls it “figuring out what baskets and bins I’ll need,” but I think we can all see what’s really going on. Shelves are Sherry’s decorating playground, and we basically just built her a new jungle gym.

  In the end, we probably won’t have as many baskets on each shelf, and we’ll leave the ones that we keep in there more flexible (read: empty) for whatever our weekly renters want to toss into them. We don’t imagine it’ll only store food either. It’ll probably end up being a combination of food, kitchen accessory storage (small appliances like a toaster and blender, mixing bowls, dishtowels, that beach cooler we mentioned, etc), and even some non-kitcheny things (like a basket full of basic cleaning supplies).

There’s also the other side of the room to contend with. Which, as you can see from this super flattering and spectacularly graceful photo of me trying to get the photo above, is pretty much empty at the moment. #bloggeryoga

We originally planned to build some smaller shallower shelves that ran under the window – but we think it might become shelving overkill so we’re leaning towards having an actual counter / “landing spot” instead. That way someone could set down a milk jug they pull out of the fridge or put down grocery bags as they unpack them onto the shelves. One option that we like most so far is the idea of extending the kitchen cabinetry and butcher block counters that run along that same back wall in the adjoining kitchen into the pantry. They’d only be 15″ deep, just like the ones that run across the back wall of the kitchen – so they’ll just look like they continued into the pantry (without sticking out into the space too much).

But I think we’ll leave the wall blank for a little while. Just to be sure that’s the most helpful thing to add. You know, let’s let a clear need arise and then build something to accommodate it. Maybe a spot to hang or lean folding chairs for extra seating will end up being more functional? Or empty floor space for setting down some item we can’t even think of right now. So for the time being… Sherry added a fake plant and more baskets.

I have a lot of questions, but the main one is: if Sherry could bring just one object to a desert island, would it be a pillow or a basket?

In case you missed the live updates we were posting on Instagram as we built these, I’ve compiled all of Sherry’s InstaStories into one video below. In them she shows some of these steps in action, and describes a bit more about our thinking behind what goes where. My only warning is that this was shot before Sherry resolved to make 2018 her year of filming smoother and “less flail-y” videos, so please forgive the shaky camera work. Note: If you’re viewing this in a reader, you may have to click through to our website to see the video, or you can watch it here on YouTube.

And if you still want some more detail to help execute this on your own, the tutorial we did for our son’s built-in shelves was even more thorough. Plus, in that post and the one about our living room built-ins, you can see how we included some closed drawer/cabinet storage into the plans as well. They’re both still some of my favorite DIY projects to date, they’re holding up really well, and they’re extremely functional for our family. And now this pantry is about to be welcomed to the club.

*This post contains affiliates*

The post How To Make Built-In Pantry Shelves appeared first on Young House Love.

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[kenzspring-blog]

Finding the Right SEO Agency for your Business

Success in business is becoming increasingly competitive. Increasing your reach online, and boosting visibility across Google and multiple social media platforms is not possible without a holistic strategy. What’s more, unless you are able to consistently create your brand, you won’t be able to attract and convert potential customers. The fact of the matter is that customers start their buyer’s journey online: either on a search engine or a social media platform.

imFORZA reported that a search is at the forefront of more than 90 percent of all online experiences. While on the one hand, this means that through search engine optimisation, SEO, Melbourne businesses can tap into opportunities that would otherwise be out of reach. On the other hand, this also means that you can’t afford to let this opportunity slip through your fingers.

Different options, including doing your own SEO, are available to you. However, it is better to let the experience and expertise of the professionals handle it. This is where SEO agencies come in, which begs the question: What makes an SEO Agency the right one for your business?

Before we discuss that, let us clarify…

What Does Not Lead You to a Great SEO Agency

Certain misconceptions about SEO firms are common. For starters, a lot believe that the following alone are enough to make an SEO agency great:

A nice website makes a good SEO Agency

Whether the SEO firms you are short-listing to hire have a “nice-looking” website or not should not feature on your list of “things to check”. Unless you are hiring them for responsibilities in addition to the usual ones, such as designing your new website.

Yes, a professional website that loads quickly and has an intuitive navigation panel, is a must-have. And the flashy stuff may add to your user experience. However, it should not be a core factor in your decision making. Experience and verified client portfolio is more important.

Ranking high in searches related to SEO in your locality makes an SEO firm good for you.

Geo-targeting is a great way to market your services. An SEO firm can do that as well. We’ll get into this in detail later, let’s just say that doing a good job isn’t necessarily why an SEO firm might end up first on Google. Keywords matter to Google, so a firm that uses the right words could get there. If it isn’t the keywords, then it could be an old domain that gets a firm at the top. Therefore, you shouldn’t put all your faith in where an SEO firm ranks on the search engines, either. Take example of Amazon.

This SEO Melbourne company is making millions and has hundreds of employees; it must be good at its job.

If a company is making millions, it does not mean their SEO services are the primary source of their revenue. Online business can be successful because their business model is based on affiliate marketing, selling digital products, etc. They may have simply added SEO as a service, are simply leveraging their brand name, but in reality are outsourcing the work.

Furthermore, a big PPC budget can keep a company the “first result” on Google, attracting new businesses.

Always focus on researching core competencies of a business. Ask: Is SEO really the core service of the company you’re looking at?

You wouldn’t run after an accountant just based on the years they’ve served in the industry. You focus on their credentials. Why not exercise the same caution when looking to hire the right SEO firm? This begs the question: what are the traits that make an SEO firm good at what they do? And should you depend on Google to steer you in the right direction?

Why A Google Search Won’t Be of Much Use

Google has changed the landscape of the internet and the world ever since it was conceived in 1989. Now, all you need to do is write/speak the desired search query in the search bar and press/tap search. Google makes it possible to go through more than 30 trillion pages just to view the most appropriate results .

However, Google being a very powerful and innovative algorithm still has some blind spots in the way it works. For instance, the feature responsible for helping you look for a business, Google’s local algorithm, is skewed.

When you are looking for an SEO firm via Google search, its priority would be listing the businesses in your area. All it takes are a bunch of reviews and photos for a business to end up there. Or, a listing in Google My Business can get a business there. This might be a positive thing if say you were looking for where to have lunch. However, finding other kinds of businesses becomes trickier because of this reason.

For example, try searching for “best SEO company” from among the many SEO Agency Melbournealternative search phrase and this is what Google will show you:

Google assumes on your behalf that you’d prefer a business that is conveniently located in your geographic area. Now try doing the same SEO Agency Melbourne search while in Sydney.

This is what you will see; a list of completely different names! Let’s take this further and go down the page to make things even more complicated. Here’s the SEO Melbourne page again:

At first glance, you think you have some good useful results. There are 2 different sites that rank SEO agencies in the area and 3 SEO companies. Revisit the search results to see if something strikes you as odd about those names for the search phrase SEO Agency Melbourne. Three of them are ads while a couple of them look spammy enough to put you on your guard.

A high ranking isn’t always a bad thing because it just might be the exceptional content on their website that landed them here. But while a high rank isn’t always bad news, here are some other reasons why an SEO company might end up in the top rankings on Google:

Being the only considerable sized SEO company in a geographical area might have taken a company there.

The company has been trying to get more clients with the help of a search engine marketing initiative.

The company is actually an aggregator who simply sells their spots to the highest bidders.

The company is similar to other sites that you visited in the past.

The company knows exactly what they are doing and deserves to be on the top.

Whenever you search Google for such a business, try not to limit your search results to just your city. Results geared to your industry and the specific role you play in it are much harder to find. So, if you aren’t a restaurant or some other highly localised business, look for results that are national and even international!

So, Google is no good when looking for a good SEO company. Don’t start cursing just yet because it is easy to find the SEO agency right for you. Even when it seems that Google is working against you!

Here are some tips that will let you avoid the bad eggs and find the right agency for your business every time:

1. Study the Company Portfolio

Many businesses will have no trouble about being listed on an SEO agency’s website as past clients. Go through the different case studies, if there are any. If what you find instead is a list of businesses, then do some investigating. However, if you find neither, then consider this a potential red flag. You might want to wait and do research before hiring such a firm for anything! Check out if it has even worked with any actual companies before.

Why should you look at an agency’s portfolio? Because it will help you understand if it is right for your kind of business and the niche it occupies in your industry. After all, if it the SEO firm has served them, then they would understand your requirements much better. It also means they would have experience in what it takes within your industry to get the kind of results you want. Don’t get spooked if the Melbourne SEO Agency has a portfolio with experience in working for many different industries. A versatile firm could work out in your favour since it is likely they will also be highly adaptable.

2. Check If You Can Afford Them

If you can’t afford their services, then even the best of SEO agencies won’t do you any good! Don’t think that if a firm has high cost for doing good SEO, it means they will deliver better results. Do not just limit your choice to one SEO firm but shortlist a few of them. Then compare what each is offering in terms of SEO services with the price they are asking. You will not only get a better deal but also find a good SEO agency that you can retain while staying within your expenditure limits.

3. Discuss Everything Beforehand

Now that you have determined how much you much you will be paying, work out your return on investment against the SEO investment itself.

Another important topic to discuss with the SEO firm, is the kind of techniques they will be implementing. While it might involve some serious head-scratching information, you will have to go through this with them. The firm should be ready to walk you through the methods they will be implementing. Some of the most commonly used techniques include:

Keyword Research & Optimisation

Headline Evaluation

Link Evaluation

Link-Building

If they aren’t disclosing this take extra caution in engaging the SEO Agency. For instance, links are an important factor for how Google looks at your web page, including both external and internal links. Therefore, the SEO firm linking a blog on one of the products you are selling to the product page is understandable. Not just for you but Google will also be able to relate the two pages.

However, a black hat SEO company can make dubious use of links by creating links and intentionally then linking them to your competitors’ websites. While the rankings for them go down with this practice, yours will go up. However, this can be bad for business since Google has caught on to building of destructive links.

Lastly, discuss with the SEO Melbourne firm how frequently you can expect progress reports from their sides. Also, verify the tracking processes they’ll be using to quantify the ROI for you. Different firms use different methods, including number of e-mail requests, phone calls, online form completions for tracking. If it isn’t quantifiable, then it isn’t any good to you!

4. Ask the Right Questions

An important way of finding out an agency that has all the right answers is to ask the right questions. Some of the questions mentioned below might come in handy when you are out looking for a good SEO firm:

What references does the firm come with? (Don’t just stop there; when they provide those references, do some verifying!)

Can they give you samples of successful results from the past cases? (Ask them for results that made it to top in the major search engines, namely Google)

How long have they in business?

What kind of internet marketing experience does the firm have under its belt?

How many keyword phrases for optimisation are covered under the price they have quoted?

How will they be maintaining your site and monitoring it over time?

Since SEO won’t happen just once, how do they intend to keep you informed?

What will be the frequency of reports they will sending in?

Do they have additional strategies beyond SEO, such as ones for generating traffic or optimising conversion rate?

Caution will pay off later in terms of a good reputation and a successful website if you vet your vendors the right way. If you want research supporting the SEO Melbourne firm that you have chosen, reputable third party review websites are the way to go. With their help, you can easily shortlist the firms with exemplary track records, real results, and legitimate reviews

[lukerhill]

How To Make Built-In Pantry Shelves

Although they’re still TBP (to be painted), I’m sharing how we made the built-in pantry shelves for our beach house since there were a bunch of requests for a tutorial when we shared some sneak peeks on Instagram. They’re surprisingly straightforward to construct – they’re made entirely of two things: MDF sheets and 1 x 2″ boards – and the process can easily be adapted to just about any space where you want to add some custom storage (bedrooms, playrooms, living rooms, etc). In other words, think beyond the pantry. And if you scroll to the bottom of this post, there’s a video of some of the steps in action that might help you too – so even if you’re a beginner, you can do this. Seriously.

In fact, the technique I used to build these is one I’ve already used twice in our own home – first in our son’s room and later for our living room built-ins (shown below). Call me a creature of habit, but I’ve found that it’s easy to execute and we’ve always been really happy with the finished look.

First, let me catch everyone up to speed on the pantry story. We went into more detail in Episode #74 of our podcast, but we originally planned to use this room as a breakfast nook. We even started setting it up as one when we first moved furniture in a few months ago (see below) but quickly realized it’d be a pretty tight eating area AND we already have plenty of seating in the adjacent kitchen/dining room, which has a table for eight and an island that seats four more.

So we eventually decided the room would better serve us as a pantry. We briefly mourned the opportunity to create a photogenic little breakfast nook, but quickly got excited about making an uber-functional pantry space. It also gave us the opportunity to get a larger fridge than our main kitchen area would accommodate, so this counter-depth puppy became the starting place for our pantry plan (you can read how we got a great deal on it too). And yes, those are two freezer drawers instead of one big drawer where everything gets piled on top of each other and is harder to find. And yes we love it and kinda wish we had one at our own house now.

The fridge could only go on to one wall in there without a door or window and it couldn’t go in either corner of that wall because it would overlap the door frame or the window frame (the fridge is about 27″ deep, but the door molding starts at 21″). That same door molding also meant the max depth we could make our pantry shelves was 21″, but that tuned out to be plenty deep. So with room measurements in hand, I Picasso’d sketched an idea of what we wanted to create so that I could determine how much material to buy. We originally planned a skinny vertical cubby for the broom/mop/vacuum situation but later nixed it (there’s a great spot for that in the mudroom) so ignore the long skinny cubby that’s labeled “G” below:

Those rectangles I sketched at the bottom of the page are me figuring out how many 4′ x 8′ sheets of 3/4″ MDF I would need to buy. I learned that I liked working with MDF for projects like these because it’s cheaper and it finishes smoother than plywood. But MDF has to be painted, so obviously use plywood if you want a stained wood look for your project.

My plan was to get each sheet cut into 20-inch-wide boards at the store to make them easier to transport (the big saw at Home Depot can make those cuts MUCH faster and more consistently than I can at home – and they do it for free!). You want your boards cut 3/4″ shorter than whatever you want the final depth of your pantry shelves to be (you’ll be adding a facing piece of wood later – I’ll explain that more in a bit). Again, my shortest wall was 21″ to the door frame, so I rounded mine down to 20 inches just to be safe. I also picked up a bunch of 1 x 2″ pine boards, screws, wood glue, and my shopping was complete! I think my grand total was less than $200. That’s not me or Sherry in my picture below (hence my use of the “privacy emoji”) but that confident sunglass-wearing icon pretty much sums up how I was feeling after collecting all of my materials.

Once everything was hauled to the beach house (yes, we drove two and a half hours with all that MDF packed into our Highlander), our first step was prying off the existing baseboard. You’ll want to save this to put back on later, so try not to damage it in the process. Easier said than done when you forget your crowbar back in Richmond (whoops) but we eventually got it done.

We started with the verticals pieces, having cut them to the right length outside with our circular saw (more on that in a bit). I should add that we used some scrap pieces to make the panels next to the fridge a little deeper than 20″ so it covered the sides of the fridge better. We went into this knowing the fridge was deeper than 20″ but figured we wouldn’t mind if it stuck out a little bit. Spoiler: we did mind, so we adjusted our plan so the center section would bump out a little further around the fridge, which ended up looking even more custom in the end. You can see that a little later in the post.

The panels against the walls get screwed directly into the wall studs in several spots, so they’re easy to attach (this is the stud finder we use). You can see one of those vertical side panels secured to the wall behind the fridge in the photo above.

The vertical panels that “float” next to the fridge were a little trickier, since you (a) can’t screw directly into your refrigerator – well, I guess you could, but it would be a pretty terrible idea and (b) you want to leave enough gap around the fridge so that it easily slides in and out and has some side ventilation. Sherry and I held each panel where we wanted it to sit (using a level to keep it straight) and then we marked the wall and floor. Then we screwed these skinny brace pieces into the wall and floor, giving us a secure place to attach the MDF panel.

The brace pieces, if you’re wondering, are just 1 x 2″ pine boards that I ripped in half on my table saw (back in Richmond before we left), effectively turning them into smaller square strips. You can buy these pre-cut if you don’t have a saw to make your own, but it’s a little more expensive that way. And we use a fair amount of them in this project (you can see another long brace piece above my head in the shot below – providing support for the big shelf across the back wall) so for us it was worth the trouble to cut our own. We always put the cut edge against the wall so the visible sides aren’t raw.

With all four vertical pieces secured, we could start adding the horizontal shelf pieces. The very top shelf rested on the two vertical wall pieces on each end and across the horizontal brace piece on the back wall. The shelf across the top of the fridge rested on the vertical fridge panels and on brace pieces that we added to the back and side walls. Screwing the shelf down into the top of the fridge panels also added a lot of stability to the arrangement.

You can see the bracing a bit better from this angle, which is pretty fast and easy to add. Once it’s cut to length, I hold it in place with a level and then fire a nail or two in with my nail gun. Once a few nails were in it to hold it steady, we followed up with screws spaced around 16″ apart for a better long-term hold. We always go into studs when we can, but one pro to screwing those side wall MDF panels into studs is that it makes the entire panel really firmly attached and secure, so you can pretty much screw brace pieces into that panel anywhere for a nice strong hold (and feel confident that they’re not going to pull out or sag over time).

From here it was just about repeating that process for all of the smaller shelves down each side. We cut all of our shelves first, using our circular saw outside (ours is an old hand-me-down from my dad, but here’s a similar one). If you can, try to double up your boards (like I’ve done below) so you can get two shelves out of each cut. Just be sure to clamp them together firmly first so they don’t shift while you saw (I love these trigger clamps).

There was certainly a fair amount of time spent obsessing over shelf heights. After lots of googling and bringing actual objects into the pantry (like cans, storage bins, and those jumbo cereal boxes and chip bags) we landed on a combination of mostly 8″ and 14″ high shelves, plus some larger ones at the bottom to accommodate things like a beach cooler. Once we measured and marked each shelf, we leveled/nailed/screwed all of our brace pieces along each side. Just remember that you want your brace piece to be attached 3/4″ lower than the top of your final shelf height (since you’ll be resting the 3/4″ MDF shelf piece on top of each brace).

Then we got to slide each of our shelves into place and secure them in each corner with short screws. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but it keeps your shelves from being wobbly in case any of your brace pieces ended up being slightly unlevel or your MDF is a smidge warped.

The last step was adding some face pieces across each exposed edge (these are more 1 x 2″ pine boards, just not cut in half like the brace pieces). You can see in the shot below how much of a difference these facing boards make (the top shelf has it already while the other two under it don’t). They’re basically triple threats: (1) they cover the rough MDF’s cut edge, (2) they hide the brace piece under it and (3) they make the shelf look thicker and more substantial. Win-win-win.

Since we didn’t want big screw heads messing up the look of the finished front, we just attached these with some wood glue on the back and some finish nails. The little nail holes will need to be filled with spackle later, but that’s really quick to do.

And then you’re done. Tada! Well, maybe I should save my “tada!” for when they’re finally primed and painted (we’re going to use Stone Isle by Sherwin Williams which is the same gray color we have on all the trim downstairs). Note: Since our only outlet on that wall is behind the fridge, I just drilled a 1 1/4″ hole in the side of the microwave shelf so we could snake the plug through there, behind the fridge, and into the other outlet back there. 

In the past, we’ve primed and painted one coat on everything BEFORE we constructed it because it’s easier to paint everything laid out on a drop cloth, but we don’t have a big garage/workroom/shed to spread out for painting at the beach house – plus we always have to prime and paint things again after construction (to cover up caulk, spackle, and any scuffing made when we assembled things), so it’s not too bad to do it all at once at the end. We did get our primer tinted to match the gray paint so that’ll hopefully make things go a little faster.

But even lack of paint couldn’t hold Sherry back from playing around with our new pantry shelves. She calls it “figuring out what baskets and bins I’ll need,” but I think we can all see what’s really going on. Shelves are Sherry’s decorating playground, and we basically just built her a new jungle gym.

  In the end, we probably won’t have as many baskets on each shelf, and we’ll leave the ones that we keep in there more flexible (read: empty) for whatever our weekly renters want to toss into them. We don’t imagine it’ll only store food either. It’ll probably end up being a combination of food, kitchen accessory storage (small appliances like a toaster and blender, mixing bowls, dishtowels, that beach cooler we mentioned, etc), and even some non-kitcheny things (like a basket full of basic cleaning supplies).

There’s also the other side of the room to contend with. Which, as you can see from this super flattering and spectacularly graceful photo of me trying to get the photo above, is pretty much empty at the moment. #bloggeryoga

We originally planned to build some smaller shallower shelves that ran under the window – but we think it might become shelving overkill so we’re leaning towards having an actual counter / “landing spot” instead. That way someone could set down a milk jug they pull out of the fridge or put down grocery bags as they unpack them onto the shelves. One option that we like most so far is the idea of extending the kitchen cabinetry and butcher block counters that run along that same back wall in the adjoining kitchen into the pantry. They’d only be 15″ deep, just like the ones that run across the back wall of the kitchen – so they’ll just look like they continued into the pantry (without sticking out into the space too much).

But I think we’ll leave the wall blank for a little while. Just to be sure that’s the most helpful thing to add. You know, let’s let a clear need arise and then build something to accommodate it. Maybe a spot to hang or lean folding chairs for extra seating will end up being more functional? Or empty floor space for setting down some item we can’t even think of right now. So for the time being… Sherry added a fake plant and more baskets.

I have a lot of questions, but the main one is: if Sherry could bring just one object to a dessert island, would it be a pillow or a basket?

In case you missed the live updates we were posting on Instagram as we built these, I’ve compiled all of Sherry’s InstaStories into one video below. In them she shows some of these steps in action, and describes a bit more about our thinking behind what goes where. My only warning is that this was shot before Sherry resolved to make 2018 her year of filming smoother and “less flail-y” videos, so please forgive the shaky camera work. Note: If you’re viewing this in a reader, you may have to click through to our website to see the video, or you can watch it here on YouTube.

And if you still want some more detail to help execute this on your own, the tutorial we did for our son’s built-in shelves was even more thorough. Plus, in that post and the one about our living room built-ins, you can see how we included some closed drawer/cabinet storage into the plans as well. They’re both still some of my favorite DIY projects to date, they’re holding up super well, and they’re extremely functional for our family. And now this pantry is about to be welcomed to the club.

*This post contains affiliates*

The post How To Make Built-In Pantry Shelves appeared first on Young House Love.

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How To Make Built-In Pantry Shelves http://ift.tt/2AHmeNM

Although they’re still TBP (to be painted), I’m sharing how we made the built-in pantry shelves for our beach house since there were a bunch of requests for a tutorial when we shared some sneak peeks on Instagram. They’re surprisingly straightforward to construct – they’re made entirely of two things: MDF sheets and 1 x 2″ boards – and the process can easily be adapted to just about any space where you want to add some custom storage (bedrooms, playrooms, living rooms, etc). In other words, think beyond the pantry. And if you scroll to the bottom of this post, there’s a video of some of the steps in action that might help you too – so even if you’re a beginner, you can do this. Seriously.

In fact, the technique I used to build these is one I’ve already used twice in our own home – first in our son’s room and later for our living room built-ins (shown below). Call me a creature of habit, but I’ve found that it’s easy to execute and we’ve always been really happy with the finished look.

First, let me catch everyone up to speed on the pantry story. We went into more detail in Episode #74 of our podcast, but we originally planned to use this room as a breakfast nook. We even started setting it up as one when we first moved furniture in a few months ago (see below) but quickly realized it’d be a pretty tight eating area AND we already have plenty of seating in the adjacent kitchen/dining room, which has a table for eight and an island that seats four more.

So we eventually decided the room would better serve us as a pantry. We briefly mourned the opportunity to create a photogenic little breakfast nook, but quickly got excited about making an uber-functional pantry space. It also gave us the opportunity to get a larger fridge than our main kitchen area would accommodate, so this counter-depth puppy became the starting place for our pantry plan (you can read how we got a great deal on it too). And yes, those are two freezer drawers instead of one big drawer where everything gets piled on top of each other and is harder to find. And yes we love it and kinda wish we had one at our own house now.

The fridge could only go on to one wall in there without a door or window and it couldn’t go in either corner of that wall because it would overlap the door frame or the window frame (the fridge is about 27″ deep, but the door molding starts at 21″). That same door molding also meant the max depth we could make our pantry shelves was 21″, but that tuned out to be plenty deep. So with room measurements in hand, I Picasso’d sketched an idea of what we wanted to create so that I could determine how much material to buy. We originally planned a skinny vertical cubby for the broom/mop/vacuum situation but later nixed it (there’s a great spot for that in the mudroom) so ignore the long skinny cubby that’s labeled “G” below:

Those rectangles I sketched at the bottom of the page are me figuring out how many 4′ x 8′ sheets of 3/4″ MDF I would need to buy. I learned that I liked working with MDF for projects like these because it’s cheaper and it finishes smoother than plywood. But MDF has to be painted, so obviously use plywood if you want a stained wood look for your project.

My plan was to get each sheet cut into 20-inch-wide boards at the store to make them easier to transport (the big saw at Home Depot can make those cuts MUCH faster and more consistently than I can at home – and they do it for free!). You want your boards cut 3/4″ shorter than whatever you want the final depth of your pantry shelves to be (you’ll be adding a facing piece of wood later – I’ll explain that more in a bit). Again, my shortest wall was 21″ to the door frame, so I rounded mine down to 20 inches just to be safe. I also picked up a bunch of 1 x 2″ pine boards, screws, wood glue, and my shopping was complete! I think my grand total was less than $200. That’s not me or Sherry in my picture below (hence my use of the “privacy emoji”) but that confident sunglass-wearing icon pretty much sums up how I was feeling after collecting all of my materials.

Once everything was hauled to the beach house (yes, we drove two and a half hours with all that MDF packed into our Highlander), our first step was prying off the existing baseboard. You’ll want to save this to put back on later, so try not to damage it in the process. Easier said than done when you forget your crowbar back in Richmond (whoops) but we eventually got it done.

We started with the verticals pieces, having cut them to the right length outside with our circular saw (more on that in a bit). I should add that we used some scrap pieces to make the panels next to the fridge a little deeper than 20″ so it covered the sides of the fridge better. We went into this knowing the fridge was deeper than 20″ but figured we wouldn’t mind if it stuck out a little bit. Spoiler: we did mind, so we adjusted our plan so the center section would bump out a little further around the fridge, which ended up looking even more custom in the end. You can see that a little later in the post.

The panels against the walls get screwed directly into the wall studs in several spots, so they’re easy to attach (this is the stud finder we use). You can see one of those vertical side panels secured to the wall behind the fridge in the photo above.

The vertical panels that “float” next to the fridge were a little trickier, since you (a) can’t screw directly into your refrigerator – well, I guess you could, but it would be a pretty terrible idea and (b) you want to leave enough gap around the fridge so that it easily slides in and out and has some side ventilation. Sherry and I held each panel where we wanted it to sit (using a level to keep it straight) and then we marked the wall and floor. Then we screwed these skinny brace pieces into the wall and floor, giving us a secure place to attach the MDF panel.

The brace pieces, if you’re wondering, are just 1 x 2″ pine boards that I ripped in half on my table saw (back in Richmond before we left), effectively turning them into smaller square strips. You can buy these pre-cut if you don’t have a saw to make your own, but it’s a little more expensive that way. And we use a fair amount of them in this project (you can see another long brace piece above my head in the shot below – providing support for the big shelf across the back wall) so for us it was worth the trouble to cut our own. We always put the cut edge against the wall so the visible sides aren’t raw.

With all four vertical pieces secured, we could start adding the horizontal shelf pieces. The very top shelf rested on the two vertical wall pieces on each end and across the horizontal brace piece on the back wall. The shelf across the top of the fridge rested on the vertical fridge panels and on brace pieces that we added to the back and side walls. Screwing the shelf down into the top of the fridge panels also added a lot of stability to the arrangement.

You can see the bracing a bit better from this angle, which is pretty fast and easy to add. Once it’s cut to length, I hold it in place with a level and then fire a nail or two in with my nail gun. Once a few nails were in it to hold it steady, we followed up with screws spaced around 16″ apart for a better long-term hold. We always go into studs when we can, but one pro to screwing those side wall MDF panels into studs is that it makes the entire panel really firmly attached and secure, so you can pretty much screw brace pieces into that panel anywhere for a nice strong hold (and feel confident that they’re not going to pull out or sag over time).

From here it was just about repeating that process for all of the smaller shelves down each side. We cut all of our shelves first, using our circular saw outside (ours is an old hand-me-down from my dad, but here’s a similar one). If you can, try to double up your boards (like I’ve done below) so you can get two shelves out of each cut. Just be sure to clamp them together firmly first so they don’t shift while you saw (I love these trigger clamps).

There was certainly a fair amount of time spent obsessing over shelf heights. After lots of googling and bringing actual objects into the pantry (like cans, storage bins, and those jumbo cereal boxes and chip bags) we landed on a combination of mostly 8″ and 14″ high shelves, plus some larger ones at the bottom to accommodate things like a beach cooler. Once we measured and marked each shelf, we leveled/nailed/screwed all of our brace pieces along each side. Just remember that you want your brace piece to be attached 3/4″ lower than the top of your final shelf height (since you’ll be resting the 3/4″ MDF shelf piece on top of each brace).

Then we got to slide each of our shelves into place and secure them in each corner with short screws. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but it keeps your shelves from being wobbly in case any of your brace pieces ended up being slightly unlevel or your MDF is a smidge warped.

The last step was adding some face pieces across each exposed edge (these are more 1 x 2″ pine boards, just not cut in half like the brace pieces). You can see in the shot below how much of a difference these facing boards make (the top shelf has it already while the other two under it don’t). They’re basically triple threats: (1) they cover the rough MDF’s cut edge, (2) they hide the brace piece under it and (3) they make the shelf look thicker and more substantial. Win-win-win.

Since we didn’t want big screw heads messing up the look of the finished front, we just attached these with some wood glue on the back and some finish nails. The little nail holes will need to be filled with spackle later, but that’s really quick to do.

And then you’re done. Tada! Well, maybe I should save my “tada!” for when they’re finally primed and painted (we’re going to use Stone Isle by Sherwin Williams which is the same gray color we have on all the trim downstairs). Note: Since our only outlet on that wall is behind the fridge, I just drilled a 1 1/4″ hole in the side of the microwave shelf so we could snake the plug through there, behind the fridge, and into the other outlet back there. 

In the past, we’ve primed and painted one coat on everything BEFORE we constructed it because it’s easier to paint everything laid out on a drop cloth, but we don’t have a big garage/workroom/shed to spread out for painting at the beach house – plus we always have to prime and paint things again after construction (to cover up caulk, spackle, and any scuffing made when we assembled things), so it’s not too bad to do it all at once at the end. We did get our primer tinted to match the gray paint so that’ll hopefully make things go a little faster.

But even lack of paint couldn’t hold Sherry back from playing around with our new pantry shelves. She calls it “figuring out what baskets and bins I’ll need,” but I think we can all see what’s really going on. Shelves are Sherry’s decorating playground, and we basically just built her a new jungle gym.

  In the end, we probably won’t have as many baskets on each shelf, and we’ll leave the ones that we keep in there more flexible (read: empty) for whatever our weekly renters want to toss into them. We don’t imagine it’ll only store food either. It’ll probably end up being a combination of food, kitchen accessory storage (small appliances like a toaster and blender, mixing bowls, dishtowels, that beach cooler we mentioned, etc), and even some non-kitcheny things (like a basket full of basic cleaning supplies).

There’s also the other side of the room to contend with. Which, as you can see from this super flattering and spectacularly graceful photo of me trying to get the photo above, is pretty much empty at the moment. #bloggeryoga

We originally planned to build some smaller shallower shelves that ran under the window – but we think it might become shelving overkill so we’re leaning towards having an actual counter / “landing spot” instead. That way someone could set down a milk jug they pull out of the fridge or put down grocery bags as they unpack them onto the shelves. One option that we like most so far is the idea of extending the kitchen cabinetry and butcher block counters that run along that same back wall in the adjoining kitchen into the pantry. They’d only be 15″ deep, just like the ones that run across the back wall of the kitchen – so they’ll just look like they continued into the pantry (without sticking out into the space too much).

But I think we’ll leave the wall blank for a little while. Just to be sure that’s the most helpful thing to add. You know, let’s let a clear need arise and then build something to accommodate it. Maybe a spot to hang or lean folding chairs for extra seating will end up being more functional? Or empty floor space for setting down some item we can’t even think of right now. So for the time being… Sherry added a fake plant and more baskets.

I have a lot of questions, but the main one is: if Sherry could bring just one object to a dessert island, would it be a pillow or a basket?

In case you missed the live updates we were posting on Instagram as we built these, I’ve compiled all of Sherry’s InstaStories into one video below. In them she shows some of these steps in action, and describes a bit more about our thinking behind what goes where. My only warning is that this was shot before Sherry resolved to make 2018 her year of filming smoother and “less flail-y” videos, so please forgive the shaky camera work:

And if you still want some more detail to help execute this on your own, the tutorial we did for our son’s built-in shelves was even more thorough. Plus, in that post and the one about our living room built-ins, you can see how we included some closed drawer/cabinet storage into the plans as well. They’re both still some of my favorite DIY projects to date, they’re holding up super well, and they’re extremely functional for our family. And now this pantry is about to be welcomed to the club.

*This post contains affiliates*

The post How To Make Built-In Pantry Shelves appeared first on Young House Love.