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leviiattacks · 3 years

Note

Lmao Levi being irritated because reader, his roomate, who he still hasn't confessed to yet, gets a cat.

The cat hates Levi but loves reader and reader loves the cat too and it's basically Levi vs the cat someone help

note :: very rushed and not proofread i only wrote for fun because once again i am bed ridden with sickness ha ha the perks of always being sick i suppose T__T

lord, does levi despise the way you act without thinking sometimes

he’s legitimately appalled at how you can manage to always do shit like this

even more appalled at how he lets you get away with it every time

now, what is the shit you have done this time?

brought a cat home a CAT

first things first, you are allergic to cats so he does not understand how that predicament will fix itself

secondly, cats shed EVERYWHERE

as much as he enjoys cleaning he is not going to clean that up every day

thirdly, cats will ruin furniture and claw at it

as well as the curtains!!!!

and levi loves the curtains in the living room because the both of you picked them out together

though it was a struggle to get you interested enough to pick a pair you liked.

maybe that’s why he’s looking at you irked by this all

you’re holding the kitten in your arms playing around with her

“peek... a... boo!”

playing fucking peek-a-boo with a cat? he questions himself in his head

“y/n. we are not keeping the cat.”

at this you innocently look up at him through your lashes

god, there you go again doing that

he doesn’t know if you’re aware of the impact you have on him when you do that

he’s good at holding his composure but that look ignites something in him

but he always has to push that something down his throat

“c’mon, you’d be the best roomie ever if you let me keep her!”

his eyes narrow at the word roomie

is that all he is to you?? a roomie???

you’re holding the cat up alongside your face and are fake pouting

“you. are. allergic. to. cats.” he punctuates every word clearly

“how do you know that?” you ask reasonably shocked he knows something that obscure and random about you

“you like talking about yourself when you’re drunk.”

a memory of him helping you throw up whilst he carefully holds your hair out of your face flashes past

if it were anyone else he wouldn’t have got anywhere near them if they were throwing up

but it was you,

it was always you.

“you rambled on and on and on about wanting a cat as a kid but not getting one because of your allergies.”

“so you would also know-” the cat tries to scratch your arm and you retract giggling

“that i really want a cat!”

“does that change your allergies? poof oh wow y/n you’re no longer allergic to shitty cats because you want one.”

you roll your eyes at his deadpan expression and pessimism

“if you knew anything about cats you would know this is a cornish rex” you now rebuttal

“a fucking what?”

“hypoallergenic cat breed! my allergies to cats are mild so it’s the perfect cat for me”

the crease between his eyebrow deepens.

“do you forget that we live in this apartment together?”

you scrunch your nose looking at your little buddy who has now settled in your lap “how could i forget that?”

he knows you see him as nothing more than a roommate

levi loves you he does but you don’t know that

but part of him thinks you do because you always give him that look when you want something

you’re doing it again.

the look.

“fuck. fine but if that thing coughs up a hair ball she’s out.”

“AAAHH THANK YOU I LOVE YOU LEVI!!!!” you’re ecstatic

his breath traps itself in his throat when he hears that

how can you carelessly say i love you??

you’re happily looking between him and the cat and hand her over to levi

“hold her you’re the dad”

“so you’re the...?” he asks

“i’m the...???” you’re clueless

he shakes his head waving it off

it takes you a moment to understand what he’s asking then your eyes widen

“ohhh the mum? yeah that would be me”

it’s so stupid, so stupid, so so so stupid he repeats it in his head the whole scenario is stupid

but it doesn't stop him from smiling like an idiot

in recent days you’ve given her the names diana, garfield and casper

sadly, none of then seem to stick because you’re too indecisive

it’s got to the point where you barge into levi’s room without asking

you’re in your pyjamas he looks at you confused as to why you’ve walked in with no permission at 2am

in a cucumber face mask...?

“name the cat please, name the cat i can’t stick to a name i’m going to rip my hair out“ you’re gripping at your hair groaning in frustration.

“edgar’

first suggestion, too ugly.

you shake your head

“candy“

second suggestion, no, just no.

you shake your head again in refusal

“zero?“

yeah, no.

another shake of the head

levi ponders and thinks hard “...angel?’

you blush, jump back and look more than startled

fumbling with your fingers awkwardly you edge closer towards the door

he just eyes you weirdly wondering what causes that reaction

well, you must like the name

“is it good enough?” he asks

you’re speechless not knowing what to actually say

“y/n...????”

you snap out of it

“isn’t that something you’d call a significant other not a cat?”

and for once in your life you actually seem kinda annoyed at him

“your cat is an angel in your eyes that’s the point” he’s explaining his point but you aren’t listening

you don’t know why levi saying that word makes your heart race

that’s why you’re annoyed right now

in fact it’s not that you’re annoyed. you’re scared that it triggers this response because this is levi.

levi, your roommate the same roommate who argues about pizza toppings with you. he’s nothing more than that.

but your cheeks continue to flush behind the cucumber face mask

“i’ll ask someone else what to name him just call him salad for now” without letting him get a word in you leave but somehow you forget the cat

salad turns to levi and gives him what can only be described as a menacing look.

“you happy you annoying shit? y/n’s annoyed because i can’t name you”

your cat jumps at him and tries to scratch at a piece of flesh but is held off easily

one cold look from levi and she stops.

“get out my room you pest.” he says as he places the cat on the floor

salad scurries away and levi rolls his eyes

he hates that cat he really does

a few hours pass levi is still up he’s always found it hard to sleep

it’s been a long day he’s just finished a thesis for his physics degree and stretches out contently

to say he’s tired is an understatement but his throat is dry and he needs to DESPERATELY hydrate

he gets to his feet and ventures into the kitchen to retrieve some water then he’ll knock out like a log and fall asleep.

the pitch of your snoring can be heard and he smiles to himself silently.

it’s all good, he’s sure you’re getting all the sleep you need.

“GRRRE”

there it is,

the little fucker, your cat is still up.

“what is it little shit?” levi asks leaned up against the surface of the counter.

salad is only staring at him blankly before turning to look over at the living room.

it’s dim the lights are switched off but levi feels something is feels off

“the hell did you do?” he asks

but salad shows no signs of breaking and revealing what it is she’s done

levi’s going to have to investigate

stepping towards the living room he flicks the lights open.

eyes survey the entire area everything looks good until he sees the way the drapes have been ripped apart

salad is picked up in one swoop she sees how levi is about to throw her out the front door and panics

meowing and struggling just in the nick of time she jumps before running away and slipping into the safety of your bedroom

groaning levi goes back to the living room to see if he’s missed anything.

well, god damn him.

scratches litter the leather furniture, it almost looks like a crossword.

salad has also conveniently taken a shit behind the sofa,

and to top it all off she’s left a dead mouse in the middle of the living room floor

levi. is. infuriated.

“you should thank her for catching the mouse”

you’re hurriedly eating some toast levi has made for you as you brush your hair out and gather it into a low ponytail

“look at the drapes y/n??” he’s exasperated and trying to make sense of your logic

“i didn’t like the drapes anyway we needed new ones.”

you aren’t taking this seriously at all and it’s getting on his nerves now

he runs a hand through his hair and glares at you “i told you taking the cat in was a bad idea”

your hair tie snaps and so do you

all the doubts from yesterday are eating you away. the question still lingers in your mind - how do you really feel about levi?

“do you have to have an opinion on everything i do? you’re my roommate not my boyfriend.”

it’s your fault for letting your anger and stress get the better of you. to be frank you have no clue why you’ve gone and said that.

if you’re honest with yourself you know he’s not a roommate. he’s not a friend either but at the same time he’s definitely not a boyfriend.

he’s more than a friend to you but you don’t think he sees you similarly.

oh how wrong you are

“roommate?”

levi’s question is filled with not an ounce of humour, the both of you know that.

oddly, he sounds displeased,

but you can’t take it back now.

and you hate backing down

“what?” you scoff

he shakes his head and makes his way to the front door not turning to look at you.

“get a grip on that cat otherwise i’m throwing it out”

SLAM!

you’ve done it, you’ve messed it up.

salad jumps up on the counter and licks your toast

maybe, he is right about the cat.

the rest of the week is incredibly busy you have an important economics presentation due today and you’ve done everything you need to prepare for it.

at least that’s what you think,

you’re stood in front of the class introducing yourself and everything seems to be going smoothly

price determination within the economic market might as well be advertised as a sleeping pill because you don’t know how you can get anyone interested enough to keep their eyes open.

but putting your best foot forward an attempt is still made.

“the buyers and sellers accept this price, and buy and sell accordin-”

you’re abruptly cut off by your professor who coughs and then proceeds to leer at you in disgust.

a few moments of silence pass and you can feel your heart hammer in your chest.

suddenly he points at the door,

he’s known for being harsh, strict and a stingy marker but it’s not as if you’ve shown up with nothing done...?

in fact this is the largest amount of effort you’ve put into your economics course since you’ve started it.

being in your usual seasonal slump has held you back but now you’re actually trying he’s saying it’s not good enough?

“your presentation. it’s awful. not enough effort put into it, leave for today.” his voice is rumbling and intimidating.

you’re stunned, you’ve worked tirelessly day and night to finish this off.

you’ve even had to cry over not knowing or understanding how to make pie charts.

interpreting data has never been your strong suit.

too embarrassed to ask for help you had to spend hours figuring out how to make it all work alongside your excel chart and spreadsheet

sighing heavily you speak up “professor i’ve spent a lot of time on this?”

“i looked through the slides. dog shit.” his response is fiery and you shudder at the boiling frustration he’s shooting right at you.

arguing in front of the lecture hall is not what you wish to do and you’re sure you aren’t going to be the only person sent out this way.

just retreat y/n

you do.

the professor is clearly in a bad mood and taking it out on you, there’s nothing you can do about it.

wordlessly you gather your belongings and leave.

as you trudge back home the feeling of not being good enough sinks in your stomach like a heavy anchor at sea.

entering through the front door is a task and a half through your glossed over eyes but somehow you manage

you’ve kept salad in your room for most of the time after your argument and she seems to actually miss levi’s presence.

so when the first thing you see as soon as you enter is salad clawing at his bedroom door begging to be let in you aren’t surprised.

thankfully for you he’s yet to return from class and hasn’t been disturbed by the sounds.

at least that’s what you assume.

you look at salad and start sobbing

you wish you were a cat.

cats don’t get shit on for fucking up economics presentations that’s for sure.

shaking you try to hold yourself up against one of the walls

frankly, school stress is getting to you.

you tried hard on that presentation only for it to fail when it was worth a quarter of your grade.

A QUARTER...

TWENTY FIVE PERCENT...

salad nuzzles herself against your leg and you lean over to pick her up

she licks at your ear, it tickles and you laugh in between sobs

“you sure are good at comforting people huh?” you’re so worn out your laugh sounds half dead.

it’s all so pathetic. you standing in your living room wailing as you hold your pet cat like a baby.

but she doesn’t mind and let’s you cry to your hearts content.

“MEOW” salad loudly squeaks and you stroke her back but she only keeps at it “MEOWWWW.”

sensing that she’s bringing something to your attention you turn around

there stands levi awkwardly waving at you and you instinctually cover your face with your arm.

the smudged mascara is none of his business.

“wanna order pizza and talk about it?”

pursing your lips at the proposition you slowly lower your arm and scratch at the sleeve of your shirt.

"yeah, i’d love that.”

“KICKED YOU OUT THE LECTURE HALL?? YOU WORKED ON THAT FOR DAYS Y/N, DAYS??”

levi is beyond pissed he hasn’t even touched the second slice of his pizza after hearing how your presentation played out.

“it’s okay, it was probably going to go bad i can’t do anything right.”

levi’s silver eyes fog up in annoyance and you shut yourself up.

“you are the most able person i have met.”

head rocking up in surprise the confession is news to you.

“really?“

“you’re great at making pad thai, somehow you convinced me to keep that cat, i remember that other time you convinced a first year to bungee jump off a building for last years charity fundraiser.”

it truly is endearing how he doesn’t call you smart or witty or hard-working. none of that basic nonsense you’ve heard time and time again from everyone else.

the fact he’s naming the most random things makes your heart swell.

you burst into laughter remembering the first year’s quivering form and you wonder why levi even remembers that.

“if salad bothers you that much i could find a friend to look after her.”

levi looks at you like he’s just come face to face with a ghost.

“no? i like her, she might frustrate me and get in the way when i want to-” he stops himself fumbling over his sentence.

“when you want to?“ you’re leaning in closer intrigued what the rest of the sentence is.

shock flashes over his face but the next second it disappears.

taking a gulp of his water seemingly in preparation he looks you right in the eye.

“when i want to kiss you.”

and that’s all it takes for you to tug him by the shirt and slam his lips against yours, you giggle into the kiss as you situate yourself in his lap. hands ghosting over your hips he’s disoriented not sure where to place his palms but you don’t care. you’ve been waiting for this and despite his sloppy response the fact you’re finally doing what you’ve been fearing the most these past few weeks is only filling you with adrenaline.

“settle down.” he’s panting heavy and ragged. “i was meant to initiate it and look cool what the fuck??” he’s not mad, he’s just playing with you but that doesn’t stop you from getting into the role.

“and if i don’t settle?” you mischievously ask, levi’s hands are cupping your jaw he pushes your hair out of your face and simply gazes in awe.

he makes you feel so beautiful, it’s unreal.

“meow...” salad’s dissatisfied whining can be heard and then out of nowhere in one fluid motion she jumps onto levi’s chest.

“salad if you don’t mind i’m trying to make out with your dad.” you explain with a frown.

she doesn’t budge and instead a trickling sound can be heard, then a foul smell floats into the room and levi screams.

“Y/N THE LITTLE SHIT IS PEEING ON ME???”

#levi #levi ackerman #aot #snk #levi x reader #levi x y/n #attack on titan #levi fluff #leviiattacks #modern levi #college levi #levi scenario #levi headcanons #levi fanfiction #aot fanfiction #attack on titan levi #attack on titan x reader

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sonicasura · 3 years

Text

Balan Wonderworld Improv #3

If you haven't noticed or I didn't tag properly, this is a review split into multiple parts and suggestions.

I'm really enjoying Balan Wonderworld so far. If you are someone who plays Super Mario Odyssey, then this isn't your cup of tea because this game is the embodiment of a puzzle. There are over 80 costumes in the game, each costume being an option to a maze of puzzles when it comes to the Collectibles such as hidden Costumes, Balan Bouts and Balan Statues.

You start off with the weaker costumes at the start of the game, the more worlds you unlock the better costumes you can find. Every world has an obstacle to keep you from grabbing every collectible, areas or enemies that need particular costumes to solve.

People have issues with a lot of costumes performing similar tasks but they shine for the ingenuity hidden underneath their adorable designs. The devs want you to take in the worlds at a reasonable pace, uncover the secrets you couldn't find through your first run.

It's a test of your creativity and problem solving skills. To see what you can do with as little as you are given. They want you to figure it out, not spoon feed it to you like some games do. Biggest example of a spoon feeder is Kirby Star Allies, it gives you the combination needed to solve all of its puzzles.

Balan Bouts are a very interesting take to quick time events. The line up for each event actually gets faster the further you are in the game. Balan will even use trickier moves to raise the difficulty of later bouts, including his infamous butt stomp. Also, getting an Oops with Balan or a Balan Cardboard Cutout is bloody hilarious. One second your a badass and the next you are sent flying like Team Rocket for messing up a quick time very badly. 😂 He's just a minty haired goofball.

I did come across a glitch. World 7 Act 2, there's a blue mushroom you need to use to reach platform needed to go the door floating far away with the flower costume. You can jump off the mushroom and it'll just makes the noises your character does when jumping.

I suggest getting the Double Jumper Costume from World 2 Act 2 to bypass the glitch should it happen. Normally you need the Fixer Upper Costume from World 12 but can use the Snow Fairy Costume in World 8 Act 1 to also reach it. You have to scale to the top of the ruins and coral but you can reach it albeit barely.

Improvements needed

Ability to manually restart the level. You need get all Excellents in a Balan Bout to get the Balan Statue. You can revisit the level but you need to beat the boss if you do fail and restart the entire world.

In-game map. It would make navigating certain worlds way easier if you are looking for costumes, Balan Bouts or Balan Statues. Even better if you can mark the map with symbols, tracking icon and used to warp to different checkpoints.

Island of Tims upgrade system. Change how you can upgrade the Tower of Tims as the normal way is quite slow. Ability to play with the Tims, you can't have an equivalent to a Chao Garden without playing with the adorable critters. Mini-games can affect the Tims' abilities or even get rare Costumes.

Name tags for bosses and characters. I didn't know any of the visitors or bosses' names until I looked it up. I had to go by their titles in each Chapter.

I do suggest you guys get the game on sale if you want to play it. Balan Wonderworld has been a fun and decent experience so far but the normal price isn't really fair since bad marketing being the reason.

Now for a more pressing matter.

I've been getting news that people are attacking Balan Wonderworld fans just because they like the game. Whoever it is, you guys are petty little shits and need to stop. You don't see anyone attacking you for having a different opinion, so what gives you the right to do it to us?

Reminds me of a similar issue with popular fandoms like Undertale, I've been personally attacked by my own sibling just because I don't want to play the game. Undertale is an interesting game but isn't my cup of tea, in fact, all of the attacks makes me avoid the game like the plague.

This is the same thing you are doing it to Balan Wonderworld fans, you are making them avoid their favorite game and feel like garbage because of your foul attitude and dickish threats.

You know what I have to say about these petty haters?

Everyone has the right to play the games they love and neither of us want your bullshit. So keep your nasty comments to yourself and quit harassing others.

Hope y'all have a good day!

#mun sonicasura #sonicasura #my personal opinion #mini reviews #how to improve #balan wonderworld #balan company #balan wonderland #square enix #improving a game #videogames #video game review

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incarnateirony · 5 years

Text

So anyway, life updates on what I’ve talked about good, bad, and vagueblog.

But I introduce you to Betty White, or the Millennium Falcon, name pending.

Most of yall know that I’m on disability, dealing with some massively janky medical issues that Alabama’s bottom-ranked health care system doesn’t even know how to cover, and my wifey blew a disc in her neck at work, essentially debilitating her, too, but also earning a small settlement. In scale of it, 25K -- 21 after lawyer fees -- isn’t really much to do anything with.

So we had already known we had to fix up and sell the house and thought, hey, the land value went up substantially out here, we can pocket and flip it and be hella good.

Until her father finally came out here and in long story short, found out that the inspector that ran through this house when my wife first bought it (during our breakup period YEARS ago) didn’t do his job and it’d be 20-30K worth of repairs to even sell this place at the value her loan is for, meaning we pretty much have to short sell it to get out from under it. I mean bad shit. Fire hazard wiring and rotting roof and siding element under shiny things that hid it that have clearly been deteriorating since long before the house got a lipstick job.

So we went and found an RV, because it’s time to go. We have to GO. We have to get out of this state. There’s nothing for us here. There’s no medical care, there’s no worker protections, being LGBT women we’re extra up a creek in the area, it’s just bad. So RV it was! But finding one in the now suddenly cramped budget with the house turning up bunk entirely was FUN.

But like a stroke of providence I happened to find a listing the day it was upgraded on what has been jokingly referred to by my friends as the Millennium Falcon of RVs.

It came from an older couple, almost 60, that had been RVing for a few years, and the thing was already used when they bought it. It’s a friggin 1994. It’s old, it’s Chonk. But it was a project RV they decided to start on and while it has a solid AF 454 engine in it,

they’ve over a few years put in just about New Everything. New transmission, new air brakes, new air bags, new radiator, new septic lines, new alternator, new battery, new steering and suspension, new new new new new. Modified backup camera that tracks engine temp/tire pressure/etc like modern dashes and stays on constantly instead of just when backing up. It has its little hijinks with the in-n-out stairs being funky and the generator is a funny little bit because they didn’t want to spend 8K+ on a generator for an old RV so they got one that’s an external mount, which I imagine is why it was having a hard time selling.

Atop that inside the wife went bananas and got rid of the shitty old wallpaper and painted it bright colors different on every wall, removed the space consuming fold out couch since they didn’t need an extra bed and installed an armoire-storage-couch-thing that takes up half the outter floor space, stuff like that.

This was their baby and they intended to keep this baby and did great work on this baby, and the second I saw it in the advert, I knew it, because the images weren’t all spit cleaned sales stuff, it was vacation images with their shit still hanging inside it and their party lawn with their sports teams and stuff and the shiny lights they added on it to make it a party bus like

So anyway it turned out they basically got conned into getting a newer shinier one and just wanted to get the fuck OUT of Alabama but because of the generator and age it wasn’t selling at market value which was about 15K even as old as it is, and had price gouged it down to *8500*

Thought it was too good to be true, got our old construction and mechanic friend go out out there and go over it with a fine toothed comb and this thing, as he put it “goddamn if I had the money, I’d buy it myself, what the hell, you ain’t gonna get anything better for that price, hell, you ain’t gonna get anything as good for the price” THEY JUST WANTED TO GET OUT OF ALABAMA. And I mean, MOOD, BIG MOOD.

In fact the money they were asking for was basically to pay off loans and costs on all the New Stuff they put into it to begin with.

Because of them basically gouging their asking price in half an old lady had come to see it same day and at first the husband was like WHOEVER GETS US THE MONEY FIRST but talking to us the wife was like HELL NO THAT OLD LADY COULD BARELY GET IN THE THING SHES JUST GONNA DRIVE IT DOWN TO FLORIDA AND LET IT ROT THIS IS OUR BABY THESE GIRLS NEED TO TAKE CARE OF IT AND THEY WILL and she ran interference through the weekend until our mechanic friend could go check it out.

You might ask “if you have a buttload of money why an RV” but in trying to get out of Alabama and all the way back to Oregon where I literally KNOW I can make it work out in life for us, for reasons that are a whole story unto themselves, the moving costs cross country alone for a uhaul would be expensive AF. Downpayments. Finding pet friendly apartments. And then whether it was portland or somewhere else we could get STUCK. And we’re tired of getting stuck. So we’re packing up our own FUCKING house that we FUCKING own outright that fucking NOBODY can take away from us and with NO payment obligations and FUCK THE SYSTEM.

So anyway this big fuckin honker the wife was like WHY ARE YOU SO COMFORTABLE DRIVING THIS to Shea, but Shea worked for both Uhaul and Hertz so like hauling bigassed trucks around was kinda her thing and she also worked horses so giant ass horse trailers, you name it. So she just got up in there like she belonged and next thing you know we’re doing 65 down the bendy ass mountain freeways of central alabama like we been doing it for years

PS when you are in a literal fucking house 65 feels like 90, I’m just letting you know that now.

We’re still at our house cuz we gotta get this properly under our own tag/insurance and get a tow for the car. It was funny though cuz experienced or not knowing it was OUR LITERAL HOUSE Shea started like GOTTA BE CAREFUL GOTTA BE CAUTIOUS GOTTA MAKE SURE NOBODY DUMB and it turned into GET OUT THE WAY FUCKERS I’LL WIN within the 120 mile haul back home. Like BITCH I’LL TAKE MY FOOT OFF THE GAS BUT I AINT GONNA TRY TO JACK RABBIT STOP THIS FUCKER SO YOU BETTER GET SOME GIDDYUP IF YOU GONNA MERGE YOU FRIGGIN HONDA

This beast only has 65K miles on it. And that sounds like a lot but for an RV that isnt S H I T. People are like, if you can find a used one under 100K you’re doing okay. Half of those miles are just taking it out for a jog because you’re supposed to drive it once every couple weeks to keep it from rusting out basically. They just safely drove it in like a tristateish area down here for a few years as you can see on the cabinet stickers and moved around to sports games and shit and had fun.

The bedroom is purple. The kitchen is blue and yellow. KJSDKJFSjk she was like “Fuck the 1990 floral wallpaper we updating, there’s extra paint in one of the storage bins if you wanna touch any of it up”

So that’s it. We’re gonna do some work with said mechanic friend on the AC and a few tweaky details and as said, gotta tag/insurance/tow but once we get that worked out, that’s it, that’s home starting in a few weeks.

We’re heading to Independence, Missouri first to touch base with my internet momma then swinging in Salt Lake City to meet old media friends like the folks at Arrowstorm and stopping to enjoy their stuff at Evermore Park before hitting Portland which, reasonably, I’ll guestimate we’ll be at like a week or two before Halloween but maybe we’ll make better time. If you’re en route to those destinations and wanna meet up, lemme know, we’re still gonna have fun on the way and try to record shit.

Portland is the city I know how to work to and from the bone. I can turn any quarter into at least a dollar there, quite literally; I know how to eat eight times a day for free if need be. I reasonably think we can stay WELLLLLLLL above the line of needing that kind of assistance but because Shea is very anxiety driven to know we outright have a promised home and have promised food if worst case scenarios happen really made her go, you know what, fuck it, sure, Portland, you loved Portland, the wages are good in Portland, let’s do Portland.

If we start with dry camping at locations with free plug ups even still paying for Shea’s car and insurance, once major gas costs GETTING there are done, we’ll be running about 500 a month, and again, that’s including insurance for both vehicles and paying off her car note. Depending on the lot we land at, 700-900 a month. I can float that on my casual residual income. Everything after that is profit. Everything after that is success. I refuse to let Shea be anything less than Okay, but most of all, weird and nonconformative as it is, everything after this is scales of success. Hell minus the car note we’d be under 600/mo on the pricy end. We got dis.

No more of my wife being convinced she needs to performatively pull loans on her livelihood and shelter for the illusion of a 3/2 middle class life with a picket fence and a job she hates in a place she hates that she doesn’t know how to get away from. Hell, if she ends up hating Oregon? WE CAN PICK UP OUR HOUSE AND MOVE.

QUEER CULTURE IS HAVING THE MILLENNIUM FALCON OF RVS RAINBOW PAINTED INTERNALLY TO HAUL ASS TO PORTLAND OREGON AND AINT SHIT YOU CAN DO TO STOP US, FUCKERS.

It’s literally parked in our yard right now awaiting our voyage.

You bet your ass we’re getting an aux cord and blaring classic rock on surround sound the whole goddamn way

Also gonna get a CB radio to roll with some of the better trucker herds out there. Trust me, solid investment for a multitude of reasons. And entertaining.

If you don’t know what Smokie In The Woods is on a CB radio, you don’t know the road.

It also comes with a lot of gadgets you usually have to buy, like converters for USB chargers in older vehicles and the cable antenna and an extra tent and hell they left two bikes on it like YALL WANT EM YOU CAN HAVE EM, SURE

So buying the RV, paying the friend for the loss of a work day, the necessary gas to get out there, and the tow all in all is gonna run us about 12,000 bucks total, which isn’t a bad deal for bringing your own house with you.

We already burned a few thousand of our settlement trying to fix this house before the bad news and/or upkeeping bills but now it’s time to burn it and walk. By the time we roll I’m expecting us to have about 4K over costs in the bank, which is... enough. It’s more of a nest egg than we’d have if we stayed here that’s for sure, covers emergencies on the way there and gives us a few months to get our shit together. Even the part-iest part time job out in Portland will float any overhead on bills much less if shea can fall in with all the media and digital work out there with her graphic design and art, we’re eyeing the portland saturday market to sell her stuff at in season too. SCREW THE SYSTEM YALL

#not spn #me #the road so far

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seanhowe · 5 years

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Against Woodstock

“Rock Imperialists” by Mark Kramer, Liberation News Service, 1969 NEW YORK (LNS) The list of stars who will show up at the Woodstock Rock Festival this August is mighty impressive—as fine as any ever. There's everyone: Joan Baez, the Who, Joe Cocker, Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, Ravi Shankar, Blood Sweat and Tears, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Richie Havens, Canned Heat, Arlo Guthrie,, Tim Hardin, Johnny Winter, the Band, Iron Butterfly, The Grateful Dead and the Incredible String Band, for example. The arrangements to help you spend three days in the wilds sound as impressive as the list of stars—free campgrounds, ample water and outhouses; free rice kitchen for the poor and hungry; catering by Nathan's of Coney Island craft booths which might just be bivouac head shoppes, and which might be craft booths. So the rock imperialists deliver the goods. When you want a banana, United Fruit sells a good banana. And when you want a rock festival, Woodstock Music and Art Fair, Inc., sells a good rock festival—at $7 a day. The Guatemalans who grew the bananas get to eat an occasional bruised model. And the street people, the denizens of the lower east side, of the Haight, let them eat free rice and maybe they'll hear the sounds wafting out past the gates. But they made the culture which the rich fops imitate. Walk down St. Marks Place in the East Village and dig the crowd on either side of the velvet rope which separates those with the bread ($10 a couple) to get into the Electric Circus from those who beg spare change to buy a knish. On the rich side, the same outfits as on the poor side, except ironed and cut from finer cloth—bell bottoms, groovy vests, mucho hair, svelte girls in granny glasses. On the poor side, it's hip...on the rich side, it's a shuck, it's an imitation of Hip. It's fancy boutique clothes cut to look like the old surplus clothes which the street people once wore out of poverty, thereby creating a style. For some, the dress constitutes a case of 'going native' for a night on the Bowery. For others it's simply high fashion. The impulse for kids to dress 'well' is plugged in nasty trend-setting magazines like "Seventeen" and supported by the huge cloth and garment companies, the cosmetics companies and the hygiene-freak companies. The sales job for fashion is easier than others—for the styles come complete with a built-in image. Marlboro has to spend millions to rope together its cancer-sticks and he-manhood. But the Fashion-Makers have it easy this year, because the clothes styles which they plug were once part of a genuine revolutionary and romantic lifestyle. So America's teenagers are exploited by big companies that hold 'lifestyle' out as bait. "BUY THIS AND YOU WILL BE..." You will be what? Hip? You'll own another piece of snappy clothing, you'll be able to crowd the poor girl down the block still further, you'll earn your ticket to daydream about running toward him through tall fields of hay, arms stretched toward the sun—the kind of daydream they push in ads for cunt deodorant. And the kind of daydream they push on album covers. “But (you say) album covers are great. I trip, and look at album covers, and…etc." But it ain't that way. Rock may have come from the Street people, along with styles that grew out of buying surplus clothing, and daydreams that grew out of mystic studies and sunshine state habits. And the communication between the performing artists and you may still bear the same free-you-up message. But in between you and the performer, there's billions of dollars that you're paying and (for the most part) he's not getting. Who is getting it? The huge companies that own the record empires. Here's the puzzle: the same companies that own the recording contracts and record studies which make 'liberated' music, also own government contracts and subsidiary companies which make electronic bombing equipment, spying equipment, death equipment which is used in Vietnam and in our other colonies. The companies don't care how they make money, as long as they make the money. If they can make it from anti-war youth culture by coming on hip, they'll do it. And if they can make it from killing Vietnamese and killing off thousands of years of Vietnamese culture with expensive weapons systems for the government, they'll do that too. For example, CBS owns Columbia records, Masterworks, Blue Horizon, Odyssey, Harmony, Date, Okeh and several other record companies. They have invested heavily in defense contracts as well, working especially in the areas of laser beams, radar, spy photography, underwater detection—the sorts of technological work which keeps up the arms race and makes fat profits. It's the same story with most of the other major record companies. Like true imperialists, they'll go wherever the market is, talk whatever language (be it Vietnamese or hip-ese) needs talking, sell whatever people will pay for, as long as they make a profit. Does this mean you shouldn't buy records? No, of course not. If you wanted to live in this country without supporting the death machine, you couldn't eat or turn on an electric light. What it means is that you should understand a few facts of life. When you sit down with a sandwich (made of food processed by big business) and when you take a bite of the sandwich and start listening to music of YOUR culture, peddled for the profit of THEIR culture, then dig it! That's the corner they've got you backed into. Supporting the very things you hate the most in order to get the few things you want. There's a revolutionary movement growing in this country to fight just that form of oppression. What has this got to do with Woodstock? You might go there and have a fine time, but just remember that someone is making a million on your fun, and it isn't the performers, many of whom come for little or nothing. We interviewed the promoters setting up the Woodstock Festival, at a press conference arranged by the mid-town publicity company they hired. The conference itself was a slick operation. It passed itself off as a consultation between "leaders of the rock community" and the underground press on how to have peaceful good times for everyone. They didn't need to consult with anyone. Way back in April they had hired a federal law enforcement official, Wes Pomeroy, whom they described to me as "a very progressive kind of cat." A very progressive kind of cat who had worked with Johnson on the Safe Streets' Act, and with Republican bigwigs in planning security for their '64 convention at the Cow Palace. That's who the investors ("leaders of the rock community”) consulted with when they wanted security for their investment, not the underground press people. Even though the press conference handout reads, "We have called a special meeting of the underground press and rock community leaders to discuss ways of developing safe and harmonious pop music festivals.” Mike Lang and Artie Kornfield and two other partners put up half-a-million bucks. They're expecting big returns from ticket sales, a cut of concession sales, and also from selling TV and movie rights. Artie used to head Columbia Records. He told me, “I’d dig my daughter to be able to eat too." What about the street people? Mike says "We're not turning our backs on these people—we've got to feed them.” And let them in? “Don't you feel you're exploiting hip culture for your own gain?” Artie said, "Much of us have the same goal, We want to be able to cut out—not take shit—and go live in the country," Except that for most, it is a dream, not a goal, as long as Artie collects from every freak who wants to hear his music. And except that now that so many people want to cut out, they might find it easier to get together and put a stop to the conditions they want to escape. What about the riot that happened at the LA rock festival, Artie? "We are them—when they attack us, they are attacking themselves. If you talk about an army, it's got a lot of different wings. We're just another wing.” Maybe Artie and Mike are fooling themselves and maybe not. But they have extracted from the movement those things which can make them some money—talent, excitement, revolutionary energy, identity with hip looks and talk. But they have missed the heart of the movement. The revolutionary energy of rock and of the movement is a response to oppression—it grew out of the blues, out of the poor white country music, out of the emancipated poverty of the street people and their drug scene, out of the anger about national leaders representing corporate interests, while killing people, anger about how students get lied to and treated in public schools. The movement is made by and sung by people who oppose exploitation, whether by war elsewhere, or by high prices, racism and low wages at home. The movement is not represented in any way by rich investors getting richer by the profits of rock festivals—even if the investors do look hip and talk hip and know hip people. By the way, if you do go to the. Woodstock festival (actually, the grounds are located in Wallkill, N.Y.), Wes Pomeroy has a staff of 400 security people working for him, in and out of costume. When he was asked about kids smoking dope there, he said, "We'll do nothing to protect them. There will be narcs there, same as everywhere—they're going to have to pay $7, too." photograph by Henry Diltz

#woodstock #liberation news service

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casualarsonist · 6 years

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Monster Hunter World review (PS4)

My first interaction with the Monster Hunter series was way back in 2000-and-something as I watched a mate of mine play Monster Hunter Tri briefly on his Nintendo Wii. I’m not going to lie - I wasn’t that impressed. Not that I watched for long enough to get more than the most brief impression about the game, as his girlfriend turned it off on him before he managed to save because there were ‘guests’, and the entire room uttered a collective gasp of disgust. In any case, while I didn’t feel motivated to buy, I was intrigued by the series’ rather unique premise, and was always tangentially aware of its existence and the zeitgeist surrounding it. So along came Monster Hunter World this year, and along with it came lashings of praise from every angle. Having no experience with the series, I had no context for the compliments it was getting, but I knew more or less immediately that at some point I was going to play this entry, and given the post-release hype, I had no doubt in my mind that I was going to enjoy it. And then I bought it on PS4...

The first thing that struck me as odd when I started the game was the ad for PSN membership that popped up when it tried to log me in online. After having subscribed for a month in order to play Titanfall 2, and then being robbed by sneaky recurring payments that I wasn’t being notified about for another 6 months after that, I refused to buy a PSN subscription ever again. So loading up a brand new game, and having it immediately stop itself to advertise Playstation subscriptions to me felt grotesque. Next came the first cutscene, which I enjoyed right up until the characters started talking and I realised that the lipsyncing hadn’t been localised, meaning that the game looked like a poorly-dubbed Japanese film. Then came the loading screens, and as I sat in front of my console for two minutes and thirty seconds waiting for the first level to load, the incredulity in me rose. And then I entered the opening hub level. And the game ran somewhere around 25 frames per second. And at that point I tried to get a refund, but it turns out that you can’t refund PS4 games after you’ve downloaded them, meaning they could be broken as shit and you’re stuck with the product anyway because fuck you. And I genuinely thought Monster Hunter World on the PS4 was broken, because it ran almost as bad as Mass Effect Andromeda - one of the worst game I’ve ever played. So, barely 10 minutes into my first time playing, I turned off the console in disgust and walked away. So after I researched Sony’s refund policy and discovered that it was utter dogshit, I realised that I was stuck with the game and I sat back down and gave it another go. And...well, it’s okay. Just okay.

I fully accept that this is my first foray into an established series with established mechanics. I hate it when games I enjoy dumb themselves down for a mainstream audience (*cough* Fallout *cough*), so I don’t criticise the game for taking some time to get used to. However, there are some real quality of life issues here that simply shouldn’t exist in this day and age.

First of all - it looks like shit. Not it terms of its design, but in terms of the quality of the visuals. Poor frame-rate aside, the graphics are heavily washed-out, which is a big disappointment given the lush forests and crystal clear waters of the first area. I don’t know whether the colour palette could be balanced better on PC, but there’s a flatness to everything on the PS4 that leaves the beautiful, evocative locales feeling drab and lifeless. This is purely a stylistic choice, and I cannot understand why they would go the trouble of crafting such a vivid landscape, only to broadcast it through what feels like a white filter. Turning the brightness all the way down helps, but there’s no reason why this should be a problem in the first place.

Secondly, Dark Souls and Bloodborn exist, and a number of copycat games like Nioh have proven that there’s no excuse for a game to be clunky in order to be difficult. Difficulty should exist in the gameplay balance, not in dated control systems, and this is a big stumbling block for Monster Hunter World. The larger monsters all have certain weak points that can be broken or severed in order to weaken them. The problem is that attacking these weakpoints is easier said than done when the lock-on system barely works, and the directional controls feel like the nine-point directional system of a PS1 game. Attacks cannot be stopped once they’ve started, meaning that you need to master your timing in order to be an effective combatant, but they also cannot be rotated once you’ve initiated them in a particular direction, so if pointing your character in the right direction is a chore, your attacks will often fall slightly to the left or right of where you intend for them to go. Coupled with the fact that the creatures move at speed, this means that finesse goes out the window and much of your initial combat experiences will involve getting as close to the target as possible simply so you can’t miss. Now don’t get me wrong - there is a sense of skill-building and personal improvement once you start to get used to this system, but it does feel extremely dated in a way that doesn’t inspire nostalgia. If a retro first-person-shooter had no mouse look, you’d be up in arms. So too does this feel like less of a design choice and more of a glaring failure to adapt to modern conveniences.

The last big issue is that the game isn’t marketed as a multiplayer game, instead being sold as a single player drop-in-drop-out experience. Which is true, to a point, yet every time you load it up it freezes to connect to the Playstation Network, and then advertises a PSN membership to you if you don’t already have one. Once you’re playing, the game will constantly remind you that other people are playing online, even going so far as to tell you who is joining your ‘session’ - a session that you aren’t in if you don’t have a PSN subscription. And to top it all off, you can’t simply select a mission and then expect it to start straight away: instead you have to wait while the game ‘prepares’ the mission as if you were in multiplayer lobby, even if you’re playing offline. This can take up to a minute or more, and makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. So even if the game detects that you have no PSN account it will still connect to the internet, then force you into either hosting or loading an online game, then tell you all of the people who are joining a session that you’re not playing in, and then put you in a mission lobby when you’re not waiting for anyone to join. It’s the cherry atop a cake baked ten years ago and marketed as a 2018 release. It's absurd. It’s as if the game was created by people who couldn’t fathom a world in which players wouldn’t play alone, and yet the game is, largely, played and sold as a single-player experience - just like all its predecessors. The greatest effect of having other people join in is that your experience bonus is split between you all instead of going solely to you, and that’s not a bonus, but a deficit.

These issues make me wonder how the game has come to be critically acclaimed at all, at least in terms of this particular version. I hear the PS4 Pro version can run at 1080p60, and I assume the PC version can as well, although I’ve heard there are some connectivity issues with the PC servers, but my immediate impressions of the standard PS4 version are near appalling. Spiderman runs flawlessly as you swing across the entire city of New York - I didn’t see a single frame drop in my entire playthrough, and yet the detailed but limited-scope environs of Monster Hunter World bring the console to its knees. This, more than anything, speaks to the decline of the console’s relevance as modern graphics capabilities increase. One of the important selling points of the consoles was the fact that you could count on them to run stably, even if their games were technologically inferior to their PC counterparts. If they look worse AND play worse, then what’s the point of owning a console at all? If you have to upgrade to a mid-generation PS Pro now every few years just to be able to ensure your games are going to work, then why not just buy a new graphics card for your PC for the same price, not have to subscribe to the fucking scam that is the Playstation Network, AND have a better quality experience while you do it? Aside from the exclusives, the Playstation 4 is redundant, in my opinion. I can’t think of a single reason to invest in the next console generation, because you know that whatever machine you buy is just going to be obsolete in a few years’ time anyway.

I’m sure that, all the gameplay quibbles aside, Monster Hunter World is perfectly fine to play on a more powerful machine, but I still cannot see why it has garnered such praise. It’s still a niche game, and it’s okay for what it is, but it’s not at all the force to be reckoned with the reviews make it sound like. It’s stuck in the past mechanically, and has the bare minimum of localisation, and while it is fun after you pass a certain teething point, I find that the ultimate experience is defined not what it is, but what it is not. My rating here is for the PS4 version, so take that as you will, but as it is, the PS Store really needs a proper refund policy.

6/10

#monster hunter world #ps4 #capcom #video game #review #nintendo #action #rpg #fighting

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oldnintendonerd · 6 years

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Just a little bit... closer...

We are right on the cusp of yard sale season folks. It’s so close. But it isn’t here yet. My area typically has about 100 yard sales around town in the Yard Sale Treasure Map app on any given weekend. I have seen it over 200 in peak season. However the listings are still only in the 20′s so far, and nothing worth stopping at. Still looking at mostly thrift store stuff here.

Let’s get into it.

First up is probably the best item. It’s not an amazing deal that I got for $2 at a yard sale or a thrift store, but I did get it from an acquaintance on Instagram. He posted that he got several N64 games, I think about a dozen, for $25. So he got them for about $2 each, and said that a few were doubles, would anyone like them? I laid claim to Super Mario 64, as that has been a long sought after piece to my collection.

Super Mario 64 - Found 2018.03.07 on Instagram

It arrived on the 15th of March. Very exciting. I never had this one in my collection, ever. Not when the 64 was the main machine to have, and not even later after the GameCube came out, or even when the Wii came out. Back when I probably could have picked it up in a bin at GameStop for $5.

But it is in the collection now. He gave me a good deal, he only made about $8 on it, because he charged me $10 plus shipping, so it came to $13. This game is still going for $30 pretty much everywhere. He could have asked for upwards of $20 and still been well below what I would have paid on eBay, were I to get it there. So enormous thanks and a huge shout out to @cartcollectoranonymous for cutting me a really good deal. I love it when people get stuff for cheap, and can pass that savings on to fellow collectors. I hope I can return the favor some time. Came out to be about 60% off of retail in the end.

I had only played this on demo kisoks back in the day, I am familiar with the very first level, the Bob-omb world. But that is about the extent of it. The N64 I bought back then was either not packaged with a game, or came with Mario Kart 64. I think it was gameless though, because the box I have for my N64 does not indicate that it came with any games. I’m fairly certain I bought the 64 by itself, and then bought Mario Kart 64 as my first game. There was a time when we had 4 controllers, and we could play MK64 with two of our friends. Good times. I’m not 100% sure what happened to my yellow and red controllers, but all I have left is a gray and a green. If more hunting turns up some others I’ll gladly hang onto them for some more 4 player action again at some point.

Next up is another Goodwill find, nothing astounding, but not a bad find for $0.99.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater - Playstation - Found at Goodwill 2018.03.13

It’s in good shape, manual is crispy, case in tact. It seems to play fine. Was never much of a fan of these games, but it’s been dry, and to find a game lately that’s not Madden Something, <insert sports league acronym here> Something, or Tiger Woods something is a feat in and of itself. It was a buck. So I grabbed it. Valued at $9.84 on Pricecharting. Not bad.

There have been slim pickins lately. I have gotten somewhat crazy in my hunts, looking for possible screw ups or even miss-priced games at places like Half Price Books. Knowing full well they charge you full or even over eBay prices there, but thought maybe I’ll get lucky and spot a game someone used the wrong price on or something.

No such luck. Hey at least it was worth a few laughs.

Behold. The ridiculous price gouging of Half Priced Books (Over Priced Everything Else).

$24.99 for a $20 game on eBay. I’ll admit, I got this one for about $16 shipped a year ago, and it has gone up some. But even so, nice one HPB, have fun babysitting that one on your shelf for all of eternity.

Wouldn’t mind this one in the collection, and it was right at or maybe a COUPLE bucks below eBay, but, as you can see above with Mario 64, I’m looking for real deals, like 60% off retail, so if this was $6, it might have been bought.

None of these are “half price”. Mario Galaxy at $19.99, I can buy it now on eBay right now for $12. This is just getting greedy. The thing that irks me the most is, you know they gave someone $2 or less for this in trade.

In their defense, it is called “Half Price Books” not “Half Price Games”. They should rename the stores to “Half Price the shit no one wants, but full price on everything cool.” Even their CDs are $5, I can buy brand new copies of CDs, shrink wrapped and all, for $5.49, I saw several at a department store today in fact. Why would I buy used CDs for $5? Thrift stores have them for $0.99. Thats where I buy my music.

So we just reminded ourselves why Half Price Books is a terrible place to game hunt. I didn’t snap pics of it, but they had Mario Sunshine in a glass case at $40.00.

It is just tragic the state that the video game market has gotten to. This is 12 years after the Wii was released in 2006, and 17 years after the GameCube was released in 2001. Mario games are still going for near what they were brand new. I’d say Super Mario Bros. 3 was the biggest Mario release on the NES, as is Mario Galaxy 2 on the Wii. If I looked for Super Mario Bros. 3 twelve years after the NES was released in 1985, I’d be standing in an EB in 1997. In the corner, in a huge bin, with no order or organization whatsoever you’d find a pile of NES games. The highest price would probably have been $5, and I guarantee Mario 3, even being the great game it is, due to its overwhelming number of trade ins, would probably have been $2 to MAYBE $4. Account for inflation and you might be looking at $6. $6 at the most. Six dollars. Six. Not TWENTY, or fucking FORTY. Realistically... SIX. For a game that is 12 years old. Which might I remind you was considered ancient at the time. People buying their N64 carts looking at people rummaging through the NES bin were just feeling pity for them.

“Man look at that guy buying NES games”

“Yeah dude, guess he can’t afford a current console, like this N64.”

“Sucks to be him”

No, sucks to be you now, he has a huge pile of valuable 30+ year old games he bought in the bargain bin in 1997, and now they are worth 3 to 10 times what he paid or better. Heh.

But I must digress finally, this Blog has become a place for me to air my grievances about not finding anything good for cheap enough anymore. Hopefully that will turn around with the upcoming Yard Sale season.

*rubs hands together diabolically*

Finally, we have the last find of this post, again nothing stellar, I haven’t really found anything earth shattering yet, and the biggest find recently was probably Grandia II.

A triple find of 007 games on the Playstation. Found on 2018.04.06 at Goodwill.

So we have Racing (Collector’s Edition), Tomorrow Never Dies (Collector’s Edition), and The World is not Enough. Racing is unfortunately missing the cover in sleeve / manual, so Pricecharting has that Disc Only at $3.58. I would have liked to have at least had those two Collector’s Edition’s complete, but it was not meant to be. Honestly the difference in value is like $1 anyway. Tomorrow Never Dies is complete and in decent shape, valued at $5.13. The World is not Enough is disc only, valued at $4.25. Each were $0.99. So $3.19 spent there all said and done and total value comes in at $12.96. Not bad. Not great, I would have liked to have had them all complete, but they all work. I may sell them as a set if it comes to that, could make $7 or $8.

Official business, we had $74.71 remaining at the end of the last post. We spent $13 on Super Mario 64 (squeeeeeeeeeeee!), taking us down to $61.71. Then it was Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater at $1.06, leaving us with $60.65, and the $3.19 from the 007 trifecta drops us to $57.46 remaining.

So $57.46 game hunting money left in the bank. I will be selling a few things soon to bolster the money for the upcoming Yard Sale season. I have those two sealed Wii games still, Wii Fit Plus and Wii Play. As well as a Dragonball game. I’ll fill you in on how that goes once everything sells.

Lets do this!

2018.04.19

#nintendo #playstation #n64 #supermario64 #supermario #retrogaming #007 #worldisnotenough #007racing #jamesbond #tomorrowneverdies #psx

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thesoulpatch-blog1 · 7 years

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Disaster

I’ve been reading a lot about the events taking place on the Gulf Coast. Category 4 Hurricane Harvey has left Houston and surrounding areas completely submerged. The flooded area in Texas is the size of Lake Michigan. That was something I heard a few days ago, so it’s most likely larger now, because the rain has not stopped. The storm’s steering currents died down once it made landfall, and thus it has no directional guidance. It is essentially spinning like a top, wobbling around and continuing to pound the Texas and Louisiana coastlines. In short, it’s really shitty down there right now.

Today I read about a Houston Best Buy that was under fire for charging $42.96 for a 24 pack of Dasani water just before the storm hit. Best Buy claims it was an honest mistake, and that employees priced the cases by tallying up 24 individually priced bottles of water, but that’s beside the point. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has apparently received more than 500 complaints in regard to price gouging before and after Harvey hit. Hotels, food, gasoline, and other necessities were being overpriced for the sake of making a few extra bucks on every poor sap who was stocking up their emergency provisions. Price gouging in the face of disaster is illegal in Texas, and the AG claims he will be pursuing these cases against the perpetrators to honor that law.

According to the Gizmodo article I read, Paxton was on air with a CNBC host who started an interesting conversation. The host acknowledged the immorality of price gouging in times of turmoil, but questioned the Texas AG on whether this law should really be enforced. His point was basically this rhetorical question: Can’t people charge whatever they want for goods and services in a capitalist market, regardless of morality?

Of course, everyone’s heart strings are being tugged by these photos of destruction and stories like a mother drowning while keeping her toddler afloat until help arrived, or the police officers killed on duty when the storm hit. Our immediate, thoughtless reaction to such a question as the CNBC host asked in a time like this is something like: “Fuck you, you can’t rip off people who could be at risk of death.” In fact, the last line of this particular article reads: “Nothing, not even the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, should apparently get in the way of making a buck.” The tone of that line is clearly facetious. But people, this is capitalism. This is our economic system. This is the backbone of all the luxuries our nation is fortunate enough to afford. This is oppression. This is the few taking advantage of the many. This is normal. It’s true; apparently, not even the lives of hundreds of thousands of people should get in the way of making a quick buck. But that is certainly not specific to the disaster in Texas.

We don’t want to acknowledge this type of thinking as rational, but the CNBC host is probably just trying to stay consistent. Reality is that in our capitalist system, you do in fact have every right to charge whatever you want for whatever you’re selling for whatever reason. Consider the price of Epipens. Mylan, the drug company that owns the rights to the Epipen, has inexplicably increased the price to $609 from $94 when Mylan acquired the rights in 2007. An Epipen is used to fight severe allergic reactions, usually in children, and is often used in a literal matter of life and death. How is someone paying $609 for their child to survive a bee sting any different than paying $43 for a case of water when disaster is about to strike? The only difference I see is about $560.

Everybody is so butthurt (I only use the term because it so accurately describes the childlike whininess that everyone indulges in) about every little tiny thing they can find that they don’t like. Doesn’t matter if you’re the Neo-Nazi or the radical leftist or anywhere in between, you’re butthurt about something someone else is doing. If you’re a moral, consistent thinker, you should be able to take a step back and realize that the problem isn’t Best Buy overcharging for water. It’s that we live in a society driven and controlled by entities with the power to rip you off. It’s naïve to believe they don’t. It’s happening to you every time you make or spend a dollar. You’re getting ripped off, because that’s what keeps capitalism afloat. You are not of the 1%, and thus, you are the cow, not the farmer. Don’t get angry at the companies, or the politicians, or whatever Donald Trump is. Be angry at the system, and be angry at yourself for participating so voluntarily.

I could dive into a long convoluted explanation, citing hundreds of examples just like the Epipen, but I encourage you to learn these things for yourself. Become angry at the whole evil that is our economic system. It’s not the welfare bums’ fault. It’s not Best Buy’s fault. It’s not immigrants. It’s not either political party. It’s you. It’s all of us, but as far as any individual should be concerned, it’s their own damn fault for participating in a destructive society while all the information to be aware of that is readily available. That’s how we do away with finger-pointing and actually progress as a society.

To hopefully drive home just how far your head may be up America’s luxurious ass, have you any clue about the disasters happening in India and Mumbai? There’s very little coverage. It is hurricane season here, but it’s monsoon season over there, and our pansy-ass tropical storms ain’t got shit on that. Since monsoon season began in June, over 1,000 people have been killed by massive flooding. Nearly 40 million people reside in the affected areas. In terms of just population and number of people affected, that’s like if our Harvey flooding had completely engulfed all of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Geographically this is impossible, but my point is that Southeast Asia is dealing with way more people displaced by floodwater, and 1,000 dead compared to our current tally of 20 deaths due to Harvey. It’s like a nonstop tropical storm that goes on for three and a half months over there, and they’re not even through one whole week in Texas. In short, it’s way shittier in Mumbai than in Houston right now. And, sidebar, as the climate continues to change, these storms will get worse and more frequent all over the world, so like... Be concerned about that as well.

If you’re actually a compassionate person who cares about people affected by hurricane Harvey, you have to care about both of these disasters. But what I believe is that as Americans, we’ve been so desensitized to suffering and oppression and unfortunate circumstances that we don’t actually give a shit about either disaster. We might send out our obligatory tweet, or send some money to the relief fund, but then it’s right back to living lifestyles which perpetuate situations like the one where Best Buy rips off horrified people over a case of water. You know damn well that when the next Xbox comes out, you’re charging it to your Best Buy credit card because new video games on a payment plan are way more fun than advocating social justice for the afflicted. And those are the types of choices you as an individual, and therefore, we as a society make. And all of that starts with you. Giving a shit is changing yourself. Giving a shit is denouncing anything and everything that is hurting so many millions of people around the globe. Giving a shit in our world is actually pretty fucking hard.

In short, everything is bullshit that usually smells and tastes fine, but when it doesn’t, we just complain about it and keep eating the bullshit until it feels better. Stop eating the bullshit. Stop being a capitalist. Stop defining as an American, or white, or liberal, or vegan, or anything other than just your average human. Start being the divine, self-aware being that you exist to be. Please, please, please, stop eating the bullshit. I know it doesn’t taste as good as you say it does.

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davewakeman · 5 years

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3 Strategic Reasons Major League Baseball's Attendance Is Free Falling...

Let’s get right to the point here:

No one outside of the teams themselves knows exactly how bad MLB’s attendance really is because the reported numbers are all built around tickets distributed and not tickets used.

Many of the examples that are thrown out in these lists of think pieces about what’s up with attendance are largely tactical and might act like a dose of sugar to an 8-year-old.

As someone that works with companies all over the globe, I look at Major League Baseball and I don’t see a tactical problem…I see a strategic problem and one that hasn’t been framed properly to this point.

In my view, the challenges that MLB is dealing with comes down to 3 things:

Value proposition:

Let me ask you a question: what is the value proposition of going to a Major League Baseball game at this point?

No one really knows.

Are you purist that is going for the love of the game?

Are you a family, enjoying a night at the ballpark?

Are you a business, entertaining clients?

All of these things might happen, but the reality of the situation is that no one really knows the point of view of Major League Baseball for why you should attend a game.

Looking at this challenge through the lens of the larger business community, we need to recognize that most teams and leagues don’t do a very good job of initiating a story about why someone should be a fan of the game or attend a game in person.

This is partly due to the fact that most of the teams have standardized their websites and content under the idea of making things uniform and simpler to create…with the unintended consequence being that, unfortunately, a lot of the brand personality has been squeezed out of the leagues and teams.

Outside of this reason though, the more important issue is that if the value proposition of what you are selling isn’t present from the first image on the landing page, you are likely costing yourself tons of money because as consumers shift more of their recreation dollars to experiences, you aren’t just competing against the in-home experience, you are also so competing against things like concerts, arts, festivals, road trips, and more.

Check out Disney World’s website:

Clean homepage with almost everything dedicated to highlighting the value of the Disney experience

Video

Strong language about the experience and limited time, to create urgency

Images of people having fun and some of the things you’ll see

I mean, I’m not going to Disney. But it looks fun!

Contrast that with the landing page of the Washington Nationals and what do you see:

Cluttered home page with nothing specific to draw your attention towards a game

Scrolling headlines that are likely interesting if you are a Nats’ fan, but if you aren’t…

A clear call-to-action about “Vote Daily! Vote Nats!” that would likely be better positioned to sell the in-stadium experience or tickets.

Best practices around the world of marketing and sales tell you three things:

Your message should be clear.

Your message should be compelling.

Your message should be consistent.

A critical eye on the website of most MLB teams would show that it varies whether or not teams are using a pop-up to alert visitors to a special game, series, or offer.

Within those that offer, there is also a wide variation of the pop-ups being good or bad.

This is hard to explain in a blog post, but if it is me…I’m starting out with 3 things to drive home the value of the in-game Major League Baseball experience:

1. Start by laying out a clear value proposition: The team side needs to be all about winning. To quote Al Davis: “Just win baby!” But on the business side and the fan experience side, my goal is to be to provide a world-class entertainment experience. Then I benchmark myself against what other experiential businesses are doing.

If I am selling premium seating and suites, I’m not looking at what other teams are doing in sports…I’m going beyond that to look at what the Four Seasons is doing.

When I’m looking at the presentation of my game, I’m looking at what Disney is doing, in their parks, on their cruises, and all the other places they entertain.

This goes on and on because every aspect of the experience matters and people’s expectations are growing as they are exposed to what experiences are like in other towns, countries, and areas.

2. Paint a compelling picture of why going to a game matters:

I did a keynote speech in the UK in 2017 that focused on the community and the connection of the live experience.

I didn’t do this for any other reason except for I’d seen a lot of reports and data that stated pretty emphatically that people want, yearn for a community and connection to the world around them.

Contrast that information with the way that is often presented when we are selling sports.

One isn’t reflected in the other.

If it is me, I’m beating people over the head with the excitement of the in-game experience:

I’m showing fans jumping up and down with joy at an exciting play.

I’m highlighting the goofy dancing and antics of fans during breaks.

I’m pointing people to see the ways our guests interact with each other in the concourses.

To put it another way, I’m putting everything out there like you have the chance to be at the best party in town 81 days a year.

To me the challenge looks like keeping demand up at a nightclub when you have 365 nights a year to get people to come to your party.

3. I’m going to deliver this message consistently:

While there may be some variation to the specific message, I’m going to be going crazy with the repetition that you need to come out and see the Orioles this weekend because the Royals are here for their only weekend series of the year and we are going to be throwing Baltimore’s best party all weekend long…and, best of all, it is family friendly.

Every message you get from me is going to be you are getting world-class entertainment that you can’t get anywhere else…best of all, bring the entire family.

…best of all, bring a client or prospect and share a one-of-its-kind experience.

On and on and on…

Customer Focus:

I’m pretty certain that if you just spent a little time going through the value proposition and really digging into how you could amp that thing up, you’d get a long way down to the point of solving many of the issues at the heart of baseball. Because out of understanding the value proposition you are likely to see that you aren’t really doing a good job delivering for your customers and you aren’t marketing very well.

Back to the customer.

There are 2 points here:

Who is MLB’s customer today?

What does their customer value?

First, does anyone really know who Major League Baseball is targeting as a customer today?

I certainly can’t tell.

Is your customer a high-end professional taking family or clients?

If so, you may be priced things the right way, but your stadium isn’t really built to encourage those fans to attend because if that was the case, you’d likely need to cut the size of your stadium from 40,000 to 4,000.

Is your customer the discount shopper?

Great!

You’ve now taught your market that if they stay away long enough, they’ll eventually get a better deal.

Is it someone else?

Who knows?!

The other point is that what do these customers value?

Without understanding your customer, you can have no idea what is valuable to your customer.

Worse even, how often are executives and marketers and sales folks just chatting with their customers, understanding what they like and don’t like, what they find valuable, etc.?

If I were to ask you the question in a workshop, I can guarantee everyone’s hand would go up.

I’m also betting that a lot of people are thinking that they do enough…and my challenge would be to do more.

Then there is the likely majority of people that aren’t really doing this at all and need to start ASAP.

The general idea being, MLB has a customer problem and it is that they don’t know who their customers are.

As far as I can tell the majority of their customers are TV partners, business sponsors, and brokers.

But if you want to get people back in the ballpark, start with your most valuable partners and ask these 2 questions:

What is the value that you receive from working with us?

What do you wish we could do better?

From there, let’s go to people you want to come to the ballpark:

Families

Young adults

Business folks

Other

Ask them what they are doing now. Why are they doing it? Why aren’t they going out to a game? What would they like to do more of?

And, on and on.

You want to understand what people find valuable.

What will cause them to come out to your venue?

What they are doing currently?

This isn’t rocket science though maybe it feels like it sometimes.

But the secret to generating demand is:

Understanding your market

Understanding their needs

Designing something that fills those needs based on your knowledge of your product and your customers.

Marketing!

Everyone knows how to market…I get it!

At least that is what most people think.

I’d argue most of you are wrong.

I go between two definitions of marketing:

Marketing is about selling shit! And, making boatloads of money! (Credit this one to Mark Ritson.)

Marketing is about creating discomfort. The discomfort of knowing that you could have something better if you’d only take action: buy it, vote for it, do it…you get the point.

I believe they are pretty similar, but too many people roll out the garbage about social purpose and brand identity and all these other things that really mean that people don’t know how to sell something or get someone to take action.

My perception of the situation is that there are 3 big marketing challenges facing MLB:

For a long time, MLB’s partners have done a great job of promoting the game, the players, and the story of baseball that the chops to market holistically just aren’t there. Look at the NHL’s decision to hire from a background outside of sports and how that has improved their marketing dramatically in a year or so.

Marketing and advertising are looked at as cost centers and boxes to check, not profit centers.

The art of storytelling has been lost.

How do you solve those 3 challenges?

First, you need to get some new life ideas into the marketing rotation.

Having the opportunity to do things across industries, I get to see the best and worst of marketing from all over the place.

Here are 3 ways to dramatically improve the marketing of baseball:

Expand the types of advertising and marketing that you are doing. I’ve used Alan Weiss’s concept of Marketing Gravity as a jumping off point of my own marketing and he lists 24-26 ways to promote yourself. I also keep a list in my folder with 125+ different ways to create content. So baseball needs to get out of the same old, same old emphasis and be creative in sharing its message.

Do better with your email marketing: email marketing for MLB is bad! Fix it. People buy from emails ask Kirk Bentley. He works with nonprofits, but I’m telling you his advice works…

Be consistent in telling the story of the game and link it to the emotional: nostalgia, experience, and community: emotions get people to act, period. Advertising and marketing is about striking an emotional chord with your target audience to get them to take action in a way that you need them to. It might be a decision ladder like I need you to go to the site, buy tickets, come to the game, repeat. Whatever it is, tell your story…over and over with an emphasis on what is going to create emotional reactions in people and get them to take action.

These things aren’t happening today. And, they are limiting the impact on what MLB is able to do from a marketing perspective.

I’ve done nothing here to cover other important parts of the issues confronting Major League Baseball like scheduling, pricing, and more.

In truth, if you knew your customers or were more in touch with the people that you need to come into the ballpark, some of these issues would be resolved during the designing an experience for your customer phase.

But this is my take on MLB’s attendance challenge from the POV of a strategist.

What say you?

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3 Strategic Reasons Major League Baseball’s Attendance Is Free Falling… was originally published on Wakeman Consulting Group

#advertising #attendance #branding #customer experience #customer focus #major league baseball #marketing #NHL #selling #strategy #ticket sales

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drtanstravels · 4 years

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Note: This post was written over the course of many months, beginning on Friday, May 3, 2019. To document as accurately as possible the entire excruciating process, I just kept adding more and more to it as events unfolded. I was initially going to cover both our experiences with buying and selling an apartment in Singapore, however, as we encountered seemingly perpetual red tape, endless delays, and the process as a whole dragged on, this piece got painfully long so I decided to edit into two separate parts, thus far resulting in this still rather lengthy first chapter solely about selling our apartment. Enjoy.

We decided quite a while ago to buy a new apartment and, despite how long it has taken, we initially thought it would be a lengthier process, because the plan was to also keep our current place and rent it out. If we sell our current apartment, we achieve our goals about two years earlier and don’t have to deal with the stress that coincides with being landlords, however, that doesn’t free us of the burden of dealing with real estate agents. The bulk of these people in Singapore are just awful, plain and simple. Okay, we initially encountered a couple while selling that weren’t too bad and the pair that ultimately got the job done were fantastic. I have previously written about what we went through to simply rent an apartment in New York City, but selling one and buying another in Singapore isn’t a whole lot of fun, either. So, what makes dealing with the bulk of Singaporean real estate agents so bad? Well, there are the obvious lies and deception that come hand-in-hand with making major secondhand purchases, but it’s usually used car dealers who get the bad rap, however, as you keep reading, particularly when I’ve finished writing the next chapter about buying an apartment, you’ll learn that the word “room” can mean almost anything to a Singaporean estate agent. Then there are the endless personal questions and comments that these awkward, giggling, little socially-stunted people make that have absolutely nothing to do with them or the process of buying or selling a house. Add to this them ignoring all regular communal time constraints when calling or messaging you, and you’ll be pulling your hair out within days.

Anna initially put our house on the market on Tuesday, April 23, 2019 and I was originally going to begin writing this piece when the entire process was completed, but in under two weeks I had accrued so many weird anecdotes and tidbits that I felt I was going to forget some nugget of gold that had occured during this entire course of action. Instead, I compiled the stories that took place as they happened instead of just putting them into the notes on my phone, until this entire debacle was completed. As you will find out, we painfully tolerated some real estate agents when we were looking at apartments to buy, which was almost immediately after we had put our place on the market. However, the only way these people can get any worse is when you have something of which they know they can make a nice little commission, the standard market rate in Singapore being 2%. When Anna first listed our place for sale she used my phone number as the main point of contact. Now, here I sit, writing this portion over two weeks later on Friday, May 10, 2019 and I have kept my phone on silent the entire time due to the constant calls and messages from real estate agents that were late to the party, yet still want a piece of the action. Here’s an example of one I received yesterday:

So much to decipher there; is his or her name Adnic? Anna told me that PN stands for PropNex, “Singapore’s largest listed real estate agency,” but why would I want this person coming over on a Saturday morning when each entire week spent dealing with these people leads to a big Friday night being required in order to de-stress and unwind? And who the hell is this Angie to whom they wish to speak? Anyway, Anna had dinner with some of her family on the Wednesday, the day after listing the property, and her auntie has bought and sold many apartments in Singapore, as well as overseas, so she gave Anna some advice and also listed our place in Singapore’s national daily newspaper, The Straits Times. Needless to say my phone blew up the next day and these people are like the hybrid of a vulture and a leech. My day consisted of just constant calls and messages, the calls mostly impossible to understand speed-mumbling and the messages indecipherable and full of typos, the example above being par for the course. Some would call four or five times in a row, hoping to get an answer, others would send a followup message just minutes after their initial message just to see if I had received it, because they still hadn’t heard back from me yet. In fact, one of them even sent me a bunch of articles about himself, some of them in Mandarin and from almost four years prior:

His mother definitely has this on the fridge

You know he has this framed somewhere

Anna was home when the phone first started ringing and it was her suggestion that I should ignore the calls and just respond to messages, which suited me fine. Still, real estate agents here want exclusive rights to your apartment, meaning that they can be the only person to market it, but we didn’t want that so Anna and myself had to devise a standard response to each of these messages that I was receiving in order to find the agents that were at least attempting to be legit. This is what Anna came up with and saved it in the notes in my phone so I just had to copy and paste the the top portion as a reply to each message:

Hi, in order for us to authorise you as our agent;

Please advise if you are an exclusive agent or can do open market, and

What is your lowest commission rate?

In the interest of convenience, please continue to communicate via message/WhatsApp.

(If they say non-exclusive and can offer a rate in writing of 2% or less, we can send them the pics and unit no.

Asking price $XXX,XXX)

I was copying and pasting this reply so frequently that I made the mistake of copying the entire thing, including the section in brackets, and sending it to a couple of agents before realising my mistake and quickly deleting it. If we received the answer from an agent as outlined in the underlined section that was intended for my eyes only, they would then receive the following message:

Thanks for your interest, we will be free to let you view our apartment and take photos on Tuesday or Thursday, 1-5pm. Please SMS to confirm viewing.

It was all getting a bit much and we would need to clean up before people viewed our apartment the following week so I went out shopping to get some of the supplies we would need. While I was out I received a phone call and figured it would just be Anna so I answered without looking. It turned out to be one of the vulture-leeches, he was in the area and wanted to speak to us personally. I told him I would be home in 30 minutes and he agreed to meet me at our place for what I assumed was an opportunity to have a look through the apartment and get some pictures early. Nope, he just wanted to give me his spiel on letting him have exclusive rights to the apartment, however, he did raise some good points. I let him know that Anna is the main breadwinner and decision maker in this process so it would be best if he spoke to her, but he’d need to wait until she returned home from work. He hung out alone at the nearby shopping mall until Anna was home and then went through his exclusivity speech again to Anna, pointing out that open market sale wasn’t an option for him, he only does exclusive sales. We said we would talk over his offer, which had its pros and cons, and then get back to him, but after discussing it we decided against his offer of exclusivity. He messaged me the following night, Friday, to ask if we had talked about it, and this was where I learnt two valuable lessons about him and most other real estate agents trying to sell properties:

He was full of shit.

He truly couldn’t care less what time he contacted me.

Despite previously saying that he only does exclusive sales, he had no problem with trying to sell on the open market when he realised we wouldn’t use him otherwise. Also, he would continue to hassle me the entire weekend, going as far as messaging me at 11:00pm on Sunday night! Here are some of the highlights of what I continued to receive over the course of the weekend, check out the times of some of them:

Desperation is a stinky cologne! I wouldn’t even message my own parents that late on a Sunday night, and you can see that there is a deleted message toward the end, because this guy was pissing me off so badly that I initially responded a little less diplomatically so Anna ultimately wrote that final reply. Still, when someone tries to point out that you don’t appreciate being contacted on that day or at that time, it takes a special kind of stupid to reply to the message. On a later occasion he texted me at 3:30am, beginning his message with an apology for contacting me at that time, but he was worried he’d forget what he wanted to ask me if he waited. Just write it down and inquire later in our agreed upon timeframe!

Monday was just as stressful, constantly dealing with real estate agents’ phone calls and messages, as well as cleaning up the place, trying to rearrange the clutter. I also cooked dinner that night and accidentally knocked a bottle of olive oil off our extremely small bench, smashing it on the ground and covering the floor with oil and shards of glass. To make matters worse, we had run out of floor cleaner so after I finished picking up as much broken glass as I could find without slipping over, I had to find a place that sold floor cleaner at 9:30pm and mop the house, putting me in a rather bad mood that ultimately scared the dog.

Tuesday was finally here and I started getting our place into the best shape I could quite early. Nobody was supposed to arrive until 1:00pm, however, the first agent showed up at 12:30pm and complained about why I hadn’t finished cleaning and that I wasn’t ready for him. I politely reminded him that I wasn’t expecting anyone for at least another 30 minutes, but he just told me he could give me tips on tidying and then started to unplug all of our devices and rearrange our furniture until I put a stop to that. He said our apartment needed to look “less cluttered, less lived in,” so I then passive-aggressively explained to him that, unfortunately for him, we still do live in it and the reason we are selling is that, although we love our current apartment, we have just outgrown it and the place simply isn’t big enough, there isn’t space for everything, but we’ll need to continue to live there until it is sold and achieving that is his role in the whole situation. It’s a nice apartment at a decent price in a highly-sought after part of town, if he can’t sell it, maybe he should try another line of work. Anyway, he spent the next hour filming our property and taking photos, not letting me in the same room as him and not allowing any of the agents that came at the correct time to enter the apartment, instead forcing them to stand in the stairwell in the heat. He even whined that out house is too dark and I need to find a way to make it lighter, especially the bedroom. Yes, that’s because we sleep in there, not use it as a photo-booth, and it’s kind of ironic that he described the place as “bright” in his video. He was an obnoxious douche and was more than a little liberal with the truth, but the video he put together (which is no longer available) wasn’t too bad and if he one day allows me to teach him pronunciation, grammar, and sentence structure, I may just take some of his decluttering tips.

Many more real estate agents arrived over the course of the day, most of them polite, some quite critical, and pretty much all of them trying to make the same jokes and starting the same conversations; “How’s the weather up there?” and, “Have you eaten?” were all questions I had to answer multiple times, as was making up excuses for where Anna was and that’s where I made my biggest faux pas. The agents always try to get personal information out of you, especially about income, which is none of their business when we’re using them to sell our apartment. There was no problem with me telling any agents that I’m a freelance writer, but Anna didn’t want any of them knowing what she does for a living, because they might try to lowball us on our place if they knew she was a surgeon. The first time an agent asked where she worked, I kind of panicked, leading to this exchange:

Agent: “So, where is your wife?” Me: “At work.” Agent: “Oh, where does she work?” Me: “Near the hospital.” Agent: “Oh, what does she do, is she a nurse? A doctor?” Me (kind of panicking): “Canteen.”

It didn’t help that Anna used to do pole dancing for exercise a few years ago and we still have the pole in our house. “So, is your wife a dancer, too?” she asked in a very judging manner. Yes, now this particular real estate agent thinks that I’m married to a stripper that also needs to work in a hospital canteen during the day to make ends meet. Another agent asked if the pole was to hold the ceiling up and could it be removed. God, some of them are dumb, we live on the third floor of a four-storey building, I’d be equally worried for the people that live above us if that were the case!

It’s now the first week of June, 2019 and we’ve had some agents bring people to check out our apartment. We’ve had around 10 different potential buyers look through, but it only seems to be the same two or three real estate agents out of all of the ones marketing it that are getting the people in. Our apartment clearly has an industrial design, however, one of the first agents who showed people through described it as “countrysides look.” Firstly, I don’t think the word ‘countryside’ can be pluralised and secondly, a countryside design would be the complete opposite of industrial. When I hear “countryside” I picture lace curtains, doilies, vases of flowers, floorboards, that type of thing, not exposed bricks and beams to go with the mostly cement floor. He also told the people that we had vinyl flooring in the living room when that portion is clearly marble, one of the only remaining original features of the entire apartment from before we renovated it when we first purchased the place seven years ago. Was he even trying? The agent who made the video of our house, a film that was apparently based on a true story, contacted me on Friday, June 7 to tell me that he had some people who wanted to look through our apartment the following day and was wondering if our place had two bathrooms. It took all of my energy to refrain from telling him that the answer is in that stupid little movie that he made and instead told him it has only one. He then asked how many bathrooms our neighbour’s place had! I wouldn’t recognise my neighbours if I saw them in the street, let alone know how many toilets they have, but I assume it would be the same amount as us, as all of the apartments in our building were built with an identical floor-plan. He also asked what time on Saturday suited me best so I told him 3:00pm, but on Saturday morning I received a message saying that he would see me at 2:30, half an hour earlier again, but at least he told me this time, unlike the day he made his home movie. Before long it was 2:20pm and my stomach was starting to cramp, I had to go to our only bathroom urgently, but I was also worried that he may arrive earlier than the agreed upon time again, on this occasion while I was in a rather compromising situation. Fortunately, I managed to complete my business quickly with enough time remaining for the aroma to adequately dissipate and the viewing went off without a hitch, however, the agent had grown a really bad moustache since we had last met.

When you’re looking at spending every cent you have on an apartment, there is an endless list of questions you could ask — Does the traffic get noisy? How much hot water does the current tank give? Have any murders ever been committed there? For some reason though, we kept getting asked the same two questions time and time again from potential buyers;

Which direction does the apartment face?

What race are our neighbours?

The second question seems to be a real selling point in Singapore and the potential buyers asking this are always relieved to find out that our neighbours are all Singaporean-Chinese. People here can be a tad biased at times and I still have no idea why, but many in this country don’t want to live anywhere near members of particular races or nationalities. I’m sure, though, that they wouldn’t have any problems with the eccentric, old Singaporean-Chinese guy that lives behind us who usually wears nothing but a faded old towel or sometimes his clothes on backwards, meditating outside on mouldy, discarded office furniture, testicles swaying in the breeze, surrounded by a fort of more hanging towels, as well as having banana peels, clam shells, and other meticulously arranged, but ultimately unusable food items drying on the ground outside his apartment full of clutter, trash, and plastic bags. His joint is constantly infested with rats and they are always running around the general vicinity of his apartment, but he’s fine:

A visit from some government officials while resplendent in a faded towel, as seen from our kitchen window

Maybe he got in a fight with the rats and they kicked him out on this particular night

The irony is that his place is worth a fortune!

From his point of view

I really wish I had a marker at the time to draw a moustache

Today is Monday, July 29, 2019 and we’ve had quite a few people look at our apartment, but no official offers, the main complaint being that, despite being listed as a “walk-up” apartment, it doesn’t have an elevator, some viewers even perplexed at this exclusion, because climbing two small flights of stairs is just too much effort for many. Why bother even looking at it at all? We also realised that it has been the same four or five agents getting people to look at our apartment and they suggested that we get the agents that haven’t done anything to take their listings down from property websites to avoid saturation, which isn’t a bad idea. This morning I sent those agents the following message:

Hi _____,

My wife and I own the property you have listed at 20 Tiong Bahru Rd. I am writing to request that, due to a complete lack of viewers, that you cease to list our property. This is not open to negotiation.

Thank you, Tim Abel

Most of them just did it and replied to let me know, which was appreciated, but one decided to call me and try to weasel his way out of it, which went something like this:

Agent: “Good day, sir, in reference to your message, what I’ve been doing is collating all of the offers on your property in order to ascertain what –” Me: “YOU HAVEN’T BROUGHT A SINGLE PERSON TO OUR PLACE IN THREE MONTHS, TAKE THE LISTING DOWN!” *click*

These guys are terrified of complaints that will damage their reputation so almost immediately after I hung up on him I received a text message that said:

Hi tim.will abide. Apologise n tks

I think that translates into “Hi, Tim, I will take the listing down as per your request. Apologies and thank you.”

Fast forward to what is now mid-December, 2019 and we’re still sitting here, waiting to sell our apartment. We ended up going with one of the female agents as an exclusive agent and she initially brought a reasonable amount of people around to our place to have a look, but even her interest waned over time to the point where she didn’t even have our place listed toward the end. Fortunately her contracted period as our exclusive agent expired. We did receive a couple of offers, but they were either quite low or rescinded after the people who made them opted for a different apartment. We ultimately chose to go with a pair of other agents at the recommendation of a friend who was able to sell her place quite quickly, instead of going through all of this hassle. To try to make the process go even smoother with these guys, I went on a crazy decluttering spree, spending many hours of many days going through certain areas of the apartment and just throwing stuff out, much to the behest of my lower back. Anna chipped in on the day the agents came to take photos and videos, managing to throw out five shopping bags full of old shoes alone, as well as several boxes of books. This cleaning process resulted in us finding some items we had completely forgotten about or didn’t even know we had. A good example is that we can never find a pen that works when we need one, yet I found three unused and rather expensive pens still in their boxes that were gifts at some of Anna’s conferences. The absolute highlight for me though, had to be two books Anna wrote in primary school, the first when she was about seven years old, detailing her family’s trip to California with interesting tidbits such as finding her cousin’s bra, her friend playing with it, and then putting it on her soft-toys. The other book was a mystery about a kidnapping and ransom, written when she was roughly eleven or so:

Anna’s artistic abilities haven’t really evolved

This might help explain why we watch so much Law & Order: SVU

As a result of all of this cleaning and carrying so many loads of heavy items down to the bins downstairs, I was barely been able to stand upright properly for a few days, plus all of the dust that had been stirred up as a result had us constantly sneezing, but it did feel nice having less crap around the place. As a result I wasn’t looking forward to the whole moving process, but that wouldn’t happening anytime soon.

The agents came around on Saturday, December 13, 2019, took their photos and videos, as well as sat down and had a chat to us, these guys actually asking questions and showing a genuine interest, so that was a good sign. They also informed us that this time of year isn’t a good one for the housing market so it probably wouldn’t be until January or February until we hear anything, but an online virtual walkthrough of our place was still put up on their website on Monday, December 15, 2019. From Saturday, January 4, 2020 we had a steady flow of viewers for our house and it wasn’t just people who were bored on the weekend and had decided to spend it snooping through other people’s apartments, these ones seemed genuinely interested in purchasing, and by Tuesday, January 21, 2020 we had accepted an offer and sold our place! What nobody else could achieve in eight months, our new agents pulled off in one, a month that happened to include the Christmas and New Year period, as well as being just prior to Chinese New Year. Pretty impressive.

This now left us with the headache of dealing with banking procedures and bureaucracy in order to finalise the sale of our apartment, as well as sort out the place we wanted to buy and it was the second one that would prove the most frustrating, but that’s a story for next time. Stay tuned for the story, whenever it is eventually finalised, that coincided directly with this one; The Hell That We Experienced In The Real Estate Process In Singapore — Buying.

Boy, that was nine months of fun Note: This post was written over the course of many months, beginning on Friday, May 3, 2019.

#agents #apartments #buying #hdb #property #real estate

0 notes

scottmapess · 4 years

Text

Bitcoin MUST ACT NOW (Before it’s too late)

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

A bit of a sell off of the Bitcoin managed to hit the resistance level at roughly six thousand six hundred six thousand five hundred dollars. Since then we ended up trading sideways a little bit and we did have the setup to continue trading higher ground. Fortunately, Bitcoin instead took that relative area of resistance to heart and we’ve ended up dropping a little bit lower. The good news is that this is in line with the rest of the market. You can see a lot of red across the board. The only green we have is in gold and a couple shit coins. So this is where the markets have been going today. Just a lot of money flowing out of those kinds of assets and into the dollar, into gold. Various different things like that. And that’s good news because it means that Bitcoin didn’t dump a loan. If it dumped a loan, then that might have indicated that there’s something specifically wrong with bitcoin. There are many things specifically wrong with Bitcoin, but fortunately in this case, those didn’t matter. And this is just a wider kind of market flush out. And I think that is a good sign. So it’s it’s tricky because this dump, you know, this is the second beautiful setup that Bitcoin has had to trade much higher. I told you about the one before where we ended up breaking out of that rising wedge where we initially chose the bearish direction and then we ended up trading higher anyway. We had a beautiful chance for bitcoin to continue to trade higher, but it didn’t take it. And this is just example number 2, which is heartbreaking. It kind of makes things look a little bit bearish because while our current structure, our short term structure might not look so bearish, it might actually look a little bit more bullish in our short term trend. The long term trend. If we zoom out just a little bit more is definitely much more negative. And so when you’re starting to see small signs of bearish activity and you’ve got a massive warning of bearish activity continuing just because of what the long term trend is, that is going to make me polarized and biased towards the bears. Now, a lot of people will often say trading shouldn’t involve bias. And my response to that is bullshit. The only thing you do as a trader is trade on bias. You either long or short, it’s hot or cold off and on. These are polar opposites and you have to be biased in order to make money. And my bias is definitely towards the short side right now because of this massive dump. Something else really important to to point out, people will feel like they have an extra edge on you because they’re a smartarse contrarian who can think opposite to you and say that, well, actually, since everyone is going Shaws that everyone is bearish, I’m going to start going long and I’m going to be bullish. And they think that they’re on some higher tier of intelligence like that. But that’s also false because when you get massive dumps like this, I’m sorry to say, mate, but when you’ve got a dump like that, that’s because everyone in their bloody none. thinks that the market is going to dump. Right. That’s where you’ve got a lot of fear in the market. A better example is when we dumped from six thousand dollars when we had this dump. No one really thought that bitcoin was going to stop at a couple people did actually mainly the famous people, which was really concerning, thought that we would stop around the $5000 range. But most people with actual brains would have understood that yes, bitcoin failed the six thousand dollar level. Everyone was going to run out of support. Everyone was gonna turn very fearful. And so when you’ve got a circumstance where everyone thinks the market is going to crash, the market bloody crashes. That’s what happens. Everyone is selling. So the only thing that can happen is that the price ends up going down. There’s too much supply and not enough demand. So that’s what happens when there’s too much bearish pressure on an asset. And that’s exactly why I think that we still have an overarching bearish setup for the market. We still have that very discusting long term trend. This rising wage that I’ve been pointing out to you guys, we’re still there. We’re still and we’re actually right on the cusp of it now, depending on how you Joy. Let’s get a little bit more accurate. We’re gonna switch this over to a clean chart where I haven’t drawn anything yet, which happens to be at the Jemini chart, as it always is lately. And we are right on the edge of that support level. This is not a beautiful line because I previously drew the line connecting these two points and it looks something a little bit like this. So I’m already having to redraw the line and that’s why I typically don’t use diagonal lines like this. I don’t think they’re very reliable. You don’t see me use them in many videos, but in this case it’s important because it helps us visualize what a relative, you know, ascending channel would look like. You know, I can actually draw that for you with the channel tool, the parallel channel tool, something a little bit like this. And just relatively speaking, the overall trend is first down, then diagonally upwards and then potentially continuing on lower. So really, really important to point out there where we are, we are definitely hovering towards that that lower end of this range now. And that has to be something which is at least. Slightly concerning because, of course, what it means is when you have got a trend with so much power towards the bears, it is entirely possible that things take another very deep dive. And obviously that would mean potentially, unfortunately, re-entering the $3000 range. If you think that Bitcoin long term speaking is going to end up going way higher than that is going to be an absolutely beautiful place to enter. So it might not be so unfortunate, but let’s be honest, it definitely gets a little bit less fun when the price drops lower. What else have we got? Well, we’ve got that head and shoulders pattern that I was talking to you guys about in the last video. Now, as I said, I don’t like head and shoulders patterns, but I’ll take anything that’s bearish in this market right now because the overall market looks absolutely disgusting. And so this isn’t a very strong pattern, but the fact that it’s showing itself within a bearish trend, as we can see from there, the fact that it is showing itself in this situation makes me more inclined to pay attention to it. And as for flies prophesized, we are starting to see that head and shoulders complete. We’re basically now forming the end of the right shoulder. And the only issue with this is we haven’t had any volume here. So if we end up getting some volume on a dump, that would make me think we’re going way, way lower. That really sets the market up for some quite bearish price action. You have to you know, we have to bear in mind what has happened here. It doesn’t look like much has happened. And so initially, if you don’t if you look at this chart, you might be scratching your head wondering what’s going on. Let’s look at the facts. The facts are very clear. We hit resistance three times. One, two, three. Relatively speaking, we could count these as more hits and we might not count this one at all. But relatively speaking, we’ve hit resistance thrice and we haven’t been able to break it. The last two times where we hit resistance, we had a really bullish setups for the market to continue trading higher and it didn’t take it. What happened there? The bulls had a window of opportunity. They didn’t take it. So the bears down well, stepped in and took back control of the market. And we already know in the long term they have control of the market. Right. And I mean, long, long term, they have had control of the market. So, you know, that coincides with what happens when we zoom out a little bit more in line with that. We’re getting some potential bearish patterns with the head and shoulders pattern. We’re also getting that beautiful rising wage, which is one of the most typical signs that the market will continue trending lower again, especially when you are in such a big uptrend. It’s just so typical that this would happen. A beautiful example of that. Something like over here, another one over here. These are much bigger rising wages. And this one might not even look like one, but the same principle held. You know, we were in a downtrend and then the price traded higher over a period of time. In this case, a very short period of time. But over a period of time, nonetheless. And then we ended up continuing that trend. Once again, we formed another rising wage. Over a period of time, we ended up trading higher and then the trend continued trading lower. So very, very important things to point out and that does give us a bearish setup. But it’s not all bad news. We actually do have a potentially very good setup in the market and it is to do with the fibonacci’s. Before I get onto that, though, let’s take a look at what’s been happening with the four hour ichi Moku cloud. Today we have had yet another full rejection out of this cloud. This is something I was talking to you guys about. We did get a fairly you know, we can call a confirm breakout. This traded a couple percentage points above the resistance cloud, but nonetheless, we did end up falling back into it. And one of the things I mentioned is if we do fall back into the cloud, it could end up being like a kind of gravity device that would just pull us lower. And that’s exactly what happened. We ended up trading outside of the cloud on the bottom end. And once again, we’ve achieved the same nasty fate today. We’ve ended up falling out of the cloud. The good news starts now, though, because we do have that for our cloud turning into support on second of April, which is just tomorrow. Now, I have to say, if you don’t know what the Ichi Moku Cloud is, then type this into YouTube for flies. Ichi Moku, just like that, type this into YouTube and you will see my full tutorial on this indicator. Really, really great content there. And and so this is potentially forecasting that if we can manage to get a bit of a pump over the next day, over the next couple of days, we could be ready to see some nice support. And this is important because we’re seeing a beautiful cloud of support forming on the four hour chart after we’ve already had volatility in the market. So one thing that’s really important from this is that we know that this Ichi Moku cloud is going to be relevant. There are certain times where it’s not relevant, right. Where you’re not really trading at all. You’re just kind of going sideways. And so it stops being useful. The best example of it is over here and over here and potentially over here as well, because when all of these clouds formed, Bitcoin wasn’t doing anything. Bitcoin was just trading sideways. So this indicator is not useful when you don’t have volatility. It’s the same for most indicators. In this case, we do have volatility. And so we know that this might be reliable and that gives us a potentially beautiful chance to continue on the higher switch on to the one hour chart. And fortunately, we’re not seeing a really nice cloud over there. And that is because we’ve just not been trading much over the one hour chart. So we have seen this one hour each Moku Cloud lose a lot of its strength pretty much after this point. All of this is why the cloud stopped being so useful. What’s good about the support on the 4 hour chart, though, is that it lines up with something really, really good. It lines up with a horizontal area of support that we do potentially have in the market. Now, this can go from anywhere between 50, 700 up to 50, 800, potentially even fifty nine hundred. But I’m going to draw this at fifty 800 just because it is sort of a happy medium. And more importantly, we’ve already bounced off this level once, twice and three times. So once, twice and thrice there. That’s beautiful. English language is of course very confusing and we do have this interesting level of potentially even macro support lining up with an indicator that we know is likely to be reliable in the market, and that is significant. So if Bitcoin over the next couple of days is able to hold its ground over here into the weekend, if it can trade sideways throughout Wednesday, it’s a story throughout Thursday and Friday and going into the weekend, which would be the third right or the fourth of April, something like that, we will be looking at a potentially bullish set up for that weekend of price action. And, you know, weekends are where things might end up happening that are significant, aren’t even know if this was the weekend. Maybe it was some of this price action. But the weekends are where you start to get some of the weird price action. And if we are talking about a potential reversal, which is something that would be completely trend changing. Well, that’s the kind of bullshit that you come to expect when you’re a bitcoin trader. So it’s not great. It’s not a very technical way to do analysis. But nonetheless, I have to point it out because it works. I don’t like using this tool, but as an analyst, that’s not really my job to get emotions involved in it. If I don’t like it and it makes me money, I’m gonna use it anyway. That’s just my job as a trader. I’ve got to be using all the tools I have available to myself, of course. That’s one of the best benefits of being in the VIP group because you can see how I’m using all of the information that I’m sharing with you in these videos, plus a whole lot more just in the analysis that I share with V.I.P.s. And you can see how that manifests into the form of trades. Beautiful short position that I took out on Bitcoin, closing a 58 percent profit. Keep him VIP members updated in real time with everything I’m seeing on my trades. I don’t trade very often because I don’t like to be looking for my thrills in in trading. I like to be getting my highs and thrills from real life. Although granted with the quarantine lifestyle, there’s not much of that either anymore. But it is definitely the smart thing to do to approach this game with a mindset of, you know, I don’t need to make 100 trades a day. So I don’t trade very often, only a couple times a week usually. And VIP is we’re able to see how I deploy those key trades that I make throughout the month at the times where I think it’s really useful where those stars align, which is the explanation for my trade to make me feel ready to trade. And then exactly what numbers I’m using, what entry’s I’m using, what targets I’ll be using, and then depending on what the situation calls for, I might even, for example, be dropping a voice message to specifically explain why I chose a very specific entry point, why I chose a very specific Stop-Loss or why I changed my game plan. I usually do lay out what my game plan looks like before I end to retreat. So this these details I shared were posted about one day before my trade even opened. I already told you some of the things I’d be expecting to do with my Stop-Loss and my profit taking areas, but I changed that on the fly and you get the explanations of why I’m doing that. So you can see how again, I’m using the very same data that you are looking at to potentially pull some really nice profits. A beautiful set of messages here from a member is continue to show me another screenshot of I think like six more beautiful profits that he has been pulling in the market previous 48 hours. He made all of these profits in 48 hours from 10 percent up to 77 percent. All thanks to four motherfucking flies. Absolutely. Love this once again. This is the member who was very hesitant to join at first, but ended up paying off the fee for joining the group plus 200 percent profit on his initial investment. Very, very happy to be in. The group has learnt more in 2 weeks in the group than he did in 31 years. That’s 2 weeks to pay off the fee and make a whole lot of money on top of that. And it wasn’t even working with a massive bankroll. And that’s the key thing here. You know, we have had people joining the group with very small amounts of bitcoin, whether it was, you know, point zero five or even, you know, all the way up to ten or a hundred bitcoins. You know, it really doesn’t matter because everything works in percentages, as you can see. You know, this is just as impressive on holdings of, say, point 1 BTC as it would be on holdings of 11 BTC or 1000 BTC. These are just as impressive. And that’s the key thing here. You’re seeing how. Doesn’t really matter what your bankroll sizes. You need to be trading correctly. And that’s something which is really important in the game of trading. It’s especially different to things like poker. For example, where in poker, when you’re playing the game, you will experience a harder difficulty of poker. The higher you go in the stakes, you know, when things get harder, when there’s more money on the table. Well, that’s where you have to level up your game. But it’s not the same in trading. In trading, when you jump into this game, you are thrown right in the deep end. And same deepened this misleading because there’s no shallow end. It’s all the same. Everyone’s playing it exactly the same difficulty. And that’s what makes this game so bloody difficult to play and profit from. But if you know what you’re doing and if you’re following a system and if you’re seeing how other people are able to develop their systems after they’ve made all the fuckups, after they’ve gone through all of those stresses, it can be very, very productive. And as we can see over here, beautiful results being pulled by members who are able to take that risk, take that leap. At the end of the day, trading is risk. Trading is where you’re taking a leap on yourself, a leap of faith on yourself. And members who’ve done that by joining the group, pulling really, really nice profits in cases like this. So if you want to get into the group, head up the first link in the description down below. Click on the artful flys button at the bottom of any post in full flight goal. This is a free telegram channel. There’s no sign up process. It will take you like 5 seconds to get in. Click on send message and ask me how to join v._i._p. We’ll give you all of the information, the price and the benefits. Everything you need to know to make your decision. Absolutely beautiful stuff there. Moving back to the charts, we have something which which is almost a disgusting coincidence that happened with this week over here. So this week was one or two days ago. So, yeah, the close of March 30th and. What we had was if we take a look at bitcoin on the CMU futures trading, I always forget how to find this. Let’s go over here and we’ll take this chart. What we actually had was on the one hour we had a massive gap form over here. This is where Bitcoin had its big dump on the twenty ninth of March. I’m terrible with dates and various different things like that, but I think this was a weekend. And so this is why there wouldn’t have been much trading. And then yet this was a weekend because the clothes or the clothes was on the twenty seventh. The open was on the twenty ninth. So full flights did prophesised once again that bitcoin could end up dumping on the weekend if we ended up trading sideways into it because again that’s just where the weird stuff happens. So it did leave this massive gap and people are always very quick to say that well if bitcoin didn’t manage to. Sorry. If Bitcoin managed to form a gap on the CMC trading platform, then it’s probably going to rise up to fill that gap. That’s what people always say. I think we have a gap around 3000 mosharraf. We closed that and another gap, maybe around 8000. So this is all arbitrary and for the most part I would label it bullshit. But in this case, because it’s so perfect with this week, what ended up happening is that the price ended up going up to fill this entire gap. Everything that that bitcoin did and trade within it ended up trading within to fill this gap. And the reason I’m bringing this up is it’s almost like a guy having a one night stand. He ends up pulling up the club. He gets exactly what he wants. And when he’s got it, he walks away. And that’s what Bitcoin did over here. It needed one thing in particular. It only needed one thing. Its drug, its CMC Gap being filled. When it got that fix, when it got that release. Bitcoin ended up trading lower again. So that means it only traded higher to get what it wanted, which in this case was to fill that gap. And now that it’s fulfilled that purpose, it’s ready to do what it initially wanted to do, which, you know, we can see very clearly, clearly if we end up, you know, expanding the timeframe to be a little bit higher. We can see a beautiful gap over here, really, really big gap around the eight thousand dollar range. So that’s why you do have a lot of people saying that we could end up filling that gap. But this kind of gaps, they happen everywhere. So I’m not I’m not so convinced that just because we have a gap over here, it’s got to be filled. I mean, we can. Yeah. There’s this probably I’m guessing this is a gap as well, because we didn’t fill this anywhere. No one’s really talking about it. You know, so it is quite arbitrary if you are holding your breath saying that this gap is gonna be filled at some point in the future. And, you know, because of that you bought at this level or you bought at this level or you bought at this level, no matter what you did, you’d be in a bloody loss. And so trading based off that or making any kind of decisions based off just gaps in the market is is just it’s unskillful. And that’s the reason it’s popular. You know, it doesn’t take any skill to point out that there’s a gap. It’s like pointing at an airplane in the sky when you’re next to an airport. Obviously you’re going to see them. Not really a surprise. There’s not much you can do with that information. But again, in this case, because this gap is so close to us and because it holds some psychological some, I have to emphasize the word, it holds some psychological bearing on the market. It’s worth bringing up, especially because the overall trend is bearish. So I think that could be one of the factors that enables the trend to continue trading lower. So what does that mean, bringing everything together from this video? Well, it’s very clear that we’re failing our bullish setups. It’s very clear that we do have some opportunity for support around the five thousand eight hundred dollar level. We do have it lining up with our four hour Ichi Moku cloud of support. So while it looks like we are going to end up dumping a little bit lower in for Fliess opinion, don’t be a bloody idiot. Read the disclaimer. While it looks like we could end up trading a little bit lower, we do have a bit of support below us. But everything is so fragile right now because of that longer term trend. This longer term trend is so bearish that I have to ground myself in it every time that I start getting excited with the bullish arguments. It is no surprise. Ladies and gents, it is no surprise that we ended up getting rejected at three relative areas of resistance at the same relative area resistance three times because we have such a bearish trend. That’s the kind of energy that a bearish trend will bring, a bearish trend. My bat kind of bucked and spoke at the same time. A parish trend will potentially have a really big dead cat bounce, his really big rising wages, which in this case ended up having bitcoin rise by 80 percent on this chart. It will breed those kinds of recoveries, those kinds of. Relief rallies. But it will also mean that at every stage of the way, there will be coughing and weakness and paranoia and doubt. That’s exactly what we’re seeing. It’s just continuously failing. So even though it did manage to break up by 80 percent, are you seeing the strength of an 80 percent positive bull market? Hell, no. Hell, no, you’re not. Because if we were, we would have broken it on the second attempt, at the very least, on the third attempt. But both of those things didn’t happen. And those are potentially early warning signs of weakness. This really is where one person will look at a chart and have no idea what’s going on. But when you’ve got a trained eye and you’ve seen this stuff happen a million times and you’ve read some t.a books and you’ve potentially taken up a cause or you’ve made the absolutely beautiful decision to join full VIP, these kind of things will jump out to you and you can immediately tell where it might look like nothing is going on. There’s actually so much that you can read into that chart. That’s gonna be meat for today. My final note for the end of this video is go show someone some love, whether that’s a partner, kids, mom, dad, neighbor, dog, whatever. Go spread a little bit of love. It can be literally anything, a text or a hug or whatever. It will make someone happy. All right, guys, take it easy, boy.

source https://www.cryptosharks.net/bitcoin-must-act-now-before-its-too-late/ source https://cryptosharks1.blogspot.com/2020/04/bitcoin-must-act-now-before-its-too-late.html

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jeffrmayhugh · 4 years

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Bitcoin MUST ACT NOW (Before it’s too late)

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

source https://www.cryptosharks.net/bitcoin-must-act-now-before-its-too-late/ source https://cryptosharks1.tumblr.com/post/614382159747235840

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heatherrdavis1 · 4 years

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Bitcoin MUST ACT NOW (Before its too late)

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Via https://www.cryptosharks.net/bitcoin-must-act-now-before-its-too-late/

source https://cryptosharks.weebly.com/blog/bitcoin-must-act-now-before-its-too-late

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cryptosharks1 · 4 years

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Bitcoin MUST ACT NOW (Before it’s too late)

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

source https://www.cryptosharks.net/bitcoin-must-act-now-before-its-too-late/

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beyondvapepage · 4 years

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 281

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 281 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Adam: All right, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day hangouts Episode 281. Today is April Fool’s. But it’s actually Episode 281. There’s no joke. I guess I’ll go with what do Wednesday’s and Top Gun have in common? You’re both in the danger zone with Hump Day Hangout!. That’s the best I can do. And Yep. All right. Chris is expressing his love of my horrible jokes. So anyway, let’s say hi to everybody real quick. And then we got some short announcements and we’re gonna kick it off and get into your question. So I’ll start with Chris since he loved my job so much. How you are doing?

Chris: Doing good here. How are you doing?

Adam: Not too bad. Yeah, things are getting a little interesting around here. They’re kind of tightening up the going outside restrictions right as the sun starts shining, so but, you know, do what you got to do and keep moving forward kind of same in life in business. So anyway, I’m doing real

Chris: as long as you’re allowed to go out with masks, you’re fine.

Adam: Yeah, yeah. And luckily people have been not too crazy around here. So anyway, you know, just the new normal going on in the day-to-day. So Marco, how about yourself?

Marco: I’m good, man. Actually, the rainy season started although it doesn’t look like it does it, it’s kind of cloudy today we had a few raindrops not much, but just enough to know that in the next couple of weeks at this time especially, you’re not going to be able to hear me talk probably from from from the noise of the rain falling on the roof or so. So it’ll be fun.

Adam: And I mean, this is we always get in these weird little weather discussions at the Hump Day Hangouts, but is that kind of I’m used to places up in that are kind of tropical-like that is it like an afternoon type of thing where it showers pretty intensely, but then it kind of goes away?

Marco: Seven and a half months of that. But we will have periods especially during hurricane season, where it might rain three, four, five days straight. When my son was born in October of 2011, we had 11 days straight, where it did not stop bringing man. It was just horrible. But other than that, no, I mean, it’s like this. it’ll rain and then it’ll go away and it’ll be nice in the evening. So yeah, it’s a nice change from just so much sun. Because too much sun isn’t good for you.

Adam: That’s good. You gotta you know, you gotta have both so you can appreciate the sunshine. Right, right. That’s good. Oh, hey, Hernan, how are you doing? You’re moving into? Let’s see. wintertime rises. A cooling winter?

Hernan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so we’re Winner Winner right now. So we’re moving into the cooler season, but it’s good, man. It’s good. Like that’s good. Like honestly, I don’t feel the quarantine and quarantine for 24/7 anyway so I’ve been preparing for this all my life for this moment, so nobody but life’s good man now. We’re safe. We got what we need to have and you know, the stores are you know full of stuff like you know we just went out to do some shopping we’re good so you know everything’s good.

Adam: Good deal and Bradley, How about yourself?

Bradley: I’m glad to be back here. Last week I was planning on being here but I took a week away to my favorite campground and trailhead where I ride ATVs and such on purpose to get away from this, you know, pandemic mess and everything. I thought was just good excuse to get away too. So I took it and I planned it from Monday through Sunday. And on Friday before I left to go the governor had issued in order to shut down you know, Visitor Center and such and so that’s why I plan on working last week and it shut down. It was shut down for any like, other than, you know, employees. It was shut down. So I was unable to work. I had a very piss poor internet service that I was tethering through my phone, which was kind of spotty. Anyways, so I was unable to be here. And I apologize for that. But it looks like you guys all handled it for me. I had never had any doubt. But I appreciate you all taking care of that. And it was actually nice to unplug for the most part for the entire week other than, you know, a few emails on my phone. I literally unplugged for the entire week, which is very rare even on vacation, I usually bring my laptop and work a little bit you know, and this was almost an entire work-free week. And it was much much needed. I came back this week and had been working you know, with renewed enthusiasm, if that makes sense. And I think that’s important for everybody to unplug.

So use this time, I think guys right now for in two ways, one, work on stuff that you’ve been putting off, and two take some time for relaxation, because I think that gets our creativity kind of flowing again. If that makes sense. If you’re overwhelmed with work, like all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, that kind of thing. I think that kind of stifles our creativity. When I say creativity, you don’t have to be in the creative. You know, like a graphic designer and stuff to be creative I’m talking about creative problem solving and things like that. I think we’re better if we have some sort of a balance if that makes sense. And I think as entrepreneurs a lot of times we don’t adhere to that advice we just work, work, work, work, work all the damn time. But I think when you can get away and you see the benefits that it can produce, it kind of makes you realize that it’s something that you should probably work into your routine, you know what I mean?

Adam: Definitely, yeah, and I hundred percent agree with that, you know, whatever it is just kind of following either what’s fun for you or if you got a side passion, and talking to other people just about what they do because man those ideas, you just start cross, you know, kind of interspersing it you can get those connections and you’ll come up with ideas that you never would have otherwise.

Cool. Before we get into it, just wanted to say real quick. We’ve been updating some training Bradley just closed week 11 of 2xyouragency training and if you’re an agency owner or you’re a consultant, if you want to get more clients, if you want to grow your revenue if you want to scale your team if any of those things sound kind of remotely good to you and the things you want to do, then you should head over to 2xyouragency.com got the training almost completely wrapped up. But if you hop in, there’s no drip, there’s no waiting you get in, you get all the training right away. We know some people can really power through it and set aside the time other people you know, you might want to go on a weekly schedule, but whatever works for you, we got it there for you.

Bradley: If I can interject for a minute, I just added the, you know, the videos from today for week 11. We got one week left guys, it would be a special week next week too. I’m looking forward to it. But anyway, so when I added it to the list of all the other training videos for the course so far, we’re at 77 videos. So I would recommend that you power through it but kind of on a weekly schedule so that you could. Because otherwise, you’re going to be sitting around. Well, you’ve probably got the time now so there’s a lot of damn training in there, guys, so don’t let the price for you.

Adam: Yeah, I was gonna say to their you know, we’ve done an improvement that we’ve listened to people and we have the video training, but we also have the executive summaries that go with it because we know some people, you know, you may already feel up to speed on some area or you just need a quick reference after you’ve gone through it. Whatever it is that you need that for we built these in for each lesson so that you’ve got that. So very helpful material there. And if you’re into more of the SEO side as for getting results instead of kind of building your agency, then you’re going to want to grab the Battle Plan, whether it’s, you know, working with new websites, age domains, YouTube channels, whatever it is, keyword research, all that sort of good stuff, head over to battle plan.semantic mastery.com and grab that.

Bradley: Ah, can we use the new one? No, but yeah, Carry on, carry on it.

Adam: We’re gonna have some good updates coming, you guys. We’ll be talking more about that in the future. In the meantime, head over to POFU Live head over to pofulive.com. We’ll have some updates about POFU Live, but we’re waiting on figuring out some alternatives to that just in case. You know, things ended up going on for a long time. And we’ll tell you more about that in the future. But what I meant to say was head over to mgyb.co. Done for you services, syndication networks, RYS drive stacks, the SEO shield, link building, embeds, all sorts of good stuff. And if you haven’t signed up at mgyb.co, yet head over there. You can opt-in or you can create your account there and subscribers definitely get access to some really good stuff. Not only do we have some free training available to you, but we also send out specials and some subscriber-only sales that go on from time to time over there.

Marco: For people who need proof. Yeah, people who need to see it. I mean, we just have to have it. I just went live for the second time. Monday was the first time showing the last solutions case study which we were which I was only sharing in the charity webinar series, but now you know, I’m getting such great results that I want to show people what’s going on. I want to update the most. I want them to see as this goes on as this moves on how well this shit works. And as a matter of fact, go watch the video on Facebook, it’s all of our groups. If you’re a paid member, it’s there. If you’re a member of the free group, it’s in there. And if you’re not a member, then go in there join, it’s free to join. And you can see the video and I’ve given people a 20% off coupon for the SEO shield, which is a month right? The SEO power shield is a must right now if you want to create your entity like right off the bat. Do you want to start off right you want the foundation to be like just spot on solid, as good as you can get it it’s an SEO power shield, and you go from there because it incorporates everything that we teach in RYS.

Yeah, I’m thinking of our Battle Plan. Sorry. It incorporates everything in a Battle Plan up to when you’re supposed to start the press releases and the link building. So the SEO Power Shield is the foundation to get then all that heavy push that lets you smack it in the ass and then it goes. It’s incredible what happened.

Adam: Outstanding! Well, I think that’s it on our end, guys. Anything else before we have any questions?

I don’t think so. So we’re good. Yeah, let’s do this. Yep, do it.

Bradley: I feel like I missed out because I wasn’t here last week. I was looking at some of the questions from last week. And I feel obligated that I have to answer them and I don’t.

So anyway, alright, cool. So it looks like we’re starting with Mohammed today. You guys are seeing my screen, right? Yep.

How To Strategize A Press Release For An Affiliate Site?

All right. What’s up Mohammed? He says, Hey, guys, I’m trying to rank an affiliate site. I’m about to order a press release for it. The problem is I don’t know how to approach a PR for something I don’t own. Would it be weird if I ran a PR on behalf of this item only for it to lead to my site now? Because of that, in my opinion, no, not at all. Because I mean, that’s natural for people to talk about products or services that they like, or, you know, like trust, whatever that they use to. It’s an endorsement, basically. So that’s, there’s no problem with that at all, Mohammed.

And remember, you’re not writing the press release, it’s up to the press release writers to determine a news angle, not you. So all you got to do like literally, they’re good at that. Like, that’s why their press release writers, right? So all I would do is just submit a guideline, like say, Hey, this is the product I want to promote. Here’s the page, put the link in the description when you order the press release, but the link into the page, and then tell them to go glean some information from that product page that they can use to write about and that’s all you have to do. That’s what I love about the press release writers is you don’t have to give them very much for them to be able to write some sort of news angle to make it PR worthy and that’s their job. So I wouldn’t bang your head against the wall to try to come up with ideas for that. Let them do it. That’s their job. Just give them the product, the page and ask them to write something that promotes that. And they’ll handle that for you. Anybody else?

Nope. Okay.

What Should You Do When Certain Web Properties From Branded Networks Are Shut Down?

Looks like Bibi has got a bunch of questions. Okay, cool. Well, we didn’t have a lot so we can run through them. Usually, if we had more, we would say don’t do that. But you’ve been coming often. So that’s perfectly fine. What happens when properties get shut down (mostly relevant to branded networks?). Should someone invest in building again? Should we change links in add to other social networks? Yeah, I mean, you know, if it’s done correctly, and I don’t know, maybe you were the one that was talking about doing a shit ton of blog posts, and they, you know or doing them too soon. And the WordPress was getting shut down. I vaguely remember a conversation like that a few weeks ago.

If you’re having it happen often, there’s something wrong. It could be with the content you’re publishing. It could be too many outbound links could be the volume or frequency of publishing. But if you’re having a bunch of sites terminated, there’s an issue because I’ve got and I was just telling Rob about it. I don’t know about two weeks ago, I was looking at some old cliffs in you know, like, six, eight folders deep. So I didn’t even know that they were there. And I found some old syndication networks that were built in 2012, a rack of them like seriously, like, I don’t know, 20 some network syndication networks. And I started just out of curiosity, looking at the properties, and many of them are still active in life today, which is unbelievable to me that they’ve been around for eight freakin years. It’s just insane. So the reason I’m telling you that is because they shouldn’t be terminated unless there’s a problem. So I would try to identify what the problem is first because otherwise, it’s going to be an ongoing problem.

However, that said, once you’ve identified that problem and resolved it, then as far as what do you do with terminated properties? Yeah, I would just build new one or I would just buy a new network is what I would do. So you don’t waste your time building them or hire a VA that you can train into rebuilding in, you know, individual web to dados that get terminated. That might be something that you want to have somebody in-house for if that’s going to be an ongoing problem with you, but I would recommend first identifying what’s causing that issue and resolving that before rebuilding, does that make sense? Anybody else got anything?

Marco: If you’ve done the work, right, which includes doing the same after doing the structured data, then it’s totally worth going in and replacing that right replacing that WordPress is touching, Blogger sometimes or anything else, because then it’s you played that as part of your entity. And I think that it should be replaced. But that’s something very specific that you really need to take a look at to keep your entity as strong and really throughout. So that would be one caveat that I would put into this.

Bradley: Should we change links and add other social networks? Well, I don’t know what you mean entirely by that question. One of the things that we teach in Syndication Academy is to constantly be looking for additional properties that you can claim a claim of presence on, you know so that you have a branded profile doesn’t necessarily mean that you can syndicate to them. As a matter of fact, most of the additional properties that you would add aren’t actually part of the syndication network, they’re part of your entity. Right? So your branded footprint, but, you know, we recommend doing that. There’s, there’s a lot of really good ones out there that you can add, as additional, you know, have an additional profile on and that’s something that you should absolutely continually be doing for your networks too. And we talked about maybe adding that as an additional service and MGB so maybe in the future that’ll be available.

Are Forum Comments Okay When Building Links For RYS And Syndication Properties?

The next question is forum comments, okay, for link building for non-money site properties, like RYS syndication properties? As far as I know, yeah. That’d be like GSA does that. I would never use that directly to money property. But yeah, that kind of stuff can be done. Typically, I think that Dadea recommends and maybe Marco can comment on this because I don’t stay up to date with the link building stuff because we have Dadea. So I don’t need to he does it all. But I think typically those type of links will usually be like tier three. So not something that he would recommend building to your tier one assets. They can be I don’t think it’s going to hurt but they’re just not as effective as they would be at like tier three, right, which would be building links to the links that are built to your tier one. Does that make sense?

So it’s usually contextual web 2.0 links as tier one to your branded tier one. I don’t want to get confusing, but that’s actually tiered two. But those are tier one links to your brand, your tier one branded entity assets. And then you could follow that up with either a second round of web 2.0 which is what he recommends and then the third tier of GSA style links which will include profile links and such. But I know that you can go web 2.0 contextual links. And then like essentially GSA style links behind that, but Dadea recommends two tiers of contextual links. And then you could always back that up with GSA style links, which would include forum comments. So, you know, I would just follow his advice. Marco, do you want to comment on that at all?

Marco: Yeah, absolutely. Because, I mean, the question is, is it okay, yeah, it’s okay. Is it necessary? No, not general. Especially not now. We were just talking about it on Monday. We’re bringing on the extension tool, right here in the next two weeks. It’s gonna be available gonna let people expand their stacks. And I’ll tell you right now, that from our testing, you get so much more power when you expand the stack. Add that keyword stack, instead of just the brand, but focusing on on on that market-level keyword and then link building to that. But then all that GSA spam, that you would have had to do it at tier three is totally unnecessary. Because you get such a great push from the tiered link building, right tier one and tier two of link building links, that it just makes everything unnecessary. Now, as you expand your drive stack, more folders, more keywords more, maybe sub categories, maybe you find another market-level category, just however it is that you decide to do it. You’re going to be powering up not only that drive stack but the previous drive stacks just from the association. So guys, yes, can you? Yes. Should you? I don’t see why you would unless you absolutely have to unless you’re not getting the push that you’re supposed to be getting or there’s just so much competition in there that you’re having a hard time hitting that apply. Where you need that extra again, that should kick in the can to get it to go where you want it to be not generally necessary. I didn’t see it necessary, nor did Dadea when he took on time and again when he took on Amazon and one.

Bradley: Yep. All right. Thanks, Marco.

Is It Okay To Build A Link To One Of THe Branded Properties In The Press Release?

The next question is, is it okay to include a link to one of the branded properties in the press release? I opened up this Excel file just for visual representation? Good. I just want to point out Yes, it’s absolutely fine. And what all of my bloggers do my content marketers who handle all of the content marketing for all my clients and such, and they order the press releases and all that is we always, you know, you can have up to three links in a press release. I use either two or three consistently in the press releases, and I just pulled up the spreadsheet because if I would have had a chance earlier, I would have opened up an actual client workbook and just taken a screenshot and blurred some out so you could see what I’m talking about, like how my format is, but each one of my clients has a separate Google workbook or Google Sheet. There’s an NAP tab or sheet on the in the workbook that has the name, address, and phone number and contact information and, you know, email address and all that stuff. That’s like the NAP info. And then underneath that, I’ve got a section that is target URLs, right. So it’ll say target URLs here. And it’s got all the branded entity URLs in there. And what my VA is or my bloggers are instructed to do is just every single time they create or order a press release is usually work press releases used to promote a blog post. That’s what we do. It’s the PR stacking method. If you have, it looks like you did watch that because I saw it in your question down here.

Press release stacking or PR silo stacking is what we typically do is we publish a blog post for within whatever silo it is that we’re trying to push. And then we publish a GMB post. You don’t have to have a GMB entity if it’s not for local but if you do, we publish a GMB post that is linking to the blog post. Then, we publish a press release that is linking to either the GMB posts or the blog posts and the press releases to promote the blog post, essentially, and then we link to either anyone of the other tier one entity assets could be the money site. If we’re linking directly to the blog post as opposed to the GMB posts that’s linking to the blog post, then we usually won’t link also to the website because we’ll choose another asset to link to GMB map. Not the share URL but the actual cid URL from the GMB map GMB web business site website you know, the GMB website, the G site, the Google site, ID page, anything right and any sort. So again, my VA just has a list of target URLs on the sheet, and they’re told to every time they publish a blog post, either link to the blog post, or the GMB, the corresponding GMB post, and then just randomly select or cycle through the target URL list that’s there. So that we’re always building a link back to one of our branded entity assets at all times, and we’re constantly cycling through so that we’re kind of diversifying the links across all of our entity assets. And it works incredibly well guys. So that’s what I recommend doing. Is it okay? Yes, absolutely. Any other comments on that guys?

Marco: No, no. Okay.

How Many Links Should You Include In A Press Release And Money Post Site?

How many links to the press release include? I just answered that. Two or three, just remember, I mean, you 123 in our in the press advantage service, which you can purchase from MGYB we recommend 1 to 3. However, as you know, Marco can talk about this a little bit more. Remember, you’re diluting any link equity. If you know if you’ve got one link, all of the link equity is going to that one link. If you’ve got three, you’re dividing it into a 30 each, if that makes sense. So just keep that in mind. If you’re trying to push more power to something specifically, you may want to only include one link, but as I just mentioned, we typically include on almost every single press release two or three links, always promoting the blog post either direct or through a GMB post and then one to another branded entity asset. And then if we’re PR stacking will link back to a previous PR, the previous PR on that same silo, if that makes sense. So that would be three links. Okay. Any comments on that one?

Marco: No, no, I mean that that’s fine. The math is available online. So if you start breaking it up, then you’re just dividing the power that you can push, and the more links that you add the more power than you’re dividing, and so you’re not going to get as big a push as you otherwise would. Unless, unless then you maximize the Lincoln, you would have to do a greater amount of link building. But then again, that this comes, this comes from the fact that it that is exponential, right. If you want to get the power to where you want it to go, and you’re splitting that up for ways it will eventually get there. But it’ll be whittled down because of how it’s being divided. And so you just do greater link building and that’s available. I mean data is available and mgyb.co. also, what’s the text to links ratio on press releases and money site posts? I don’t know. I mean, honestly, I think in press releases, I think the rule of thumb was like one at one link, for every 200 words, is what is rec is no more than one link every 200 words, but I can’t swear to that. As I said, the press releases that we use are usually around 750 words 600 to 750 in that range, and we recommend, or they, you know, it’s recommended not to include more than three links. So that works out to about one every 200 to 250 words. Okay. As far as, go ahead. No, to me, the content ratio is that doesn’t matter. What one or two links, period, one or two, that’s it. Forget about ratios. Forget about all that other shit. If you want to get the maximum power to wherever it is that you’re trying to deliver it.

If you start going down three, four, then you’re going to have to increase the liquid. The link building has to be greater but and I’m not going to go into factors, so and how much link building you should do, because that’s what you avoid by not splitting it up that much.

Yeah.

How Should You Use The SEO Power Shield To Beat The Competitors?

Alright, so the next one is I got the concept of the shield. I understand now that it is for me not having to deal with the Google updates, and we should care about Google. But what about the competition? What if someone else is using it? What if baby I’m going to give you a hard time here, buddy? I’m not picking on you. I am picking on you specifically actually. But this is for everyone else’s benefit too. What you can What if yourself into inaction? And that’s exactly what it sounds like you’re doing. Maybe I’m wrong and forgive me if I am. But guys, you can What if yourself to death into not taking any action period? What if it is nothing other than negative imagination. So instead, like seriously, that’s all…

What if in situations you’re worried about potential situations that are imaginary, right, you’re imagining potential situations that haven’t occurred. And you’re just trying to circumvent, you’re trying to find solutions for problems that don’t exist. So don’t do that. Instead, use your imagination on trying to imagine how it will work. And how if that makes sense. Think to flip it. It’s imagination, regardless of worry. And what if the thing is negative imagination, and you can have positive imagination where you try to think about, you know, how to how to make it successful? And in my opinion, that’s the way to go about it. Because if you try to what if every scenario, you’ll never take any action period, and you’re much better off what we just said this saying yesterday. It’s better to take imperfect action than perfect inaction. And that’s exactly what it sounds like from that type of a question. I hate what if questions because and again, I don’t mean to pick on you, but I’m just saying, I hate what if questions because you can What if any sort of scenario that you can imagine.

In my opinion, just go out and do the damn thing. And then if you know as things occur, you resolve them right if any issues were to occur. Now, that all said, I also had seen a similar question and maybe I don’t know if it was from you, but even from just last week, as I was scrolling through the questions during the opening of this hump day hangout today, I was looking at last week’s questions and I saw somebody say, Well, what if Google catches on to RYS and syndication networks? What if Google catches on and we’ve heard that over the years, go to Google right now in search, SEO, Virginia, tell me what you see is the number one position? It’s my Google site from a drive stack that I built, that’s not even a complete drive stack in May of 2015. Think about that, guys. That was five years ago. It’s still ranked number one for SEO Virginia, SEO agency, Virginia, Virginia SEO, number of keywords. It’s an incomplete drive stack. And syndication networks we’re just talking about I’ve got syndication networks that are still valid for from 2012 when I started building them. And so what if Google catches on to them? Well, that was eight damn years ago, and they’re still working today. And in fact, they’re working better today than they ever were in a different light because now they’re an entity validator and solidified before they were just a method of link building. Okay.

And RYS, the same thing. What if Google catches on, there was another SEO guru out there that had a whole entire video about why he thought drive stacks were stupid and to not use them? Good. I like those kinds of people. Because then we’re going to continue using them and we’re going to continue benefiting from them. While those dummies don’t. Do you know what I mean? And don’t get me wrong. There are other ways to do things, too. I get those guys and I’m not knocking other methods. I’m just saying, for somebody to have such a closed mind and say, Oh, why I have determined it. Marco can comment on this, I have determined that this won’t work. That’s such small-minded thinking, in my opinion. And again, those are the kind of people that find that’s great.

Continuing thinking that we’ll continue using them and benefiting from them. So to wrap it up, BB, don’t worry about that. Use them, especially if you use them the way that we build them or the way that we teach you to build them. Unless somebody else is using our exact same methods, you don’t have anything to worry about. And it’s very unlikely that they’re going to be using our exact same methods. And even if they are using our exact same methods, you come in here and engaging with us on a weekly basis will give you an edge because we can tell you how to power up over and above whatever your competitors are doing, which is really just comes down to link building at that point. So, Marco, I know you’ve got some things.

Marco: I’m going to go to August of 2015. end of August when we released the original RYS Academy and the guy. Well what if Google closes the loophole? Remember that? Yeah, what if Google closed the loophole in 2015 and we had a ton of people buy in 2015 and a ton of people who didn’t one of those people who didn’t is the guy who said, What if? What he’s still wondering what if? Because it’s still working. But what if, what if? What if? What if tomorrow? What if? What if the fucking world ends tomorrow? Nothing is promised, right? All we have is right now and what we’re doing right now, man if you’re doing to do right now, that tomorrow doesn’t make a difference because tomorrow you can just do more of it. Okay? And so then you happen to be in a niche. And think of the possibilities of you being in a niche where there’s another person that’s using the exact same methods, the exact same way as you’re doing it. As you’ve learned it as you’ve approached it, that’s nearly impossible. Because once you have it, I mean it’s just doing more of it. But in the unlikelihood that that happens, think about thinking about the possibilities. Think about what we’re talking about, what are the chances? Can this actually has a word this. I practice entity-based worryless SEO. That includes my competition because I don’t care. Literally. I don’t care who the competition is. I even stopped doing competition analysis because it makes no difference anymore. It doesn’t matter. Once I go after a niche that niche is mine. Or once I’m working with someone to go after a niche, that niche is ours. It makes no difference competition. I don’t care when I come on, they better start worrying about me. Now they be they better be doing what if Marco comes out after this niche, that’s what you should be worried about. Other than that, dude, go do the do and do more of it and then do more of a build your system. Get that system in place so that you can systematize it and it’s repeatable. And then you just do it again, and again. And again and again and again. You just do more of it. So what if someone comes in then you expand your stack, they expand that you expanded more, they do link building you do more. That’s it! And as a matter of fact, it’s competition’s healty because it keeps you on your toes, it keeps you from slipping.

Bradley: It is. And so I just pulled this up just to I mean, again, just to example, guys, it’s pulling my map and it might just be because that’s, you know, sees my IP and, you know, local, but there’s it is number one, and it has been for five years and for whatever reason the maps not showing here, so I have to investigate that. That should be my GMB map. But my point is, guys, and look, it’s incomplete. This is a very poorly done Gsite that only this is all of the stacks right here. That’s the entire stack right there. You can see it. It’s all embedded right here. And it’s not anything like what we do now. And yet there it is. Five years later, it’s still number one guys, and I’ve never done anything to this period, other than that’s it like I mean, I built it and built some links to it. Way back when and that was it. I’ve never touched it since. And it’s still number one today so for those of you that say you know what if that was five years ago guys and it’s it’s you know you can What if yourself into taking an action is what I meant and I mean that guys don’t do that so anyways and that’s why.

Marco: for BB if you’ll pick up you are at but then again you’re not you’re getting game you’re getting shit for free that you shouldn’t be getting you’re getting schooled into how to the do that we do and just again systems and more of it that’s it.

Bradley: and take the criticism constructively you know what I mean? Like we understand you’re here to gain a better understanding and to be able to beat your competition and so if we’re a bit harsh we mean it with all due respect for real that and I mean that guy. So anyways, BB, I’m not picking on you hope you understand that.

Should You Link Back To Previous Press Release Even If It’s From A Different Domain?

He says, I saw the press release stacking videos still trying to figure it out. Should we be linking back to previous press release even though the previous piece whereas on a different domain? it doesn’t matter.

What I suggest, though, is that you make sure that you’re linking back to PRs that don’t purge. There are a few of them through MGYB or Press Advantage. For example, the press advantage domain obviously, the USA Today, Digital Journal, Street Insider, all of those rank really, really well anyways, so why not just use those as the ones that you link back to in a PR silo? Does that make sense? Okay.

How Should You Use The SEO Shield For National Keywords?

Brad says how would you use a shield specifically a drive stack for national keywords build out every major city or is there an easier way? No, I wouldn’t do that for national Marco you’re the one that can comment on this much better than me.

Marco: on the national in real estate I did or we did that has that’s targeting every state and every city and it just had some good shit baked in there. But that’s not necessary. I think brand plus keyword association at the national level that’s it. Brand gets associated with the keywords what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to become Google in your space. You’re trying to become the entity. So when people say if I say if I say jello, you know exactly what I’m talking about generally. Gelatin is what it actually is, if I say Bandaid, you know you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s the keyword for adhesive bandage. And I could go on and on guys Zipper was originally trademarked. It was stripped. Windbreaker was originally trademarked, but it became the word for that niche. That’s what we’re trying to do. And I’ve said this plenty of times before.

Most of us are not going to get there. If you do that, just think of of the money that Tinder when you become the keyword for the for the niche. But in the meantime, what you’re doing is you’re creating that brand plus keyword association, so that the bot understands you that you your entity, should be the one that’s going considered for that keyword set, the best match right for anything under that keyword set and imagine the kind of traffic, the kind of money that you’re going to produce when you get there. So we’re not talking about being the keyword for the brand where people consider it. The word for the niche, but where the bot understands that it’s that it’s the keyword for the niche that your brand is the same as the keyword for the niche when you force the bot into that association, the man look, you write your own check, relax, it’s a done deal. Just watch the bank account grow. I mean, I can tell you, I’m not gonna show you I’m not gonna go open my Stripe and I’m not gonna open my account, but I wish I could show you just what’s going on. I’m not the kind of person to do that.

I’m not the kind of person to show the checks the kind of stuff that comes threw my hands but you have to see it. Like when you hit that sweet spot for that client at the calls start coming in. And an example DC plumber, where the plumber has to take a phone off the hook because he was getting too many calls. Seriously, think about it. Think about it getting too many damn calls. You take a phone up though, the personal injury attorney in New York City who had to hire multiple people to answer phones. That’s the kind of traffic and it I’ll be totally transparent. It has slowed down, but not to the point where she’s had to really close up shop in New York is complicated right now. Right? But she’s getting contacts. So she’s still going through it. And she’s continuing to pay. We’ve made an arrangement, of course. And then what I explained to her is, listen, when this is all over, soon as people are allowed just back out on the street willy nilly. Think of accidents that are gonna happen. I know. It may be morbid. But it’s true, people are going to be just crazy about getting out, they’re not going to be careful. We’re gonna have a ton of a ton of accidents happening. And it’s a ton of people that are going to call her. So she’s gonna make all the money back. So let’s relax and let’s go and you pay me again. And it’s going to be more than what it was. So these are all the kinds of things that can happen when they know that you’re this person who can produce these kinds of results. And they understand that they let you go, you’re going to the competition to offer your services. So think about all that when you are approaching national keywords are there for you. You don’t have to approach it every major city because something like real estate is kind of location based, even on a national level, but maybe what you’re doing isn’t location basis, totally keyword based. So it depends on how people are searching for that niche. So I hope I hope that made sense. If not go watch the videos, contribute to the to my charity, you’re gonna get access to the charity videos where we’ve talked about all these different things, all the different scenarios, we make scripts available. I mean, it’s incredible the amount of information that’s in there. So think about that. I’ll leave it at that.

Bradley: Yeah. And because we got time, because we only had two more questions as of right now. We’ll come back to those in a minute. But I want to point out because you were asking about whether it was two questions in the past few minutes. One was RYS again, will that what if they catch on number two was how would you approach it nationally, and so Marco has been sharing even in the free Facebook group this week, this week alone, he’s shared about the Land Solutions Network, which is his National Land buying site that him and Rob have been working on while my mind I’m just focusing on Virginia my real estate business, my land buying business. And in both instances, both cases, the Land Solutions Network, they used a mass page builder, but basically they just solidified the entity and built the drive stack. That’s it. I mean other than what a couple of press releases for my so and it’s ranking nationally for in many different states and such for his primary keyword sell land fast. Well, I’ve only targeted Virginia but same thing is a if I were to do so, land fast Virginia, this is what Marco was talking about, as you see how it pulls my knowledge panel for that keyword. Right, that makes sense. So the brand has been associated with that keyword. I’m targeting only Virginia. But you can see that it’s pulled that this is a full on brand association with my keyword for it to bring that up here. Does that make sense? And you can also see in that search field now with sell land fast right there is Alpha Land Realty, I didn’t even type in alpha land or start to type in the brand name and it’s popping my brand name into a keyword search suggests. Does that make sense? So think about that. I swear to God. This is my word. Only thing I’ve done to this. It’s a single page. I’ll show it to you. It’s a single page, Click Funnels page. This is just a landing page. Guys. That’s it. There’s no, there’s no content marketing going on here. There’s no silo structure here. It’s a single page landing page, Click Funnels, which you can’t even optimize the SEO elements of a Click Funnels page. I do have structured data embedded in this, but that’s it. And then I’ve solidified the entity with an SEO power shield, the same thing that we teach you guys. That’s what I did with this. And I’ve done nothing else but one link building gig from MGYB to the drive stack in the syndication network last summer. I created this business a year ago, so probably about nine months ago. I did a link building gig, one link building gig to the drive stack and listen to the SEO power shield basically. And I’ve done and I’ve just driven traffic to it through direct mail. And now obviously, your organic track traffic it’s getting on its own as well as I run ads for for lead generation Google ads. And that’s it. So I’ve done the SEO power shield, one link building gig and then I’ve driven relevant traffic to it, which is exactly what we teach with our Google branding, Google Ads branding course or our YouTube local traffic course. It’s about how to drive relevant traffic into your entity to get the push and to create that brand and keyword association, which I’ve proven right here beyond a shadow of a doubt. And that’s it, guys. I’ve done nothing else. I have published some press releases, primarily for properties that I’m selling, but that’s a different domain. It’s the same entity, but it’s a different domain because I use Alpha Land Realty dot sale as my selling site. So anyways, my point is I just want to point out how you know exactly what Mark is talking about is using a drive stack to create that association, it didn’t happen overnight. But I didn’t even have to keep pushing links into this for it to work.

It just took time and actually relevant traffic, which will bring me to the next question here in a minute about somebody saying our links still relevant. They are but this case right here, and it’s and they always in my I’m not going to never say never, never say always either, right? I’m going to say they’re always going to remain relevant. But this particular project here that I’m showing, as an example, proves that it doesn’t necessarily take links, just sending relevant traffic and then having that traffic convert on the page, which means, you know, complete a conversion goal, in this case, submitting the OPT, you know, the property assessment worksheet that can access that’s a that’s a conversion. And that’s a huge signal for SEO, and that’s caused the brand association with my primary keyword. And it wasn’t link based, really, it was mainly entity based exactly what we’ve been teaching and relevant traffic activity, ART — Activity, Relevance, trust, and authority. So those two things alone have caused me to be the number one position not just for that keyword, but for others as well that I wasn’t even really pushing on. Take a look. Now, in fact, it didn’t pop my knowledge panel here, but it still puts me as number one. Does that make sense? So I just want to point out like how really powerful this stuff is guys. You know, we’re practicing what we preach here. Do you want to comment on that, Marco?

Marco: Sorry, it’s raining right now and it’s loud

Bradley: by the way, it didn’t pop a knowledge panel for we buy land Virginia, but look at that, guys see that? That’s keyboard association. And it’s pulling my that’s a keyword search. And it’s brought my brand into suggesting that’s pretty powerful. For the first several months I as soon as I would start to type in alpha land, it would pop up. So but it was it you know, it wasn’t coming with a generic keyword, but you can see it, it’s definitely coming up now. And then if you take a look. Get my Google Site guys, my drive stack. I have not done anything mirroring at all because there’s no theme to mirror-like, in other words, I don’t have a site, I’ve got a single page landing page as my website. So there’s no silo structure, nothing else. So the drive stack is a flat drive stack. In other words, there’s no structure, there’s no silo structure to it. And, and all and that’s all I’ve ever done, guys. And you can see, it’s just, it’s just ranking incredibly well. And I’ve got I’ve been able to get that brand association with that keyword by just doing exactly what we teach. I’m sorry, Marco, go ahead.

Marco: No, no, I mean, this totally. It just reaffirms what we teach over and over and over again, despite the people who say it doesn’t work. I mean, seriously, we show it on video. We’re gonna believe, like the experts, and then the gurus, the professionals or you’re lying eyes. It’s up to you.

Do You Think Links Are Getting Less Important?

Yeah. So that’s the next question is do you think links are getting less important? If so, what would you recommend placing them? They’re still important, there’s no question. Like I said, Never say never, never say always. But I’m going to say, as you know, I think links will always have its place. Google’s entire algorithm is built on, you know, the backbone of it, the underlying foundation is about links. So I’m not going to say that it will never change, but it’s likely that it won’t anytime soon. So that said, but are links becoming less important? Yeah, they are to a degree because again, as I just proved, activity, relevance, trust, and authority. So activity is very, very important. Those types of engagement signals can trigger what only links used to be able to do, does that make sense? And we, you know, again, like YouTube videos, you can rank YouTube videos on engagement alone with zero SEO signals. And when you have a lot of engagement, it’s going to naturally accrue links and stuff anyways, right? Because people will link to it and things like that. But what I’m saying is without any proactive intentional SEO, link building work being done to YouTube videos, you can rank them all day long with purely on engagement signals.

And we’re starting to see that more and more with web assets and entities, as long as the proper engagement signals are triggered, such as visitation, dwell time, scroll depth, you know, clicking through to different links. So navigating through the site, conversion goals are incredibly powerful, because that’s showing that you satisfied the searchers query, because they they clicked through to the site, and then they converted, which is another especially if you’ve got Analytics on your site, or if it’s submitted to any any sort of Google Code on the site will recognize that a conversion has occurred, if that makes sense. I like to have Google Ads remarketing tag and conversion tag on every site that I set up specifically for that even if I’m not running Google ads, which I run Google ads for everything now. Not necessarily search ads, but remarketing and display and YouTube. But what I’m saying is I always set up a conversion tracking in Google ads, so that Google is always aware of every time somebody submits an opt in form or makes a phone call, or clicks the tap to call button on my site. Does that make sense? And all of those things act as SEO signals that make links less important, although I think they’re an underlying foundation, that’s not going to go away.

Marco: Um, okay, so links, and ART. The only way that art can be measured is through links. The only way that Google can track anything from one place to the other, and then from there to the other places, so that they can see exactly what’s going on with that entity is links. There’s no other way. It’s not magic. I mean, this isn’t lucky charms. It’s not magically delicious. Google doesn’t disappear. I got out of smoke somewhere. And say, Oh, look, look what I found. Look at all this activity, relevance, trust and authority that doesn’t have it. Links, not only foundation, I mean, the essence of what the fuck Google is doing. AI doesn’t magically happen. Hear, it has to go wherever it is, and it has to it. It looks at all of these different things. But it’s done through links. As long as that happens until Google can teleport, which is why they want quantum. It’s been their whole idea since the beginning to get rid of search to do away with search, because they can make so much fun.

Knowing quantum, you can teleport from one site to another without actually going through a link. But and until that happens, and we’re really far from that theory to actually happening and then having it be applied to search to do away with search. Right now, everything that we do everything that happens, as far as Google as far as anything else, as far as I know, is linked. Why? Because that’s everything that the whole group of everything is links. PageRank and ranking. So that’s what we’re building. I mean that that’s why when you hammer things with with links, especially if you do follow links, it works so well and it pushes things so well. That’s why a stacking works so well. That’s why it’s stacking iframes works so well. That’s why link pushing link building through mapping bits through everything. That’s why it works so well. That’s why when Dadea takes something out, once you have the foundation, you got art going in there, you got all of these different things, you’ve done your entity, right, you got your own page, right? When you hit that link, that’s when the magic really happens. And if they were not important, or if they were just an underlying factor, we would not get the results that we that we get. I mean this shit. And as a matter of fact, I’m about to do a link building test where I’m going to show just how important link building is but again, we go back to they have to be the right panel next they have to be well they have to have activity relevance. Trust enough.

Already, Google will measure the destination, it will measure the link origin and everything that’s linking to the link origin and the link destination in order to see everything that’s related to that entity. But the only way that it can do it right now, and the only way that it does is it has to get that through late. And it’s measuring, it’s building up your PageRank. It’s building up your ranking score. And then it gets weighted, right? And then it gets compared to all of the other entities in that niche to see which one answers the query the best, but a whole bunch of other things happen before that actually happens, right? And then, as you said, the what senses at all, is when you do all of these things that young people come and take action on your website, and they actually finish whatever it is that they started. I mean that that’s that that’s what closes the loop for everything. Because then Google sees people trusting whatever it is that you’re doing, by giving you information by making a call Oh, by getting a satisfying their query. Exactly.

Bradley: Yeah, that’s exact because guys, I’ve talked about this before, way back years ago, I think it was 2014 when we talked about CT spam, click through spam and how effective that was. And, you know, the, the completing the conversion goal is incredibly important because it proves. I remember I watched I think it was a TED talk, but it was Larry Page, right, which is one of the founders of Google. And he’s talking about how, and this was, I think, in 2010, when I saw this. So way back when I first got started, and Google was kind of, you know, wasn’t even the big get on the block at the time it was becoming it but it wasn’t yet. Well, it might have been in 2010, but it was still anyways, my point is I saw an early. I think it was a TED talk, but it was talking on stage about what their kind of vision for Google was going to going to be. And he said it was very simple to end search.

And at the time, it didn’t make any sense to me, but it does now and it has for many years but essentially what he was saying was that what they wanted to do with Google was that when somebody would put a search in that their query would be answered in that first page like that first 10 results. The solution to their problem was would be found right there. And that that’s the end search. But so that’s the whole point. Like if you understand that, and you’re able to satisfy that searchers query and prove that to Google, which means allowing them to peek into your site, basically and see it happen, then you’re you’re you’re providing them the exact same signals that they aspire to have, you know, that they that’s really what they wanted to begin with. So, to answer your to follow up with what Marco said, I agree, like, you know, links are the foundation of everything, which is what I said, would you say what would you recommend in place of them? Well, not I wouldn’t recommend this in place, but on top of, which would be, like I said, running relevant traffic in which you can buy very inexpensively from YouTube, although that’s more about views than clicks, but the clicks are highly weighted when they come from YouTube videos from ads especially, but display ads, and remarketing are very, very inexpensive traffic, remarketing is less expensive than cold traffic display ads. So that’s number one. But number two, again, make sure that you have some sort of conversion action on your site that’s going to trigger that. And like Marco said, kind of solidified, it kind of underpins that, it completes the loop closes the loop. And there’s a number of ways you can do it. If you’re running ads, I would set up conversion tracking in Google ads. But you don’t have to even if you’re not running Google ads, you could do it with Google Analytics, right? You can put Analytics on the site and set up a conversion goal there. And again, it’s just a trigger to notify Google that the visitor that’s coming from Google or from anywhere else for that matter is converting which means you’re satisfying their queries, you’re providing value. It’s very, very powerful. So it’s a great question, by the way.

Will MGYB.co Continue To Set Up Verified GMBs?

Aaron says, Is mgyb.co continuing to set up your verified GMBs? no not right now. Specifically for Why you said that? Or for what you stated here Google has stopped displaying reviews making changes in GMB could trigger suspension or verification. So we’ve, we’ve had to suspend that service again. So for now, no, we’re not verifying GMB and we’re not recovering suspended GMB is either. Okay, maybe once all this stuff settles down, it’ll come back but for now, no.

last one is BB come. He says, Hey, guys tune in late 1010 X or 10 times, I guess, mix of what I think and understanding and hypothetically speaking stuff. Yeah. And that’s what I was saying, Man, hopefully you understand I wasn’t trying to be malicious. It’s for everybody else’s benefit to too many times in any business or any endeavor in life. You hear people that are, you know, what if, what if, what if, and I’ve seen it too many times, people not take action because they think that they have to understand every solution to every possible scenario before they take the first step. And that’s just not it’s not done.

Not even reasonable, right? It’s good that you ask those questions may be as far as like, well, what if somebody record you know, Google recognizes our wives and stuff cuz it gives us an opportunity to show the staying power of what we’ve been teaching. But we don’t work for Google. And we don’t know tomorrow, it could all come to a, you know, crashing, halt a fiery death. But we don’t know that. And it’s been working for many, many years. And as long as it is still working, we’re going to continue to exploit it. You know what I mean? So, comments on that? Anybody? Yeah. Damn, right. Damn right. Do the do until you can’t do no more, but then by then, we will have figured out another way to try and do. That’s it.

It’s the cat mouse game that we play, you know, and that’s it. And we learned that I mean, we’ve seen it, we’ve seen it. I’ve seen it all. 2002 2003 beginning 2004. I’ve seen it all. And it’s just a matter of keeping up keeping up keeping up. Okay, this is what Google’s doing. This is what Google’s going, I’m gonna go there, I’m not gonna wait here and be changes while Google is making changes. I’m off to the races, because I can see what Google’s doing. And then when they get to whatever it is that they know, we’re off to the races again, and to meet them at the next at the next one. And you know, that’s just anyone who isn’t doing it. Anyone who isn’t trying to play the game that way, then what you’re doing is you’re playing a catch up game, instead of playing. I’m gonna wait for Google at the pass game. And I’m gonna shoot him from high high up where I can just pick them off.

First offense is what you’re saying. Right, right. What do you want to do with me? I love to attack I’m gonna go and I’m gonna just figure out how to get into everything so that I can get the best results possible. I could care less about, you know, that. colors or whatever. I don’t even think about that. I just go and get results period.

Do You Prefer Push Notifications Or Email Subs?

So last question. And this is perfect timing. So we’re about to wrap up anyways, he says, if there’s time, push notifications or email subs, okay. I’m going to tell you what my preference is, but I have no data to back it up. So I’m gonna make that disclaimer right now. I prefer email subs over push notifications any day of the week. Why? Because I hate push notifications. Personally, I turned them off, I decline any sort of browser notification when it asked me if I want browser notifications, I turn off my phone, push notifications. I hate it. I hate push notifications. And but I’m also in my 40s. So the younger generation may very well prefer push notifications over email. So I have no data to back that up. I just would rather have an email list than a push notification list Well, for the type of markets that I, you know, compete in, but if I was dealing with a younger crowd, and there’s data to show that push notifications are more effective than I would absolutely use those. But personally, I hate push notifications and for the industry trees that I work in with mainly contracting type stuff. Email subs, in my opinion, are much more valuable. Yeah, yes or no I agree. I agree with that and in fact that we could say that a lot of the revenue that we generate in our various industries are based off of email we haven’t tried we push a lot I know that on some specific affiliate niches, push notifications work really really well. Maybe you can get both but honestly we try with bush we try with many chat we’ll try with a bunch of different stuff and we always come back to email because it’s so you know, this is proven tested and you know, it’s still the highest ROI marketing strategy that you can deploy for your brand I think a second close to that Hernan and correct me if I’m wrong would be remarketing right now building. Yeah, yeah. 100%. Yep.

Remarketing, in my opinion, guys is better than well. I’m not gonna say better than email, but it’s a very close second because you don’t have to get anybody to opt in right to be up to all somebody has to do is visit a page where your remarketing tag is to get put on a remarketing list. So it’s non confrontational non obtrusive. In other words like you don’t have to get them to complete a conversion goal to get put on a remarketing list. So I think remarketing is so powerful.

Anybody else before we wrap it up at five o'clock? Cool. Sweet, good. No, perfect timing. Thanks, everybody for being here. We’ll see you guys next week. Hey, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 281 posted first on http://beyondvapepage.blogspot.com

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