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tippedbykreider · 3 years

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it’s all coming back to me | c. kreider (i)

Word Count: 8.2k Warnings: Slow burn, exes to friends to lovers, relationship breakdown, swearing, alcohol mention. Author’s Note: So many of you have been requesting for this to be brought back! The consensus was that you’d rather have it in smaller chunks so I’ll be posting each new part weekly and they’ll come in between 6 & 9k per chapter. Not only is it more manageable for you guys but it also gives me chance to keep writing new content for it 💖 There is a playlist for this fic which I posted separately, it gives a chronological feel for their relationship and their story. This has been a tonne of fun to write so far and I can’t wait to tell the rest of their story. Summary: Chris Kreider x Reader Insert. They say that all good things come to an end, that you can never have too much of a good thing, but when Chris decided to end your relationship you wondered how anything could ever be good again. A chance meeting 9 years later drags up all those feelings you both thought you were done with. Can you work through your hurt and pain to see what it is that Chris is trying to show you? Or are some things better left forgotten? Tagging: @danglesnipecelly - this girl deserves a writing credit on this thing because she’s pushed me to keep going with this and her input and advice has been invaluable. Thank you for all the support on this one, K 💖

*Italics indicates a flashback*

The notion of fresh starts is often something that is associated with the arrival of the New Year. People use the turning of the calendar to turn over a new leaf, to learn a new skill, to challenge themselves to be better than the year before and to let go of all that was and focus on all that will be. There’s something inherently magical about a new beginning, a fresh start; sometimes it’s the excitement of what might lie ahead and other times it’s the comfort in knowing that you can seize the opportunity be whoever you want to be and to reinvent yourself. It’s the line in the sand and the final full stop at the end of the chapter and it’s the anticipation of picking up the pen and writing those first few words on the new page.

For Chris Kreider this feeling wasn’t one that was brought about by the strike of the clock at midnight on New Year’s Eve because while the date on the calendar changed and while he still spent the next couple of weeks dating things with the wrong year just like everybody else, it still often felt like nothing really changed for him. Chris could only feel like the year was truly coming to an end when the first petals of spring exploded like fireworks in a symphony of technicolour blooms and he found himself giving the locker-room clearout interview. That was the end of the year, the full stop, the line and the warmer days and the balmy nights would give him the opportunity to decompress ready for the turning of the page come September when his focus would once again turn back to hockey.

Chris loved New York; that much was undeniably true. He loved the vibrancy of the city but he also loved the way that he could melt into the background or enjoy the feeling of quiet solace his apartment gave him. It was oftentimes a bolthole, an oasis of peace during an otherwise hectic few months between September and May but the end of the hockey season and the arrival of summer had him seeking the cry of gulls on the breath of a gentle breeze and that crisp, purifying sea air that always managed to fill his lungs differently. Rowayton wasn’t far, a little over an hour on a good day but with its coastal Connecticut charm, slower pace and pretty houses, especially the ones that overlooked the water, it was a world away from NYC and exactly what Chris needed to reset and recharge.

It was a Saturday morning in mid-July and for the first time in a long time, longer than Chris could recall, he allowed himself to sleep in. His bedroom window had been open all night and the welcome breeze snaked through the slats in the blinds and carried on it the faintest smell of salt and sunshine. Chris stretched his muscles in big pulls around the bed before he settled on his back and inhaled deeply, the fresh air clearing his mind and filling his body as the last remnants of sleep slipped away on the exhale of breath. Imbued with energy, he climbed out of bed and pulled the blinds all the way up, flooding the bedroom with beautiful incandescence born out of a cloudless sky. He didn’t make his bed though, not yet, because while he had left his room and was padding down the stairs, he had every intention of returning to the still warm sheets to read a chapter or two of the book on his nightstand with a fresh cup of coffee, a cinnamon and raisin bagel, that invigorating coastal air and the oceanscape outside as the soundtrack.

One chapter turned into two and two became three and before Chris knew it, the sun was high in the sky and lunchtime beckoned. It was shaping up to be a beautiful summer day in Rowayton and Chris thought it would be a crying shame to spend his time at home, even if the page-turner he’d held in his hands moments ago seemed incredibly appealing out on the back deck overlooking the water. It was then he decided to take advantage of that gorgeous sunshine, take in the scenery and stretch his legs by going for a walk into town to pick up a few essentials at Rowayton Market. For all it was a small, it contained everything he would need to keep him going for a few more days until he’d finally need to drive into Norwalk to do a more substantial grocery shop, something that he’d admittedly been putting off. The Market also had some of the best baked goods and fresh coffee in the village and if you asked Chris it would be pretty rude to not take advantage – it was right there, after all, and Chris never could say no to a still-warm Danish and Americano.

He walked slower than he usually would, a conscious effort on his part due to the fact that his legs seemed to want to go into an auto-pilot primed for life in New York City. He was in no rush though, he never was whenever he came here and even though it was a route he’d walked hundreds of times before, and one he would walk hundreds more, Chris still wanted to soak in all the pretty trees and shrubs that were nestled in amongst those classical New England style homes, all shingled exteriors and white, gridded windows in soft muted colours that mirrored the coastal landscape of the village. It was a world away from the brick and the concrete and the bright lights of the city and while Chris loved all of those things about New York and loved wandering through the streets of Tribeca and Soho, getting lost in bookstores and hole-in-the-wall cafes, he also loved the sand, shale and stars and those were things that he just couldn’t find in the city that never slept.

There were quite a few people out and about, Chris noted, most of them he recognised as being residents with their friendly smiles and waved greetings, but there were a handful of tourists too; there always was on weekends during the summer. Not that Chris minded, of course, because for all the village was a popular escape for those seeking a break from the metropolitan life of the nearby hub of cities, it never succumbed to the all-too-often inevitability of commercialisation and still managed to hold on to its peaceful charm, despite it not quite being the quaint fishing village it once was back in the days before the Civil War.

It was one of the reasons why Chris found himself retreating here in the summer and not making the trip back home to spend the off-season in Massachusetts. He would go back to Boxford for a couple of weeks, naturally, because family was something that had always been important to Chris and he would never miss an opportunity to spend time with his parents and sister, but if he had the choice between spending his entire summer being bitten to death by mosquitoes back home (his father always did say that they were the town bird, after all) or feeling the gentle kiss of the ocean breeze against his skin, there was no real contest. Rowayton would always win.

The main street through town was busier, which wasn’t exactly unexpected and if anything it only seemed to add to the charm of the village. Chris decided to head straight to the market to pick up his groceries, if only to facilitate the Danish eating in a more timely-fashion. He picked up a basket as he entered and proceeded to add only the essentials he’d need to get him through the next couple of days. He’d pay for his shopping before going to the coffee bar, because trying to pack his reusable grocery bag with a full takeout cup was a mistake he’d made once before and was sure to never repeat again.

With his groceries purchased and bags packed in such a way that the couple of bottles of wine he’d picked up wouldn’t clink together when he walked (it was three to be exact but after seeing the selection of cured meats, cheeses and olives available he thought it’d be a crime if they didn’t find their way into his basket to come home with him, and if there was cheese there had to be wine), Chris made his way to the coffee counter situated near the Market entrance.

You couldn’t remember the last time you’d taken a trip away without the company of anyone else but the last couple of months at work had been incredibly stressful, with projects seemingly coming out of your ears and while you knew your mother had been worried by your suggestion of taking off somewhere alone for the weekend, she also knew better than to fight you on something you’d quite clearly already set your mind to. If you were being completely honest, your plans for the first full weekend you’d had off in months would have consisted of not setting foot outside of your apartment or engaging in any kind of unnecessary conversation had you decided to stay home in Hartford, at least this way you’d be getting some fresh air and the sun on your face.

It was just shy of a two hour drive down to Rowayton, which had the dual benefit of being close enough to home that it didn’t feel like a huge trek just to get there, but also being far enough away that you would be a complete stranger in this town and could take the time to decompress and recharge while blending into the background, and the place was pretty to boot. You’d found a little studio Airbnb not too far away in South Norwalk, figuring that you’d only be using it as somewhere to sleep as you’d planned on spending as much of your time as possible being right by that ocean with the wind in your hair and the warm sun on your skin.

That’s how you’d planned on spending your Saturday afternoon, sat on the sand of Bayley Beach with a good book and a cup of coffee. It was set to be a balmy day, with temperatures sitting in the mid-eighties and the last thing you wanted to be doing in the heat was any amount of excessive walking. So with that in mind, you’d spent your morning exploring the village and taking in the sights and sounds. The gentle protest of your stomach told you it was lunchtime before you’d even taken the opportunity to glance down at your watch and a quick Google search pointed you in the direction of somewhere to get that all important cup of coffee and a small bite to eat.

Rowayton Market didn’t look like much from the outside in the sense that it was a little on the petite side, but the reviews were great and the coffee was allegedly some of the best in the village and that was good enough for you. You were greeted with the smell of freshly baked goods and ground coffee, which was welcoming enough before you even saw the bright smile of the girl behind the counter. Your eyes drifted over the selection of pastries, each one more delicious looking than the last and you knew that you were going to have a hard time choosing just one. You knew you’d have to make a decision, though, suddenly aware of the small line that had seemingly materialised right out of thin air behind you and while you were sure that these people were more accustomed to a slower pace of life, the city girl in you, who was so used to living life in the fast lane, didn’t want to keep these good people waiting while you deliberated. You’d go with your usual and that would be that.

Chris’s attention was fixed out of the large glass windows at the front of the shop, watching as people milled in the street and went about their daily business. It was something he quite often did, whether he was here or back home in New York. There was something oddly soothing about watching the world go by, he thought, and occasionally he’d catch something that would quirk his lips up into a smile, like the sight before him now of a rather large gull in the process of committing larceny against what he could only assume was an unsuspecting tourist. Their sandwich was held high above their head while their free hand attempted to shoo the bird away with little success. He chuckled quietly to himself then, not least because the gulls seemed to get more brazen with each year that passed and he was sure that one of these days he’d see someone’s lunch get snatched right out of their hand by the feathered menaces.

Chris had no reason at all to believe as he stood in that line that everything was about to change. Why would he? The day had started like any other. He’d picked up his groceries in this store more times than he could count, he’d waited in a line just like this one for his coffee and Danish and yet, in that moment, something as innocuous as a woman’s voice would bring feelings that he thought he was done with, and memories he thought had strayed out of his mind for good, flooding back to the surface. But it wasn’t just any woman’s voice, no, it wasn’t as detached and neutral as that. It was your voice; a voice he hadn’t heard in nine years and it was something as simple as a coffee order, an order that he now knew to have remained the same since the day you’d first met at Boston College all those years ago, that blew the dam wide open and every word the two of you had ever spoken, from day one to the last thing you ever said to him, came rushing back.

The sound of Chris’s voice calling your name was something you never thought you’d hear out loud again. It was a voice you’d only heard in your dreams for many years after he walked out of your life, but even that had faded beyond memory to where you weren’t a hundred percent certain that you’d be able to remember what it sounded like anymore. And yet, in the middle of a tiny supermarket in Rowayton, you heard him clear as day with his tongue rolling around the syllables of your name with the same fondness, even after all this time and it was like you’d never forgotten the sound at all.

Autumn was beginning to make her presence felt in Boston. The palette on campus had shifted from a spectrum of vivid greens to shades of deep russet, amber, ochre and vermillion; but even above the changing leaves, the turning of the calendar brought a slight chill to the air that had you reaching for your jacket on a morning as you left your dorm.

Today was no different. The temperature had dropped again overnight as November creeped ever closer and it was chilly enough that you had to draw your coat tighter around you as you walked across campus towards class. Your brisk pace had bought you enough time to make a stop at the coffee stand just outside of Campion where your first class of the day was being held. There was a decent selection on offer, but it wasn’t enough to sway you from ordering your usual.

You rooted around your backpack for your wallet while the barista prepared your coffee and grabbed you your cinnamon roll, unaware of the new presence to your right, before handing over the money and taking the coffee and pastry bag from the young man’s hands.

“Coffee and cinnamon roll, eh? Now that’s the breakfast of champions.”

You turned your head towards the source of the voice, lips quirking into a small smile at the sight of the stranger beside you who looked to be not much older than you were, incredibly tall and broad for his apparent age but not for his height. He was grinning at you with a fullness that made his eyes crinkle at the corners and gave him a unique kind of softness.

“My mom would disagree,” you replied with a smirk. “If she found out I was having this for breakfast she’d be in her car so fast and dragging my ass back to Hartford.”

He laughed at that, loud and bright with his head tipped back slightly before running a hand through his dark brown hair that was shorter on the sides but had the faintest hint of a curl at the longer strands on top.

“I won’t tell her if you don’t.”

“Oh, I’m definitely not telling her,” you grinned as you swung your backpack over one shoulder. “So looks like you’re sworn to secrecy.”

You studied him for a brief moment, with the way he was still grinning at you and his eyes that seemed to sparkle behind his dark lashes before your brain gently reminded you that you, in fact, had somewhere you needed to be. “Well, I hate to impose a vow of silence on you like some sort of mafia boss and then immediately split but I uh I gotta head to class.”

“No problem at all and hey, your secret is safe with me. In fact, I’ve forgotten already. What were we talking about?”

There it was again, that smile of his that made you want to stay rooted right where you were standing and look at it all day, but class beckoned and so you gave an awkward wave of your hand and a soft laugh before you turned and headed into the building behind you without another glance back. If you had you’d have seen the stranger from the coffee stand watch until you’d disappeared from view, with that smile still on his face.

This little routine of yours would continue over the course of the next few weeks. Every Tuesday morning, at around 8:45am, you’d find yourself stood at that coffee stand outside of Campion to get your coffee and cinnamon roll, and every Tuesday morning, at around 8:46am, the tall stranger would appear beside you with his kind eyes and his bright smile. You’d exchange a ‘hello’ and a friendly grin and you’d laugh more often than not too while you made pleasant small talk before you both said your goodbyes and went to your respective classes, though you would always leave first and he would watch you go until you’d disappeared into the building.

It was mid-November, now, and the campus of Boston College was firmly in autumn’s frigid grasp. The temperatures continued to drop, seemingly overnight, which had you bundled up in your hat and scarf and the trees had shed their branches of leaves, crunching underfoot with the slight frost as you made your way towards Campion. Your hands were shoved deep into your coat pockets to ward off the gnawing chill and you were looking forward to being able to warm them around your coffee cup.

You approached the stand as normal, rooting through your backpack for your wallet ready to order.

“Hey!”

You looked up, your features fixed in a state of mild confusion while you looked for the source of the voice you recognised but couldn’t quite place. It was then you saw him though, all bright eyed and bushy tailed with a medium coffee and pastry bag held up in one of his large hands as if on display. He was grinning at you and cocked his head, beckoning you over with the wordless gesture.

“Hey, yourself,” you smiled as you approached. “What’s this then?” You tilted your head slightly at the items in his hand as he offered them to you.

“Breakfast of champions.”

Your eyebrow quirked as you took the coffee from him before taking a tentative sip, smiling while the warm liquid slid down your throat.

“You got my coffee order right.”

“It wasn’t hard,” he smirked. “You order the same thing every week and if you open that little paper bag I think you’ll find a cinnamon roll in there.”

Sure enough, as you opened the bag you were greeted with the sight of a perfectly formed cinnamon roll and you couldn’t help the grin that sparked at your lips and spread the full width of your face.

“I don’t order the same thing every week.”

“You do,” he replied with a laugh. “Every Tuesday for the last 5 weeks you’ve come to this coffee stand and ordered a medium Americano with half and half and a cinnamon roll and every Tuesday for the last 5 weeks I’ve been meaning to ask you your name.”

Your face flushed warm at that, not only at his words but at the sure little smile he was giving you and the way his eyes were sparkling. In fact, now that you were really looking at him properly, you were knocked back a bit by the perpetual kindness that seemed to rest in them and you couldn’t help but notice how they really were the perfect shade of hazel, like a forest with a deep bark heart surrounded by leaves that were every shade of green. You’d been quiet a little too long though and so you took a settling sip of coffee to give you enough time to find your voice again and tell him your name.

“Nice to meet you,” he smiled as he offered you his hand, which was large and warm as you shook it.

“And who should I thank for the coffee?” you asked.

His smile grew into a grin then, the kind that you’d noticed over the course of the last few weeks that made his eyes crinkle and happiness radiate from him, before simply replying:

“Chris.”

“Chris?”

It was as if time had stood still in that little Market in Rowayton, where your surroundings become a still-frame and there’s nothing but static in your ears. You’d often thought about what it would have been like to see him again. Those first couple of years after he’d left Boston College had you imagining all kinds of scenarios, much like the one you were in right now where you’d bump into each other in a supermarket or a pharmacy, anywhere really, but now that you were living it, seeing it, breathing it, there was nothing you could have conjured up in your imagination that would have prepared you for what it would really feel like to see him again. If you were to be completely honest, you were glad that your coffee and cinnamon roll were still on the top of the counter because you were certain that they would have fallen right out of your hands and onto the Market floor.

He abandoned his position in the line then, as if you speaking his name was a call to him, and maybe it was, on some level, but the truth and simplicity of it was that you were suspended in a state of pure disbelief and even in the short time it took for him to close the distance between you both, you were still yet to move and fix your features to something more neutral.

“Hey.”

It was a simple greeting that he gave you and logically you knew that there wasn’t really any tangible meaning behind that single word he spoke and yet there was something about the look in his eyes and the warmth in the smile he gave you.

“It’s been a while.”

“It has,” you replied, finally finding your voice. “You look, you look good.”

It wasn’t a lie either, he did look good. The tall college boy you remembered, who was just a little too slight for his height, had filled out; you could tell that just from the way the fabric of his t-shirt stretched across the broad plains of his chest and strained around his biceps, and he was no longer clean shaven, which was something that had always made him look quite baby-faced. Instead he was sporting a neatly trimmed goatee and while he had kept his hair short on the sides, just like you’d remembered it, it was longer on the top than it had been in college and the curls were sweeping in a way that reminded you of the waves just beyond the Market door. He looked older, yes, which is exactly what you would have expected in the nine years since you’d last seen him but his eyes were still exactly the same, sparkling and full of mischief , yet still soft, perhaps even softer than before on account of the faint lines around them drawn by time’s fair hand.

“So do you,” he grinned. “You cut your hair.”

“I did,” you looked down as your face flushed with warmth, unsure exactly what you were supposed to say to him.

It was something you’d thought about during those imagined scenarios where you’d magically bump into each other again and you’d thought about all of the things that you would say to him. You would tell him about how much you’d cried when he left you behind to live out his boyhood dream and how angry you were that he didn’t want you to be a part of that, how it felt like all the plans you’d ever talked about were nothing more than empty words and how hurt that had made you feel. You felt like you at least deserved that, especially given that it was never just a casual fling between you both. After all, you’d been practically inseparable for two years. You’d been inseparable ever since he’d said those three words that mean so much. But now that he was here in front of you, all those words that had swirled around in your head and in your chest like a hurricane for so long, dissipated into nothing and you found yourself clutching at straws to find something, anything, to say.

Chris could sense this though. Of course he could because he was Chris and he had always been so in tune with you and your emotions and the fact that he was still able to read you so well was both a comfort and a knife in your chest, and while he internally grimaced at the fact he was having to fall back on using small talk between you both, he felt like it was what you needed in the moment. He wouldn’t expect things to go back to how they were after all this time, he couldn’t, and so he started with something simple, something he knew you would be able give him an answer to.

“So, what brings you to sunny Rowayton?”

“I could ask you the same question,” you replied.

“Ah,” Chris grinned, trying to keep the mood light. “See I asked you first and also, I live here so therefore the ‘question answering’ responsibility falls back to you.”

You couldn’t help but laugh at that, at both his words and the silly little expression he was wearing and despite all the years that sat between you both like a void and all of your hurt that was held within it, it all seemed to briefly melt away and in that moment it was like you were back at that little coffee stand outside of Campion.

“I didn’t realise this was an interrogation. Wait is this one of those little weird cult towns? Should I be worried?”

Chris knew by the little smirk you were wearing that you meant no malice behind your words and so he responded by sucking in air through his teeth before speaking again with one of those smiles that went all the way up to his eyes.

“Watch it, Pickle.”

Your stomach fell right into your shoes in that moment, that name he used only for you slipped from his lips like it was the easiest thing in the world for him to do, like he’d never stopped calling you it and like it hadn’t been nine years since you’d last spoke a word to one another. Chris knew all this of course and he didn’t need to rely on intuition either because he could see every emotion written all over your face.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly on the exhale of a breath. “I um.. Force of habit, I guess.”

“It’s okay,” you muttered, not quite meeting his eyes. “Although not exactly ‘habit’, it’s been how long?”

Chris winced at that, the reality of how he left things between you both slapping him in the face and he was filled with the guilt that he’d spent almost a decade pushing out of his chest and shoving into the darkest corner of his memory where he would hope it would rest undisturbed. He knew that you were angry at him for leaving things the way he did, how could you not be? After all, he was the one who had broken your heart and left you in Boston, but it was never as simple as that, even back then there was so much he should have said but that was something he wouldn’t realise until much later when it was too late to repair the damage. The thinly veiled hurt in your eyes and the way your mouth was downturned was demonstrative of that fact.

“I know,” he all but whispered. “It just-“

“It’s fine, Chris. Can we just forget about it? Please?”

He nodded, watching with a quiet kind of sadness on his features as you turned to finally pick your coffee and cinnamon roll up off the counter before he cleared his throat softly to continue speaking.

“You never did say what brought you into town.”

You took a sip of coffee to give yourself long enough to settle the thundering in your chest before answering him, because for all your heart felt like it was about to burst from all the hurt you’d managed to hide away up until now, there was also a weird sense of nostalgia that came with seeing him and hearing his voice again, and even though he’d shattered your heart completely when he decided he no longer wanted you in his life, your mother had raised you right and you knew the proper thing to do was to indulge him in a little small talk, even if for nothing more than old time’s sake.

“Just here for the weekend,” you replied. “Work has been nuts lately and I needed some time away from home.”

Chris shuffled on his feet for a moment as you spoke while his eyes darted between you and the door that would lead to the outside world and the possibility of the two of you parting once more. It was an unexpected pull that he felt in his chest at that thought, you reappearing in his life out of the blue only to slip out of it just as suddenly by doing something as simple as walking out of that supermarket back out into the wide world. For nine years he’d thought about where you were, what you were doing, if you were okay, if you were happy and with each year that passed without seeing your face or hearing your voice, he’d resigned himself to the fact that you were lost to him, drifting out there in the seas of life never to see you again. He didn’t know why you’d suddenly come back to him now, whether by some stroke of luck or twist of fate, although Chris couldn’t have cared less which one it was. All he cared about was the fact that you were here at all and it was an opportunity that he was sure he wasn’t going to waste. He didn’t even know for certain that you would want to give him any of your time after what had happened when he left Boston, but he wanted to at least give you what he should have all those years ago and that was an explanation and an opportunity for you to tell him how his actions had made you feel.

“Hey, what are you up to this afternoon?”

“Not much,” you shrugged. “I was just going to sit on Bayley Beach and enjoy the nice weather.”

“Would you mind some company? No pressure, of course, I understand if you… I understand if you’d rather not want to spend any time with me.”

You exhaled then and Chris’s shoulders visibly sagged, bracing himself for your polite refusal, but your response was not one that he was expecting and truthfully, it wasn’t one that you had expected either.

“Honestly?” you started, getting swept up in the nostalgia of seeing him again before the rational part of your brain could catch up. “That would be nice.”

“Great,” he smiled in what you could see was pure relief. “Do you mind if I grab a coffee before we head out?”

“Sure,” you replied. “I’ll wait outside for you.”

You headed out the door and were sure to stand where Chris could see you, knowing him well enough to realise that he’d be worrying, at least on some level, that you’d slip off into the crowd. You’d never do that to him, of course, even after everything, because while he had broken your heart, he was also the first person you’d ever truly loved and when you’d put the pieces back together, you couldn’t help but keep a part of him wrapped up amongst the tape and string holding those pieces together while you healed. It was in doing that that you understood that he would always have a special place in your heart and honestly? You were kind of okay with that because while the ending hadn’t exactly been perfect, the two years you’d spent together were and you wouldn’t have changed that time for anything.

You weren’t sure what exactly had possessed you to let Chris talk you into venturing off campus and out in the early-February snow to get burgers at Eagle’s Deli but you were cursing those sparkling eyes and that roguish grin of his for wearing down your sensibilities as you righted yourself after what felt like the hundredth near-fall. It was slushy underfoot, the kind that’s a twisted ankle or sprained knee waiting to happen and while you’d dressed weather appropriately in your winter boots and heavy parka, you were still very newborn lamb-like in your movements which was amusing Chris to no end.

“Come on, slowpoke,” he called from up ahead as he grinned at you over his shoulder.

“Not all of us can be hockey prodigies and thrive in this kind of inclement weather,” you grumbled, shuffling slowly so as not to slip.

Chris laughed as he came back towards you with confident and purposeful steps, surprising you when he offered his arm for you to loop yours through.

“Now, I’m no expert in geography or meteorology but it snows in Hartford, no?”

He was grinning at you, the kind of grin that you had to fight with every fibre of your being not to reciprocate because you’d already committed to your grumpy act and you couldn’t have him thinking he’d cracked you already, even if he, in fact, had.

“Yes,” you stressed. “But I don’t make a habit of going out in it to get burgers like a crazy person.”

The cackle you received from him in reply was loud and a little wild and you couldn’t help but be completely captivated by the way his cheeks were ruddy from the cold and the snowflakes clinging to the curls on top of his head and long eyelashes. Tuesday morning coffees with him outside of Campion before class had turned into coffees in actual cafes during free periods and getting lunch together. It was even dragging your body out into the cold to the Alumni Stadium with your blanket and your thermos to watch Chris play with the BC Eagles because you couldn’t say no to that damn smile and those damn eyes and even now, as you looked at him taking in the scenery along the Chestnut Hill Reservoir pathway, you knew that they were going to be the death of you.

“It’s really pretty along here,” he spoke, more quietly than before; softer too. “You wouldn’t think we were in the middle of Boston.”

“Yeah, it’s a nice walk,” you agreed before shooting him a smirk and a look. “Would be nice in the spring sunshine too.”

“Yeah, yeah. I get it, Little Miss Chilly.”

“I don’t know what you have against being warm, Kreider. Warm is good, warm is nice-“

You shrieked as your feet went out from under you, courtesy of a patch of black ice hidden under slushy snow and you squeezed your eyes shut in preparation for the impact of your ass hitting the cold, hard ground. But it never came.

“It’s okay,” Chris spoke reassuringly, one hand tight around your bicep while his other arm was curled around your waist, holding you upright. “I’ve got you.”

You opened your eyes then to be met with Chris’s looking right at you, all moss and bark and warm. He was smiling at you but it was different to the easy grin he usually wore around you, this was softer somehow and all rational thought was replaced by one of those monkeys playing the cymbals. For the briefest of seconds, and for reasons completely unknown to you, the monkey tried to take the wheel and the idea of kissing him right there, in the middle of the pathway that had made an attempt on your life, flashed into your head.

Maybe it was the snow and how perfect and picturesque the scene around you felt? Maybe it was the fact he’d just saved you from slipping? But the reality of it was that those eyes and that smile held some sort of power over you that you couldn’t yet fully understand. You shook your head quickly, if only to take back control of the situation before you did something more embarrassing than almost falling on your ass.

“Thanks,” you muttered as you regained your composure. “This damn pathway.”

“I’ve got an idea,” Chris grinned as he turned so his back was to you and stooped slightly. “Hop on.”

“You can’t be serious?”

“I never joke about piggy-backs,” he replied in a faux solemn tone with the face to match. “Come on, we’ll get you to the Deli in one piece one way or another.”

And that was how you ended up with your arms looped around Chris’s shoulders and his strong hands holding the backs of your legs as he carried you on his back to Eagle’s Deli.

Not twenty minutes later, the pair of you were shuffling into a booth as you shed your coats, gloves and scarves, Chris grinning at you while you blew on your fingers in an attempt to restore warmth into them.

“See, told you I’d get you here in one piece.”

You scoffed at him and shot a playful glance across the table separating you both.

“You’re not human, that is the only explanation for how you’re able to walk in that,” you nodded towards the window where the snow was still falling to illustrate your point before continuing, “and not fall flat on your face.”

“Or my ass,” he added with a grin.

“Hey, that never actually happened!”

Chris’s face split into an even bigger smile at your little protest and the pout that had formed on your lips and while the gentle teasing between you was simply a part of the dynamic of your friendship, Chris would have been lying if he didn’t admit that the reason he did it so often was because you always looked so adorable trying to rebut him.

“No, you’re right. It didn’t,” he mused with a smirk, not needing to remind you that it was him who had come to your rescue judging from the unimpressed look you were throwing his way.

“All I’m saying is that we could’ve just gone to Hillside for lunch.”

“But the burgers here are superior,” he countered, smiling at you. “And you got to enjoy a beautiful walk in the snow with me so who’s the real winner he- mmpf!”

Chris was cut off by your damp mitten hitting his face, brows knitting into a slight frown before laughing at the proud grin you wore at the accuracy of your throw.

“That wasn’t very nice,” he said with mock hurt.

“Maybe I’m not a very nice person.”

“I don’t believe that for one second,” he replied, but there was no teasing in his tone this time, only the kind of sincerity that had your face flushing warm and had you reaching for the menu to hide behind under the pretence of looking at the choices available.

He couldn’t help but smile at the awkwardness with which you were trying and failing to hide from him but soon joined you in picking up a menu and perusing it, despite already knowing what he was going to order.

It was a few moments before the waitress came over and while neither of you spoke the silence between you both wasn’t exactly awkward even though Chris knew there was something about his last words that had had some kind of effect on you. He was right, of course, because despite the fact that you’d had hold of this menu for a good couple of minutes already, you hadn’t actually looked at a single thing on it even though you’d made such a show of doing just that and now that Chris had ordered, a cheeseburger with fries and a chocolate milkshake, the waitress was looking at you expectantly. Unable to form any kind of rational thought under that kind of pressure, you found yourself simply saying “same” and soon enough it was just you and Chris at the table once more.

Chris was looking at you like he had something he wanted to say and the unreadable expression on his face had you feeling somewhat uneasy for reasons you hadn’t quite ascertained but probably understood on some level if you let yourself think about it for more than a second. He could feel the nervous energy radiating from you though and so rather than pursue his current train of thought, he picked a topic of conversation that was much safer and knew you’d be comfortable with: school.

You talked about your classes and upcoming assignments while he listened intently and you returned the favour while he spoke earnestly about hockey and his own academic workload. It was so easy to settle into a natural rhythm with Chris whenever you talked, as if you’d been having conversations like these for years when in fact it had only been a few months of knowing him and a few weeks of meeting up like this. None of that seemed to really matter though, not when the conversation was good and the chemistry felt right and especially not when it was clear that you were both on the same page when it came to your friendship. There was something else there though, something that was beyond being purely platonic, that much was becoming crystal clear and yet despite the ease in which it was to talk to him about literally anything else, there was something that had you stumbling over the thought of bringing it up.

You were saved from falling down that particular rabbit hole by the reappearance of the waitress, two burgers that were big enough to have your eyes popping out of your head in her hands. Chris chuckled from behind his milkshake at the look of disbelief on your face as your burger was set down in front of you before he reached for the bottle of ketchup between you both. You took the top of your burger bun off, nose immediately wrinkling at the sight of four pickle slices resting on top of the lettuce and tomato.

“Ugh, I forgot to ask for no pickles.”

Chris looked up from where he was squirting ketchup onto his bun, his eyes meeting yours briefly as his face split into a grin.

“You’re not one of those people, are you?”

“Shut up,” you grumbled as you began to pick the offensive green menaces off your food and set them at the edge of your plate. “I like what I like.”

Chris reached across and began to transfer the pickles from your plate to his burger, smiling widely at you as he did so.

“Well, I might have found a solution to this particular pickle you find yourself in,” he chuckled at the exaggerated groan and roll of your eyes at the expense of his joke. “You see, I love pickles.”

“You love anything,” you countered. “You’re like a human dumpster.”

“Hurtful,” he replied as he clutched at his chest. “But also true so I’ll allow it.”

You picked up a fry from your plate and threw it at him, immediately filled with equal parts surprise and a strange sense of awe as he reflexively moved and caught it in his mouth.

“You really are a dumpster,” you grinned as you shook your head at the proud little smile he was giving you.

“I am, so how about you don’t ask for no pickles on your burgers and you just give ‘em to me instead?”

It was easy to agree to his proposal, not least because his logic actually made a lot of sense when you thought about it, but mostly because of the way his eyes were sparkling and the way his smile made you feel warm all over, like the falling snow and freezing air outside didn’t exist, like your fingers and toes hadn’t been numbed by the biting cold during your walk here, like there had only ever been sunshine. It was also why you’d agreed to let him carry you back through the snow to your dorm, his large hands hooked around the backs of your thighs and your arms draped over his shoulders much like during the walk to the diner. You’d protested initially, of course, not wanting to burden Chris or put you both at risk of an injury due to the slippery conditions, but he wasn’t about to be convinced otherwise and remained unperturbed by the weather, gently reminding you that he had in fact got you to the diner in one piece in the first instance at your objections.

Truthfully, despite the mild embarrassment you felt at your complete ineptitude when it came to walking on ice, you couldn’t help but be more than a little impressed at Chris’s sheer strength. You wondered then, about how hard he must work in the gym to develop such a strong core because while you knew from first-hand experience how slippery it was underfoot, he didn’t falter once throughout the entire walk home and with the way he was talking amiably about his favourite places in the city he called home, and how his hands were holding your legs so surely and securely, you felt safe as houses with your chest pressed into his back – even with your thick coats and layers of winter clothing between you.

He walked with you on his back right up to the entrance of your dorm, setting you down carefully on the pathway that looked to have been newly shovelled before he turned to face you, his cheeks once again ruddy from the cold and your walk home.

“I don’t want to say ‘I told you so’ twice in one day,” he grinned, sucking air in through his teeth and shaking his head slightly. “But didn’t I say that I’d get you home safely?”

“So what if you were right twice?” you rebutted with a playful nudge. “It’s not like it’s ever gonna happen again.”

“Watch it, Pickle. I’ll have you know that I’m right about a lot of things.”

“Pickle?” you barked out a laugh, watching as Chris walked slowly backwards down the path away from you with that smile still on his face. “What kind of a name is that? I don’t even like pickles.”

“I know,” he called out into the growing distance between you both. “But I do, remember?”

You shook your head at him, chuckling to yourself with a smile on your lips that mirrored his as you watched him.

“See ya Tuesday then, Trash Can!” you hollered.

His raucous cackle cut through the silent flurry as he continued to walk slowly backwards, his grin clear as day even through the falling snowflakes.

“Trash Can! Fucking, Trash Can! Man, you got some serious chirps, Pickle. Can you throw hands too? I mean, I know you suck at keeping your balance on the ice but we could use an enforcer! I could push you around?”

“Anytime, anywhere!” you laughed, watching him with a grin until he had waved his goodbye and turned away before he retreated into the heavy snow.

Part ii

#it's all coming back to me fic #my writing #chris kreider #chris kreider fic #chris kreider x reader #nhl fic #nhl writing #nhl fanfic #nhl fanfiction #hockey fic #hockey fanfic #hockey fanfiction #hockey writing

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biostudyblog · 4 years

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Cognition

Models of Memory

Memory is an extremely difficult subject to study due to its subversive and subjective nature. Thus, many models have been proposed which describe how memories are processed by our brain. The two major ones are the three-box model and the levels of processing model.

Three-box model

This model of memory is also known as the information-processing model. It describes how the brain processes information (hence the name). Our sensory memory processes external events. Some of that information is encoded by the short-term/working memory. Some of that information is then encoded by the long-term memory.

Sensory Memory: The sensory memory only lasts for a fraction of a second and consists of the information you are processing right now. George Sperling demonstrated this memory with his experiment, where he would flash a 9 letter grid to subjects for a split second. The subjects were then asked to recall either the top middle or bottom row letters immediately after they appeared. They were able to recite the letters, showing that that information was being stored for a short amount of time. This type of sensory memory is called iconic memory- a short lived photograph of a scene. There is also echoic memory, which is another short lived memory for sounds rather than pictures. Events that are encoded into the working memory are encoded as visual codes (a visual), acoustic codes (a collection of sounds), or semantic codes (the meaning of the event). In order to decide which memories are encoded into the working memory, the brain depends on selective attention. This means that information that is important to us is encoded. This is why we are able to ignore certain stimuli such as the sound of a fan, or the feeling of our clothes because they are not being encoded into the working memory. This is what makes the cocktail party effect work.

Short-term memory: Short-term memory is known as working memory because they’re the memories we’re working with in the present moment. They last longer than sensory memories, but not very long; usually around 10-30 seconds. Our short-term memory caps at around 7. In his experiments, George Miller found this number, and titled his research “The Magical Number 7, Plus or Minus Two.” So how do we improve the functionality of our short-term memory? One method is through chunking. Take psychology; there’s a lot of vocabulary to memories. If you try and memorise all of those words a couple nights before the exam, you’re not going to have much luck. Instead, it’s better to chunk that massive list into groups of 7. Another example of chunking is the famous mnemonic device; My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas, where the names and order of the planets are chunked into the first letters of each word in the sentence. Another trick is to rehearse the information. Instead of staring at your vocabulary list, repeat the words you’ve chunked to yourself over and over again, thus maintaining that information in your short-term memory.

Long-term memory: These strategies are great for keeping information in our short-term memory, but the best strategies are ones that help encode that information into long-term memory, as it is our permanent storage. So far, it seems that long-term memories storage potential is unlimited. Once information makes it to our long-term memory, it stays- although it is subject to decay. It is stored in three different ways:

Memories can be explicit of implicit.

Explicit memories: Also known as declarative memories, these are usually what first come to our mind. They’re conscious memories that we actively try to remember. For example, at the moment, you’re trying to form explicit memories about psychology.

Implicit memories: Also known as non-declarative memories, these are memories we form unintentionally. You may realise when trying to cook lunch that you’ve managed to form an implicit memory on how to cook grandma’s famous pasta because you’ve watched her do it so many times.

An interesting phenomenon involves individuals with eidetic or photographic memory. Alexander Luria studied a patient who could repeat a list of 70 letters backwards, and could remember it as far as 15 years later.

Levels of Processing Model

Instead of describing memory in steps, this theory maintains that memories are either deeply/elaboratively processed or shallowly/maintenance processed. If to study for an upcoming psychology exam, you repeat a list of vocabulary words to yourself over and over again, you’ve shallowly processed that information, and will go away soon after you’ve taken your test. If you, however study those vocabulary words and do intensive research into each term, you’ve deeply processed those words, and will most likely be able to remember them long after your exam. The more cognitive energy you expend trying to remember something, the longer that memory will last. This model explains why we remember stories and questions better than boring old recitation of events and statements. We find the former more interesting, and more deeply process them.

Retrieval

All memory models end with retrieval. It is the process of taking information out of memory so it can be useful to us. Recognition is a process where we match a fact with one we already have stored in our memory. (”Where have I heard that song?”) Recall is retrieving a memory based on an external cue. (”What did grandma’s pasta taste like?”) There are all kinds of things that change why we’re able to retrieve some memories and why we lose others.

One factor was found by the early psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus. He found that the order that things are presented in a list influence which things we remember. The primary effect states that we are more likely to remember the first few items on the list, while the recency effect states we are more likely to remember the last few items on that list. Both of these effects come together to form the serial position effect. The serial position effect indicates that we are the least likely to remember words in the middle of a list.

Another factor is context. Something that happens to all of us is the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. When I was taking my SAT Biology exam, I completely forgot the word “commensalism.” I sat there thinking facts that I knew about it; it’s a symbiotic relationship, it’s the relationship where one organism is helped and one isn’t hurt or helped” “I watched a youtube video about it” and although I remembered all these facts, it took me a second to remember the actual word. A theory that helps explain why this happens is the semantic network theory. This theory states that our brain forms new memories by joining their meaning and their context with those that already exist in our memory, forming an interlocking web full of memories. So when I was listing facts that I could remember about commensalism, I was making my way through the web, until I finally came across the word. Another phenomenon caused by context are flashbulb memories. When you ask someone who was conscious during 9/11, often they can give detailed descriptions of where they were and what they were doing. This is a flashbulb memory; where the importance causes us to encode more than we normally would.

The emotional context also affects retrieval. Mood-congruent memory is an interesting phenomenon, where you’re more likely to remember something when your mood matches the mood you were in at the time of the event. State-dependent memory is a similar phenomenon, where the state you’re in (for example, drowsy) allows you to retrieve memories from when you were in a similar state.

Constructive Memory

As much as we’d like to believe that it is, memory is not perfect. An example of this is the “recovered memory” phenomenon, where someone seems to “recover” a repressed memory that is actually a false memory based on outside influence. This phenomenon was discovered by Elizabeth Loftus. A constructed memory is a memory that contains false details of a real event, or a fake event altogether. This is why eyewitness accounts can prove to be problematic in police investigations. The way a policeman asks their question can completely change how the eyewitness remembers the event.

Forgetting

A number of things lead to forgetting. One example is decay where memories or connections that we don’t use a lot fade after a while. I used to be able to label every European country when I was younger, but now I’ll be lucky if I can get 15. These memories aren’t gone forever though; the relearning effect has shown that it takes less time recovering these memories than it took the first time. Another thing that causes forgetting is interference. There are two main types: retroactive interference and proactive interference. Retroactive interference is when learning something new hurts your ability to recall older information. Proactive interference is when something you learned a while ago interferes with your ability to learn newer information. A friend of mine told me a fun pneumonic that helps me remember the meaning of these two words: PORN- Proactive, Old interferes with new, Retroactive, New interferes with old.

How Memories are Stored

We know very little about the biological process of memory storage. Research performed on patients with brain damage has shown the hippocampus’ importance in encoding new memories. Patients with a damaged hippocampus had a condition known as anterograde amnesia, where new memories couldn’t form properly, but old memories could be recalled. Think of Dory from finding Nemo. Further connecting to Dory, remember how she could read but couldn’t remember that she could read? Researchers have found this phenomenon typical when studying anterograde amnesiacs, where they can learn and remember new skills but can’t remember learning that skill, showing that procedural memory is stored elsewhere in the brain. When studying memories, researchers tend to focus on long-term potentiation. As neurons fire more and more, their connections can strengthen, making the receiving neuron more sensitive to messages.

Language

Elements of Language

All languages are built with morphemes and phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound in a language. non-English speakers and non-Americans tend to have trouble with the American R- a phoneme that is particularly difficult to recreate. On the flip side, Americans tend to have trouble recreating the Spanish R, while a native Spanish speaker would find that phoneme easy to make. Morphemes are the smallest unit of meaning in a language. Morphemes can be words like “but” and “the” letter like “a” or “I” and prefixes and suffixes like “pre-” and “an-.” Phonemes make up morphemes, and morphemes make up words. The words are organised in a particular order which is known as syntax. Different languages have different syntaxes which can be difficult for non-native speakers to wrap their head around. In english, the order that adjectives are used to describe a word is very particular, and while unconscious for us, is extremely tricky for learners. When describing a dress that you just bought, would you say “my velvet, dinner, new dress? Or would you say “my new velvet dinner dress?” At the same time, in french, the syntax of adjectives can be very frustrating for us to learn. For example, the sentence: Ma ancienne lycée means the high school I formerly attended, while the sentence Ma lycée ancienne means my antique high school.

Language Acquisition

Studies performed by developmental psychologists have shown that while babies who are learning different languages are developing, they move through the same basic stages. The first step of language acquisition is babbling, and occurs when the baby is typically around 4 months old. Babbling is innate, as shown by the fact that even deaf babies babble. Babbling is a babies way of experimenting with different phonemes, and at this point they can recreate all possible phonemes- this is why teaching a baby or very young child a new language can cause the accent to stick. As the baby continues to develop, the phonemes from its primary languages stick, and they lose the others. Babies will then move from babbling to single words (holophrases) which is aptly names the holophrastic/one-word stage, and normally occurs when the baby is one year old. The next milestone is telegraphic speech or the two-word stage. This typically is around 18 months. Toddlers will smash the words they know into basic commands; “No play!”- They have meaning down (”I don’t want to play right now!”), but are still working on grammar and syntax rules. As they learn these rules, they tend to misapply them. For example, a toddler may learn that “ed” indicates past tense, and may say “I runned to the store!” This is known as overgeneralisation or overregularisation.

The specifics of how we acquire language is a bit controversial. Behaviorists think that language is learnt through operant conditioning and shaping. If a baby makes a phoneme that exists in the parents language, or says a word, the parents will smile or pay more attention to the baby, reinforcing that behaviour. Cognitive psychologists challenge this idea. Noam Chomsky stated that humans are born with a language acquisition device. This is known as the nativist theory of language acquisition. He used children who had been deprived of language when they were young to show that there is a critical period for language learning. Today’s psychologists believe it is a combination of these two ideas.

Language and Cognition

How does language influence how we think? I know that personally, my personality changes when I am speaking French versus when I’m speaking English, and I know that I’m not alone. Benjamin Whorf theorised that the language we use affects and limits how we think. This is the linguistic relativity hypothesis. While studies have proven that language effects how we think about people, objects, and ideas, few have shown a drastic change in what we are able to think about.

Thinking and Creativity

Describing Thought

Describing thought is a monumental task; descriptions count as thoughts, so if I can get meta for a moment; we have to use thought to describe thought. It’s immensely difficult to create a global definition of thought, so psychologists tend to describe categories of thoughts instead. Concepts are similar to schemas. Everyone has cognitive rules we use to process our environments, and categorise objects, people, and ideas. We tend to base our concepts on prototypes, or what we think is most typical of a concept. Another kind of thought is an image, a mental picture we have in our mind of the world.

Problem Solving

There are two main kinds of problem solving, and like anything have their drawbacks and their advantages. Say you have a safe to open, and you don’t know the combination. There are two simple ways you can try and open it.

Algorithms: A simple, but arduous way to solve your safe problem is to try every single combination. This is an algorithm and is defined as a rule that guarantees the right solution by using a formula or other foolproof method.

Heuristics: If that safe combination is more than 2 numbers, you could be there all day just punching in numbers. Another thing you could try is using numbers that make up years you know are important to the owner of the safe. This is a heuristic. A heuristic isn’t foolproof and doesn’t guarantee a solution but can seriously shave down the time you spend solving your problem. There are severals of heuristics. Two of the main ones are representative heuristics and availability heuristics.

Heuristics can lead to overconfidence as we overestimate how good our judgements really are. This can lead to belief bias, and belief perseverance. Belief biases are illogical conclusions that we make to confirm preexisting beliefs. Belief perseverance is the tendency to maintain a belief even when evidence proves contradictory.

Impediments to problem solving:

Rigidity/mental set: The tendency to fall back into comfortable thought patterns. People tend to use problem solving methods that worked in the past to solve a new problem- this can cause people to ignore new solutions. A specific example of rigidity is functional fixedness which is the inability to see a new use for a specific object. Books are for reading, cups are for drinking, and clothes are for wearing. One time I accidentally spilled my tea on my desk, and instead of using the old shirt that was sitting next to my desk, I ran to grab a towel, allowing the tea to get everywhere and nearly ruin my computer.

Not breaking the problem into parts: Research has proven that by breaking a big problem down into smaller, manageable chunks, tackling the problem is significantly easier and tends to lead to success.

Confirmation bias: When we have made a conclusion about something, when researching it, we tend to ignore research that proves that conclusion wrong. This is why anti-vaxxers can spend hours scouring the internet and pull away one or two studies proving their point right, and completely ignore hundreds of articles that prove them wrong.

Framing: The way a problem is framed can completely impact our ability to solve that problem. If I were to give you a tricky math problem and tell you “99% of people have solved this problem,” you’d likely go into it not expecting much difficulty, while if I told you “99% of people can’t solve this problem,” you’d likely go in expecting something really difficult. This can completely change how able you are to solve a problem.

Creativity

How do you define creativity? Even harder: how do you find a global definition for creativity? While we may agree on some events exemplifying someone’s creativity, people’s individual criteria for creativity varies massively.

Some psychologists have delved into this problem. In his chimpanzee experiment, Wolfgang Kohler documented elements of insight by observing chimps get the banana from the ceiling. Research looking into creativity has found very little connection between creativity and intelligence. Research looking into creativity tends to look at convergent thinking; thinking pointed towards one solution, and divergent thinking; thinking pointed towards multiple possible solutions. Divergent thinking tends to be linked most closely with creativity.

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fondnesses · 3 years

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roscoe’s notebook post

A while back I said I was going to write a post about the way I use notebooks for writing projects. This is the first of several posts about Writing Process I’ve been tossing around in my drafts for a little while as a result of conversations with friends, so bear with me.

I. Love. Notebooks. I genuinely would have to deeply overhaul my whole Process of writing anything on the longer side if I were to go paperless; I find physical paper pretty invaluable when I’m outlining, brainstorming, and researching, and I still probably write ¼-⅓ of all my actual content on paper first. (That proportion used to be a lot higher, but I’ve gotten better at being productive on a computer in recent years, which is great.) I’m a very visual person, so notebooks really help me visualize my ideas, story structure, etc. It’s very helpful to be able to use arrows and diagrams and physically strike things through, and the tactility is really soothing to me. If I show people my notebooks or talk about them, I often get a response like “this is so organized”, which is sort of true, but I have to stress that it’s “organization for a disorganized mind”; I can’t misplace ideas or notes if it all goes into the same physical object, vs. electronic notes, which are much more, like “Did I say that in a voice memo? PM it to myself on Discord? Leave it in a desktop sticky note? Write it directly into the Google Doc? Who knows! It’s lost to time!”. It’s very much an ADHD management strategy.

It helps that I’m a very neophyte stationery hobbyist and appreciate any excuse I have to use my pens, but I also will go off at any opportunity about how helpful I find them for writing projects, which is why I decided to just make a post about it. Right now I mostly use them for (fan and original) fiction projects, but I used a notebook for a very similar purpose when I was working on my undergrad thesis, and I have a slightly different but equally necessary-to-me approach to notebooks I use at work.

My typical structure for a notebook that’s devoted to one project only looks like this:

I always leave the first couple pages blank so I can go back and retroactively index bujo-style. I don’t always actually do the index, because sometimes I get too lazy, but I like having those blank pages there to give me the option. I also usually put epigraphs/inspo quotes on the first page.

After that, there’s often (but not always, I’ll talk about it) a couple pages at the start where I’m frantically jotting down loose brainstorming ideas before they've coagulated into a story structure. Just, like, vomiting into the void.

Stemming out of that, I usually write out about like 5-10 pages of outline-style notes in chronological order, laying out all the main story beats and charting out the story trajectory. This will inevitably get revised and rewritten many times, but I find the process of writing these wide-angle synopses really useful for dislodging ideas, making connections re: thematic threads, etc. from my brain.

I’ll devote a couple pages after that to specific things like "sex scene brainstorming", "random scene ideas/minor details that don't have a clear place in the outline right now but I'll turn to for inspo later" [this is what I refer to as “bits” in one of the later photos], "page where I just outline the Motifs And Themes", "research notes", "to-do list", "stuff to check on a second pass", "things to put in the a/n and AO3 tags", etc.--the specifics vary with the story.

Then, I skip ahead to approx. halfway through the notebook and cordon off the rest of the pages to be “free writing” space, AKA writing of actual content rather than planning, with the expectation there will be no internal organization and I’ll transcribe to laptop as I go. Writing on paper feels less binding than typing something on a computer; it’s like a little secret kept with myself, and it doesn’t need to go anywhere or be seen by anyone if I decide I don’t like it. Setting aside pages in the back half of the notebook means that, as more things come up re: planning, I can go back and add those in the rest of the pages that were intentionally left blank. This is how I avoid (for the most part) having the whole thing be a jumbled mess where there’s no separation between the notes and the actual story writing; I learned this the hard way via the first notebook I’ll show you in a second. I’ve recently gotten really into using Muji sticky note tabs to label any pages/sections of particular import that don't want to have to refer back to in the index and would rather just flip to instantly.

I do use notebooks that aren’t specific to any one project, but those are much less organized and less worth sharing.

Before I look at more recent stuff, here are some selections from my notebook for the project that got me into writing longfic, my Golden Kamuy canon divergence AU (with apologies for the bad photos, my phone’s camera is trash). I worked on this from Sept 2018-July 2019. It was a learning experience in a lot of ways, and notebook utilization was one of those. I’ve always used notebooks for keeping track of writing projects, as I said earlier, but before this it was largely without much organization or structure; just total chaos. Having a physical notebook became really important for this project because it was a sprawling multichapter story with rotating POVs and a lot of historical research. I also learned a lot about what not to do with a notebook, personally, or at least things that don’t work so well (for me). This was a college ruled spiral-bound Decomposition Book, for the record.

By the time I bought a notebook for it I already had a (very basic) plot outline in mind, so I wasn’t doing that very initial ground-zero brainstorming in here; I was copying out of my phone’s notes app, basically, and then going from there.

This is one of the first pages in this notebook; I wanted to visualize the relationship web between the four central characters in the story in terms of how they feel about one another. The two colours correspond to the POV characters (Sugimoto in orange, Ogata in pink), and I used this colour-coding throughout the notebook with highlighters, etc. to keep track of information that was more relevant to one character than the other. Tsurumi and Yuusaku aren’t POV characters, but they’re prominent in the story and their presence impacts the central relationship between Sugimoto and Ogata, and it was helpful to me to map out the emotional ecosystem, as it were.

(There are coffee stains all over this, because I wrote the vast majority of the story in coffee shops because I didn’t want to be around my roommates, lol. This is part of why I never do fiction writing in notebooks that are too nice, I get neurotic about needing to keep them tidy. I can’t use ones that are too shit though, either, so it’s a bit of a narrow window. I’ll talk more about brands and paper quality etc. later.)

As you can see, this is the first page of many I set aside specifically for jotting down different pieces of historical information relevant to my story. It’s about fictional characters who are members of an army division that existed in real life, and both the canon and my fic involve a high level of attention to detail with regards to which divisions were present for which battles, etc., as well as general historical details specific to the Russo-Japanese War setting--what did people eat in the trenches? What did they do to fill time? How did they get through the winter? What did third party observers have to say about the conditions? What were the specs of their weaponry (particularly important because one of the POV characters is a sniper and gun nut)? I did a lot of reading (and watching of antique gun collector Youtube videos... the things I do for love, eh), and it came in handy so many times, because it turns out it’s much easier to write trench warfare slice of life if you have factual details to pull from when you don’t know what to do with a scene! Imagine that!

This is the first of three “grid outlines” I made; this is a way I sometimes like to visualize a story outline all on one page, with the columns representing chapters and the squares within the columns representing sections/scenes within the chapters. As you can see, early on I was hoping to get this done in five or even FOUR chapters (whatmakesyouhaha.mp3), with POV switches happening internally within the chapters. This proved to be unwieldy for many reasons, so I revised the outline:

Here I’d come to terms with the fact this story was going to have a lot more chapters than I’d planned, and I rearranged things so that it would happen in ten, with each chapter belonging to only one POV character. This also needed revising later, and in the end the story looked a bit more like this (though it did in fact end up being twelve chapters, but only because Chapter Ten was like, 12k, and needed to be split in two chunks):

I must have remembered to bring my fineliners to the coffee shop this time, lol, because as you can see it’s properly colour-coded this time. This outline was made when I was already four posted chapters into the fic, which hopefully gives you a sense of the way in which I am sort of a planner and a pantser; I can’t get into a longer project without an outline, but the outline inevitably changes many times throughout writing and I often end up with a finished product that looks pretty different from what I was intending. My creative M.O. as always is Do The Maximum! Amount! Of! Work! Possible!

This is what a “free writing” page looks like, for me. In this notebook I didn’t set aside any specific spaces for free writing so it’s strewn throughout the notebook in a really disorganized way and I was constantly flipping through looking for bits I’d written and forgotten to transcribe, and I decided to be more organized in future as a result of that. If something’s crossed through, that means I transcribed it. As you can see, they’re often small sections, sometimes just a coupled decontextualized sentences. About 3/4 of what I write in a notebook makes it into the story, I’d say; some of it never goes anywhere, and that’s OK. I have less of an issue killing my darlings if they never make it off the paper page.

A very brief, top-down chapter outline, where the goal was not to get too bogged down in details and just to visualize the beats and pin down what they’re trying to accomplish. Chapters for this fic typically ran about 6k, and five or six scenes per chapter was pretty common, so the average scene length was about 1-1.25k words/scene. IDK why I called it storyboarding when I didn’t make drawings. (Margin numbers are to keep track of word count, since I was using a daily word count tracker while writing this.)

This page was, as titled, for keeping track of the various balls in the air when I was about 2/3-3/4 of the way through the story and really feeling the pressure with regards to tying up the various loose ends. This was... a struggle. I hadn’t ever written anything longish (this fic ended up just under 70k) that had an action plot before, let alone a canon divergence scenario where I had to engage with and explain away various canon plot elements so I could maintain the audience’s suspension of disbelief.

Now, I mentioned earlier that I learned various “things not to do” with my notebooks while working on that project. One of those lessons I learned is to be more realistic when assessing how big a project is likely to get, not least because I RAN OUT OF PAGES around the chapter 9-10 mark. In my defense though, that’s because I’d never written anything even half this long! But I know better now, and try not to be in denial. Finishing the notebook early was a way bigger problem than I’d anticipated, and was part of the reason the last few chapters took several grueling months to finish. The issue was that I needed to be able to use a notebook to maintain my workflow--attempting to do it only on a computer was dismal--but it seemed silly to start a notebook of a similar size to the one I’d finished (80pg, approximately B5 dimensions) when there was no way it would need that much space, especially since the reference pages, like the historical notes, didn’t need to be transcribed over. I was also pretty broke at the time and didn’t want to spend money unnecessarily, lol. I tried to get by using a Moleskine Cahier for a month or so because I had one lying around, but it was horrid; it was too small to be used comfortably, it wasn’t spiral-bound so it wouldn’t lay flat, the ghosting is terrible and I hate the way Moleskine paper feels, etc. Eventually I caved and went to Muji and bought a 30ish page A5 with closer to lay-flat binding, and I finished the story in there. I would take a comparative pic for you of the relative notebook sizes and include some of the scene staging diagrams, etc. I put in there, but I can’t find it :(

So I learned that specs really do matter, and it’s okay to be picky if the pickiness is going to make the difference between actually using a notebook or not. Things that are important to me in my notebooks:

Ruling (gotta have ruling, I can suffer through grid but blank or dot is a no-go)

Size (I can’t use anything smaller than at least a medium-large notebook, I find it claustrophobic and get miserly about page space)

Binding (twin ring is my preference because it looks and feels better than a classic spiral but has the same comfort of use with regards to bending the pages back to suit workspace size and laying flat with ease)

Paper quality and colour (I don’t like anything too slippery/smooth or with too much visible ghosting, and I strongly prefer an off-white paper to bleached paper--part of why I don’t use Decomposition Books anymore, the paper is scratchy and it’s too damn bleached!)

Pagecount relative to size of project

Portability (in non-COVID times; anything bigger than a B5 wouldn’t fit in the satchel I used to bring to work at my old job), etc.

But everyone’s taste is different in this respect, and the only way to figure out what works for you is through trial and error, I’m afraid. I also suspect I’m more neurotic and particular about the sensory experience of using a notebook than most people are, but I yam what I yam.

Now to talk about the notebooks for my current projects, where I’ve refined my approach somewhat. I’ve included less photos for these because they’re ongoing WIPs I don’t want to spoil completely, but I’ve tried to include some outline-type stuff to give you an idea.

My big bang fic is in the very ugly twin ring notebook on the right; I got it at a dollar store by my house because I needed something to work in and didn’t want to wait for an online order, but it’s been very serviceable for my needs. The paper isn’t even bad. The bigger notebook (B5) is my Sangcheng fic.

I wanted something with a lot of pages for this, because I knew it was going to be a long story, and for some reason the fact it’s smaller than my usual preference doesn’t bug me (I think it’s an A5?); it just fits this story, somehow. I’m not sure exactly how many sheets are in here but I’d guess about 150.

Because this notebook has upwards of 100 sheets, I made a lot of use of sticky-note tabs to label high-priority pages. The colour coding of these doesn’t mean anything, it was just whichever ones I had at hand at any given moment. These are those tabs from Muji I mentioned, I’m really obsessed with them--the shape makes them so much less obtrusive and more practical than conventional squares/rectangles OR flag shapes, IME.

My big bang story is nonlinear, so, similarly to what I did with colour coding for the two POVs for my GK fic, this story has two main colours corresponding to whether a given section takes place in the “before” or the “after” portions of the timeline, with blue as “after”, yellow as “before”. This is what the most current version of the outline looks like in there:

If you squint, you can see the alphanumeric notes in the top right of each section entry; I gave them each a code like “A3″ or “B5″ corresponding to their position in the story sequence (so, it goes A1, B1, A2, B2, etc., through to B9 and then the epilogue). [Unintentional that this schema overlaps with notebook size labeling and so is kind of confusing in the context of this post.] At first I was just keeping track of the sections via the highlighted titles, but it got confusing because I’d write down “Wedding” or “Yiling” in my notes and then refer to the notes later like “but there are multiple marriages?? and multiple scenes in Yiling??”. Stuff gets struck through with a straight line if it’s been written in a more-or-less complete form and crossed out with a squiggly line if it’s been cut from the outline or made redundant.

As I said earlier, I started out all the initial brainstorming for my Sangcheng fic in its notebook, instead of brainstorming it in someone’s DMs/my notes app/a voice memo/etc. and then transcribing it into the notebook in a somewhat more organized fashion, which is how my stories usually start out. Because of this, the first five-ish pages are basically just stream of consciousness rambling where I was trying to jot down every disconnected thought I had about the story concept. I don’t have photos for that because it’s too spoilerific for later developments in the fic, but I can show you some of the stages the outlines went through, once I was able to corral those initial notes into a story structure:

All the chapters in this fic have their own highlighter colour, so when I started trying to make sense of my initial brainstorm notes I just went through and highlighted stuff in the colour of the chapter it would make the most sense for, and then transcribed things more-or-less in chronological order into the relevant chapter outline. I later ended up rewriting all the chapter outlines AGAIN to refine them and divide them internally by the individual scenes, which makes them a lot more legible and less wall-of-text-y. They look like this now, with about four sheets per chapter:

Because this fic is on the longer side, I have some pages that are just for keeping track of other story elements, like this, where I refer back to whatever the fuck the “themes” are supposed to be whenever I forget what this fic is about:

It’s all about the visionboarding... Anyway, that’s most of what I have to offer, since most of these two notebooks is Forbidden Content.

With regards to brands/supplies, I really like this Kokuyo Campus Wide notebook that I’m writing Sangcheng in, it’s pretty perfect for me. I also like the B5 Muji twin rings, but those only come in 30 sheets, so I wouldn’t use it for anything above a ~20k project. The B5 Maruman Spiral Note 6.5mm ruled/80 sheet is another good one, though I wish it was twin ring instead of spiral. As you can tell, I like Japanese stationery brands because it’s easier to find decent paper quality and minimalist design without shelling out $$ than it is with American/European brands, at least IME. I like Rollbahns too. But honestly, I can usually find pretty serviceable random notebooks that aren’t brand-name from Asian dollar stores; it’s really not something where you need to shell out tons of money.

#notebooks #writing #idk how to tag this!

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kuiperblog · 3 years

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DRPGs: function over form

I have an odd affection for DRPGs, or “Dungeon-crawling Role-Playing Games,” which are sometimes referred to as “Wizardly clones” in the same way that early FPS games were called “Doom Clones.”

Legend of Grimrock is an indie game that I’ve found is closest to actually emulating the feel of the original Wizardry games from an aesthetic perspective while updating them for modern graphics; most of the examples from recent history are Japanese and feature anime-style character designs, with Etrian Odyssey being perhaps the best-known (and best-selling).

I describe my affection for DRPGs as “odd,” because few other games have the ability to thoroughly captivate me for the time I’m playing, only for me to completely forget everything about them when I’m done playing them.

For example, I recently noticed that Demon Gaze 2 was on sale for 75% off in the Playstation store. I’m keen to try it out, since I enjoyed the first Demon Gaze game so much that I took the time to 100% (I earned the “platinum trophy” so that anyone on my Playstation Network friends list can see the evidence of my achievement). This is a task that reportedly takes around 50 hours. I say “reportedly” because it’s based on other people’s reports of how long it took for them to “platinum” the game; I can’t really recall from memory how much time I spent playing that game, or really anything else about it for that matter.

I cannot express how weird it is for me to not have a memory of have any specific memories of playing a video game, especially one that I spent that amount of time playing. I can still vividly remember a specific game of Dota 2 that I played over half a decade ago. I could talk for paragraphs about an indie puzzle game that I played for 2 hours in 2012. You could ask me to talk about any of the N64 games I played as a middle schooler and I could probably recall many specific memories from the time I spent with those games.

And yet, when it comes to Demon Gaze, I remember nothing. Not the characters, not the plot, not any of the specific milieus or setpieces. And, truthfully, it’s probably because caring about any of these things is never really something that the game asked of me in the first place. I earnestly tried to remember anything I could about Demon Gaze, and here is a full, comprehensive list of what I came up with:

There’s an NPC whose character trait is that she’s always sleepy. I think she lived in the basement of...something. I think your “home base” was an inn, and she lived in the inn’s basement, and you would sometimes have to talk to her to do certain things or something.

One of the levels had plants and was mostly green. Maybe multiple levels, actually. I want to assume this meant there was a hedge maze, but I’m not actually remembering a hedge maze; I’m just assuming that a dungeon-crawling game plus a green area must mean there was a hedge maze.

One of the levels involved climbing a tall tower, or maybe descending into a deep pit. There was definitely verticality involved, and the map was cylindrical.

I think the main character used swords. But maybe they didn’t. I’m pretty sure that you could dual-wield at a certain point in the game. (I think part of what made the main character so strong was the fact that they could equip an artifact that let them dual-wield?)

That is truthfully and honestly the full extent of what I remembered about the game before I started writing this post and digging up screenshots which reminded me of the main character’s heterochromia. When grabbing screenshots for this post, I found one that showed a character’s class as being “Paladin,” and my reaction was not, “Oh yeah, Paladin was totally a character class in this game,” but “Oh yeah, Paladin totally sounds like a character class that could plausibly be in this game.”

Normally, I’d have memories of specific boss battles, or setpieces, or characters, or story moments. But in place of those, I have memories of looking at Google Sheets that people had made to list all of the items that dropped from certain areas, and ranked them to let you know which items were the best. I could more vividly tell you the decor of the room I was in when I unlocked the platinum trophy than the final boss I beat (or item I obtained) to unlock it. (Being a game for a portable system like the Vita, I actually have memories of many locations and “setpieces” associated with that game; just not locations in the game.)

DRPGs are, maybe more than any genre, a game that is experienced through a layer of abstraction, and I think this is best illustrated by the Etrian Odyssey, which lives in the DS family of systems, which are notable for having two screens (as is suggested by the name “Dual Screen”). Here’s a screenshot that shows what the game displays on both screens when you’re dungeon crawling:

On the top screen, you see the environment you’re exploring in all its 3D-rendered detail. On the bottom screen, you have a map of the area you’re navigating, with the arrow in the middle indicating your current position and orientation. And for the vast, vast majority of dungeon crawling, my attention is focused solely on the bottom screen.

This is, I gather, how most people play DRPGs. Etrian Odyssey puts even more of the focus on the bottom screen by forcing you to draw the map as you walk (hence the bevy of icons and paintbrushes it offers you when filling in the grid). If you try to play by looking at the environment, you’ll quickly realize how much of the area is just copy-pasted assets that are difficult to navigate by. The map isn’t just a “guide;” the game feels less like a first-person dungeon crawler and more like game with a top-down POV where your avatar is represented by that arrow on the map. If you watch gameplay videos and only pay attention to the top screen, you’ll be blown away by how fast it seems like people are moving, but it makes a lot more sense when you realize that people are only paying attention to the map: people will see, “okay, I want to walk north 5 tiles, turn 90 degrees left, then walk west 2 tiles,” and then just input that series of actions faster than the walking animation can actually play out on screen.

I’m half convinced that the reason Etrian Odyssey took off more than any other DRPG is that, due to being on the DS, it has an entire screen dedicated to the map, whereas in a game like Demon Gaze, your screen is mostly taken up with what amounts to decorative filler while the part of your brain that’s focused on gameplay has to focus on a mini-map in the corner of the screen:

So, perhaps you can understand how it is that I played this game for 50 hours, yet have no recollection of the scene/location depicted in this screenshot. It’s because close to 100% of my focus was on the mini-map. I experienced most of this game as an abstraction.

There’s a real sense in which DRPG players (I’m talking about myself here) want everything in the game to be an abstraction. The ideal length for a combat animation is “as long as it takes for me to read how much damage the attack did, so please just advance the battle as fast as I’m pressing the X button.”

Video games are inherently abstractions of real things, like the way that adding the pyramids to my build queue in Civilization V is an abstraction of what it’s actually like to build the pyramids in ancient Egypt, or left clicking in Counter-Strike is an abstraction of what it’s like to fire a gun, but they usually try to call back to the things that they’re abstractions of. Civilization gives you an inspiring quote from some historian describing the pyramids, and Counter-Strike tries to have animations and sounds that somewhat reflect the behavior of real guns. But in DRPGs, I don’t want the combat to be the simulation of my character swinging a sword on an enemy. All I care about is watching the numbers flash on screen, and the reward isn’t “you’ve triumphed over this vile forest-dwelling enemy,” it’s “the number on your exp meter went up.”

While games like World of Warcraft eventually become like this for a lot of people (a game with a hundred buttons that is all about managing cooldowns), you at least start from a place of walking your avatar around the world and performing actions that make your wizard look as though you’re casting a spell. But most DRPGs start from the position of “all you care about is the numbers, right?” The game is an abstraction unto itself. It is a game that is made for people who like looking at spreadsheets (and I most definitely spent a decent chunk of time looking at spreadsheets).

Maybe that’s why they can get away with having character designs often clash with the art style of the environment and enemies, and sometimes with the art style of other party members. Several of the character portraits in the above screenshot seem like they were drawn by different people, and there are some moments that, when you look at them in a screenshot gallery, make you think that the characters just don’t belong in the world they’re inhabiting. And while the game is sometimes visually non-cohesive in a way that becomes really obvious if you pay attention, the truth is that when you’re actually playing the game, you’re not really paying attention to all that.

For another example of this, I like to turn to Stranger of Sword City, which has a really cool aesthetic that hits you from the moment you pick up the box (or look at the title screen):

The original release of the game, on Xbox 360, was remarkably consistent with this specific style. But the Playstation Vita version of the game (which was later ported to PC) gives you an updated character creator and your options include, well, a variety of options drawn in a variety of different styles.

I just looked at the screenshots on the Steam store page for the Stranger of Sword City and, well:

Yes, that is a Prinny in the bottom left corner. Yes, Nippon Ichi did publish this game, why do you ask?

I think one of the reasons I don’t tremendously mind the aesthetic choice (or is it a lack of choice?) in a lot of DRPGs like this to randomly have anime-style characters (even when they might be dissonant with the rest of what’s on screen) that I don’t necessarily need my paladin’s look to really communicate that they’re a holy warrior or whatever; I really just want them to be eye candy that I can appreciate in the moments when I’m distracted from the numbers. But in the end, it doesn’t actually matter that much, because, well...

DRPGs feel like they are all about function over form. (The “looking at the mini-map and not the 3D environment” is a microcosm of a playstyle that’s encouraged by a design philosophy that seems to apply to nearly everything in a “good” DRPG.) This puts them in stark contrast to, say, Persona, which involves a ton of dungeon crawling, but relies heavily on the style (which includes the battle music, the stylish combat animations, and the quips that your characters make in battle) to make that part of the game interesting.

When you down all of the enemies in Persona, part of the “reward” for that comes from getting to deal a bunch of damage to all of the enemies, but a huge part of the reward also comes from the feeling of visceral pleasure that comes in the moment when Akihiko senpai says “I’ve been waiting for this!” and you smile and agree and say, “Me too, Aki. Now give me that shot that’s so iconic it became a meme template.”

I probably would not have made it through dozens of hours of crawling through Tartarus in Persona 3 if Mass Destruction weren’t such a banger of a battle theme. But I spent just as much (if not more) time dungeon crawling in Demon Gaze despite not having Lotus Juice’s rap verses soothing my ears during those battles, which I guess maybe stands as a testament to how good Demon Gaze was at making the game fun?

Ultimately, the abstraction that every RPG leveling system gets toward is “your character gets stronger.” Maybe DRPGs are better than any other genre at removing any abstractions that would serve as a barrier between you and that goal. And the best DRPGs also give you formidable challenges that give you ample reason to want to become stronger: games like Etrian Odyssey are notorious for their difficulty. I feel the difficulty is a bit overhyped; much like my feelings on Dark Souls, Etrian Odyssey only really feels “hard” when compared with other games where the player is never put plausibly close to a failure state whereas Dark Souls and EO actually punish the player for making mistakes, and EO also has the “X-factor” of having enough variance (due to things like random crits) that you actually do want to give yourself a decent margin for error. Which is to say, EO is one of the RPGs where you actually care a lot about having a team that’s strong enough to kill a boss in 8 turns instead of 10 turns, since that’s 20% fewer chances for an unfortunate event to send you back to home base. Powering up your team in EO feels important and significant way more than it does in a lot of other JRPGs.

There is a very real sense in which the entire point of the obligatory spreadsheet companion is to aid you in your quest to become the strongest you can be by breaking the game somehow. The thing I do remember about Demon Gaze (not concretely, but in the abstract) was that there were some item/class combinations that were wildly better than the alternatives. Some might deride this as poor balance, but in my eyes, “breaking” a game in that way is really more akin to “solving” it, in the same way that one might “solve” a puzzle. I did it: I found right combination of skills and items to trivialize the game’s difficulty! Huzzah! In a “well-balanced” game where all items and classes were all carefully tuned to be equally viable, such a thing would not be possible. Thus, what others might consider “poor balance” in some DRPGs is actually an essential and core part of what compels me to spend time with those games.

I feel like these factors and more make DRPGs somewhat unique in a way that probably contributes to them reviewing poorly. For example, if you look among discussions on DRPG forums about recommended games, there seems to be universal consensus that Stranger of Sword City is a great game (with many praising it as the best DRPG they’ve ever played), but on OpenCritic, only 45% of critics recommend it, and I think all of this is perfectly encapsulated by a 6/10 review from TheSixthAxis:

Stranger of Sword City excels at one thing, and really flounders at the others. It’s a rewarding experience if you’re a fan of challenging RPGs and gameplay depth. If you’re a fan of well-written dialogue, engaging music or proper difficulty curves though…well….there are a lot of other video games out there that may suit you better.

And that’s the kind of thing that makes me want to locate a guide, crack open a spreadsheet, and start a new save file.

Anyway, the Stranger of Sword City is on sale for 80% on Steam right now. That’s $4, for a game that I paid $40 for when it first came out on Vita! I’m tempted to buy it again, just for the convenience of being able to play it on my monitor without having to dig around to locate my old Vita TV.

#drpg #stranger of sword city #video games #nippon ichi #jrpg #atlus #persona #demon gaze #wizardry

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replaykoo · 4 years

Text

📁 ᨳ how I study in college :

⠀˒⠀ methods and tipps that might be helpful

# contents

taking notes

organizing your note

reading texts

how to structure a study session

useful apps

𖥻 taking notes

I guess the most important thing when studying is how to take your notes. I know there are quite many note taking methods and I’ve tried a few of them (like the one where you section your paper in two collums etc) but usually they just didn’t rly work for me and made things more complicated.

So the question you have to ask yourself is why you even take notes ! Usually that’s for write down key elements from a textbook, lecture etc to remember them later. And for that your notes should be simple, structured and easy to read/understand. A big chunk of words won’t rly help you (imo)

So here’s how I do it. I take „smart notes“. (learned that method from a yt video by mariana‘s study corner). You basically translate bigger ideas/concepts into single sentences. (Or multiple grammatically easy ones). The key is just to make them as simple as possible so you can quickly read over them and understand what the concept explains.

so I keep my sentences simple

one sentence per line / bullet point

I do use → , =, + or similar symbols to add mini sentences and show connections

𖥻 organizing your notes

I’d say if you can, it’s best to take your notes digitally. It’s easy to move things around and re-organize, keep things in sections/categories and you can ofc edit it afterwards if you need to. My fav programm is OneNote bcs you can make great folders, sections, books, sub-pages etc. But notion is also a great alternative (both are free)

I personally have my notes sorted like this :

- major

- minor

course 1

course 2

course 3

lesson week 1

lesson week 2

→ lecture (notes)

→ lecture powerpoint/ dossier

→ literature + notes

→ questions I have or additional info the teacher gave during the q&a session

I’m sure there are many other great organizing systems but this one works quite good for me so far.

𖥻 reading texts

When reading from textbook or just texts that have structured paragraphs I always read the paragraph FIRST and highlight the key word(s) later. This is rly useful if yours someone who tends to just highlight the whole page. It forces you to think about what the key word/concept was. (With paragraphs I mean about 10-ish sentences. Doing any more is kinda a waste of time bcs you’ll have to go back all the time. So keep the chunks small)

While reading & highlighting I don’t take my notes yet. I finish a sub-chapter or topic and then go back and take my notes (like explained above) I find this useful bcs you’ll already know more about the concept/topic when you’re taking your notes, instead of just summarizing the text as you go.

𖥻 how to structure a study session

For study I use the pomodoro technique. You study for 25 min, then take a 5 min break. Then study again, break, study, break .... After 4 study sessions you can take a longer break (15min)

To plan my weeks/days I made a weekly schedule for myself where I marked live lectures/zoom webinars, when I watch lecture recordings, read my literature, do weekly assignments & exercises, study sessions, weekly deadlines and just stuff that usually happens weekly. Since my college is 90% online I can plan all my time as I want to so I made my own schedule.

If you have exams upcoming it’s also a great idea to make a study plan. For that I take a monthly overview and mark my exams BiG in a specific color. Then in the sams color I write down what exercises etc I wanna do each day. (Make sure to mark these smaller or in a different way than the exam so it’s super obvious when the exam will be ans you don’t get confused) If you have multiple exams in a short period this method is super useful. Use different colors for each subject/course

I used to make these on paper (and not digitally) so I just made myself a 7:4 grid and marked the days. I colored the exam day all in the color of the subject. For the study notes each day I just highlighted them in the specific color

𖥻 useful apps & websites

For the pomodoro technique I mentioned earlier I use a website called pomofucus.io ! It’s basically a timer

I also heard a lot about this app called forest ! It’s a study timer that helps you to stay focused and off your phone. It costs 2$ tho

For my weekly plan I use the free google calendar ! You can make color codes categories and the design is rly nice in my opinion.

If you need to study vocabulary I can only recommend quizlet !! They have an app & website both free. I’ve been using it for >6 years and it’s helped me so much through highschool. It has different study modes like flashcards, learning-mode, quiz etc. You can also study sets that other people made, so if you wanna study just some random vocab you can look through these. I’ve found some of the textbooks I used so this saved me quite some time.

Also don’t underestimate study or 101 YouTube channels. I usually looked for some explanation YouTube videos for subjects like physics or chemistry and they always helped me a lot.

𖥻 more

I know sometimes you jsut don’t feel like sitting down to study. Studying is hard sometimes. But procrastinating isn’t the solution. Just think about how you’ll feel the next day. If you put off your work on the next day that means you HAVE TO DO IT the next day. But do you think you’ll be more motivated the next day? Probably not, right ... So just do the work as soon as possible. Your future self will thank you.

𖥻 ending notes

So, I hope you could learn a big from this. These are in no way perfect methods but I think they’re quite practical and helpful. Also feel free to comment if you know other great methods !! I’m always open to try out new stuff c:

Let me know if you liked this guide and what other things you’d like to see on my blog ◡̈

໑ see you next time ✧ またね ഒ

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cheshiresense · 5 years

Note

Orion x Hadrian with Naruto AU! XD I kinda want to know how you’ll fit them into the hardcore ninja world.

Welp that’s definitely a new spin. Let’s seee…….

1. Okay so are they themselves? Dropped into the Naruto ‘verse? Or do they get reborn into Naruto canon characters? You know what, as themselves would be more interesting. But also wait are they even reincarnated or were they just born in the Naruto world?? We’ll go with reincarnation, Hadrian isn’t Hadrian without his dimension-hopping. So, Orion is born an Uchiha, because of course it’s just his luck to get tossed into a family full of blood-purists except without a Sirius this time. He’s born a handful of years after Fugaku, second son and relatively unimportant, but he almost gives his new mother a heart attack when he toddles into the kitchen one morning with the Sharingan already spinning in his eyes.

(His death had not been an easy one. He’d watched the only man he’d ever loved die protecting him, and it had been a relief to follow in a hail of spell-fire, even if it had been with the knowledge that Hadrian’s death had been in vain.)

They hail him as a prodigy, which makes Orion roll his eyes. It isn’t helped by the fact that he - thankfully - still has his magic, and after a few years of experimenting, he’s even able to pass off a few abilities as jutsus. His clan is proud of him - not even in the Academy yet and already wielding chakra like he was born knowing how. Their only complaint - something that would probably make his father tear out his hair in frustration if he was any less dignified, and drives the clan elders around the bend - was Orion’s utter lack of interest in holding up family honour. Oh, he doesn’t do anything outright rude, but even just acting himself seems to “tarnish their reputation”. He’s an introvert by nature - even years of knowing Hadrian hasn’t changed that - so acting the perfect Uchiha child whenever he goes out with his parents or on the few occasions other clans come to visit is not exactly a priority. He finds politics in general boring even if he’s forced to sit down and begin learning the ins and outs of clan laws very early, and working himself into other people’s good graces is just something he doesn’t do. He speaks too little even for an Uchiha, but when he does speak he’s too blunt even for a child. He looks at his new parents, compares them to Sirius and Remus, and finds them terribly wanting. He supposes they’re not terrible, especially since half the time they’re out fighting a war or attending meetings, but they care far more about propriety and prestige than Orion is used to, restricts Orion’s freedom more than he likes, and that puts even more of a distance between them. He cares about them, but only in a vaguely distant way. He’s fonder of Fugaku, whom he knows envies him a little for his skill with chakra (magic) and his already active Sharingan, but his uncaring attitude in just about every other department that a clan child should strive towards seems to appease him, and for the most part, they get along fine. It helps, Orion thinks with some amusement, that he has no desire to fight against Fugaku for their clan’s attention, even though he realizes that that seems to be a common practice amongst clan siblings. Their father certainly tries, remarking on how much farther along Fugaku already is with his studies and the clan jutsus, but Orion doesn’t care, and honestly, he’d make a terrible clan head. Fugaku wants it, and as far as Orion is concerned, he can definitely have it.

2. Hadrian is born an Uzumaki, and the one thing he absolutely loves about it is his hair. It’s a red so dark it could almost pass for black at night, but when he stands in the sunlight, it shines as bright as Lily Potter’s did.

Everything else about an Uzumaki is… not as great. Oh, the sealing that comes so naturally for their clan is neat enough, but he was already a sealmaster in two lifetimes, and while there are some new branches he can explore in this new world, he still prefers his own style, and it’s not long before other people notice. They think it’s his creation, his genius, and they’re all so proud of him, definitely Uzumaki and twice the prodigy, and that too is something Hadrian enjoys - the Uzumaki Clan isn’t as large as some in other villages, but they’re close-knit and full of love and laughter, and growing up in Uzushio, Hadrian wants for nothing.

Then of course, because his life is just like that, his home is destroyed at the tail-end of the second shinobi world war. This universe is full of soldiers and children conscripted as soldiers, and the foundations are so very ugly. Even Hadrian was already doing his part from the onset of the war, not even ten yet, by creating and improvising new seals for his village. Uzushio is kinder only that they do not send children to the frontlines unless there is no other choice, and Hadrian’s genius ensures he has a position with the Sealing Division within the safety of the village. His skills there at least are too valuable to risk losing on the battlefield.

(Hadrian is tired of war. He has fought three of them now, and the last one finally managed to kill him. He has no doubt Orion fell as well because even after so many years, or perhaps especially after so many years, Orion still looked at him like the moon rose and set at Hadrian’s command, and Orion was the ocean’s tide that followed its call.)

Only some quick thinking and liberal applications of some of the most complicated seals Hadrian has ever made on the fly manages to save just a little under half of his village. He creates a wide-range portal seal behind a defensive barrier interlocked with a delayed explosion ward, activates all three at the same time, and just before the light of the seal consumes him and all the villagers he could save (far too few), Uzushio detonates, taking all the invading Iwa- and Kiri-nin with her. Serves them right.

They materialize at the gates of Konoha, and over the course of the next several weeks, the remains of Uzushiogakure are shuffled between the hospital and a hastily sectioned off piece of land large enough to house them. Kushina bursts through the figurative gates within the day, crying and hugging everyone she can reach, tackling Hadrian too because they weren’t the closest within their clan but he’d been the one to teach her pretty much everything she knew of seals before she’d been forced to move to Konoha.

After that, there is a lot of bargaining and arguing, subtle accusations and even subtler threats thrown, but the first thing Hadrian does is erect wards powerful enough to stop an army, and so in the end, Konoha has no choice but to acquiesce to their demands. They still need Uzushio’s strength, and while Uzushio has never failed their sister village, as friend or comrade or ally, well, Konoha never showed up to aid them in their greatest moment of need, did they? So they make a home in Fire Country but call themselves Uzushio-nin, an island unto themselves with enough firepower to level half the country, and even Konoha dares not threaten that.

The war ends with Konoha - officially - the victor. A large chunk of Iwa and Kiri forces were destroyed, courtesy of Uzushio, and Uzushio, displaced and desecrated, bares its teeth and refuses to let the world forget them.

3. Two years later, Hadrian is sixteen, a Jounin, returning from a mission and reporting in before making his way through Konoha in the quiet hours of the morning. Things are still a little strained between Konoha and Uzushio, but they share most of their missions, most of their information, they cross each other’s village boundaries as if they were one, and after Hadrian caught half a dozen ROOT members attempting to assassinate his village in the dark of night, Danzou had been tried, his delays of Konoha reinforcements to Uzushio dragged into the light, amongst numerous other crimes, and he’d been summarily executed for them. Hadrian doesn’t think he’s the only one who thinks Konoha feels just a little bit lighter in the aftermath.

For now, his feet takes him past some of the training grounds, and he can hear the distant thwacks of someone practicing their aim. Early training sessions aren’t uncommon, but it’s early enough that Hadrian feels a vague sense of curiosity for who it might be.

He finds a Konoha-nin, of course, easily recognized as an Uchiha, around the age of twelve. Judging by the hitae-ate tied around his arm, he’s already a genin at least. It’s rare though, for an Uchiha to be training in public, even if the place is void of people at this hour. Clan members usually use their own private training grounds, especially one still so young. His skill is plain to see though, every kunai thudding dead center into their targets while the boy himself dances easily across a sparse grid of wires. Hadrian only has time to up his estimate to Chuunin before the boy flips into the air and makes a very familiar gesture at the target boards. Hadrian’s breath catches as all the kunai fly neatly into the Uchiha’s hands, and the slight sound is enough to attract his attention.

Green eyes meet blue, rare on an Uchiha, not so rare on-

“Orion,” Hadrian croaks out before he can think better of it, and this time, it’s the Uchiha boy’s turn to freeze. Disbelief wells up in his expression, followed by a desperate sort of hope as he chokes out, “Hadrian?”

Hadrian doesn’t know who moves first, but he blinks once, and then Orion is in his arms, wrapped around him like a barnacle, and his body feels different, smaller and more slender, bones less sturdy, hair softer, but Hadrian doesn’t care because it’s Orion, and he loves his new family and everything they’ve given him, but sometimes he still wakes up in the middle of the night, grasping blindly for a man no longer there, and all he can think now is that this time at least he’s not alone.

Orion hugs him back just as hard, uncaring of the fact that Hadrian seems destined to be older in some way in every lifetime. He’s wondered, of course he has, because he knows dimension travel and time travel are possible, and if he’s been reincarnated, surely Fate or the gods or something would see fit to do the same for Hadrian. But he’s looked, and no one in Konoha has the same skills that he does.

Of course he was looking in the wrong place. He should’ve known Hadrian would be born into the clan that produces the craziest seal-happy shinobi in existence.

4. Orion is a freshly-minted Chuunin. He wasn’t looking for a promotion exactly, but his Genin team was boring him, his two teammates didn’t like having an Uchiha on the team that so far outstripped them, and his sensei had no idea what to do with him. Orion’s even gladder that he decided to do his best in the recent Exams, because now it means Hadrian can request him on his team for missions.

They spend the rest of that first day together, talking about their respective new lives. Orion was all for following Hadrian home, but they both knew even the disappointing second son can’t just up and disappear into Uzushio territory for the night without the Uchihas sending out a search party and probably demanding recompense. So they spend the day together, talking, eating, Orion suggests a nap because it’s clear Hadrian just came back from a mission but Hadrian rolls his eyes and drags him back to a training grounds for a spar. Which is fun because they’re definitely more evenly matched in the ninja arts than they were in duelling magic. They don’t go all-out, but Orion enjoys showing Hadrian some of the Uchiha-exclusive jutsus he’s learned (no, he’s not supposed to, but also no, he doesn’t care), and he can’t help laughing when Hadrian begins teaching him seals.

Hadrian walks him back to the Uchiha compound. The guards stare, surprised and wary because Orion has friendly acquaintances in Konoha but no friends, certainly none that makes him so obviously happy. Orion wants to invite him in, but his family isn’t something he wants to inflict on Hadrian, and they’ll have more time together later. He almost forgets himself and leans in for a kiss, but Hadrian raises an eyebrow, equal parts amused and rueful, and even in this messed up world where children have adult rights as soon as they become genin, a twelve-year-old probably shouldn’t up and kiss a sixteen-year-old Jounin, even if they are from a clan with technically equal standing as the Uchiha. So Orion limits himself to a lingering hug, one that Hadrian returns with a hair-ruffle thrown in (”I’m taller than you for once!”), and then they part ways.

Word spreads like wildfire. Ninja gossip worse than the Hogwarts rumour mill, and Hadrian is a well-known name across most of the Elemental Countries, famed for saving his village and wiping out a third each of Kiri’s and Iwa’s ranks. Both villages labelled him S-rank before the war even ended, and while his first loyalty is to Uzushio, he’s also done quite a bit for Konoha’s defenses over the past year.

But even Orion is surprised when it’s Fugaku who corners him first the next morning, bright and early and looking forward to the rest of the day in a way he hasn’t for… literally his entire life here so far. Even his older brother, arms crossed and already frowning (honestly no wonder his face already carries faint stress lines), doesn’t dampen his mood.

Fugaku doesn’t scold him because he knows Orion isn’t going to listen. Literally the only one who still tries is their father, who shouts until he’s hoarse but never makes a dent in Orion’s disinterest and wayward independence.

Instead, Fugaku sighs and watches Orion pack two bentos before finally telling him, “At least you picked an Uzumaki. And of all the Uzumaki, at least you picked the best one. A Hyuuga might actually make Father keel over from a heart attack.”

Orion rolls his eyes as he hunts down a picnic blanket. Uchihas are so dramatic. Also, “Where is your mind at, Brother? I just made a friend.”

Even Fugaku’s monotone grunt somehow sounds skeptical. “Just… keep it in your pants for a few more years. And remind Uzumaki that just because you aren’t the Uchiha heir doesn’t mean we won’t come after him if he hurts you.”

Orion pauses and glances at him, and Fugaku scowls back, all gruff exasperation mingled with stilted concern. Orion rolls his eyes again, but he also smiles, reluctantly, because he and Fugaku may not be close, may not get along all the time, may have wildly different interests and opinions, but at the end of the day, they are brothers.

“Thanks, Fugaku,” Orion says grudgingly. This family doesn’t do affection much, so Orion isn’t used to it anymore. Fugaku looks even more embarrassed, and after a dismissive wave, he disappears back upstairs, probably for another few hours of sleep before his mission later today.

Orion does the opposite, making his way out of the compound and immediately brightening when he finds Hadrian already waiting for him. He has the same green eyes, even if everything else about him is different, and some part of Orion still can’t believe he isn’t dreaming.

“Hey,” He greets, bounding over on silent feet.

“Hey yourself,” Hadrian says as they set off down the road. He grins and holds up a mission scroll. “We don’t leave until late afternoon but it’ll just be the two of us. B-rank, retrieval, should take us two weeks tops. Sound good?”

Two weeks with just the two of them, away from Konoha and all its prying eyes? Orion grins back. “Sounds perfect.”

5. Four years later, Orion is Jounin with enough missions and successes under his belt to qualify as S-rank himself, and on the day after his sixteenth birthday, the Uchihas receive a formal betrothal request from the Uzumakis. Father takes one look at Orion’s expectant face and gleaming eyes and sighs like the world is ending.

“At least you picked Uzushio royalty,” He grumbles sourly as he reads over the terms. “And I suppose he does have… adequate credentials.” He looks at Orion again and then waves a hand irritably. “Fine. Fine. I’ll meet with the Uzumaki clan head within the next few days and make the necessary arrangements. Now get out of here. An Uchiha shouldn’t hover like a-”

Orion is already gone. He finds Hadrian deep in the Forest of Death, a simple ward keeping the hostile creatures away, lazily tracing elemental seals in the air to pass the time.

“Your father said yes?” Hadrian asks as soon as Orion drops down beside him on the tree branch.

Orion scoffs. “As if I would’ve let him say anything else.”

He pauses, then twists around in a fluid motion, and a second later, he’s straddling Hadrian’s lap, arms coming up to drape around the other man’s shoulders. Hadrian cocks an eyebrow, a smile already tugging at his lips as his hands settle on Orion’s waist. They’re finally equal in height, much to Hadrian’s disgruntlement.

“You’ll find me in our next life too, won’t you?” Orion demands.

Hadrian’s other eyebrow goes up. “We haven’t even finished this life.” He sighs. “And who knows if we’ll be reborn together again? Or at all?”

Orion tries to imagine it, tries to see himself in a world without Hadrian at his side, and… and he can, because he’s done it before, this life and his last. But he doesn’t much care for it, and he hopes he’ll never have to again.

“But if we are,” He persists. “You’ll try, won’t you?”

Hadrian’s grip tightens around him, and he draws Orion into a long, lingering kiss before murmuring against his lips, “If we are reborn together, then I’ll find you, no matter how far apart we end up. But you have to look for me too. Promise?”

Orion huffs and bites down on Hadrian’s bottom lip in brief reproach before licking over it to soothe the sting. Hadrian makes a contented sound at the back of his throat.

“That’s a given,” Orion vows. “If you exist, I’ll definitely find you.”

He feels more than sees Hadrian’s smile, but as always, it summons one of his own in reply.

“Then between the two of us, I’m sure it won’t be a problem.”

#headcanon meme: answered #hp series #orion black #hadrian evans #naruto au #pairp #headcanon #lol this basically ended up mostly hadrian/orion + reincarnation #not much interaction with the naruto verse whoops #hadrian/orion

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andromeda-sapphire · 4 years

Text

Witchy Then Vs. Now

I was SO inspired by the post by @hermeticimp regarding comparing the witchy things of our childhood to the witchy things we do now. I had to write a blog post about it!

Herbal Magic:

Then: I remember when I was a kid, maybe around age 5 or 7, I used to make rose water with my brother in the summertime. But not quite the way I would now! My mom had a few rose bushes in the front yard, and we would pick a bunch of roses and put them in a big bucket of water. Then, we’d roll up our pants and jump in the bucket (or for me, just jump in, as I was usually wearing dresses at that age) and start smashing the roses up with our bare feet! We called the rose water “magic perfume” and I remember wanting to keep some stored in a bottle but my mom always dumped it out when we were finished because playtime was over and it was dinnertime.

Now: I typically don’t even make rose water very often now, as I don’t usually have access to fresh rose petals. I love to use beauty products with rose water in them though, like Thayer’s brand alcohol-free witch hazel. Nowadays I usually use dried rose petals for spell bottles and for smoking herbal blends. My herbal witchcraft nowadays is mostly making tea blends, smoke blends, and of course as ingredients for spells. I’ve also made healing salves and oils with herbs over the years.

Crystal Magic:

Then: Inspired by my mother’s geological rock collection (she was a science teacher when I was a kid), I began collecting rocks when I was a young child, probably as young as 7. I have a lot of crystals that came from my mom’s collection, and as a kid, I remember taking out her rock collection boxes from the garage and placing them all over the living room so I could open them all up and look at the cool rocks inside. I remember reading about crystal healing in a book on home remedies that my mom gave me. I bookmarked so many pages in that book, most of them in the crystal healing section. I had one special crystal that I had found near my elementary school as a kid (but lost over time.. sad!) and I was convinced it was a magic crystal. I carried it with me all the time, I slept with it under my pillow, and I never completely knew what it was (maybe some kind of quartz?) but I felt that it enhanced my dreams and made them much more vivid.

Now: My crystal collection has multiplied... Significantly... (oops) I am definitely a crystal collector, and now I go out and find some of my own crystals as well. In fact, the huge chunk of serpentine in the image above is one that I found, and it’s roughly the size of my face! I love my crystals, and I make crystal grids as a part of my rituals and practice. Crystals are somehow always involved in my practice actually. I make wire wrap jewelry now with crystals also (check out Buffalo Wraps on Instagram) inspired by the healing properties of the crystals.

Astrology:

Then: When I was about 10, my grandma gave me this book. It was her original copy of Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs. It even has my grandmother’s signature on the inside cover. I was visiting my grandparents in New Zealand at the time, and didn’t have any other books with me for the trip that I can remember, so I spent my evenings in bed reading the section on How to Recognize a Libra. (I’m a Libra Sun, and that was all I knew about astrology at the time) As I finished the chapter on Libra, I was convinced there had to be something real to this tradition of the cosmos. So after returning to the USA, I began researching astrology in my free time, reading as many books and online resources as possible about the topic. I gave my friends and family birth chart readings, and was constantly examining my friends’ behaviors as a scientist examines their test subject.

Now: Well, now I’m trying to become a professional astrologer! It’s been my goal since my third year in University to become an astrologer, and I’ve been taking webinar courses since then from well-known astrologers and (again) reading as many books and online resources as possible. I now have shelves and shelves (almost a whole large tote full actually) of astrology books of all kinds that I’ve collected and read over the years, and it all started with my grandma’s little copy of Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs. Instead of only giving free birth chart readings to friends and family, now I offer paid readings of all types as well! I’ve learned so much over the last almost 15 years of studying this beautiful tradition! Astrology is also a huge part of my magic as well. I never cast a spell without first planning it for a specific planetary hour and day that aligns with the desired planetary energies. I’m constantly watching transits and studying how they affect us down here on Earth as well.

Astronomy:

Then: As a kid, maybe 3rd grade through middle school, I was super into outer space. I remember having those little glow in the dark stars all over my ceiling. My dad gave me a telescope for Christmas one year, and I remember him helping me to set it up a few times at night outside on the porch. I was always staring at the stars as a kid, looking at the moon and the constellations. I had (still have actually) a great little guide book on all of the constellations in the sky and the mythology behind them, and all kinds of cool info.

Now: Unfortunately, that telescope got very dusty over the years. It’s sitting in storage now, and I’m dying to bring it out and set it up again, but I need the space for it first! I still observe the sky and watch the stars and moon, but aside from my astrology practice and cosmic witchery, I don’t focus too much on space. I still watch documentaries on space and the planets etc. however! My magic actually heavily relies on my knowledge of both astronomy AND astrology.

Mythology/Fairy Tales:

Then: As a kid, I loved reading fiction and fantasy! I loved drawing dragons and unicorns, and reading about magical princesses and fairies. I wanted to live in a world of mythology so badly. I remember one of my favorite books at the time was Dealing With Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede. I think that book really got me excited about dragons and magic. I also have believed from a very young age, not sure where it originated from, that I am a witch, and have magic within me! I know one influence on that belief was a graphic novel series I used to read all the time growing up called W.I.T.C.H. - I related to one of the characters in that series, Irma, who had water magic abilities. I always felt a deep connection to water for some reason, and as a kid I believed I could control it to an extent. Later in elementary school, I remember learning about Greek mythology briefly, but didn’t get to learn much about it until later.

Now: I went through a bit of a phase a while ago where I thought I had to connect to a deity, or a pantheon. And I feel like I did have a few encounters with deities, but nothing that truly made me feel comfortable worshiping a deity. Don’t get me wrong, I love Greek mythology and religion, and I’ve actually taken a class at University on Greek mythology. Though I’m no expert, I feel pretty well-versed in my myths. They have a few good mythology documentary shows on Netflix that I enjoy as well. I guess because I come from a semi-Christian background though, I have a distaste for worshiping a “god” or “god-like” figure... So I don’t really worship any deities at the moment, but I do recognize the possibility of them existing, and I recognize them as archetypal figures. Same goes for other mythological beings, I don’t really work with them, but I recognize the potential for their existence in another plane.

Divination:

Then: When I was a kid, I had a little pendulum that I made out of blue lace agate and a chain. I used that for divination purposes, just asking yes or no questions. I didn’t know much else about divination though, aside from astrology, so I didn’t know what other directions there were for me to explore.

Now: I use a few different types of divination, and surprisingly, I rarely use my crystal pendulums! Besides astrology, my go-to divination method nowadays is tarot. I’ve learned to read tarot cards over the last few years after one of my college roommates gave me a rune reading and introduced me to tarot and other forms of divination. Now I have several tarot decks, oracle decks, and pendulums all stored in a beautiful box I call my “divination box.”

Anyway, that’s my Witchy Then Vs. Now! I really would like to see this pick up on Witchblr cuz it’s a fun challenge to make you reflect a little on how you’ve changed, or stayed the same!

Check out my Ko-Fi below to leave me a tip!

ko-fi.com/andromeda_sapphire

#wakingwitchblr #witchythenvsnow #witchblr #witch #witchy woman #blog #me #mine #childhood #memories #crystal healing #herbal remedies #reflecting

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myownpersonaldemons · 5 years

Text

Selftober Prompt 28

Yandere Proposal

Grillby/Reader

Because I’m not comfortable writing about yandere I asked people what they’d rather read, and @theyaremorethanjustfictional said ‘Maybe the prompt being something like proposal and the ship is grillbyxreader? I love your writing by the way!’

(Awww thank you <3)

This is kind of a sequel EDIT: prequel to the Rain prompt which you can find here!

So! Without further ado, here we go :D

It was date night!

Grillby had told you to dress up however you wished, and you would’ve totally just worn your usual…but Grillby being Grillby had laid out his outfit for the night before going to get the bar opened and make sure that Fuku had everything under control. Now, your boyfriend was always the classy, old fashion type. The only time he ever wore anything less than a button-up with dress slacks was when he was home with you. (You still remembered the first time you saw him in sweats and a nerdy teeshirt you’d be so delighted.) However, the outfit he’d chosen? It was the one he only pulled out for special occasions.

You ditched the idea of wearing your normal immediately and dove into your shared closet to find something that would rival his. It took a while of rooting, but you pulled together a fancier outfit and then hurried into the bathroom to get ready.

You finished preening in front of the mirror a few minutes after Grillby had come home, gone into the bedroom, and then emerged once again. He quietly knocked on the bathroom door. You quickly opened the door with a smile, made one last adjustment before extending your arms slightly out beside you. “Ta-da!”

“…beautiful,” he said, his fire crackling warmly and there was the faint shift of his flames around his mouth to reveal his smile. You grinned before placing your hands against his cheeks and giving his lips a quick peck.

“You’re pretty handsome, yourself,” you said happily, “Are you ready?”

He leaned into your touch, “…whenever you are, my love.”

The affectionate term made your chest swell with affection and a giddy smile rise on your lips. You nodded as you reluctantly released his face, and your smile grew more as he caught one of your hands with his own and kissed your knuckles.

Awww, you fucking loved him so much.

As the two of you made your way downstairs to the car you began thinking about what he had planned. Grillby was an incredibly romantic monster, and you swore he got most of his romantic gestures from romcoms or cheesy romance novels. You’d never called him out on it, but there was the time you mentioned how couples didn’t just spontaneously dance to no music together like they did in the movie you were watching, Grillby had pulled you up from the couch, turned off the television and proved you wrong.

You grinned at the back of his head, you’d think he was romantic even if he took you into his own restaurant, and the two of you sat at the bar to just chat, even if Sans was there too. Everything he did when it came to you was just infused with love.

Grillby was the one to drive, and you…only grabbed the little handle on the door twice. He was getting better. Still not great, but he’d only gotten his full license a year ago. After you’d gotten into an accident at work and he couldn’t come get you because of his lack of driving abilities. He had gotten to the hospital after you had already been released and was merely waiting for him.

You got curious as he drove out of the city for a while, a good long while actually. Though, the two of you kept up the conversation easily especially as you had just finished watching a show together.

After probably an hour of driving, he had pulled off the main road, and after a short drive down the side road he pulled up to a tiny cabin facing a lake. Your eyebrows rose and you glanced over at him. “A cabin?”

He nodded, “rented for one night.”

“Oh my god,” you breathed out, it was gorgeous. It was the peak of fall, the oranges, yellows, and browns of the trees reflected off of the lake water beautifully. The cabin was small and from the looks of it, pretty off-grid. There was a tiny dock that you knew you’d probably lie down on later that night to watch the stars and hear the lapping of the lake water against it. (With Grillby waiting anxiously at the other end of the dock because water does not mix well with fire.)

You climbed out of the car and inhaled deeply, smelling the fresh air mixed with that distinct fall scent.

Oh, this was going to be a lovely night.

“Wait,” you turned to Grillby as he shut the car door, “I didn’t bring anything for the night.”

Grillby didn’t respond, just walked to the trunk of your car and pulled out a duffle bag, holding it towards you. You relaxed instantly and hurried to take it from him as he pulled out a small cooler as well. As he closed the trunk, you kissed his jaw quickly before darting over to the door of the cabin. You were so fucking excited for this night. An entire night of just…being with Grillby. No distractions.

The inside of the cabin, once Grillby unlocked the door, was one room. A small kitchen area was to the immediate left of the door, a small seating area that overlooked the lake, and a bed tucked into the back corner beside what you assumed was the bathroom. There was an old wood-burning stove fireplace beside the bed that you knew wouldn’t be used because your boyfriend was a walking, talking fire. It was decorated in the most outdoorsy, woodsy, lumberjacky way possible. Flannel covered all plush surfaces, and everything was stained wood.

“For Halloween, you should dress up as a lumberjack,” you said placing the duffle bag down on the bed. Grillby gave you a curious look, turning away from the cooler.

“…lumberjack?”

You explained what a lumberjack was to him, plucking at the flannel curtains when you described the aesthetic. “It’s a good look,” you finished before giving a chef’s kiss.

“…a sexy lumberjack?” he inquired next, and you got the image of Grillby with a button-up flannel completely unbuttoned, low-riding jean shorts, an axe, and a fire beard and you couldn’t help but start giggling.

“You’re always sexy,” you amended when he feigned upset at your laughing. He shook his head, but the amusement was clear in his flames. As you sobered up from giggling, he pulled a few items from the cooler. Hot chocolate mix? Marshmallows? Graham crackers? You gasped, “Are we seriously going to have a campfire?” you blurted out, moving to his side and taking the bag of large marshmallows from him.

“…of course,” Grillby kissed the top of your head, “…cuddling in front of a fire in the middle of the woods is peak romance…if I recall your words correctly.”

You grinned up at him, “I’m always cuddling in front of a fire.”

“…with a fire,” he corrected with a smile, before giving you another kiss. You giggled softly and gave his lips a few pecks before gesturing towards the door.

“Let’s get this fire going!”

You quickly figured out that when your boyfriend was literally fire making a campfire was easy-peasy. Though you did get to see Grillby cut wood, which he was amazingly good at, and you tried as well but Grillby freaked out after you split a piece in half, which fell onto another piece and you got pinged in the face by a catapulted chunk of bark. So, you were regulated to getting the food set up to make roasting marshmallows and making smores a streamlined process.

Instead of chairs, Grillby brought out a blanket and some pillows from your apartment and placed them relatively close to the fire, but still far enough away that there was no chance of accidentally catching anything on fire.

For the next three hours, the two of you did nothing but indulge in chocolatey, marshmallowey goodness, cuddle, watch the stars when they blinked into view, and talked quietly. It was…perfect. You were cuddled against his chest, contently warm against the chill of autumn night, and…you couldn’t be happier.

You peeked up at him, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” he replied immediately, kissing the top of your head. You hummed contently before he gently nudged you. “…I forgot something in the cabin.”

You reluctantly shifted away from him to let him head back into the cabin. After his light disappeared behind the door, you turned your attention back to the fire in order to add another log and watch it slowly catch.

This was honestly, the most surprising turn of events for date night. Grillby wasn’t normally the type of person who wanted to be away from home. Vacations to Grillby were days you just spent at home without working. You’d had a couple of those vacations with him, taking days off just so you could spend more time with your boyfriend. Even if it was surprising, you were delighted. This was…so relaxing. The sound of the lake waves lapping at the shore, the ambient noise of the fire and the forest around you, everything was just….beautiful.

Grillby startled you slightly as he sat down beside you, but you merely smiled and gave him a kiss in response to his apologetic look.

He cleared his throat, and you raised your eyebrow at that. There was only a few times where you had heard that come from your boyfriend and it was always followed by a lot of speaking. When he said your name, there was something different to the way he said it…as if he didn’t want to say anyone else’s name ever again.

Or you could just be feeling the cheesy romantic atmosphere and projecting.

“…We’ve been dating for five years now,” he started, intertwining his warm fingers with yours. You nodded in agreement, head tilting slightly. “…I’ve been alive for many, many more years than that and…I haven’t found anyone like you in my long life………..I thought the sunrise was the most beautiful thing in the world, but it’s nothing compared to that first smile………………..you give me every morning.”

He paused, hand squeezing yours for a moment. You knew it was uncomfortable for him to speak in long stretches, but you couldn’t speak. Your heart was in your throat and you turned towards him, eyes starting to prick with tears. He leaned forward and kissed away a tear that did escape, it sizzled and you laughed wetly.

“……I will forever be grateful for Papryus dragging me to that…awful cooking lesson in the middle of the pouring rain because I met you…….You make each day full of love, dorky jokes, and joy. I know that I take a long time to make decisions…………………………………….and I have made you wait much longer than most would, but…” Grillby paused again, and cleared his throat again, “….I wish to be fully bonded with you to be forever yours. Will you marry me?”

He uncurled his other hand and held out a ring towards you. A small sob left your throat and you found yourself unable to say anything, you just started nodding vigorously, holding out your left hand. Grillby’s flames cracked erratically and brightened as he slid the ring onto your finger. The moment it was secure, you threw yourself at him kissing him in a way that you hoped portrayed your excitement, happiness, and devotion to this flaming man.

One of his arms circled around you, pulling you close, and the other stroke your face, wiping away tears that evaporated as it came into contact with his fingers.

“Yes,” you managed to blurt out against his lips, not bothering to pull away to speak. He chuckled, peppering your face with kisses. “I love you so much,” you choked out, “being so…fucking…heartfelt. You dork.”

Grillby chuckled at your eloquent response to his proposal, and said,“…I can’t wait to call you my wife.”

#fanfiction #fanfic #myfanfics #my fanfics #undertale fanfiction #grillby #grillby x reader #grillby/reader #self tober #selftober #self insert #reader insert

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its-bianca · 5 years

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Studying/Planner Apps

Essential apps for studying, planning, health, etc. Who says everything has to be analog?

These are all the ones I’ve tried and downloaded (unless said otherwise). The ones with the * next to it are the ones I don’t use or have gotten rid of for personal reasons, but still highly recommend all of them.

I go through apps like a child goes through toys. I try them out, get rid of the ones I don’t like. Apps are toys.

There’s tons more, but these ones are the ones that I recommend to people with similar needs and schedules like mine. The ones I haven’t or don’t use anymore are ones I could definitely see being helpful to others or that I’d maybe use in the future if my needs change.

Note: these are things from the App Store, but I’m pretty sure most are available on the Play Store too.

Podomoro Time Trackers

Forrest* - Haven’t tried this because you have to pay for it on the App Store, but I’ve seen everyone go bonkers over this app and how they plant trees for studying, etc. etc.

Plantie - Best and only Podomoro app I still use. Gamified, but not TOO gamified. You just grow fruit, collect, coins, buy more fruit trees. It’s super simple, while still providing really good graphs and charts. Also, it allows you to turn off the feature where it stops your task as soon as you leave the app. Sometimes I need to use my phone for assignments, and I still want to track my time. It’s completely FREE, with GREAT charts as a visual. Other apps need a premium subscription to access the graphs and charts, which is why I love this app because even though the chart is quite simple, it does its job. Although, it doesn’t tell you when to take the longer break and it has to be adjusted manually. That’s fine for me, because I always get disturbed by something before I even get to 4 blocks, and if I waited until I had a big chunk, I’d never get anything done.

Block & Flow: Stay focused* - Podomoro but visualised with stacks of blocks for each day or week. And you can list out what tasks you have for that day and sort out sections for work, reading, school, etc. I didn’t need that feature, which is why I used Plantie instead.

Workflow Timer* - Another good option with options to make multiple tasks lists. One of the simpler and more user-friendly ones. It also looks really good!

Hours Time Tracking* - App for timeblocking, scheduling, and tracking the time while you’re working. It’s not helpful for me, because it’s practically impossible for me to strictly schedule something in my day after school, but could be useful for others. Really easy to makes tasks and separate by color.

Stay Focused* - Simplest Podomoro timer out there. No distractions, no graphs, no gamification, just pure focus.

Planners/Calendars/Tasks

Wunderlist - Great reminder system, intuitive (type in “essay next mon” and it will schedule the task to be due next Monday), syncs everywhere, attach documents, etc. I used this for my assignment list, books to read list, schedule etc. for a long time, until recently where things got hectic and I wanted to make a daily to do list rather than only a master list. I use a bullet journal for school stuff now, but still keep Wunderlist for that shopping/movies/books/apps/websites to check out list.

24me* - Personal assistant, lots and lots of features, with scheduling, to-do lists, notes, journaling, etc. Tracks weather and traffic to and from work/school. All in one.

Google Calendar - I don’t schedule on this, but use it to sync my school calendar with personal calendar. Easy scheduling and you can SHARE your calendar with a friend! All Google apps are made for collaboration basically.

Habitify* - Habit tracker on your phone and tracks progress every day, showing when you skip and reminding you of it. Don’t quite remember why I got rid of it because checking back it seems really good. Might redownload.

Trello* - Kanban boards, “cards” and lists, great reviews. I’ve heard people use it as a bullet journal sort of and project planner though that wasn’t it’s original purpose. I downloaded it for a club thing, but never really used it personally.

Notetaking/Planning/Journaling

OneNote - I use this ALL the time, even though I don’t use my Microsoft account much anymore. My notes are organized and have a hierarchy. Very customizable with headers, notebook sections, pages, subpages, etc. Easy to share with group mates and an okay collaboration space if you want to see each other’s progress on research or something during a group project. MUCH better than having tons of Google or Word docs of notes. Completely FREE for the full experience.

Notion* - One in all workspace for journaling, notes, scheduling, planning projects basically a mini-website for your life and work. Great guide for bullet journaling on Notion from studyblr Eintsein here. Another Notion bullet journaling guide on YouTube here and here. I highly recommend it, but don’t use it since I use an analog bujo, prefer OneNote for class notes, and don’t have much use for it other than that currently. You do have to pay for unlimited notes, but there’s a pretty good amount to start out, and if you really don’t want to pay, there are workarounds to it.

Milanote* - Like Notion, but more restrictions on the free version. I don’t use it anymore because I’ve realized I didn’t really have a good purpose for it and it cluttered up my phone. In a way, it’s more ~aesthetic~ than Notion, but there are less things you can do. It does have a better learning curve though.

Evernote - I don’t use it often, but I have it to take quick notes or other stuff. Evernote is like a god in the notetaking world, because it’s user friendly, quick, and syncs up really easily with everything.

Health

7 Minute Fitness - There’s a lot of these out there. Go find one or two. Don’t be sedentary.

30 Day Fitness Challenge - Same concept as above.

Simple Habit - FULL of free mostly 5 minute guided meditations (though there’s premium access). There’s no excuse now. Also, I used to try 10 minute meditations on Headspace which made me really sleepy. 5 minutes work best, because they’re quick, and if you want more time, just move on to the next part in the series or find another one. Lots of free series for basically any subject (school, women, mothers, grade anxiety, sleep) and SOS mode. Unfortunately, you can’t download any of them in the free version.

AloeBud* - Self-care pocket companion. Make reminders on your phone for every self-care thing you can think of. Schedule notifications multiple times a day with personalized messages.

TaoMix2 - Mixer for relaxing nature/white noise sounds. It’s pretty restricted in the free, but it’s enough for me.

Cove* - If you’re a music person, this app let’s you make quick music and tunes matching your mood. A sort of an easy music therapy if you’re not good with instruments or composition.

Reflecty* - Little journal buddy asking you fun/reflective questions about your day and tracking your mood. It’s short and sweet. Each entry is a “story”.

Oak* - Great for breathing and very simple guided meditations. Breathing practices for anxiety, freshening up, and calming nerves before a big performance. It just takes 15 seconds to breathe.

Grid Diary* - Journal prompts in grid fromat. Customizable daily prompts.

DayOne Journal* - Again, RAVING reviews. Everyone loves it. I haven’t used it because I prefer analog journals, but it’s a pretty good for travel journals with pictures, audio, video, etc.

UVLens - Reminds you to put sunscreen on throughout the day depending on your skin, activities that day, and type of sunscreen.

Flo - Period tracker. Need I say more?

Tasty - FOOOD (by Buzzfeed). New recipe ideas, includes shopping list, make your own cookbook.

KitchenStories - MORE FOOOOD. Includes Asian and international cuisine since it’s crowd-sourced.

Miscellaneous

Audiobooks - Audiobooks from the Gutenberg Project, but in app form. You can download classics for free, etc. There are some paid audiobooks, but they’re usually for better narrators/text corrections, so absolutely not necessary to get lost in an old book. Jane Austen, Charlotte Brönte, L. Frank Baum, all the good stuff.

Daylio - Tracks mood, activities, with intuitive charts. You can edit moods and activities shown per day. Free version is pretty good, and it replaces the need for making a habit tracker in my journal, because I don’t like making those.

Scannable - Very intuitive scanning app. I’ve used this for many legal/important documents and nobody had a clue it was “scanned” on a phone. It makes regular photos of documents easier to read and look like it came from a scanner. It can share as a PDF or jpg. Granted, you need good lighting for the best quality.

Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Slides - Everyone’s probably used this before, but to reiterate, this is the best collaboration app/website. Super easy to share with real-time tracking and updates.

BEAKER by THIX* - For chemistry people. Mix compounds/elements together, make new compounds, see their reactions. Don’t have much use for it since my chemistry class is moving at a glacial pace but I could see this being useful for others.

Chemtriz - Same as above, but gamified. You take elements and put them together in the right configuration to make compounds.

PictureThis - Plant Identifier - Weird addition to list, but it’s a cool app to get back in with nature. Now I know what a boxwood plant looks like.

IFTTT* - Hard to explain, but it enables different apps that don’t usually work together to work together. So if you input something in an email, you can make it go into a Google Spreadsheet(?). Just go check it out. It’s cool. Many shortcuts, track stuff in the Health App, get emails showing cool NASA pictures.

Canva - AMAZING graphic design app/website for those who can’t use Photoshop (ie. me). It’s better online, but there are hundreds of templates for magazines, book covers, planners, posters, flyers, and basically any graphic design needs. Many free graphics and photos ready to use. Premium version is NOT necessary to get full benefits from this program. I used it to create this calendar for my room.

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scorchroots · 5 years

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TV Writing Outlining — for Pantsers!

Hey everybody! I’ve seen a few posts around the writeblr community about writing scripts. I’ve been working with television formatting for a few years now, and as a chronic pantser, I struggled at first to outline within such a rigid format. Plus, even with the popularity of streaming platforms, shows do follow the same structure that they do when there are commercial breaks mandating when the beats hit the hardest!

I recently talked to a writer who is just now starting to work in scripts, and she commented that having the structure background of screenwriting is also very helpful for novels (even if it feels hard because the structure is much looser).

This will focus on outlines for hour-long TV, usually five acts, which is my expertise (I’m not that funny, haha), but it can be applied to the three-act structure for half-hours and can be adapted for novels as well.

If you learn screenwriting academically, this is usually taught as an hour long lecture, so it is long! Bear with me!

First, let’s cover why TV is structured the way it is.

If someone watches a TV show from the beginning, you have anywhere between 7-15 pages to hook the viewer. Why? Because that’s when the first commercial break hits. Viewers are willing to watch something they aren’t sure about until then, but if it’s not good by the first commercial break, they probably won’t stick around through the ads to see if it gets better.

Your show has to tell the viewer what they’re getting for the rest of the hour by the end of that. You have to end with the hook of the episode, so that people will be interested beyond that commercial.

However, the big twist moment of the episode comes around page 30. There has to be a seriously interesting beat at that point, because that commercial break is generally the longest of the episode (it runs about double the length of any other commercial).

The action after that generally drops, and then builds again, with one big beat around page 40, and then your climax beat at page 50, which is the “all hope is lost” moment before the fifth act wraps it up (and, since TV is serialized, usually still leaves on some kind of cliffhanger).

(In half-hours, the beats are around page 10 and page 20. They can be staggered a little further, as they probably will be in the editing itself.)

So we get five distinct acts:

Act I: 10-15 pages. Might start out with a 3-7 page cold open. This should introduce the show and present the hook of the episode. If it’s a pilot, it might set up the backstory, but if that’s how you’re writing it then you want to create the episode hook pretty immediately after.

Act II: ~15 pages, ends around page 30. This should be tension central; you need to build to a pretty big moment by the end. This is the biggest chunk you have so use it to establish stuff that will play out later.

Act III: ~10 pages, ends around page 40. There must be a vague resolution of whatever bombshell you dropped at the end of Act II. This is rising action, back to a smaller peak at the end of the act.

Act IV: ~10 pages, ends around page 50. Building up to the climax; much bigger peak at the end of this act. If you have a lot to set up for the next episode (many shows are heavily serialized now), you might resolve your climax at the end of this act, though that resolution should form its own kind of setup—asking more questions than it answers.

Act V: ~10 pages, ends around page 60. Resolves this episode’s plot and sets up the next. Might deal with the season arc, if the show has one (and nowadays, every show does, even comedies). Usually still ends on a high action beat.

(Sidenote: hour-longs are 60-page scripts, and half-hours are 30-page scripts, even though each page is roughly one minute of screentime and there will be commercials. Why? Because scenes will get cut at every step of the process until it hits the screen, and the writer is only step one.)

Okay, now how do you outline for this?

My strategy is to plan around those act endings.

I grew up watching soap operas, so my biggest strength in writing is setting up cliffhangers. These are the moments that TV is built around, so build your writing around them!

I start with the ending. Where do I need to get the characters by the end of this script? That’s usually the easiest moment for me to plan. Especially if you’re writing pilots, this will lead into the rest of the episode. Set that last cliffhanger first.

Then find your episode plot ending. That’s your Act IV ending.

After that, you want the beat that sets up the plot to get to that Act IV ending, which is the Act I ending, and then the big twist that happens halfway through (Act II end). The Act III ending is the least important to have set in stone at this stage, but once you do set it, I find that the rest of the episode is easier.

So, by now you have (in the order you planned them):

Act V end (show setup)

Act IV end (episode resolution)

Act I end (episode setup)

Act II end (big twist)

Act III end (small upbeat)

All five of these moments, by the way, should serve your A-plot.

Unless you’re writing a bottle episode (which is quite different), there are 2-4 plots in every TV episode, in order of importance:

A-plot (main plotline of the episode—usually focusing on conflict between or surrounding one or two characters)

B-plot (secondary plotline—might follow the characters in the A-plot but on a more emotional than physical journey, or it may be a totally different storyline surrounding a couple different characters)

C-plot (tertiary plotline—usually a small emotional journey; this doesn’t come up as much in half-hours, but most hour-longs have one)

D-plot (the smallest story; most episodes don’t have this but it can come up)

Now that we have our major beats and our 2-4 plots, we can do the outline.

Here’s the trick with this: I handwrite this on a blank piece of paper, and make a grid, five rows and three columns.

I label the rows with the acts, and the columns with the plots.

Then I fill in the major beats for the A-plot, writing them at the bottom of each row. This grid should take up the full page!

You should also have similar emotional beats for your B- and C-plots, by the way. Fill those in.

Then, write down each moment that you need to get from beat to beat. I usually have around 5 for acts I and II, and 3 or 4 for the rest. If your moments in between feel like they jump too much, add another moment in between. But because you already laid out your main beats, the in between pacing should be roughly correct for an episode of television.

Eventually, you’ll want to break these down into individual scenes, which vary in length and emotional impact, but this is the basic structure for how I outline scripts.

I hope this was helpful!

#this kind of turned into a quick course on screenwriting #but the outline structure is at the end #screenwriting #writing tips #writing #writeblr

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stuclyblrs · 6 years

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hi, would you have any tips on getting started with chinese? i would love to have a tutor and i think that would be the best way of learning but im completely broke, so which other ways would be good? i know its super difficult and im a complete beginner so i have no idea about pronunciation or symbols or anything so i need a good place to start. Thanks!

你好! so sorry about the late reply!! i started studying chinese with classes at uni so im not 100% the best person to ask about self-studying but i’ll do my best !!!

first learn pinyin and tones

pinyin actually isnt as hard as it seems tbh tones on the other hand are something i struggle a lot with even after a semester of college level chinese so dedicate a lot of time to this !! i recommend this playlist by yoyo chinese/yangyang chen. the first several videos cover tones which is followed by pinyin itself. i also recommend this video by her as more pinyin review (its very lengthy so i recommend watching it in chunks) and this video by her for tone practice. she also has a pinyin chart which is soooooo helpful! it has audio recordings of each syllable w/ the 4 tones + quick videos for the harder syllables (strongly recommend her youtube channel in general)

writing/learning characters

this basically comes down to practice practice practice !!! when ever you learn a new character look up the stroke order and only write it that way. it will make your characters look nicer and if you write the same way every time you’ll build muscle memory making it much easier to remember (writing characters that you’ve studied will come naturally this way) i use this website to look up stroke order for each character (you can look up the rules for stroke order but tbh i dont understand them so i just look up for each character). i suggest learning the 40 most common radicals first. understanding these will make learning meanings of new characters easier.

in terms of actually practicing i strongly do not recommend flashcards. i think flashcards are great for vocab in any other language but not chinese. they’ll help you recognize characters and associate them with meaning and pronunciation but when you go to write you’ll blank out (if you only look at the pinyin/meaning side and write the characters i think they’re okay but its kind of a lot of work) when i learn new words, i would write out about two lines worth of the character over and over again (i usually used printer paper rather than lined cause some characters are big and its kind of a squeeze - many people use hanzi grids to write). once i did that for every character in the lesson, i would write out the dialogue once or twice. after this i would look at the pinyin for the dialogue (covering the characters) and write it out again a few times until i made sure that i remembered every character. i like doing this because it ensure that i actually know the character and then im learning it in context rather than just knowing meaning. i also then look at the dialogue and write the whole thing in pinyin (covering the pinyin and looking at the characters) just to make sure i remember that too!

textbooks

for self studying i think getting a textbook and following it is one of the best ways to learn. it will have vocab and grammar that goes with it and will allow you to stick to a more precise learning schedule rather than getting lost on what you should study and what order to learn things. there are a lot of different books so i would look at ones that interest you and read reviews/watch video reviews on youtube to determine which is the best to use

the only textbook ive used is integrated chinese since thats what we used in class and i believe its a very popular one to use but i havent used anything else so i dont have anything to compare it to. there is a pdf of the third version here (dont think there are major differences between the third and fourth tho) i have seen people say that its not super good w/out a teacher but idk :// i feel like how my professor taught class wasnt completely based on the book - more her taking the vocab/grammar in each lesson and then making her own explanations/lessons based on that

other textbooks that i have pdfs on (have never used so cant give opinion on)

modern mandarin chinese grammar and a workbook (original post)

folder with a lot of stuff (original post)

another folder with a lot of books (original post)

helpful apps

pleco - dictionary app that includes simplified and traditional, example sentences and audio recordings of the words

hellotalk - im using this for korean rn and have had a general positive experience with it ! you can talk to native speakers learning english w/ the chat function and post “moments” publicly for others to correct. its super easy to correct sentences w/in the app (some people have had issues w/ this app in terms of people only contacting them to try and date but i havent encountered that yet) i used the moments feature a lot to post scripts and other writings for class so someone can look over it before i handed it in :^)

chineseskill - i actually havent used this yet but pretty much every chinese langblr recommends it! chinese duolingo essentially

other

some various other things that might be helpful for studying !

if ur interested my general tag for chinese, vocab, and grammar

favorite blogs @liu-anhuaming and @langblog

making a langblr/studyblr !! its fun, theres lots of resources, vocab lists, other people learning on here and making ur own posts is helpful in seeing where you lack some understanding about certain topics and for learning new vocab

listen to music and watch tv shows/movies! its good for listening practice and lets you learn more in context

reading practice site - has different levels, you can hover over words for instant translation, and there is an explanation of more complex grammar

masterposts that i like (x) (x)

i hope this is helpful and if you have any more questions please feel free to message me again. good luck with your studies 加油！

#chinese #mandarin #chinese studyblr #mine:chinese #sspoons #asks

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hrjerry-me-blog · 5 years

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What Marketing Strategy Is the Best for You?

If you pick the right marketing strategy, you’ll be like that little guy in the middle of my diagram above. Yes! Winning! Fist pumps!

The problem with marketing today is that there are way too many options and it’s much too confusing. It makes me dizzy just thinking about this stuff and I’ve been immersed in it for 35 years.

Well, I lay down on my bed last week with a notepad and started to map out my “Unified Theory of Marketing Strategies” with an emphasis on online marketing.

And I actually came up with something that’s not totally confusing, and might even be helpful to a few people.

Here goes…

It’s yet another four-quadrant grid where the vertical axis is a scale from easy to hard and the horizontal axis is a scale from passive to proactive.

I emerged with these four snappy quadrants:

Hard and Passive = Multimedia

Easy and Passive = Publishing

Hard and Proactive = Presentations

Easy and Proactive = Email

Now, all of these strategies can be effective. But, yes some are easier than others. And the passive ones tend to take a lot longer than the proactive ones.

Hard and Passive = Multimedia (Videos)

Everyone is crazy about video these days. It’s a challenging, yet passive strategy. You put a lot work into creating a video and then post it on YouTube hoping people see it.

It’s difficult to do well. It’s time-consuming and it can be expensive. And most videos are pure crap. If you want to do it well, it takes a chunk of change and a lot of time.

Throwing up a lot of little videos on your website can be a nice touch, but they usually don’t get people to call you in droves.

So, as you can see, I’m not crazy about a video strategy for self-employed professionals. I’m not saying they can’t work, but it’s a whole lot of work to do right.

Best example: A non-duality teacher named Rupert Spira. He does live workshops and films everything. Then his staff chops them up into questions and answer segments and posts them on YouTube. They’re five to fifteen minutes long. And what you see is what you get. No pitch, no hype. It’s his teaching unadulterated.

He has hundreds of videos on YouTube with hundreds of thousands of views. Does it work? Well, his workshops are always full and all he does is a low-key email announcement to his list every month or two.

I like this approach a lot. Got a lot of good content? Look good on video (unlike yours truly)? Then you may want to emulate Rupert.

Easy and Passive = Publishing

I happen to like this strategy a lot as it, ahem, built my “Empire.” It’s relatively easy: Write a how-to article on your subject matter once a week, send it out to those on your e-list and publish on your blog. Fame ensues.

But online publishing can be a lot more than that. You can take those same articles and publish them on Medium, LinkedIn, and Ezine Articles. And then you can announce them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Sometimes you can get big exposure when writing an article for a major online publication. Web traffic multiplies.

The cost is zero; an article takes from two to five hours to write (unless it takes you several days). And your ideas are online for eternity to be discovered by those looking for practical ideas. Some will opt-in to your e-list and perpetuate this virtuous marketing circle.

The downside, of course, is that, according to my extensive research, (a 10 second Google search), there are 2 million articles published online every day. The mind reels. So your stuff will be out there, but somewhat lost in a very big haystack.

I’m still a big advocate of online publishing, but the mountain is getting steeper and steeper. Just writing an article or two here and there won’t help you much.

Best Example: Well, other than mine, of course, check out Henneke of Enchanted Marketing. She has a wonderful, readable, fun blog on business writing and blogging. And she walks her talk. It’s all about well-written, relevant content. If you don’t have that as a foundation, it’s a total waste of time.

Hard and Proactive = Presentations

I built my business on presentations in front of live audiences at professional associations and chambers of commerce. It got me attention, added people to my mailing list and generated warm leads for marketing coaching.

And I still do presentations today in the form of webinars. I just filled my recent group program with the help of a couple webinars (also called video conferences). They most certainly do work.

But I put presentations in the hard category, not because they are all that hard to give, but can take a long time to prepare. The last one I did took me two full days. There were about 200 slides (whew).

Yes, that’s not the only way to do a webinar. You can just go live on Zoom Video, and that can work as well. You ultimately have to find your style and test what works.

Presentations are proactive in that at the end you can ask for the business. And, of course, you can turn the recording of the webinar into a video in a snap and send it out to those on your list. Watch it here.

So presentations will always play a big part in my marketing toolkit.

One other thing though – If you don’t have a LOT of people on your email list, good luck in getting much of an attendance. Yes, you can do guest presentations hosted by others, but you don’t have the same control and ability to pitch your professional services.

Best example: John Nemo of LinkedIn Riches. His webinar is a blast. There are a lot of them out there in the online marketing world. And many, Like John, have set them up as evergreen webinars that are scheduled to play automatically several times a day. These are kind of a hybrid between publishing and presentations.

Easy and Proactive = Email

In my opinion, email is the most powerful overall marketing tool. And it gets the least respect. But I can’t imagine even being in business without email marketing.

Social media gets all the PR and all the attention, but email gets the business. A recent study showed that email generated 40 times the business results of Facebook and Twitter combined.

Email is the online tool that’s been around the longest, and I think it’s taken for granted. Promotional emails have expanded exponentially over the years, but most of it isn’t very good.

We wade through our email boxes like we sort our mail over the trashcan. Delete, delete, delete. Why? Because it’s either not relevant or it’s boring. Usually both.

I feel that email has the greatest potential of all the online marketing strategies because it’s both relatively easy and the most proactive marketing medium of all. Your message goes right into the mailbox of your potential client. Nothing else can do that.

Marketing email holds great opportunities for improvement in several areas:

1. How to incorporate humor as the most powerful attention-getting device in existence (that almost nobody is using).

2. How to telegraph your value proposition straight to the minds and hearts of your prospect.

3. How to make your emails clear, focused, and easy-to-read.

4. How to craft a compelling call-to-action that is hard to resist.

5. How to get emails to thousands of your prospects without looking like spam.

If you’re not working on ALL of these, your emails will not get the attention and response you want.

Best Example: Therapy Practice Accelerator. Visit this site and get on the list just to see the brilliance of the email marketing. It’s all about demonstrating results.

What marketing strategies will you choose?

Take the four marketing quadrants into consideration. The easier a marketing activity, the more likely you’ll actually do it. And the more proactive a marketing activity, the faster the response you’ll get.

Cheers, Robert

Action Plan Marketing helps self-employed people attract more clients through action-oriented marketing strategies that get you in front of prospective clients. Get our free report on how you can attract more of your ideal clients at this link: http://actionplan.club/free-stuff.

#marketing stratergies #online marketing #marketing tactics

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tothewaterhq · 5 years

Photo

PIXEL DELAROUX // SCORE OF 11

“Where... where the hell did she go? When we find her, make sure she doesn’t leave anyone’s radar. Ever again.”

{

<waiting>;

Pixel was still here. Unbelievable. Every attempt ruined by inconvenient chance. Her margin of error was shrinking quickly, and the possibility that she might actually be sent into the arena was growing adjacently.

Which meant she needed a strategy for her private training.

A low or middle-of-the-road score would be the most obvious strategy. She hadn’t wanted to stand out so that she could more easily escape. But Pixel had been living in that space for a while now, and if she really did make it into the arena then she’d be needing sponsors.

Which meant she needed a good strategy for her private training.

Pixel couldn’t fight. Sure she’d learned a few moves during training but nothing that would significantly help her out here. So what was she good at? She was sneaky, stealthy, quick. Pixel was probably the only one here who knew how to code, and she doubted many other tributes knew the intricacies of a lot of this technology. The touchscreens on the plant and throwing knife stations were exactly the same as ones she had worked on in the last year. They might even have been the ones she herself had touched and assembled.

</waiting><training>;

When Pixel walked into the room she made her way immediately over to the throwing knife station, immediately finding the button on the right hand side to turn it on and, holding it down, hoped it really was the same kind of machine that she’d assembled.

It was. After ten seconds of holding the button down, instead of the machine turning on its normal interface to begin training, a page of code scattered its way down the screen. Pixel smiled. It was just like home, and she suddenly felt the twitching in her fingers that she did at the factories when she was given the freedom to experiment with new lines and actions.

She thought for a second, then scrolled and highlighted a chunk of text, replacing it with different lines.

createFigures; quantity=25;

She continued this several more times, then gave the screen a double tap to save, and turned the screen off. Pixel rebooted the machine, and the user interface popped up, though it was different from how it had appeared before. With another swipe, the throwing knife station lit up in activity, with the holographic figures created for training appearing amid the physical targets.

The figures stood in place as Pixel walked to the corner of the room with the plant identification screen. In creating these devices, Pixel knew that they were wired to connect within the mainframe of the building. She’d never had the chance to actually do what she wanted on this large of a scale because fixtures like these were meant to interact within the infrastructure of an entire building system. Which meant, Pixel thought as she approached the screen, that it was all interconnected.

This might include the lights, any speaker systems… anything that worked within the electrical grid of the Tower. Most of it was out of her range of abilities (there was no way she could code well enough to impact the function of the HVAC system, or make it into any locked file network with information on the tributes or the function of the Games; she certainly wouldn’t be able to get into any of the Gamemakers’ personal files or designs), but lights and sounds? Those would be easy.

Pixel held down a button on the same side that had been on the throwing knife station screen, bringing up another screen with scattered black and white code. This was reflected on the large screen above her, where usually there were rows of plants to identify.

She spent the next several minutes scrolling through, entering new lines and erasing unnecessary ones (truly, even if Pixel wasn’t messing with the mainframe, so many of these lines were simply redundant). She rebooted, held down the power button in a different sequence to pull up a different screen of code, just like she’d done back home to help work out its interconnectivity within the building.

And when Pixel was finished going through it and making her edits, she rebooted once more.

All the previous information would be saved in a backup drive if the Capitol engineers had any brains, so it would only take minutes for them to return it to its regular state once she was done.

When the screen booted up once more, there was, once again, an interface that was different than normal.

She went back to the throwing knife station, where the holographic figures continued to stand. Making a swipe across the screen and hitting a spot in the corner, she smiled as she glanced up and saw the figures beginning to move.

<dance>;

Pixel didn’t know much about dance, so she hoped she had coded this correctly, and the somewhat erratic movements of the figures showed that she had a little bit of work to do on that front. But they were, recognizably, dancing. Slowly. She’d wanted elegance, and had probably needed to put a bit more work into the exact speed she had set, but they were unmistakably slow dancing.

<lights> <music>;

And then Pixel made it back to the plant station, where she hit a few spots on the screen. A sound began from each corner of the center, too low to make out clearly. And it began growing in volume. Music was playing softly, eerily.

{block:AudioPlayer};

The lights began to flicker.

There was a tension that had begun to build in the ambiance and Pixel just stood there, waiting as the Gamemakers began to shift in unease. There was something that wasn’t right in this center now, and they couldn’t quite decide what it was. The feel had shifted.

The humanoid figures continued to dance, the light of their holograms being the only ones that didn’t flicker or fade. In what was now the beginning of darkness, they seemed to get brighter.

<volume>;

The lights were shutting off now, gradually across the center. Some flickered as if they were strobe lights, painting a visual of Pixel standing in the middle of the center. She was small, but looked intensely towards the Gamemakers. Music grew louder, the lights turned off one by one, the room grew darker and darker. And she stood there, staring as the lights gave an effect that made her seem to disappear from view on and off, for only split seconds.

Suddenly the 14 year old was no longer a small, wide-eyed girl but a chaotic entity that was quickly shutting off light after light as the eerie music began to play louder.

It wasn’t quite the vibe that Pixel had been going for- in truth she’d just hoped to get a crescendo of music of any sort, and was happy that she’d picked the right one, and to make the lights shut off. They were supposed to go off all at once, but there must have been some backup system in place causing the backup and the flickering before they went out.

The Gamemakers were watching the figures continue to dance, entertained by this new use of their technology. How creative, Pixel figured they must be thinking. How new.

The lights flickered out one by one, the music grew louder, and Pixel suddenly realized that this could be her chance.

Her eyes darted around the room as Peacekeepers looked at each other in discomfort, the music growing too loud for them to hear one another. Closely guarded by one of the Peacekeepers was an exit, definitely meant for an emergency but not clearly marked. As the lights continued to shut off one by one, the room fell into darkness, and Pixel continued to stand and stare at the Gamemakers until suddenly-

It was near total darkness, with only the dancing figures creating any sort of light within the training center, creating a visible distraction for anyone and everyone in the center. The music was near deafening. They’d be, quite literally, blind to anything else. With stealth Pixel leapt towards the door. Others would be focused on the spotlight of the slow dancing figures. What they wanted was to be entertained, right?

{/block:AudioPlayer};

This was the perfect moment, Pixel thought as she neared the door and slipped one foot out towards the dingy hallway it led to. Since District Three was one of the first to go into training, it could be hours until someone noticed she was gone.

</training>; </volume>;

And, suddenly, she was gone. Down a hallway in the bowels of the Capitol Tower, finally making her great escape.

And, when the lights were turned on by the saved backup that the engineers had indeed saved everyone else assumed that she had simply taken her leave back to the suite. There was no chance that Pixel Delaroux was now running quietly down a hallway that led to the streets of the Capitol.

</dance></lights></music>;

}

#77.scores #pixel

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jimmyjohnsmnm · 4 years

Text

How to Set Up Microsoft Bing Shopping Campaigns for Ecommerce Businesses

Google may lead the search engine ranks, but they’re not the only player in the game.

Bing holds 11.22% of the global search engine market share. Compared to Google’s 72.94%, that may not seem like much — but with upwards of a third of US desktop searches coming from Bing (and Bing-backed AOL and Yahoo), it’s pretty huge.

For ecommerce businesses, that makes Microsoft Shopping Campaigns (formally known as Bing shopping campaigns) a killer opportunity to boost your bottom line.

NOTE: Bing now refers to all platforms related to their shopping ads by the Microsoft name. For example, what was once called the “Bing Merchant Center” is now the “Microsoft Merchant Center.”

Bing Does Not Equal Google, but That Could Be a Good Thing

Long story short: Your paid media strategy deserves diversification, and Bing is the place to find it.

Why?

Because Bing offers unique demographics you may not be able to target from Google Ads.

More than 70% of Bing users are over the age of 35. At the same time, nearly 40% of Bing users have a six-figure annual household income. The company reports a good chunk of their user base comes from the South Atlantic region of the US (which includes various states from Delaware to Florida, plus Washington DC) — but they also have a stronghold across North America, Latin America, China, and more.

If you are looking for high earners in a particular region, Bing could be your gateway into a lucrative ecommerce market.

Bing has some other perks too, like:

Affordable cost-per-click: Bing competition is significantly less than Google, with one ReportGarden study sharing the average cost-per-click for Bing Ads is just $7.99, while the average Google Ads cost-per-click costs more than $20. Of course, this depends on the industry — but a 250% price increase is nothing to ignore.

User-friendly design: You don’t have to be a digital marketing pro to use Bing Shopping (though you may feel like one after you’re all set up.) You can easily craft ecommerce ad campaigns across platforms (Google included) to reach a wider audience.

Targeting differentiation: On Bing, you can target the device (desktop, smartphone, or tablet), operating system, timezone, and more. (Google allows similar targeting, but the options are far more limited.)

An in with major websites: AOL and Yahoo both use Bing to power their search engines. This benefit provides Bing shopping marketers with a combined 700+ million unique monthly visitors from these two websites alone. Additionally, Amazon’s Alexa currently uses Bing for web searches.

When used in tandem with Google Ads, Bing can diversify your paid media campaigns for all kinds of ecommerce products.

For more information about paid shopping and product campaigns, check out this video and the eCommerce Unlocked series on my YouTube channel:

youtube

How Does Bing Shopping Work?

When a user searches a branded or non-branded keyword on Bing, they’ll receive a grid of shopping results from various ecommerce platforms, which are usually from big ecommerce giants like Amazon and small businesses with compelling offers and inventory.

If the user has their location tracking turned on, Bing will refine the results by adding products they can find locally.

Bing “hiking boots” search query

Depending on your layout, these ads might show up as a vertical grid on the SERP’s right-hand side.

As an ecommerce marketer, your Bing shopping campaigns can give you valuable real estate above the fold.

And it may just put you in contact with a whole new audience while you’re at it.

How to Set Up Your Bing Shopping Campaigns

First things first: Create your Microsoft Merchant Center account.

You can do this by logging onto your Microsoft Ads (formerly known as Bing Ads) account, click the “Microsoft Merchant Center” button, and create an account. You’ll need to verify your store with a destination URL, which may take up to 48 hours.

Once that’s done, follow the steps below.

Create an Up-To-Date Shopping Catalog

A shopping catalog (or shopping feed) is where your products live. You can either import your existing shopping feed from Google Merchant Center or create a brand new one. You can upload any new catalogs to your Microsoft Merchant Center.

When creating a new feed, don’t forget to set up all of your product attributes.

There are mandatory product attributes (like title, link, price, description, product identifiers, and more), but there are also some optional ones (like color, gender, material, and size).

Add as many as you can because this info helps you connect with users in your target audience. That will help improve your conversion rates — which is always a good thing.

Create an Audience

Creating a custom audience tells Microsoft and Bing who you want to reach. Aim to create a narrow audience, so you don’t waste ad spend on people outside your target audience.

On your Microsoft Advertising account, head to “Shared Library.” Under the audience header, you’ll click “View Audiences.” This section is where you can lay out your ad’s plan of action once it’s live.

Create a Campaign

From your Microsoft Merchant Center, click Create Campaign. Then click Sell Products.

You’ll adjust your campaign settings, like setting priority levels for each of your Bing shopping campaigns.

Priority levels can be high, medium, or low. The higher priority campaigns take precedence, so set your important campaigns with a bigger budget on high priority while leaving your runner-ups on medium or low.

Organize Your Product Groups

You can organize based on various attributes you’ve given to each product. This feature helps with targeting.

Turn on Automatic Item Updates

This option ensures your ad prices always reflect your website prices, and you’re not advertising products that you’ve already sold. A new consumer isn’t going to give your shop a second look if prices are off or you’re promoting out of stock items.

Instant updates also help you avoid wasting your budget.

Use Custom Labels to Streamline Audience Targeting

Head to the “Labels” on your product feed in your campaign editor. You can organize campaigns, keywords, ad groups, and ads in a way that works for you.

While it won’t directly impact your Bing ads, this does help you better analyze your campaigns and improve future targeting. That can boost future campaigns and help you optimize existing ones.

Need a more hands-on guide? Microsoft has a training course for newbies.

Tips and Plugins to Optimize Your Bing Campaigns

Why settle for average when your ecommerce shop can run the Bing shopping game?

Try these tips and tricks to optimize your Bing ad campaigns and maximize your ad dollars. You can also view my free PDF of Bing Ads resources.

Import Google Ads to Bing Shopping Campaigns

It may seem like magic, but you can import your shopping campaigns to Bing straight from Google Ads.

All you have to do is make sure your website is set up on an ecommerce platform (think Shopify and the like.) Then, ensure your Google Ads shopping feed and campaign are up and running.

Once you create your Microsoft Merchant Center store and verify it, you can import your campaign using Microsoft’s Google Merchant Center (GMC) Import tool.

Then, tick the option that allows you to sync the two platforms to keep everything updated.

Universal Event Tracking

Universal Event Tracking (UET) is a Microsoft tool that helps track the sales and conversions that stem directly from your Bing shopping campaigns.

Events are consumer actions like clicks throughs, add to carts, and purchases. You can track which events matter most to you and follow the consumer’s path from start to finish.

This tracking will help you understand how much revenue you can attribute to your Bing ads. The process includes applying a UET event tag and short web coding to record the conversions as they come.

Use Microsoft’s how-to guide for implementing UET for your Bing shopping campaigns.

Microsoft Ad Extensions

To help businesses of every kind (including you ecommerce folks), Microsoft has developed a series of ad extensions for Bing shopping campaigns.

What are my favorite extensions for ecommerce businesses?

Well, since you asked:

Sitelink extensions: Sitelinks are a cool tool that sends ecommerce customers straight to the right page. Word on the street is that you can’t actively control these on Google, so take advantage of this in Bing ads.

Image extensions: Add relevant images to your Bing ad using image extensions.

Review extensions: Show average reviews for your ecommerce products, right on the ad.

Price extensions: List your competitive price to lure in consumers from the SERP.

Action extensions: Add a call-to-action to your campaign that’s clear, concise, and action-oriented.

Shopify Ecommerce Store Integration

If you use Shopify to run your ecommerce store, you can integrate it directly with Bing Shopping.

Use the Shopify app to streamline analytics and keep all your data in one easy-to-access place.

Shopify is especially helpful for ecommerce teams who want collaborative access to Bing shopping campaign info. But regardless of how many people you have on your side, it’s undoubtedly beneficial for Shopify store owners.

Set up Bing Remarketing Audiences

Remarketing is a process that lets you target consumers based on their prior web actions.

Keep in mind, if you import Google shopping feeds over to your Microsoft Merchant Center, you can’t import your remarketing data. That means whether you’re importing or starting campaigns from scratch, you’ll need to set up remarketing audiences manually.

Start with your existing audiences in your Microsoft Advertising platform.

You’ll also want to make sure you’ve set up UET tags and coded them into your website. This tagging makes sense considering you’re basing it off of the customer’s previous actions, so you need to track them.

Once you hit the “Audience” page, click “Create a remarketing list.”

From there, create a tag and configure the settings as you see fit. And whatever you do, don’t forget to save!

Use Local Inventory Ads For Storefronts

Bing’s local feature is pretty cool. It shows your ads for localized product queries, including cities, states, or phrasing such as “near me.”

So if your ecommerce business also has a local storefront, set up Local Inventory Ads to maximize reach.

All you have to do is provide your shop’s physical location, upload and submit product info, keep your inventory updated, and enable your Microsoft Shopping Campaigns.

Conclusion

There’s no denying Google‘s prowess, but ecommerce advertisers should consider Bing campaigns as well.

Adding Bing shopping campaigns to your marketing repertoire is an easy way to diversify your paid advertising.

Is your ecommerce business ready for an adventure into the world of Bing shopping?

The post How to Set Up Microsoft Bing Shopping Campaigns for Ecommerce Businesses appeared first on Neil Patel.

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