#my older version of this method is ALSO in that tag- its a little more convoluted than this one though so i wanted to share the new version | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

themida-crack-sa · 2 years

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Download Themida crack (license key) latest version XUG!

💾 ►►► DOWNLOAD FILE 🔥🔥🔥 It should unpack any themida packed file version 1. This post is only for educational purposes. The exe i'm looking to unpack is the one in bin folder, PT2. Try this tutotial: How Unpack Themida 2. In a Themida binary, different parts of the code are run in virtual machines and it obscures the behavior of the target program. Backtracing from the crashsite is probably hard because you dont know what the addresses pointed to back when you first unpacked it. The Code for the Anti-Debugger sequence, unpacks its self, and the. Functions: Unpack: Unpacks the binary you select. File list Click to check if it's the file you need, and recomment it at the bottom : Filename. We need blackhat with experience in themida packer unpacking for a long termework. NET is a tool developed to quickly and easily unpack packed. Note: You need to use a bit Python interpreter to dump bit executables. As you can see, it relies heavily on the JNI. 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Posted by pyschogsmdestroyer in: Scripts. Unpacking Tutorials Either way, best of luck to ya! View full post. PEiD detects most common packers, cryptors and compilers for PE files. Improve version detection to handle packed Delphi executables. Different encryption algorithms and keys in each protected application. Most likely its Themida or VMProtect. Compared to Themida v2, the themida v3 does not have a great improvement over the VMs. I think other hide plugin use the same trick. Even if you had videos you still have to do experimenting in order to unpack what ever you're doing. The best method to unpack a VM-protected packer like Themida is to devirtualize it, which involves figuring out the entire instruction set that the packer uses and writing a script to interpret that language. The program is using a checksum algorithm to detect if the dll is tampered. Currently, we are experiencing in the tRO people finding their Recvpacket. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you. This tutorial shows you how to get original codes from a compressed program example 1. We need blackhat with experience in themida …. So temporarily disable your antivirus and update CopyTrans apps. I get debug the executable with ollydbg, but i can't find it's hard the exactly jump to bypass the verification dongle key HARDKey , because themida encript. I want to release a new tutorial about the popular theme Themida - WinLicense. Start CopyTrans Control Center. Hello, I'm a developer in Oreans Technologies and we have developed Themida to protect applications against cracking. There's a newer version: HERE. I'm looking for a person who can unpack and rebuild. So when I found this community, decide. However, I have never attempted to unpack Themida. Themida will pack the executable. Right-click on the antivirus icon and temporarily disable protection for 10 mins. 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Now press F9 to run it and as you can see, we got a pop up, don't worry just press ok and the debug is terminated. I have a 32bit version from this, but, there is the same, all unpackers are stuck in procedure or hangs up. Net executables 32 and bit. Make sure to use this tool in a VM if you're unsure about what the target executable does. Malware analysis is one of the key problems. NET is a tool developed to quickly and easily unpack …. Successful malware distributors are not using public crypters as often, heuristics for detecting public packers is too easy, which is why we have seen a reduction in AIO unpacker tools. Anti-memory dumpers techniques for any Ring3 and Ring0 dumpers. Themida is so complicated to unpack that most people write scripts and so you can search for a script for the given version you are trying to unpack and attempt to use that. Gracefully handle bitness mismatch between interpreter and target PEs. How to Unpacking Themida? I'm trying to get back into reversing. To verify the effectiveness of x64Unpack, experiments were conducted on the obfuscation tools: UPX 3. I've been trying to hook nt apis and try debugging it. Support all version! Tested in 1. Unpacking themida and other protections. A protector is a software for protecting core technologies by using compression and encryption. It's free to sign up and bid on jobs. Jan 28, — Category Archives: Ioncube v10 decoder JavaScript Obfuscator is a free online tool that obfuscates your source code, …. I've made some changes to my game. The unpacked binary will be saved with an U suffix. My question is, how can I get better so that I can unpack Themida? I want to unpack Themida for the following reason: While reverse engineering GameLauncher. It was Spotify the application protected with Themida.

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themida-crack-fm · 2 years

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Download Themida crack (serial key) latest version TLA;

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kyidyl · 3 years

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Kyidyl Explains Bones - Part 6

(All of these are under the KyidylBones tag.)

Age Determination

Well, age at death anyway. I’m gonna put this warning up front:

Today’s post will contain pictures of the skeletons of children. This is something that a lot of people, even those who think they won’t be bothered, find upsetting. This goes double if you actually have children. This post will also include frank discussion of child death.

You have been warned.

So what is age determination? Age determination isn’t the process of figuring out how old a set of remains is, it’s the process of figuring out how old the individual was when they died. Because of the sensitive nature of the topic, I’m putting everything behind a cut today.

Ethics: Beyond the normal respectful approach, there aren’t separate ethical considerations with dealing with age like there are for sex and race. Just be considerate of the fact that child death is super upsetting to some people. I literally had people in my classes at the masters level who were moved to tears by some of the younger remains, so even when you’re used to looking at things from a clinical perspective, kids can be tough.

General: Age is separated into three general categories: juvenile (0-early 20s), adult, and elderly. Juveniles are from birth until the last known skeletal change takes place. IE, until all your teeth come in and all your bones fuse. These are really good indicators of age, so we use them as much as we can for as long into the lifespan as we can. Adults range from “done growing” to “showing signs of degeneration” EG, arthritis and that kind of thing. Elderly is anything older than that.

Also, this applies to all age categories: size is not an indicator of age. Ever.

Juveniles: We say juveniles instead of children because people in their late teens and early 20s aren’t really children, but they haven’t finished growing yet. So juvenile is a more inclusive term, and the more accurate one. That said, kids are by FAR the easiest to know the age of. Juvenile remains do not look like small adult remains, because juveniles that have skeletons that do not resemble adult skeletons beyond the basic “ah, that’s probably a human”.

There are a few ways that we determine the age of a juvenile, and the first thing we check is the teeth. Before the body, before any other signs. Because the teeth are consistently accurate across race, sex, economic standing, any pathologies, etc. Teeth are formed and come in on a schedule. Here is that schedule:

And here is a link to a high res PDF version that you absolutely should take a look at (Source).

Beyond this, the 3rd molar AKA wisdom teeth come in between ages 17-25. Now, archaeological remains won’t have scars on the bone from the wisdom teeth removal that a lot of people commonly undergo, but in the future that will be visible on the bone. I’ll get into this more when I get around to doing the damage and pathology posts, but healed bone has a different appearance than unbroken bone, so a healed-over tooth socket has a different appearance than bone that never had a tooth there to begin with. In addition, while tooth eruption in a living juvenile is accepted as the time when the tooth breaks through the gums, in the remains of a juvenile we can see un-erupted teeth within the jaw. It looks like this:

(Source)

As an aside: those lines on the teeth are called enamel hypoplasia, and I’ll cover it more in the teeth post, but essentially if you don’t get proper nutrition as a child when your adult teeth are developing in your jaw you get these lines in them.

So anyway, because teeth come in on such a precise schedule, and because teeth survive better than anything else in your body (especially in a child’s body. Childrens’ bones are fragile, partially ossified, and they decay quickly.), they’re very good for estimating age at death. Even more so than bones, because bones can be altered by illness, malnutrition, repetitive activity, or genetic anomalies. Teeth almost never are. Or, rather, their rate of growth isn’t.

Another thing we look for when determining age at death is the fusion of the bones. See, as you’re growing you have more bones. Those get larger until they meet up with the bone they’re part of, and then they start to fuse. These are called epiphysis (growth plates). Very young children don’t even have entirely ossified (bone instead of cartilage) bones, let along epiphysis that touch. Babies don’t show up often in the archaeological record because of this. To better illustrate this, here is an image of an xray of a baby’s hand:

(Source)

You’ll notice that the finger bones (Metacarpals and carpels, known collectively as phalanges.) have small little bones at the ends that aren’t attached - that’s not an anomaly, that’s normal. Those are the physis, which will fuse later in life after they are larger, and the plate between them from which they grow is the epiphysis. You can also see that the wrist bones have barely begun to ossify and don’t show up on the xray, and the physis for the radius and ulna (arm bones) also haven’t begin to ossify and thus don’t show up - that’s why the arm bones look like one bone. They aren’t, they have an epiphysis at either end (Your elbow is a separate bone called the olecranon and it doesn’t fuse until later on.). This happens at a very predictable rate, and so we can tell how old someone is from a combination of their teeth and which bones have and have not ossified and fused. In addition, the bone of the epiphysis has a unique texture that is referred to as “billowy” in the literature (even tho I hate that word). Here’s a picture:

(Source)

The one on the left is what you want to look at, since this is a progression through age. Also I sniped this from a paper on age estimation, so if you’re interested in this take a look at it. It’s on researchgate so it’s not behind a paywall. As an aside: researchgate is amazing and you should all learn to use it.

Anyway, see that bumpy texture on the left? That’s what unfused bone looks like at the growth plate. This actually applies to, as far as I know, all land mammals. So if you find animal bones with this texture at the end of the bone, then that animal was a juvenile when it died. Bones fuse at different times in your life, but we know the times when they fuse. There are 206 bones in the adult body, so that would be a lot for me to try and put in a tumblr post, but if you google a specific bone you should be able to find the ages they fuse. I believe, if memory serves, that the skull sutures are the last to fully fuse, and they in fact continue to become more tightly fused as your life goes on. I’ll cover that in the next section tho. It will hold together as a teenager, but the skull bones take a long time to fuse to each other. Two of the last epiphysis to fuse though are the iliac crest (The curved part of the hip - it’s actually its own separate bone. Like just the small, smooth curved part.) and the sternal end of the clavicle (clavicle = collarbone, and the sternal end is the medial part towards the sternum.). This happens in your early to mid 20s.

So teeth and bone fusion are the two most used methods of age estimation. So if anyone ever shows you a small skeleton with fused bones and calls it a child, roll your eyes at them. It’s not a child.

One last note on juvenile skeletons: until the individual undergoes puberty, sex and race determinations are extremely difficult (teeth can be used for race, but not for sex. Not really, anyway.). So again, anyone who professes to know the sex of a set of pre-pubescent remains without like...a gravestone or something telling them is probably a liar. Right now the methods for doing that are either expensive (genetics) or inaccurate. And doing genetic evaluations on old juvenile remains is difficult, because their bones are more fragile than adult bones and break down easier, which exposes the DNA to easy degradation. It’s not impossible, it’s just usually more difficult and more expensive.

For reference, here is a juvenile skeleton laid out in standard anatomical position. There is more than one individual here, so ignore any of the bones outside the arms and above the head.

(Source)

Adults and the Elderly: After an individual finishes growing, estimating their age becomes increasingly difficult. There’s no such thing as, for example, an average number of tooth cavities. In addition, the natural growth and destruction of your bone cells over your lifetime means that things you do habitually can significantly alter the shape of your bones and the rate at which they break down.

However, there are a few things that can be used. Joints wear down at a fairly consistent rate, and arthritis leaves specific markers on the bones that we can identify as arthritis rather than normal wear and tear. This is most easily views in two places: the public symphasis (the front where your two hip bones meet.) and the acetabulum (The socket that the round end of your thigh bone is in.). The picture I used above is an image of the wear and tear seen on a series of pubic symphysises (symphysii? IDK.). And so these are matched against skeletons whose age at death was known and age ranges for changes to this area were arrived at.

When I was doing my MSc, we did a project where we were assigned a set of remains and had to use everything we’d learned in the course to do a full evaluation of our skeletons. Well, the majority of my skull was missing and so I used the acetabulum to do age estimation on the skeleton (I had some teeth, but not most of the ones that are diagnostic of age, which I’ll cover in a sec.). This is an image from and a link to one of the papers I used:

(Source)

Two things happen here as you age. One, the edges of the socket become damaged and it starts to change the anatomy (F is oldest). Two, that space in the middle is called the acetabular fossa, or the acetabular notch. And as you can see, the shape of it changes over time due to normal wear and tear. In combination with resources like the one I linked, we can use this to estimate the age of an adult or elderly individual.

Another tool we use has to do with the fusion of your growth plates. After the bones fuse, the line is still visible. Throughout your life the remodeling (normal breakdown/growth of bones and healing from damage.) causes the sutures to be come less and less visible. We call this obliteration. In the elderly, most of their sutures and growth plates will be completely obliterated. For example, the femur is in four pieces as a child. The main body of the femur, the head of the femur, the greater trochanter (The big bump on the top outside. This is like...the part that’s wides below your hips where your thigh meets your pelvis, but on the outside.), and the condyles (the rounded pieces on the far end.). The greater trochanter fuses and obliterates pretty early on, but the head and the condyles are pretty easy to see even in adults. Here’s an example showing the femoral head:

(Source)

As you can see, the trochanter has fused and is obliterated, but the head has fused and you can still see the line from the growth plate. The sutures in the skull are especially good for this, as cranial sutures take the majority of the lifespan to obliterate (sometimes they never fully do.). If you see a smooth skull, that person was ooooold.

The last easily accessible way we assess age at death is via tooth wear. Now, this won’t work in modern skeletons, which is why there’s a lot of research surrounding the evaluation of age at death. We’re well aware that after humans entered roughly the industrial age, our foods became soft and teeth no longer wear like they should, and after that point in time it’s not possible to use the standardized methods of tooth wear to evaluate age. Well, I should rephrase, it won’t be possible in westernized and industrialized societies. Cultures in Africa and South America that still practice pastoral or hunter/gatherer lifestyles will likely still have expected tooth wear. Anyone who lives in a society that has and uses grocery stores or doesn’t use two rocks to mill flour (Do not underestimate how much bread people ate.), is not going to have expected tooth wear (so it’s not about rural vs city.).

See, it’s normal and natural for teeth to wear. It’s normal and natural for the yellowish substance below the enamel, called dentin, to show. Dentin is almost as hard as enamel, and it actually regrows. We evolved to have tooth wear both on the surfaces and between the teeth. Humans used to eat much tougher foods, and even when we weren’t, our foods had a lot of grit in them (IE, tiny pieces of stone from milling flour. I have a whole ass theory about the role of dirt in the evolution of teeth for all animals but that’s neither here nor there.) and wore our teeth down. Wear isn’t a sign of bad dental hygiene, it’s a sign of a tougher diet. After the industrial age we started using different methods to produce food and started eating softer food overall, so we stopped putting the stresses on our jaws required for both proper tooth wear and the proper growth of our teeth (AKA: wisdom tooth impaction.). So normally worn teeth look like this:

(Source for both images)

If you’ll notice in that top image the lines where the teeth meet fit exactly together. This is because of tooth wear. Interestingly you’ll also notice in the bottom image that this individual’s teeth are unevenly worn, meaning they chewed on the right side of their mouth. This is actually something we see all the time because of both handedness, and insult to the teeth on one side of the aw (AKA it was painful cause they had cavities.). This individual was likely a young adult given that they don’t have a lot of tooth wear to begin with, but they were preferentially using one side of their mouth to chew and so it is more worn than it would be for someone who wasn’t doing that. Here is the chart we use to grade tooth wear and age on adult teeth:

(Source)

That link has a larger version of the chart and more images.

So the fact that I’m 40 and still can feel all the cusps on all of my molars is an anomaly compared to previous humans. Soft foods. So if you compare the above image of the jaw with the chart, you’ll see that the individuals in both pictures have wear in the 25-35yrs old age rage, or what we would consider to be a young adult. And before you start talking about average age of humans back in the day, don’t forget that the average includes a lot of dead children. Once you made it to adulthood you lived a decent amount of time.

So those of you who are older than your 30s or so might not remember this, but when your adult incisors come in they had small ridges on the edges. It was easier to tell on your top teeth (maxillary incisors) than your bottom ones (mandibular incisors.), but it’s present on both. These bad boys:

(Source)

That is obviously a living human, but I’m showing you because they wear quickly. They do, however, wear at a prescribed pace so if a set of remains has them they were young. Sometimes they’re gone before you’re even an adult, but I figured I’d mention them because they are another kind of tooth wear.

Disease: The last thing that helps in age determination are age-based diseases. Namely, osteoarthritis and osteoporosis. There are circumstances wherein someone younger can have both of those pathologies, but that’s why we have all of the other things. So if we see signs of arthritis in a younger person, we’ll have the other signs to help us realize that they aren’t an elderly individual.

Osteoarthritis is, essentially, a thinning of the cartilage, fluid, and other soft tissues in the joints, causing the bones to rub against each other instead of sliding nicely on the cartilage. Now, a certain amount of thinning is expected with age - obviously, as arthritis in the elderly is extremely common even now. But osteoarthritis is an escalation of the normal wear and tear into a pathology. Osteoarthritis damages the joints, and so bone attempts to regrow, so you see a lot of abnormal outgrowths of bone that fit tightly together because they were rubbing against each other. You also see, in extreme cases, striations on the bones where they were grinding together. Like this:

(Source)

This is a knee joint, viewed from the posterior side. You can see on the bottom condyle and the opposing articular surface that there are lines. Those lines are from the bones grinding. You also can see, especially on the tibia, all those little funky looking bone bits. All that roughness sticking out around end, below the flat surface. Some roughness there is normal, but that’s rougher than it should be and that’s the result of osteoarthritis.

The other disease common in the elderly is osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is an illness that causes compact/cortical (the thicker hard bone around the spingy bone to thin and become porous (hence the name.). I’ve held bone with extremely advanced osteoporosis and they are about half the weight of normal bones. So that’s the first sign. The next sign is that they’ll be damaged, both from the natural processes of time and from subsequent handling, because they’re farm more fragile than health adult bone. The vertebra also take on a “squished” appearance due to the forces of gravity and the remodeling during the life of the individual. You also will often see poorly healed breaks (I’ll show you more of this later in this series when I get to pathologies.).

So that brings us to the end of the bit about age determination. Hope you guys are enjoying this series. :) I think next up is gonna be teeth! =D

#science #KyidylBones #archaeology #forensic #forensic anthropology #skeleton #age #human skeleton #human remains #educational #infodump #bones #human bones

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the-bloody-masquerade · 3 years

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End of Year ask! So I'm playing Amanda, the Ventrue PC in Coteries. It's my first time playing a Ventrue, and I never realized how difficult their bane is. What's the most difficult Ventrue bane you as a player have taken on, and/or given one of original Ventrue characters?

Also from baddass-at-cuddling: Second end of year ask is what do you think LaCroix's Ventrue bane is? Maybe he can only feed from handsome mobsters like Mercurio? 🤔 [I’m gonna throw both your asks in one because the second answer is gonna have a lot to do with my first answer.] And heads up trigger warning for mention of rape and slavery as I discuss a couple of White Wolfs more *edgy* character arcs. How about post-first-week-of-the-year ask. That’s about all the quicker I move with these asks. 😅 So! The Ventrue! I love them so much and they are my favorite clan. A lot of people with project their frustrations of the real-world “top 1%” onto the Ventrue and tend to treat them scornfully, or worse yet, project those frustrations onto the people who like the Ventrue. Its just make believe folks! There are numerous reasons to be fond of the vampire aristocracy and not all of them automatically equate “I want to lick the boots of harmful capitalists in real life.” Anyway, the Ventrue bane can be tricky but I think it is also one of the more appealing aspects of the clan due to how it is springboard for creativity and character development. There is no official “rhyme or reason” to why a certain Ventrue gets a certain Bane but I wanna take a little time to explain my personal pitch for how a Ventrue gets their Bane. Its not really a singular cohesive idea but I cannot fathom not making a Ventrue character’s Bane relevant to their personality or backstory. Something that explores some aspect of their psyche. Maybe constructs that sense of “personal horror” that vtm says it so loves to cultivate.

I actually know of very few canonical ventrue banes and a lot of them are... dicey. 😬

On the completely innocuous end of the spectrum you have characters like Victor Temple from LA by Night who’s preference appears to be people who “know who he is” ie recognize his fame. Its simple, and not at all difficult as long as he stays in LA or its culture sphere where he as a music industry mogul and social media personality is well known. Pretty easy to tie this to Victor psychologically, he craves recognition and maybe a human aspiration was transformed by supernatural Ventrue ambition upon his embrace. Sure would be an interesting challenge for Victor to travel to an area of the world where his music empire wasn’t well known...

Then there’s Alexander of Paris who’s blood preference only allowed him to feed from women who were in love (but not married). Devilishly specific, perhaps tricky, perhaps not if the Toreador-level-pretty Alexander could just make his blood dolls fall in love with him. I don’t know enough about this character to say if this is backstory-relavant to him.

On the dicey side you have things like our dear Jan Pieterzoon’s canonical blood restriction to only feed from rape survivors. Sort of recently I’ve seen people tossing about the headcanon that this could be made less stereotypically “White Wolf edgy dark shock value bullshit” if this was a reflection Pieterzoon being a survivor himself, and then exploring the aspects of a “personal horror” how having a blood restriction that reflects that. Because as far as I know, canon never does that, his restriction is just that way in canon to be edgy. On the other hand, yet another canonical Ventrue with a... squicky blood preference would be Andrew Seneca, a former black American slave who found out after his embrace that his blood preference was in fact, slaves. 😬I am not equipped to parse out the handling of this storyline so I won’t try but he’s got a listing on the white wolf wiki if you want to know. Without getting into it, his backstory and blood preference certainly seem to be made for a very hardcore impactful case of “personal horror,” especially regarding what he was going to do as the ages marched on, but again, I can’t really speak to how it was handled.

So by now you’ve figured out that I have a preference for Ventrue whos blood preferences speak to something intrinsic to their backstory or character arcs. I actually have something of a mini-dynasty of Ventrue OCs who’s blood preferences I’ve put a lot of thought into. I’d love to go into that but I’d prefer to do it on my personal project blog. So I’ll do that and tag you in it, okay Badass? But I will answer the question of my speculation on LaCroix’s blood preference here (finally, lol). I’ve seen a few people in fandom take a pass at it and many of them do wrap it into psychological aspects of LaCroix that they’ve explored in their own works.

I have seen a version of LaCroix where his blood preference is blood that is laced with alcohol and/or opium, ‘old timey comfort drugs’ speaking to his 19th century wartime backstory.

I’ve also seen a take in which LaCroix’s blood preference is dominant women, setting up an accidental embrace and romance that the author wanted to explore. The take that I use for my own fics is that LaCroix’s blood preference is real down to earth kind of people. Peasants, working class, to put it one way, but not because it contrasts with LaCroix’s presumed aristocracy. No, in my version LaCroix was born a common citizen into a family with only fair means. His vampiric blood preference for low-born hardworking folk is a reflection of almost all the people who surrounded him in life, family, hometown friends and soldier buddies. The kinds of people he remembers fondly from life. And our favorite even-tempered salt of the earth smuggler Mercurio fits that bill for LaCroix. Another thing I’ve always pondered is if a Ventrue’s ghouls are necessarily a “tell” as to their blood preference. I think for young Ventrue it would be, since traditionally you gotta feed on the person you’re going to ghoul to ghoul them so they have to fit their blood preference. That and one of the primary purposes for a ghoul is a quick easy snack. I suppose older Ventrue could acquire ghouls who aren’t their preference by going out of their way. To make a ghoul you just gotta exsanguinate them, you don’t necessarily have to drink it. [Edit, I mixed this up, the only difference between a ghoul and embracing a new vampire is a ghoul drinks vampire blood while in a state of good health, a new vampire is created when they drink blood while having barely any other blood in their system, ie being exsanguinated. I ALWAYS get the methods of ghouling/embrace confused] So yeah, there’s a whole big barf of my thoughts and ideas about Ventrue. I just kinda tend to do that, take a relatively simple ask and be like “WANNA SEE HOW LONG I CAN TYPE???” When I get there I’ll post about my Ventrue OCs’ blood preferences on my personal project blog. Until then thanks for reading!

#asks #badass-at-cuddling #ventrue #vampire the masquerade #vtm #blood preference

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carewyncromwell · 3 years

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“Good evening, everyone. I hope that your holiday season is appropriately merry. I am called Bartholomew, or Bat, Varney, and this is my singular favorite part of the entire year. As she is aware of this, my mundane has given me special access to her ‘Askbox,’ so that I may interact, educate, and debate with all of you about subjects involving this most wondrous time of year. I was raised in the later half of the 18th century and I’ve also lived through what my mundane calls the ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ and ‘Fantastic Beasts’ timelines, or the 19th century and early 20th century...and, courtesy of my mundane, I’ve been also given access to the fourth wall so that I can discuss things that came later, as well, as long as they involve Christmas.”

‘I must say, as much as I still don’t understand about my mundane and this communication method of hers, discussing Christmas traditions of the future is incredibly appealing.’

“For more such Christmas content, my mundane says you may consult the ‘Bat Comments on Christmas!’ tag...and naturally, she encourages you to send in those Christmas-related owls my way.

“Today’s topic of discussion is one of Christmas’s most central traditions -- caroling.

“Now of course, holiday songs are as old as holidays themselves, so there was naturally plenty of music centering around Christ and his birth from the start -- generally hymns, which were written in Latin and meant to be sung in church, whether on Christmas or not. But since Christmas was always split into both secular and non-secular traditions, there were also less formal songs that people sang outside of church as well. The first written carols of this sort that we know of originated during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I -- in fact, one of the most popular Christmas songs we know of today, ‘What Child is This?’, uses the tune of the song ‘Greensleeves,’ which was written at that time.

“Christmas caroling on people’s doorsteps -- much like Halloween’s ‘trick-or-treating’ tradition -- was inspired by a custom from older winter holidays where poor people would go door to door in wintertime, singing vaguely threatening songs to beg the houses’ rich owners for food, lodging, and/or money. As time went on, that tradition was called ‘wassailing,’ after a hot spiced beverage called wassail, which I suppose would be comparable to eggnog today. Caroling became more mainstream once people took to writing the songs down and printing copies in the 16th and 17th century -- even though there was a significant span of time in England when caroling was banned, thanks to the efforts of Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan-led Parliament. Even with the ban, though, the singing of carols persisted. Christmas caroling in organized groups really took off with Christmas’s rebirth in the 19th century. Thanks in part to a rather popular novel by Charles Dickens -- which was, appropriately enough, called A Christmas Carol -- the holiday that was once a bawdy outdoor festival was rebranded as a time for togetherness, love, peace, and giving to the needy...and caroling cheery songs door-to-door with others for pay fit perfectly with that theme. More song books were published, compiling many traditional Christmas songs together specifically for caroling.

“Now then...shall we discuss some individual Christmas songs? I suppose I can always start with a few of my favorites, from over the years...and, perhaps, you all can contribute others for me to discuss as well, if you so desire.

“‘Hark! How All the Welkin Rings’ is a song I learned in my childhood from my mother. The version I grew up with was originally written in 1739 under the name ‘a Hymn for Christmas-Day,’ by Charles Welsey -- over the years, the lyrics and melody were modified and transformed into what you all may know as ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.’

“‘The World Turned Upside Down,’ as I’ve mentioned previously, centers around the time that Christmas was banned in England. Interestingly one could easily compare its structure to that of traditional sea shanties, as it’s a rather repetitive cluster of notes that always ends with an identical line that everyone can sing along to, even if they don’t know the rest of the words.

“‘Joy to the World’ is based largely off of psalm 98 of the Christian Bible. Its first musical variation was published in 1719, though the tune used today is from an slightly more recent version from 1848. From what I understand, the popularity of that second version has only increased exponentially, over time.

“‘O Holy Night’ was originally written in French in the mid-1800′s as ‘Cantique de Noël.’ It was based off a poem called ‘Midnight, Christians.’ It’s also a favorite of my esteemed friends, Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel.

“‘The Santa Claus Express’ sadly did not take off the way other Christmas songs have, from what I gather, but it without fail always reminds me of my close associate Grim. @cursebreakerfarrier Trains have been closely associated with Christmas at least since the 1860s when the first wooden toy trains were made, but they only became more popular with the invention of the first electric toy trains at the very beginning of the 20th century. It’s little wonder that since then model train sets became popular gifts and that -- likewise -- trains now spark a lot of nostalgia for both childhood and Christmas in a lot of people. I suppose that’s why one of my mundanes’ favorite Christmas-themed moving pictures, The Polar Express, focuses around a train that travels to the North Pole.

“‘Winter Wonderland’ is the newest of these songs, as it was written in 1934, but from what I understand, it’s become very well-beloved over time. One story I’ve heard is that its writer had been in treatment for tuberculosis when he wrote its lyrics, taking inspiration from his memory of New York City’s snow-capped Central Park. I must confess that I always enjoy ‘echoing’ each line until it comes to the chorus whenever I hear it -- you know, ‘Sleigh bells ring (sleigh bells ring) -- are you listening? (Are you listening?)’ Violet and Bertie @that-ravenpuff-witch tend to do the same thing, whenever either of them are in my earshot and the song starts playing.”

#bat comments on christmas!#christmas #bartholomew varney #roleplaying #lol recycled art #music #my favorite carols also include 'i'll be home for christmas' 'once in royal david's city' and 'ding dong merrily on high' among others #the santa claus express I found on a whim and yeah it made me giggle #it's SO 30's #and yeah I do that thing with winter wonderland constantly #that particular recording plays at disney's california adventure during the holidays so i associate it closely with work!#geezus do I miss the parks!! ;-;

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chipotle · 4 years

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Panic's Nova text editor (a review)

Review: Panic’s Nova text editor

Panic, the long-established makers of Mac utility software, seems fully aware that introducing a new, commercial code editor in 2020 is a quixotic proposition. Is there enough of an advantage to a native editor over both old school cross-platform editors like Emacs and explosively popular new editors like Visual Studio Code to persuade people to switch?

I’m an unusual case as far as text editor users go: my primary job is technical writing, and the last three jobs that I’ve worked at have a “docs as code” approach, where we write documentation in Markdown and manage it under version control just like source code. The editor that works best for me in tech writing is the venerable BBEdit. When it comes to editing code, though, BBEdit lags behind. My suspicion is that BBEdit’s lack of an integrated package manager has hurt it here. Also, BBEdit’s language modules don’t support extending one another, making it effectively impossible to do full highlighting for a templating language like JSX or Jinja.

When I was a web programmer, I was one of many who moved to TextMate, and used it for everything for a while. When the Godot-like wait for TextMate 2.0 became unbearable, I wandered the text editing wilderness, eventually splitting my loyalties between BBEdit, Sublime Text, and more recently VS Code. At this point, I suspect nothing will pull me away from BBEdit for technical writing, but for programming I’m open to persuasion.

So: meet Nova.

I’ve been using Nova off and on in beta for months. I’ve reported some bugs, although I may mention a couple here that I didn’t catch until after 1.0’s release. And, I’m going to compare it to the GUI editors that I’ve been using recently: BBEdit, Sublime Text, and VS Code.

Nova is a pretty editor, as far as such things go, and with files of relatively reasonable size it’s fast. With stupid huge files its performance drops noticeably, though. This isn’t just the ridiculous 109MB, nearly 450,000-line SQL file I threw at it once, it’s also with a merely 2MB, 50,000-line SQL file, and Nova’s offer to turn off syntax highlighting in both files didn’t help it much. This may sound like a silly test, but in my day job I’m occasionally stuck editing an 80,000-line JSON file by hand (don’t ask). This is something BBEdit and VS Code can do without complaint. Panic wrote their own text editing engine for Nova, which is brave, but it needs more tuning for pathological cases like these. They may not come up often, but almost every programmer has one stupid huge file to deal with.

Nova has an integrated terminal and an integrated SSH client, and even an integrated file transfer system based on Panic’s Transmit. In fact, if you have Transmit and use Panic Sync, it knows all of those servers out of the box. Nova has a task workflow system for automating building and running. You can associated servers, tasks, and more with individual projects; Nova’s project settings are considerably more comprehensive than I’ve seen in other editors. You can even set up remote tasks. Nova has a serviceable Git client built in, too. Like VS Code, Nova uses JavaScript for its extension API, and it has built-in Language Server Protocol support—it’s a superbly solid foundation.

Beyond that, some smaller features have become table stakes for modern GUI editors, and Nova handles them with aplomb. “Open Quickly” can jump to any file in the open project, as well as search by symbols or just symbols in currently open files; it has a command palette; you can comprehensively edit keybindings. It has multiple cursor support for those of us who like that, and a “mini map” view for those of you who like that, although know that you are wrong. Nova’s selection features include “Select all in scope” and “Select all between brackets,” a command I often use in BBEdit and miss dearly in Code. (Both Nova and BBEdit select between brackets and braces, although BBEdit also selects between parentheses.) This effectively becomes “Select between tags” in HTML, a nice touch. There are a few other commands like “Select all in function” and “Select all in scope” that I didn’t have any luck in making work at all; a little more documentation would be nice.

That’s worth an aside. Panic has created a “library” of tech note-style articles about Nova sorted by publication date rather than an actual manual, and it’s not always easy to find the information you want in it. I know this is just what a technical writer would say, but I’d dearly like to see a human-organized table of contents starting with the editor basics and moving to advanced topics like version control, server publishing and extension authoring.

The Zen of Language Servers

A lot of Visual Studio Code’s smarts depend on the implementation of a “language server” behind the scenes: language servers offer almost spookily intelligent completion. For instance, take this PHP snippet:

if ($allowed) { $response = new Response(405); $response->

If you have the Intelephense PHP language server plugin, Code understands that $response is an instance of Response and, after you type the > above, offers completions of method names from the Response class.

Right now, Nova’s mostly limited to the language servers Panic provides, and they’re… not always so smart. In that snippet above, Nova starts by offering completions of, apparently, everything in the open project, starting with the variables. If I type “s,” it narrows things down to methods that begin with “s,” but it’s all methods that start with “s” rather than just the methods from Response. The “Jump to Definition” command shows a similar lack of context; if I highlight a method name that’s defined in multiple places, Nova shows me a popup menu and prompts me to choose which one to jump to, rather than introspecting the code to make that decision itself.

But, this is a solvable problem: there’s (I think) no reason someone couldn’t write an Inteliphense plugin for Nova. If Nova’s ecosystem takes off, it could be pretty formidable pretty quickly.

Walk like a Mac

Even so, LSP support isn’t Panic’s biggest selling point. Unlike Sublime Text or VS Code, Nova isn’t cross-platform: it’s a Mac-only program written to core platform APIs. Is that still a huge draw in 2020? (Is it instead a drawback?)

You can definitely see a difference between Nova and BBEdit on one side and Sublime and Code on the other in terms of resource usage. With the two Ruby files shown in the screenshot above loaded, I get:

VS Code: 355 MB, 6 processes

Sublime Text: 338 MB, 2 processes

Nova: 101 MB, 2 processes

BBEdit: 97 MB, 1 process

Code is an Electron-based program, although Microsoft famously puts a lot of effort into making it not feel like the black hole a lot of Electron-based apps are. Sublime uses its own proprietary cross-platform framework. In fairness, while us nerds like to harp on research usage a lot, if your computer’s got 16G or more of RAM in it, this probably isn’t a big deal.

You notice Nova’s essential Mac-ness in other ways. Its preference pane is, like BBEdit’s, an actual preference pane, instead of opening in another tab like Code or just opening a JSON file in a new tab (!) like Sublime. And while all editors better have first-class keyboard support—and Nova does—a good Mac editor should have first-class mouse support, too, and it does. You notice that in the drag-and-drop support for creating new tabs and splits. Nova’s sidebar is also highly customizable, possibly more so than any editor I’ve regularly used. (Yes, Emacs fans, I know you can write all of Nova in Lisp if you want. When one of you does that, please get back to me.)

Unlike BBEdit, though, Nova doesn’t have a Mac-like title bar, or a Mac-like outline view of the project files, or Mac-like tabs. (Well, BBEdit doesn’t have tabs at all, which turns out to be a great UI decision once you have a dozen or more files open, but never mind.) This isn’t necessarily bad; people often say BBEdit “looks old,” and it’s hard not to suspect that what people mean by that—whether or not they know it—is that it looks like the long-established Mac program it is. Nova is relying less on “we have a Mac UI and the other guys don’t” than on “we have Panic’s designers and the other guys don’t.” Make no mistake, having Panic’s designers counts for a lot.

What may be more disappointing to old school Mac nerds is AppleScript support: none whatsoever. It doesn’t even have a vestigial script dictionary. Again, this may not be something most people care much about; personally, I hate having to write AppleScript. But I love being able to write AppleScript. BBEdit’s extensive scriptability is one of its hidden strengths. Nova’s Node-based JavaScript engine is probably more powerful for its own extensions and certainly more accessible to anyone under the age of 50, but it may be hard to call it from external programs.

So is it worth it?

That probably depends on where you’re coming from.

If you loved—or still use—Panic’s older editor, Coda, this is a no-brainer upgrade. If you used Espresso, a Coda-ish editor that always seemed to be on the verge of greatness without ever reaching it, Nova may also be a no-brainer for you.

If you’re a fan of Sublime Text, BBEdit, TextMate, or another editor that doesn’t have native Language Server Protocol support, you should definitely try Nova. Sublime and TextMate have more plugins (especially Sublime), but many extensions seem to be languishing (especially TextMate). BBEdit never had a great extension ecosystem to start with. All of these editors have strengths Nova doesn’t, but the reverse is also true, and Nova may catch up.

If you’re an Emacs or Vim power user, we both know you’re just reading this out of academic interest and you’re not going to switch. C’mon.

If you use Visual Studio Code, though, it’s way tougher to make the case for Nova. Code has a vastly larger extension library. It has the best support for LSP of any editor out there (LSP was developed for Code). Despite being Electron-based, it’s pretty high-performance. Code doesn’t have an integrated SSH or FTP client, but it does have an integrated terminal and task runner and Git client. If you don’t object to using an editor that isn’t a “perfect fit” with the Mac UI, Code is very, very good… and it’s free.

I don’t object to Nova’s pricing model—$99 up front including a year of updates, $49 for future years of updates—but I can’t help but wonder if Panic should have gone with super aggressive introductory pricing. Also, I saw more than a few suggestions on Hacker News about how there should be a Code-to-Nova extension translator; I’m not sure automatic conversion would be practical, but a guide on manual conversion seems like an excellent idea.

For my day job of technical writing, I’m going to stick to BBEdit. (One day I’ll write up an article about why I think it’s the best “documentation as code” editor on the market.) For programming and web editing, when I was working on both a Ruby and a PHP project—the former a Rails learning exercise, the latter an obstinate “I am going to write a modern PHP app without using a framework” exercise—I kept trying Nova’s betas and then switching back to Code for Inteliphense and, I swear to God, MacVim for Tim Pope’s amazing rails.vim plugin. I suspect Nova could duplicate both of those, but I’m not sure I want to be the one to do it. (Also, while Panic has decent reference documentation for writing extensions, I’d like to see a few simple end-to-end walkthroughs for those of us who look at a huge list of reference topics and don’t know where to start.)

But Nova isn’t just pretty, it’s powerful, and has a lot of promise. The editors I’ve been comparing it to have been around since 2015 for VS Code, 2008 for Sublime Text, and 1992 (!) for BBEdit; it’s not reasonable to expect Nova to blow past them in every respect right out of the starting gate. Even so, they are Nova’s competition. Catching up fast is an essential requirement.

So: yes, I’ve bought Nova, and I’m rooting for Panic here. I’ll come back in a year and report if I’m willing to stay on the update train.

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moatgrease44-blog · 4 years

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Mini Facelift London

Femiwand info

Content

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Our highly certified Aesthetic specialists use a Fibroblast electrode to eliminate the skin lesion. We use a localized numbing gel prior to the treatment as well as it normally takes a couple of mins to get rid of a single a skin tag. Skin tags, consisting of those from near your eyes, can be removed or frozen off with fluid nitrogen.

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If you want to have an added examination with a Doctor prior to the day of the procedure, prices begin with ₤ 95. To make a consultation you can call us or book a clinic visit online. If you do so, please check out the section "How TVVS works", thoroughly. In situation you are bothered with discomfort, please visit this site to see just how we give painfree surgery. some people have large number of them, others have huge solitary one. For pain alleviation they can be infused with a regional anaesthetic such as Lidocaine.

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Benign skin sores are usually operatively gotten rid of under neighborhood anaesthetic or moderate sedation. The kind of surgical procedure to remove your benign sore will certainly depend on the type, dimension and also place of your sore. The removal of benign skin sores under regional anaesthetic is executed in a variety of means including slashing off, eliminating, freezing off as well as scooping away.

Skin tag therapies are readily available at both our Kensington and also Wimbledon skincare centers. Skin tags are generally not cancerous although skin tag-like bumps that show numerous colours such as pink, brown, red or black call for a biopsy. Additionally, if you have a piece of skin that appears like a skin tag that bleeds you need to reserve a consultation with your medical professional to ensure it isn't skin cancer or any kind of various other causes. Good candidates for skin tag removal include individuals with highly visible tags or tags that are located in sensitive areas of the body. You might likewise be a prospect for skin tag removal if you've attempted one or more home-remedies without success.

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In a lot of mole removal, skin tag removal and also wart removal no stitches are required and possibilities of any kind of scarring are negligible. These guide rates are an estimate of costs and also you will certainly obtain a formal quotation cost following your appointment with one of our surgeons. This formal quote for your benign skin lesion will certainly be valid for 60 days and also consists of unlimited aftercare. If your skin sore has actually been removed under regional anaesthetic you might not have complete feeling in the treated location for an hour or 2 so you need to be mindful not to bump it. The area may really feel tender later on and also you can take over the counter pain alleviation.

The sort of treatment will certainly depend on your skin sore type, dimension as well as location. A benign skin sore might be eliminated if it is triggering you substantial problems or is troublesome, if there is any concern that maybe cancerous or for aesthetic factors. Any type of skin lesion which has a questionable look e.g. with ulcer, altering coloring, bleeding, need to be biopsied. If we consider your skin tag to be in all questionable, nonetheless, you will certainly be encouraged to see your General Practitioner if you do not wish to wage this minor surgical treatment on a private basis. When you schedule your consultation, our care group will discuss your issues and whom it would be best to see. You will certainly be able to reserve an analysis, as well as tell us if you wish for a removal during the very same visit. Cryotherapy is a secure, economical and trustworthy therapy which makes use of fluid nitrogen to ice up benign moles or skin lesions so that they leave without the need of any kind of surgical treatment.

You will certainly see a scab kind at the treatment site and also some completely dry shriveled skin where the lesion was located the area will quickly recover and also it is generally fully healed within 7 days. It is believed skin tags grow where skin massages versus skin or apparel. This would certainly discuss why they often tend to affect obese people who have excess folds up of skin and skin chafing.

Additionally, a topical anaesthetic such as "Emla Cream" can be used in advance. We will certainly after that typically use electrosurgical equipment to shave your them and quit bleeding at the same time. Additionally, consider specialist surgical treatment if you have bigger or several Skin Identifies. Expert skin surgical treatment will certainly additionally send your Skin Tag to a laboratory to have them evaluated giving you total comfort. If they are like on the image over they are very likely skin tags, however if in doubt it is constantly more secure to ask your General Practitioner for suggestions or book an appointment with us. Tiny skin tags less most likely to hemorrhage dramatically might be removed by a cut excision. Adhering to application of a neighborhood anaesthetic, often in the form of a lotion, a tool called a Dermablade is used to cut the growth off.

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siennaswritings · 4 years

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Novel Prep Tag Game

Tagged by @dustylovelyrun, thank you so much!!! 💖💖 I’ll be doing this for my WIP The Trials of Emma and Isabella Evans, because it’s been on my mind so much lately!

First Look

1. Describe your novel in 1-2 sentences (elevator pitch).

When Crowned Princess Isabella Evans finds out she has a mother she was always told to be dead and a sister she didn’t even know existed, she thought that’d be the biggest thing to happen to her life. However, when her uncle kills her father and she’s the one blamed, she has to find a way to prove her innocence while on the run, navigate being someone’s sister, and a newfound relationship with her personal guard…

2. How long do you plan for your novel to be? (Novella, single book, book series, etc.)

Definitely a trilogy! Each book will be in a different sister’s perspective (there’s three), and each tells a different story within the same universe.

3. What’s your novel’s aesthetic?

Dark/edgy royalty, rebellion, warriors.

4. What other stories inspired your novel?

The setting of the novel was inspired by Sharkboy and Lavagirl lol. Lavagirl became Emma, the eldest sister, and Sharkboy is her (younger) twin. Then, because I was really into opposites/yin and yang stuff when I was little and making this up to entertain myself, so the third sister was in “peace land” as I used to call it (lol).

5. Share 3+ images that give a feel for the novel.

Main Characters

6. Who is your protagonist?

For the first novel, Isabella (the second eldest) is my main protagonist!

7. Who is their closest ally?

Their personal guard, Arminia, becomes their greatest ally outside of her older twin Emma.

8. Who is their enemy?

Lord Zachariah, her uncle.

9. What do they want more than anything?

To help her kingdom grow into a better version of itself via creating more equality for the people.

10. Why can’t they have it?

Because in order to be put on her rightful place on the throne, she has to prove her innocence.

11. What do they wrongly believe about themselves?

She doesn’t believe they’re worthy of the throne. She think that they’re only getting it because she was born into it. Which, while she was put in the line for it because it’s her birthright, she’s worked hard for the position and is a very worthy queen.

12. Draw your protagonist! (Or share a description)

She’s the middle girl of three and the Crowned Princess of the Rzeka kingdom. She has straight jet-back hair, her left eye a cobalt blue and her right eye emerald green. She’s 17 years old (like her twin Emma) and 5’4”. She has an oval face and a turned-up nose. She was, and still is, a rebellious princess with little to no regard for how things are run in the kingdom. She goes to the Black Market often for forbidden or hard-to-find texts, and she isn’t afraid to go toe-to-toe with any of the older men on the Royal Council (least of all her uncle, Lord Zachariah). Her gaze is youthful, and she lets her hair flow freely (which most of the time just makes it seem unkempt). She tends to favor fashionable blouses and pants, because she finds those easier to fight in. She is extremely pale due to the little to no sunlight her kingdom gets throughout the year. She will do anything if it’s right for her kingdom and its people.

Plot Points

13. What is the internal conflict?

Self-worth and figuring out who to trust.

14. What is the external conflict?

Proving herself to not be her father’s murderer.

15. What is the worst thing that could happen to your protagonist?

Being found guilty.

16. What secret will be revealed that changes the course of the story?

The overall story will be changed when we found out certain people at the end are not actually dead...

17. Do you know how it ends?

Yep! I’ve had this story in my head since I was four or five, and, even though it’s grown and evolved into what it is now, I’ve always had the endings in mind.

18. What is the theme?

Proving oneself to yourself, trust.

19. What is a recurring symbol?

Family and love, in all its forms!

20. Where is the story set? (Share a description)

It’s mostly set within a different realm. It’s made up of three kingdoms and one neutral territory (the Amddiffyn Sanctuary). A lot of the time, Emma and Isabella are moving around different family properties. They stay on the run while trying to come up with a game plan to fight back against their uncle, so there’s a lot of forest and a lot of cabins in the forest and whatnot.

21. Do you have any images or scenes in your mind already?

Oh yes, so so many!! The novel is literally just so many skewed scenes in a random order that I just gotta piece together.

22. What excited you about this story?

All the betrayal!

23. Tell us about your usual writing method!

I sit down and stare at the page and just type. Either that, or I walk away if nothing comes out lol. I’ve been trying to stop that and outline stuff more, because that helps me more when I go back to projects.

Tagging: @milkyway-writes, @celestialbunnistories, @cosmicwordsblog, and @tabbykatwrites! I’ll also be adding my E & I taglist under the cut~!

Tagging: @dowings, @lesserghost, @milkyway-writes, @nattletak, @magicalmisstemi, @starry-writes, @panic-at-my-sexuality, @captainrynna

#writeblr #novel prep tag #tag game #e + i taglist

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taste-in-music · 5 years

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How to Discover New Music

As the first month of the year comes to a close, (can you believe it’s already been a month?) I’ve been reflecting on how I’ve been working towards achieving one of my New Year’s resolutions, which is listening to more new music. I guess I’ve been doing an okay job at keeping up with new releases, but as for discovering new artists and finding older albums, I haven’t being doing so well in those regards. So I decided to put together this handy-dandy guide to different methods that both you and myself can use to discover new artists and expand our listening horizons. Let’s get started, shall we?

1) Watch or Read Music Reviews

Some people don’t like music reviews because they think music is subjective and a matter of personal taste, and while I agree with that, I do think that hearing other peoples’ opinions on music can be helpful in trying to expand your music taste. I mainly get my music reviews off of YouTube, but there are many publications like Rolling Stone or Pitchfork that not only publish reviews but also interviews with both established and upcoming artists. Because of music reviewers, I’ve come across artists like CHVRCHES, Let’s Eat Grandma, ROSALÍA, and Gus Dapperton. You don’t always have to agree with what one person is saying to discover something new.

2) Follow Music Blogs

Call this a shameless self-plug, but the very platform you are currently on is filled with thousands of people blogging about what they’re passionate about, and that includes music. You’re bound to find at least one person who has a similar taste to you, and who knows? They might like an artist you’ve never heard of, and you could give that artist a try. Just look at the “playlist” tag and you’ll find a crap ton of posts with artists of all genres, wrapped up in a neat little package for you to enjoy. I know personally when I make playlists, I try to mix more popular artists with lesser-known ones so that people who want to listen to the playlist for the more popular artist might try out the smaller one that I think is underrated and discover that they love them.

3) Use Your Streaming Platform to Its Potential

Many streaming services having a ton of features that are perfect for finding new artists, whether that be “related artists” pages, pre-made playlists, a new releases page, or a section of recommendations based on your listening history. Take advantage of these features! Maybe this tip seems a bit obvious, but click on something you’ve never heard before, and who knows, maybe you’ll love it.

4) YouTube. Just... YouTube

YouTube is a giant platform that is stuffed to the brim with musical talent. There are a lot of different channels that feature artists giving live performances. Some great ones include:

NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concerts: Frustrated after being unable to hear singer Laura Gibson at a local bar show, NPR music editor and future show host Bob Boilen invited her to perform a show at Boilen’s desk. Since then, the tradition has expanded to include a variety of acts, my favorites including Superorganism, (seriously, watch theirs, it features inflatable whales, toy race cars, and a reading of a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay,) Mitski, and Maggie Rogers.

Vevo DSCVR: An offshoot of Vevo, this channel highlights up-and-coming talents in a variety of genres, bringing them on for live performances. They’ve featured some of my favorite rising stars, including Rina Sawayama, Charlotte Lawrence, Jade Bird, Astrid S, and Donna Missal.

A COLORS SHOW: A simple premise with stunning results. A variety of artists of all genres give a stripped-back performance in front of a colored background. My favorite performances are those by Phum Viphurit, Billie Eilish, Kali Uchis, Snoh Aalegra, and Dennis Lloyd.

triple j: This channel features all kinds of performance and music related news, but my favorite part their series called Like a Version, where they have singers do covers. My absolute favorite is CHVRCHES covering Kendrick Lamar’s LOVE

Late night TV shows like SNL, the Tonight Show, and Late Night with Seth Meyers also upload live performances, and while they usually have bigger names, sometimes smaller artists get a chance to go live as well. YouTube has great recommendations sometimes, and I found Skott, Transviolet, Allie X, Carlie Hanson, and half•alive all because YouTube recommended their music videos to me.

5) Look into Music Publications

I mentioned Rolling Stone and Pitchfork above, but other magazines and online publications like Billboard, PAPER, Teen Vogue, EUPHORIA, Pop Justice, and many other have interviews with artists, creative photo shoots, concert videos, reviews, and a ton of other cool stuff that can help you learn about new music. It’s because I used to have a subscription to Teen Vogue that I am blessed with the sounds of LION BABE and Say Lou Lou, so it’s worth a shot.

6) Ask Around

You could go online and use special websites to look for new artists, or you could, you know, just talk to people instead. Ask your family and friends what they’re listening to at the moment. Odds are they’ll get really excited, because people tend to like to talk about what they love, (at least, that’s been the case with me.) I got into dodie, SHAED, Dagny, MGMT, Wet, Kacey Musgraves, and Madison Beer all by asking my friends and family what music they liked.

What do you guys do to find new music?

#new music #recommendations #not my usual content #but idk #taste in music

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agaliar3pt · 5 years

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With Love Choice now an inescapable aspect of Love 365, I figured I’d share some thoughts / concerns on the system and Love 365 itself. Several issues have been brought up previously by others, including:

- Love Choice limiting actual choice insofar as the choice with hearts is the right one, thereby creating a less engaging gaming experience – add to this the standard 5 hour wait time between chapters outside the campaign period

- doing away with the utility of the monthly pass

- the high cost needed to complete the story, or to re-read it a later date

- that we cannot keep the story outside the campaign period

Adding to these, are the following issues I’ve found from playing Kazuomi’s route, which I was thankfully able to complete only because I already had the necessary number of hearts accumulated.

Warning: this will be a long rant.

1. The increase of hearts required by international players in comparison to Japanese players. I’m actually surprised I didn’t see more of an outcry over this. In Japan, 144 hearts are required to unlock all premium options, which is already a ridiculous amount to charge. In the international app, that number has been bumped up to 169 hearts. Seriously, why are we paying more?! I can’t fathom the rationale behind charging us more, especially given how fervently we have protested the Love Choice system. The only reasons I can come up with are:

- they think there is a viable international market that doesn’t mind paying more (though I find this hard to believe)

- they’re not expecting as much user engagement, and think they can offset those who won’t pay with those willing to pay by charging them more

- they’ve purposefully inflated the cost with the intent of lowering it to what Japan is paying (or lower, but I doubt it) in future routes, all so they can claim: “we’ve heard your concerns, and we’re going to lower the amount of hearts required, see guys, we’re not that greedy and we totally care about your opinion!” Those who don’t know about the Japanese app will think they’re getting a better deal, and will be more likely to buy hearts as a result. A scummy sales tactic, but one that works as people are more likely to fork out money if they think they’re gaining something or saving in some way. Though this option seems likely, I’m still not sure it’s the case, mainly because of….

2. The lack of engagement with their customers. No announcements have been made whatsoever to address everyone’s concerns about Love Choice. Further, no survey has been released asking for feedback despite their automatic emails on this issue having mentioned considering player opinion through surveys (not that they’d necessarily listen, but as a business you need to at least give the illusion of engaging with your concerns and caring about their opinion). The silence on Voltage’s end, the complete disregard to what their player base have said, and their stubbornness in steamrolling ahead with Love Choice with no regard for player feedback is quite frankly disgusting. Add to this the possibility that they’d further refuse to placate or do right by their international customers by at least lowering the amount of hearts required to, at the bare minimum, what Japan is paying.

3. The limited means with which to obtain free hearts. Currently hearts can only be acquired through reading a character’s main story endings (both SHE and HE) and the log-in wheel. Once the main story options have been depleted, all that’s left is luck with the log-in wheel. Main issue here is that the main story options are limited, and with every future main route for new titles being Love Choice per Japan’s release schedule, obtaining hearts via this method will soon become obsolete, thereby forcing players to fork out money.

Which is entirely the point, but given the ridiculous amount of hearts one route requires and the unpopularity of Love Choice, Voltage should meet their customers somewhere in the middle as a gesture of good faith and smart business acumen. If they’re not going to decrease the amount of hearts required, then they should implement other avenues to obtain hearts, be it through a daily log-in bonus similar to the Liar! app, with progressively better rewards for more consecutive log-ins, heart rewards for random missions, a 5 or 10 heart option on the long-in wheel that replaces one of the single hearts, and/or extending heart rewards for reading all story endings.

Voltage should reward players who spend their hard-earned money to purchase their stories. There’s no reason to limit heart rewards to a character’s first main story beyond sheer greed and indifference. Season 2, 3, etc. mains cost the same amount (400 coins), and for significantly fewer episodes than their season 1 counterparts (13 vs 10 for recent stories, and let’s not get started on the utter cheek in charging, such as the case of Ayame from OTBS, 400 coins for a season 2 main that only has 5 episodes and 1 CG (WTF Voltage?!)). Other season mains also require you to unlock two different endings. Why not reward your customers with hearts for finishing these routes? Players are already getting less in terms of content for the same if not more money (older title mains were 16 episodes long!). Previous Love Choice options at least allowed us to unlock the collector’s edition, with all choices made available, provided we got the CG – now we get a version with only the choices we paid for unlocked, all to force us to purchase/use more hearts.

Unfortunately, I don’t see Voltage implementing such a change. There are characters who appear later on in a title’s story whose first main story does not award hearts (eg. Eiji and Kenta in MSB). So even if you’ve paid to read a new character’s route, you get no hearts, all because they weren’t around since season 1. Further, and perhaps most alarmingly, I don’t consider it a coincidence that the frequency of free mains for us to read was reduced around the same time Love Choice was being prepared to be fully rolled out with Masquerade Kiss. Further, there have been multiple characters whose main stories have reappeared in the free section (Shunichiro and Eisuke, to name a couple). Not only does this limit access to free hearts for those that do not own those stories by giving them less variety less frequently, but further limits hearts by recycling the same mains over and over again, for which no further hearts can be gained. They could showcase some more obscure characters from less popular titles that the majority less than likely owns, but they don’t, as that grants access to new sources of free hearts.

4. Lack of transparency of the Love Choice system going forward, particularly with regards to campaign editions. Will there be a campaign edition for every Love Choice release? Many players have stated that if Love Choice is here to stay, they’d be happy to pay a little more so as to be able to keep the story (500-800 coins being the most reasonable estimates). At the moment, keeping the story is limited to the campaign period. Is this a permanent feature or not? Voltage needs to make this clear, though it would pay them not to do away with it as many players are more likely to buy hearts at a premium so long as they can keep the story. No collector’s edition, no incentive for many to play Love Choice as it’s just wasted money.

This is why Voltage should consider being more generous with free heart sources. Supposing players need something like an extra 50-80 hearts to get the SHE and acquire the collector’s edition because they don’t have enough free hearts accumulated, they’ll likely fork out the money given that it is time limited and a somewhat reasonable price to pay in comparison to dropping money for the 169 hearts (for all unlocked options) they don’t have just to earn one route. 50-80 hearts is 500-800 coins, still more than the standard 400 coins a main costs, which means Voltage earns more and players don’t feel wholly ripped off. Expecting players to spend somewhere around 1700 coins in their local currency after free heart sources have disappeared for one route is laughable and untenable. Very, very, very few are willing to do this, which means less revenue across the board for Voltage.

This of course doesn’t benefit newer players down the line, as they miss out on past campaign periods. One solution would be to offer VIPs access to past campaigns, in which they can gain the collector’s edition of any currently released Love Choice route. As Voltage will never allow players to buy these stories outright, this is the next best thing in allowing all players, current and future, the opportunity to earn the collector’s edition. It also incentivises the purchase of the monthly pass, which as of current is practically useless as all new mains are Love Choice.

5. Finally, and this is geared towards Masquerade Kiss itself, the advertising and mechanics of the route are a tad misleading. It’s 26 episodes long, but each episode is about half a standard one, so in the end it ends up being around a usual 13 episode main in length. Further, this title was advertised as being especially mature, in the vein of Kings of Paradise and Irresistible Mistakes. The latter two have actual detailed depictions of sexual acts; Kazuomi’s did not (and yes, there is a plot reason for it given, slight SPOILER, the bet, but it still doesn’t change the fact the marketing for this was misleading). You don’t introduce a billionaire playboy and not allow us to hump like rabbits at every opportunity, Voltage! Talk about wasted potential! As for the story itself, it was enjoyable and different to the usual workplace offerings, but the overall enjoyment was nothing substantially greater than some of my other favourite routes, especially not enough to justify the premium price tag. Every title has its own soundtrack, so again there is nothing really unique or exceptional on that front. And as far as CGs and backgrounds go, they’re comparable in quality to Kings of Paradise.

Again, nothing to justify the exorbitant pricing.

And finally, can we stop comparing Kazuomi to Eisuke. Please. They’re absolutely nothing alike beyond being rich. I get that Eisuke is Voltage’s most popular ikemen, but comparing Kazuomi to him won’t make Eisuke fangirls flock to the new guy with open wallets (because that’s exactly what Voltage intended, let’s not kid ourselves). Kazuomi is a great character with depth that can stand on his own; don’t diminish him or his character’s worth by comparing him to the fan favourite in what is obviously a desperate marketing ploy. Even if they exist in the same universe, with future crossovers in the works, let the title stand on its own.

Or it would, if it wasn’t Love Choice. And Voltage knows they need all the help they can get with making it more appealing to its customers.

To close things off, as a long-time customer I’m disappointed with Voltage. Ideally I’d like to see them do away with Love Choice altogether, but the odds of that happening are practically non-existent. The least they could do is compromise and listen to player concerns. They’ve shown no indication of doing either, and I doubt they’ll even consider any of the suggestions I and others have proposed, which is sadly unfortunate. The only way to make them listen is by hitting them where it hurts: their wallet. I’ve already cancelled my monthly subscription and I’ll be far less generous with my future purchases, especially if Voltage continues to ignore our concerns and not change Love Choice as it currently is to be more customer friendly. It’s no loss for me as I have quite a backlog of stories I’ve yet to read, and other otome options that are well worth the money.

During a Steam sale last year I picked up Amnesia, Hakuoki: Kyoto Winds and Edo Blossoms for around $11. That’s almost a 90% discount as all three titles sell for around $90 AUD. The games are entirely voiced, interactive with various endings, beautiful artwork, CGs and soundtrack, not to mention translated with no mistakes. The number of love interests I have access to is beyond satisfying. To put all that in perspective, for the price of one character’s main and two sub stories from Voltage, I purchased three professionally developed games of incomparable quality with numerous routes and love interests to choose from.

In contrast, Voltage has never had a character’s main available for less than 300 coins – that’s only 25% off – not even for their older titles (In Your Arms Tonight, Kiss of Revenge, Dreamy Days in West Tokyo etc.) or less popular titles (Sakura Amidst Chaos, First Love Diaries, Kiss Me On Clover Hill, Office Secrets etc.). Their bundle sets are priced around 2-3 times the price I paid for the 3 Otomate games, and that’s just for one character. And if I happen to already own one of the included stories, I’m unable to purchase it.

Voltage offerings are already quite expensive when considering all this (for $60, I can buy an entire PSVita game with, again, numerous available love interests). The only thing they have above other competitors is their quantity and accessibility – I wish Otomate would release more games more frequently (without compromising on quality), and I wish more otome games were translated and made available internationally. But even as I say this, even with so much uncertainty in the otoge market, more titles are bound to be localised as developers will realise a market exists. At some point, we will be spoiled for choice, and Voltage won’t be who we choose to give our money to. Why would we? There are hundreds of Freemium games on mobile. Voltage had a niche in that they were P2P; that’s why their customers chose them. They don’t even have that going for them anymore (so much for their promise that Love 365 would remain a P2P app).

They had a customer base willing to pay their more expensive prices just so they could own a story and read it whenever they like. Now Voltage says we can’t do that; we have to pay much, much more and outside of a limited time period cannot keep the story. They’ve alienated their customers, and so I’ll be taking the majority of my business elsewhere.

#voltage inc #love 365 #voltage otome #masquerade kiss #otome romance #love choice

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wxldchxld · 5 years

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Unpopular Opinions as Told by Mary

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Ummmm Daenerys’ dragons look really fuckin stupid. Yeah. Sorry. This one isn’t going to be super in depth or really even justified by any arguments. I respect the Game of Thrones developers for going for it, and like the execution of it graphics wise is actually really impressive given its a TV show and all, but the model is so bad. Did GRRM make it? I really fucking hope not. From a distance when I see them in shots I’m like “yo cool” and then I see their faces and they look so stupid to me and it just ruins it. I’m really picky about dragons so this probably doesn’t come as a surprise.

Also side rant, why is it so popular to give dragons a weird bottom jaw where it like, protrudes. They did it with Smaug and to a lesser extent they do it with Dany’s dragons. What the fuck is that modeled after? It’s not a snake. It’s not crocodilians. The only thing I can think is maybe some species of monitor lizards? And I’m only granting that bc I really don’t know due to the fact that there are a lot of monitor lizard species. Including this dope one that I’ve modeled dragons after on my dragon blog.

I guess what drives me nuts is like I feel like there’s no originality in the design. I haven’t read Dany’s parts in the books but from what I have been told at least the coloration is more intense. There are so many species of reptiles, real and extinct, that they could have pulled from to make something that looked really cool…but they didn’t.

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The words “alpha wolf” need to die in a fire. And I’m not trying to come at some of the people I know follow me that use that term. It’s just become this really huge thing that infects so much of lore that has to do with modern day werewolves (such as in The Originals) and even bleeds over into things like the Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire fandom and just about anywhere you see wolves you eventually hear the term alpha.

The term in and of itself is annoying because it’s not a thing that exists. Wolves don’t live in a pack where they just automatically submit to the strongest wolf, nor do they live in social structures that cause them to battle with one another to see who is on top. Wolves live in family groups usually run by the breeding pair and the offspring of the last few years. The only reason we ever really thought that “alpha wolf” was a thing was because a couple of researchers massively popularized its usage after studying primarily (in fact I think it was exclusively) captive wolf packs where individuals were brought in from various places in the world and forced to live together. And while I’m not saying that all studies should be thrown out if they’re done on captive bred wolves, I think it’s poor practice to say “this is how all wolves are” when you haven’t taken into consideration what natural family groups do.

So it’s annoying, because it’s not a thing, but it’s also—-really boring to me. We miss the fact that these incredible animals have evolved to have things like a sense of fairness and the ability to cooperate, but the thing that we focus on is that “this is the alpha and its very important to them.” Family is important to them. I’d love to see more media that involved wolves that represented not only how their family groups actually work, but also didn’t make that such a central point for their plots.

I’m not going to go into uses of the term outside of fiction or address the A/B/O fanfiction. My point is that I personally as a reader find it overused and boring. I understand that since its fiction, there will be inaccuracies in order to fit your narrative. Hell, I have some with Beck and the animals that pop up on this blog. My problem isn’t the inaccuracy alone, it’s the inaccuracy being used to beat a long dead horse (and occasionally as a method of god modding but—I won’t go further into that either).

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And since I’m just going all in on the GoT shit tonight (sorry guys) Also this is going to make an already very long post massive, and I’m sorry.

… Yara Greyjoy is actually a good character and her book counterpart isn’t nicer nor is she just “better” for some vague undefined reason. She’s not a perfect character, she’s not a necessarily nice person, but Yara Greyjoy is arguably one of the better characters on the show IMO and I wish that she would have gotten way more screen time than she really did.

The worst part of this weird like #notmyAsha argument (and I’ve seen that tag used before it was hilarious) is that people complain that she’s not nice to Theon and that because she either doesn’t have or cannot convey compassion and empathy regarding his trauma, that it’s somehow a valid plot point for her to be tortured so they can bond over mutual trauma. This is gross and I hate it.

Full disclosure Theon Greyjoy is one of my favorite characters in show and book canon, but he is kind of a garbage human being and I love him in spite and often because of that. Now onto our feature presentation:

Yara Greyjoy doesn’t owe her brother shit. Not even a little. She has zero reason to do anything other than perceive him as unstable and a threat to the position she hopes to claim. Don’t complain to me about how mean Yara is to Theon while simultaneously ignoring the fact that he only stopped treating her like garbage once he’d been horribly traumatized. He was TEN when he was taken from the Iron Islands, and she was older than him and he—didn’t recognize her. So yeah she manipulates him, but he could have very easily put a stop to it if he remembered her or if he just wasn’t such a horny prick in general. He tries to demean her in front of their father, insults her, and shouts at her. Not saying she didn’t deserve it, but you can’t exactly paint him as the saint in the situation either.

I could go on with a million reasons Yara is actually a lot nicer to Theon in the show than the books, and why she’s not obligated to do anything for him at all, but I’d be here for hours.

What bothers me is the conclusion that because Yara has been mean to him that she somehow deserves to be punished by being tortured or that she needs to be tortured in order to ever like understand her brother. Both of those things are like the craziest logic in the world to me.

First off: no. Yara tried to save Theon. It’s not Yara’s fault he got in that situation, it’s his own, and she tried to rescue him. Then she allowed him back into her home at a critical time, and rather than being ashamed of him for being “weak” she brings him with her to political meetings and presents him as what is essentially her version of a “hand.”

Second: y’all that’s not how mental health works. Theon’s not ok, and if they write him as ok they’re bad writers. You don’t get over trauma that fast. Especially not because of like one conversation you had with your sister while she made out with a topless hooker in a brothel, and a fight on the beech where you got kneed in the balls you don’t have. Theon is still traumatized and he deserves a plot where his sister learns to see that, acknowledge it, and try to understand him. You don’t throw two traumatized people together and just say “well they have both been horrifically abused… they understand one another.” and then things get better. If anything those people are more likely to be self destructive and dangerous because neither of them are in a good place mentally to make sound and rational decisions.

So yeah, the point I was trying to make but got really distracted from because I’m very salty about all the Yara hate I see is that she’s actually a good character in comparison to the others in the show and it’s not ok to wish she would be tortured just for the sake of making Theon ok bc a) that won’t work and b) for the millions time: it’s gross.

#ooc #agentharrisonofshield

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dweemeister · 5 years

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2018 Movie Odyssey Award for Best Original Song (final round)

TAGGING: @cokwong, @dansmonarbre, @dog-of-ulthar, @emilylime5, @fredsbarandgrill, @halfwaythruthedark, @ideallaedi, @introspectivemeltdown, @itsjustangc, @loveless422, @maximiliani, @memetoilet, @mindo80, @monkeysmadeofcheese, @myluckyerror, @nazur, @phendranaedge, @plus-low-overthrow, @saucy-witch, @shadesofhappy, @somequeerdistortion, @stephdgray, @themusicmoviesportsguy, @umgeschrieben, @underblackwings, @yellanimal

Also TAGGING older followers/friends/supporters who I really haven’t been in touch with lately, have done the final before, or are on the inactive side. And also some newcomers who have been supporting the blog a lot: @astorytellertothestars, @babeltwo, @celibatemachine, @classwarhooligan, @dakotarosie, @emergencyhugs, @haveyoubeentobahia, @ineedanumbrella, @jayb3, @justtheguest, @mundi41, @nudehearth, @sadisticsunglasses, @shootingstarvenator, @thenarddog, @thethirdman8, @thewolfofelectricavenue, and @voicetalentbrendan!

And now the grand finale. For those of you who have never seen this before, I have an Oscar-like ceremony on my blog celebrating all the movies of that year’s Movie Odyssey (all the movies I saw for the first time in their entirety) at the year’s end. For the last four years, I have asked family and friends to help out with the Best Original Song category - because in all other categories, you'd be forced to watch entire movies to decide it. This is a musical thank-you to all of you, who have contributed, in your ways, to support the Movie Odyssey and me. Please do not feel like you have to do this; there are no hard feelings if you do not participate, and you have my thanks either way. But if you are, I hope you enjoy this 2018 edition!

This final round has the largest chronological spread we have ever covered: eighty-eight years. Songs in English, German (making its debut), Hindi, Japanese are all involved. A Vietnamese-language song made its debut for MOABOS, but was eliminated in the preliminary.

INSTRUCTIONS Please rank (#1-16) your choices in order. The top ten songs will receive nominations. Be warned, there is a new tabulation method for this year's final (described in the "read more" at the bottom). There is no minimum or maximum amount of songs you can rank, but because of the nature of this new tabulation system, it is highly recommended to rank as many songs as possible, rather than only one or two. Those who rank fewer songs run a greater risk of their ballots being discarded as I am counting the ballots. Again, this is all described in the "read more". Why not implement at a minimum number of songs to rank? Well, I believe in giving you folks as much freedom as possible.

Please consider to the best of your ability: how musically interesting the song is, its lyrics, context within the film (if you've seen it - this factor also includes integration into the film's score), choreography/dance direction (if applicable; not many song-and-dance numbers this year), and the song's cultural impact/life outside the film (if applicable, and by far the least important factor). Imperfect audio and video quality may not be used against any song, as this disadvantages older and non-English language songs. You may absolutely send in comments and reactions with your rankings - it’s always fun to read reactions to individual songs, and it usually makes the process (for everyone) more enjoyable!

The submission deadline is Sunday, December 31 at 6 PM Pacific Time / 4 PM Hawai'i / 5 PM Alaska / 8 PM Central / 10 PM Eastern. If you're across the Atlantic, that's New Year's Day at 2 AM GMT / 3 AM CET / 4 AM EET / 7:30 AM IST. There will be no deadline extensions.

And now the sixteen finalists in this category, for your listening pleasure (contextual blurbs are provided, and I hope they are informative; if links do not work there are most likely alternatives across the Internet but please inform me if that does not apply to you):

“Bless Your Beautiful Hide”, music by Gene de Paul, lyrics by Johnny Mercer, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)

Performed by Howard Keel

The opener to Seven Brides; its melody is used as the main orchestral theme throughout (most memorably in the barn dance scene). Oregonian backwoodsman Adam Pontipee (Keel) has little experience with society (let alone women), as he looks for a bride to take care of him and his six brothers in this satirical musical of gendered misbehavior - which pokes fun of, never endorses, said misbehavior.

“'Bout Time”, music and lyrics by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band (1968)

Performed by John Davidson and Lesley Ann Warren

In this Disney musical, Joe Carder (Davidson) has convinced the Bower family to move to Dakota Territory. Joe is suitor to Alice Bower (Warren), their relationship complicated by her grandfather's politics. This song takes place on the first day in their new hometown, and before her first day at work at the schoolhouse.

“Candle on the Water”, music and lyrics by Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, Pete's Dragon (1977)

Performed by Helen Reddy

Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song

Nora (Reddy) has just tucked Pete in, not before describing the story of her long-lost fiancé (missing sea for over a year) to him. After being scolded by her father for clinging onto the past, Nora goes up to the lighthouse balcony to sing this.

“Chaar Kadam”, music by Shantanu Moitra, lyrics by Swanand Kirkire, PK (2014, India)

Performed by Sushant Singh Rajput (dubbed by Shaan) and Anushka Sharma (dubbed by Shreya Ghoshal)

Lyrics in Hindi (song ends at 16:20)

In Bruges in Belgium, an Indian Hindu woman named Jaggu (Sharma) has met a Pakistani Muslim, Sarfaraz (Rajput) - both are students. This is their love duet before her family objects due to nationalistic and (especially) religious reasons. Don't worry about the dude at the end - he's the one who got them together.

“Charade”, music by Henry Mancini, lyrics by Johnny Mercer, Charade (1963)

Performed by orchestra and chorus; conducted by Mancini

Used as main theme throughout this romantic comedy/mystery/suspense film. This song is more famous for its instrumental version without lyrics.

“Falling in Love Again (Can't Help It)”, music and German lyrics by Friedrich Hollaender, English lyrics by Sammy Lerner, The Blue Angel (1930, Germany)

Performed by Marlene Dietrich

(English-language version... excuse the badly-edited video) / (German original)

A college prep school professor is angry at his students for passing around photos of cabaret singer, Lola Lola (Dietrich), in class. In hopes to catch the boys at the club, he goes to the cabaret and is overcome with lust for Lola after seeing her perform this song. Their relationship will become toxic, based on his groveling and humiliations.

“Gunfight at the O.K. Corral”, music by Dimitri Tiomkin, lyrics by Ned Washington, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957)

Performed by Frankie Laine (the above was re-recorded in the 1980s when Laine was in his mid-70s, so those familiar with Laine's voice will notice it sounds weaker)

Played in the opening credits, with additional verses sung during montage scenes across the film. Used as main orchestral theme in the film's score. This version of the song contains additional lyrics that can't be found online.

“Hooray for Hollywood”, music by Richard A. Whiting, lyrics by Johnny Mercer, Hollywood Hotel (1937)

Performed by Johnnie Davis, Frances Langford, and Benny Goodman and His Orchestra

Considered an unofficial anthem of Hollywood. Usually played at least once in every Oscars ceremony and other movie awards ceremonies worldwide.

Small town saxophonist Ronnie Bowers (Dick Powell) has just won a contract with a major Hollywood studio. His friends and former employer, Benny Goodman, arrive at the airport to send him off. The lyrics are meant to satirize what people do to become famous as actors.

“Hum Aapki Aankhon Mein”, music by Sachin Dev Burman, lyrics by Sahir Ludhianvi, Pyaasa (1957, India)

Performed by Guru Dutt (dubbed by Mohammad Rafi) and Mala Sinha (dubbed by Geeta Dutt)

Lyrics in Hindi

Broke poet Vijay (Guru Dutt) encounters his university ex, Meena (Sinha), who is now married to a hotshot publisher who won't publish Vijay's work. Vijay then has a flashback, and within that flashback is this foggy fantasy song-and-dance sequence. Flashback-ception?

“It's Not Easy”, music and lyrics by Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, Pete's Dragon (1977)

Performed by Sean Marshall and Helen Reddy

Pete (Marshall) and his dragon, Elliott, are on the run from his abusive foster family. The lighthouse keeper and his daughter, Nora (Reddy), take Pete in. Nora has not met Elliott yet, and believes that he is Pete's imaginary friend.

"Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing", music by Sammy Fain, lyrics by Paul Francis Webster, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955)

Non-film version performed by Nat King Cole; film version performed by chorus (and is unavailable)

Used as main orchestral theme throughout this romantic drama's score; version with lyrics sung by chorus first appear at the end of the film.

"Mystery of Love", music and lyrics by Sufjan Stevens, Call Me by Your Name (2017)

Performed by Stevens

(single version) / (use in film; song isn't played in its entirety)

This song appears as the film's main characters, Elio and Oliver, take one of their many day trips in this Italian summer.

“Rain”, music by Shin'ichi Nakajima, Saori Fujisaki, and Satoshi Fukase, lyrics by Saori Fujisaki and Satoshi Fukase, Mary and the Witch's Flower (2017, Japan)

Performed by Sekai no Owari

Lyrics in Japanese (rough translations)

Appears in the end credits; this song is not referenced in this anime fantasy's score (but like the score, there's a prominent and unusual use of a dulcimer).

“Shallow”, music and lyrics by Mark Ronson, Lady Gaga, Anthony Rossomando, and Andrew Wyatt, A Star Is Born (2018)

Performed by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper

Aspiring singer-songwriter Ally (Lady Gaga) has fallen for declining artist Jackson Maine (Cooper). At one of his concerts, he begins to put music to a song she sung to him in a parking lot, inviting her onstage.

“This Is Me”, music and lyrics by Justin Paul and Benj Pasek, The Greatest Showman (2017)

Performed by Keala Settle and company

After being shunned from a dinner including P.T. Barnum’s wealthy sponsors for his circus, the circus "freaks" sing this ballad which eventually becomes a montage, refusing to put up with those harass and put them down.

“You're the One That I Want”, music and lyrics by John Farrar, Grease (1978)

Performed by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John

At the post-graduation high school carnival, greaser and bad boy Danny Zuko (Travolta) is stunned to see his relatively restrained, somewhat prudish, girlfriend, Sandy (Newton-John), committing to change herself for him to win him over.

Well, have at it! And thanks for your time and consideration! You may submit your responses in any way, as long as they come in before the deadline. I am free to answer any questions about anything you have about the process. The 2018 Movie Odyssey has been a rewarding one, and I have been glad to share it with you.

TABULATION Like the preliminary... a respondent’s first choice receives 10 points, the second choice receives 9, the third choice receives 8, etc. HOWEVER, the points system is used only for tiebreaker purposes.

The way the winner will be decided is through a process called instant-runoff voting (IRV; the Academy Awards uses this method to choose a Best Picture winner, visually represented here - you should really watch this video if the below doesn't make sense... which it probably won't):

All #1 picks from all voters are tabulated. A song needs more than half of all aggregate votes to win (50% of all votes plus one... i.e. if there are thirty respondents, sixteen #1 votes are needed to win on the first count).

If there is no winner after the first count (as is most likely), the song(s) with the fewest #1 votes or points is/are eliminated. Then, we look at the ballots of those who voted for the last-placed song(s). Their votes then go to the highest-remaining (non-eliminated) song on their ballot.

This process (in #2) repeats until one song has secured 50% plus one of all votes. We keep eliminating nominees and transfer votes to the highest-ranked, non-eliminated song on each ballot. NOTE: It is possible after several rounds of counting that respondents who did not entirely fill in their ballots will have wasted their votes at the end of the process. For example, if a person voted the second-to-last place song as their #1, ranked no other songs, and the count has exceeded two rounds, their ballot is discarded (lowering the vote threshold needed to win), and they have no say in which song ultimately is the winner.

A song wins when it reaches more than fifty percent of all #1 and re-distributed votes.

Tiebreakers: 1) first song to receive 50% plus one of all #1 and transferred votes; 2) total points earned; 3) total #1 votes; 4) placement on my ballot; 5) placement on my sister’s ballot; 6) tie declared

Previous years’ results for reference: 2013 final 2014 final (input from family and friends began this year) 2015 final 2016 prelim / final 2017 prelim / final

#2018 Movie Odyssey Awards

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destiny-smasher · 5 years

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Kingdom Hearts 3 impressions

So, uh, I will ONLY be talking about stuff up until the very start of the second World, and only AFTER the break. Kingdom Hearts 1 was an incredibly important and influential piece of media when I was growing up. I was writing fic based on Smash Bros. just before KH rolled onto the scene was like, “Yo, Disney and Final Fantasy, BAM, fuckin’ random? fucking RADDDD” and I was all about it. You had FF characters remixed with OCs remixed with Disney characters, and the villains were all crossing over to form the League of Bad Cartoons, it was a great time. And then Nomura realized his gamble was a win and decided to waste the next 15 years of everyone’s time shoving in every trope he liked, every IDEA that felt “cool” together into a mish mash of whatever the hell this “narrative” has become. Suffice it to say, I’ve got beef with Kingdom Hearts as a “story.” It just occurred to me today that a big part of this is thematic/tonal.

But it’s also VERY rare, maybe even unprecedented, for a piece of media like Kingdom Hearts 3 to come around. For years, then months, then weeks, then days, I told myself, “It’s not real, that game doesn’t exist, I won’t believe it until I’m literally playing it” and just could not be bothered to be hype or interested, if only because Nomura’s “vision”, from my perspective, warped something I admired in my youth into a fucking train wreck, leaving me very little to feel emotionally invested in outside of Aqua and by proxy the two lads she is trying to protect. (also I GUESS I’m slightly invested in Axel/Xion/Roxas.../Namine? for similar reasons now that I think about it?) Well, guess what? Kingdom Hearts VERY WELL might be real, and I very well might be about three hours into it. And for all of the beef I have with the plot, I am fucking relieved that those three hours have felt/sounded good, as a video game. NOW we’re gonna talk about the first World. --

When I first heard that Olympus was gonna be the first World in KH3 I was disappointed and BAFFLED. We’re visiting that place a THIRD time? And why THAT World? Turns out, there’s actually some substantial thematic relevance and that’s actually A-OK, not to mention that starting with a familiar world after ALL OF THIS TIME is not such a bad way to kick things off. First off, structurally, I actually really enjoyed the way this world played out. Two of my biggest problems with KH as a video game series have been that worlds feel like empty, vacant, haunted houses, and that said worlds are usually small and linear with a lot of pointless backtracking. Olympus fixes all of this. There are NPCs. Actual fucking PEOPLE in this world. Sure, they’re just people in danger, calling for help, but they’re THERE for once! And they have vocies! EVERY line of dialogue (except for like one “plot” moment) has actually been voiced so far! About time. Also. This World is not as linear as most KH Worlds. In fact, it help more open and dynamic than ANY World in any KH game so far, not to mention it featured three, THREE (wtf) unique and distinct types of settings. The city, the mountain, and Olympus. Nice. ALSO also. The music. We’ve been here before. We KNOW that Olympus theme from earlier games. And as you traverse the city, up the mountain, you hear this more sweeping, movie-like version, and it’s like “oh whoa nice” aaaaand then you get TO Olympus and it KICKS in, the old song, up to modern snuff. That was great. That was a thing that really helped convey “Kingdom Hearts is back, baby.” The World was big, compared to typical KH worlds. It had multiple nooks and crannies to explore, side-paths to go down, treasure to find hidden away. There is a LOT of verticality. Running up walls and seamlessly hopping over things in the environment makes traversal more enjoyable than it ever has been. Even though a lot of the World is technically a linear path it’s not structured like a path. Going off and exploring rewards you with items and the like, and the World is big enough to actually feel like you have places to poke around in. Having said this, WHY is there no...map? Like. You literally COLLECT Maps from Chests like you used to. But near as I can tell, there’s no way to pull up an actual MAP, to seer where the main path is, to see where the side paths are. It’s boggling. Maybe the game has the option hidden away somewhere but if so, that’s just silly. And if there’s just no actual map option at ALL that’s just...baffling. There were barely any load times for how much SPACE there was to navigate, and things looked very shiny and pretty, and ran at a smooth 60 fps MOST of the time. Tech specs aren’t everything, but when your brand is built on “looking pretty” it sure af helps when you bring scale AND a smooth framerate to match. It’s weird, and a bit jarring, sometimes in a good way, to see all of this stuff rendered in modern tech. Stuff looks...a little too plasticy a lot of the time, (which actually ought to pay off when we get to Toy Story?) but the environments so far feel rich and vast and detailed all at once in a way we just have never seen the series, because we’re basically jumping from PS2-level tech to PS4. So that difference in production is more noticeable for the wait -- I just wish things looked a bit more...I guess cel-shaded? Like the original trailer. Things (specifically, characters) look a little too flat/plasticy at times, for how pretty things are. Combat seems to be as flashy as ever and I’m sure I’ll feel differently as I get further in and unlock more options but it’s still too easy, simple, and mashy for my tastes. I am HOPING we get more moments that require quick reflexes and specific tactics like the harder moments of older KH games. The amusement rides mechanic is...weird. It’s given NO context in universe. And they last a little too long/feel too overpowered for how easy they are to utilize. Similarly, there are frequently seemingly random party-member tag-team attacks that...just seem like “press triangle to win” moves. I wish they entailed more interaction, and/or felt less common/random. I like the IDEA of these kinds of moves, especially ones that change your controls/method of attack for a few seconds (like Hercules’ team attack) but the execution makes them feel too cheap and easy to abuse, with combat that’s ALREADY skewing on the “too easy” side for the genre. I like the “form change” for keyblades, and that you can swap keyblades in the middle of a fight. Really hoping this allows for some good tactical stuff later -- buuuuut that would also require the game to ASK OF ME to do more than “mash X,” which KH as a brand typically does not do... Characters SPEAK in reaction to gameplay moments, when you initiate things in the environment, etc. It’s a nice touch that makes them feel more like characters in an RPG. Donald and Goofy are ALWAYS in the party, alongside the Disney member(s). NICE. Maybe KH3 is putting its best foot forward, but overall, I was pleasantly surprised with Olympus. It single-handedly corrected MOST of the issues I’ve ever had with Kingdom Hearts level design. I only hope the momentum keeps going. Moving on, Gummi Ships. What little I played is easily the best they have every been. I love having an open world with optional places/fights to explore, while still giving me those shmup-like bursts of action. The Gummi Phone seems like a fun mechanic, and taking selfies/photos makes SENSE for this game because of how visually detailed it is -- but the pleasant surprise was how I took selfies with Donald and Goofy and they REACTED to it, starting to pose and commenting on it. On the other hand, the loading screen being nonsensical “social media” posts from KH characters...I don’t like it thanks go away. x’D I’ve spent only a few minutes in Twilight Town and INSTANTLY I am so much more enamored than I ever was in previous games. Not just due to the bump up in visual fidelity, but also because -- GASP -- NPCs??? Are you trying to tell me this is an actual TOWN that people LIVE IN?? Holy shit, Kingdom Hearts, I never knew! For all of this stuff I liked, though, KH3 is still...a KH game. Which means after you get through the intro, after you gear up to land in Olympus, the game flashes the title: “Kingdom Hearts II.9″ ...no. Just no. Fuck. Stop doing this shit. Whenever an Organization 13 member (or EX member) shows up and starts speaking all cocky in riddles like the flamboyant anime jackass they are, whenever Mickey starts dead-ass blathering about weird nonsense whenever the plot HAS to acknowledge “oh right Sora golly gawrsh ya FURRGOT this random bullshit a-FYUCK better shove this expository throwaway dialogue right in here before we go n’ furrget again!” whenever Kairi continues to be irrelevant and invisible after ALL THIS TIME whenever Rikku has to say some obligatory thing about his darkness or his copy of himself or Ansem or whatever whenever the plot informs Sorta/Dornold/Goffy about another convoluted ridiculous THING that we already know about and they MAYBE already know about because it is OBLIGATED to because this game’s entire purpose has become to “wrap things up already Nomura” I am reminded of the freshly opened scar on my heart from how much SHIT this series has dragged itself through for...what? Nothing worth all of this, IMO. Thankfully, these moments feel less and less pressing in KH3′s opening hours than they certainly could be, though I’m sure the closing hours of the game -- once they’ve tidily gotten all of that silly, inconsequential DISNEY CONTENT out of the way (even though that’s the BULK of the game environments and HALF of the series’ identity/purpose) -- those closing hours will surely be packed to the gills with all of this crazy crap. Maybe by then I might finally care enough to finally get the catharsis I’ve waited over a decade for. I dunno. I’m just relieved the game looks, plays, sounds, and feels as good as it does so far. EDIT: almost forgot to mention this since it hasn’t actually come up yet BUT I picked up a BUNCH of “ingredients”??? Like. FOR COOKING??? Which is one of my all-time favorite mechanics in a video game?? (thanks Paper Mario) So I’m at LEAST excited to see what THAT is all about.

#KH3 #Kingdom Hearts 3

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damijon-supersons · 6 years

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Damijon Week Day 1:Slice of life? Very poor choice of words… - A DamiJon Fic

Notes:

Heyo! So DamiJon week is here and here’s my meager contribution. So this is gonna be an entire week and imma do my best to write for every day...cuz this fic right here is the first chapter of a series I’m making that follows the prompts for each day of the week. This one is the middleschool au prompt (er, not so au anymore cuz the comics are doing it, but in my version, Damian and Jon are classmates :p) and I’ll continue this with the next prompts and days as much as I can. So yeah, I hope you guys like it, and help support the week by submitting and tagging content! ( Jondamiweek2018, or Damijonweek2018)

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

“Mr. Wayne,” Mr Tomas called out firmly. His tone wasn’t overly pissed as all hell, but it was definitely in the range of ‘you-are-in such-deep-trouble’.

Jon winced as he glanced back two rows to his left. Although it wasn’t his name that was getting called out for a grade-A chewing-out, he couldn’t help but cringe as he watched Damian stand defiantly, meeting the teacher’s glare with a steely look of his own.

“What have I told you about giving unsolicited comments to your classmates?” the elderly man snapped.

“That you discourage my efforts to take over your job,” Damian quipped coolly.

Jon could see a vein throbbing on the side of Mr. Tomas’ head. The young Kent buried his face in his hands as he felt what can only be explained as shame on behalf of his friend.

“I said,” the teacher declared with an even louder voice, “that you leave the teaching to me. Your preferred method of teaching doesn’t conform to our school’s…standards of decency.”

“I was under the impression that I was doing Gino a favor by correcting his mistake with a succinct explanation,” Damian countered smoothly. There was no doubt that he could match the older man’s stiff formality, albeit with a hint of insolence.

“You wrote on his test paper,” Mr. Tomas raised the sheet in front of him and adjusted his glasses, “only an idiot would confuse Steinbeck’s symbolism for the pearl as anything other than greed and avarice. How stupid can you be?” He looked daggers at Damian, who merely shrugged in reply.

“I’m not wrong,” Damian insisted.

“Mr. Wayne,” Mr. Tomas sighed deeply and heavily as if he was regretting his choices in life, “I’ll need to have a word with your father for this…”

“And I wish you the best of luck with that…sir.” Damian added the epithet as a lazy afterthought. “My father is very busy with his work and if you can grab his attention with something as trivial as this, you deserve a medal.”

Mr. Tomas gritted his teeth. Jon knew that his teacher was just itching to give Damian a harsher punishment, but couldn’t because Damian was the son of the school’s largest donor and honorary chairman, Bruce Wayne.

Damian sat back down with a satisfied look on his face. If Damian were anyone else, the class might have laughed appreciatively. But Jon could see how the other boys and girls either glared at Damian or inched away from him. It was almost like Damian was surrounded by an invisible force field of suck.

***

Jon had been extremely excited when he’d found out that he and Damian were going to the same school. He’d fantasized about being locker buddies with Damian, eating lunch with him, doing homework, doing phys ed…everything, really. It was like Jon’s best dream come true. Everything was going to be fun, amazing, and infinitely awesome. But whatever giddiness he’d had back then had been replaced by a dull painful ache inside his stomach, one that would tug at his insides whenever Damian did…well…anything.

They’ve been enrolled at West-Reeve School for two weeks. Two Weeks. But for Jon, it felt like forever as he witnessed Damian’s not-so-simple adjustment period.

On the first day, Damian had been late, and someone had already taken the seat Jon that had saved for him. He’d been looking forward to being seatmates with Damian, too… When he’d asked Damian what the reason was for his tardiness, Damian had said that he’d gone out on patrol and ‘enjoyed’ himself before he was ‘shackled down to the education system’.

On the second day, they were grouped up in social studies to present in class. Damian had loudly protested that he should have been the leader of their group, because he was smarter than any of his groupmates. He had been voted out of the group, and the teacher had let him do the presentation alone. He’d still gotten the highest marks.

On the fourth day, some would-be bullies—some 8th graders—started to put the moves on Damian. It was nothing serious, really. They’d just started crowding around Damian and kind of coerced him to strike a conversation with them, because he was the ‘famous secret son of Bruce Wayne’. Then they’d made unflattering remarks about the fact that Damian’s mom had never been publicly identified. They’d left Damian after that, but the next day, the student body was abuzz about three 8th grade boys who’d had to be rushed to the hospital for broken limbs.

Three days ago, during an experiment in science, Damian had…almost assaulted their classmate Ben Percy. Damian had thrown a metal stirrer at the beaker Ben had been holding, shattering it, and staining Ben’s clothes with its contents. Damian had argued that Ben was about to ‘stupidly’ inhale the acrid vapor coming from the concoction like ‘an idiot’, which could have corroded his nostrils, so he’d taken action. Damian had narrowly avoided trouble because Ben hadn’t denied it, but he also argued that Damian could have used less violent methods.

Jon couldn’t do anything but wring his hands in exasperation, as Damian failed to realize that most middle-schoolers couldn’t throw objects with deadly accuracy like say, a batarang. That, and Damian’s little stunt was definitely in the list of ‘things that will make it obvious we’re actually superheroes’, which included, among other things, using their powers—Jon’s powers, mostly—for anything while in school.

He’d talked to Damian about that during one lunch period, but Damian had given him his usual stubborn replies. Today, he tried again.

“Damian,” Jon began as he bit into his sandwich and swallowed, “could you at least try to not be a jerk to the other kids?”

“Not my fault if they’re too slow to keep up with me,” Damian grunted in-between sips of orange juice. “Besides, I don’t see why they should have an issue with my attitude…I mean, you can take it.”

The pair sat on the school’s roof deck with their backs pressed against the wall of a maintenance closet. Ever since day one, Damian had refused point-blank to eat at the cafeteria with the other kids. This is how Jon found himself up the roof with Damian, eating their lunch, even though no one was allowed there. Damian had assured him that nothing will happen to them, because his dad practically owned the school—which wasn’t wrong.

“Damian,” Jon sighed wearily. “I’m used to you. We’re friends and we’ve known each other for a long time now. Our classmates didn’t have that time. You gotta be a little patient with them...just…play ball, y’know? How can you be a student in school if you make all the students in the school hate you?”

“I’ve infiltrated a school before…” Damian grumbled.

“You’re not pretending to be a student, dummy!” Jon chided. “You are one! This is real! We’re students! And you really should try better to be one…”

Damian stood up with a frustrated look. “You can’t imagine how irritated I am with all of this!” Damian snapped at him. Jon dropped his sandwich in surprise.

“When I was a toddler I was already taught resourcefulness and independence, to get what I need by myself. Under my father, he taught me the same, but also ingenuity, and not a small measure of willpower! Now, these…children,” Damian spat the last word out. “They expect their hands to be held at every turn. And they’re praised for it! Even you consent to it!”

Jon knew Damian wasn’t really angry at him. Damian directed his fury to the sky, the floor, and the horizon, as if he blamed the whole world for its shortcomings. Damian wanted Jon there to listen…and that’s exactly what he knew Damian needed.

“Damian…” Jon stood up beside Damian and joined him in staring at the landscape below them. They could see the school parking lot and the main road leading back to downtown Metropolis. Students milled around the grounds and some of the younger kids ran around chasing each other.

“You know, the whole point of school is to hold hands…” Jon began. He grabbed Damian’s hand until their fingers intertwined, and then raised it in front of them.

“W—what are you on about?” Damian asked. If Jon hadn’t known any better, he could’ve sworn that Damian gulped.

“Sure, school teaches us…stuff…” Jon said with a cheerful tone. “But even you’d say that all the things they teach us in class are stuff you can look up online—or read in books,” Jon hastily added after seeing Damian’s disapproving look.

“But the whole point of being in a place with all these other kids learning the same things is that, you also get to see and learn stuff books will never tell you.”

“And pray tell, what are those?” Damian scoffed, his hand still clasped in Jon’s and growing warmer.

“It’s hard to explain…” Jon mused as he stuck his tongue out in thought. “But it’s a lot like our hands, see? We both have the same hands, but when we put them together…”

“We have two hands. Amazing,” Damian said flatly.

“No, dummy!” Jon insisted, shaking their combined hands emphatically. “It’s bigger together, is my point! Learning together with others is better than learning alone because you get a lot more learning done by seeing how everyone else gets it.”

“What…?” Damian asked, completely confused.

Jon stuck his tongue out again. “You get to see how what you learn is important to other people by how they learn it. Like say, Pete? His family has a farm like we used to before, so when we learned about proteins and stuff in science the other day, remember he said that they grow crops with that? Now with Gene, he’s in the track and field team, so he could be interested in that because remember, they gotta have a diet in the team.”

“Okay…?” Damian replied slowly.

“Damian…what’s the point of knowing a lot of things?” Jon asked patiently

“Knowledge is power…an advantage over your enemies,” Damian said confidently.

“No…knowledge isn’t just a sword you swing at bad guys Damian…the things you learn only matter if you know how they matter to other people. And if you know what matters to other people, only then can you help them,” Jon finished and then looked straight into Damian’s eyes.

Damian tried to hold his gaze, but something in his eyes—and frankly his gut—made him feel awkward and he chose to stare at the floor instead.

“You sound like your dad,” Damian said simply.

“It took me a while to understand that when he talked to me, to be honest,” Jon said with a grin. “I asked him why I still have to go to school when he’s Superman and I’m Superboy anyway. So he gave me this whole lecture, and I just gave it to you.”

“So…” Damian started to say, “when you study, you try to see how it’ll be useful when it comes to helping people?”

“I guess…?” Jon replied, wondering where this was leading.

“Did you study me?” Damian asked in a small voice. “Is this what you’ve learned? How to help me? Because I’ll have you know that I don’t—!”

Jon gripped Damian’s hand tighter and placed it on his chest. It promptly shut Damian up.

“You’re my friend, Damian,” Jon said with a fond smile. “You can’t stop me from wanting to help you. And I always will even if you think you don’t need it.”

“Is holding my hand really part of helping me?” Damian said finally.

“Did it help?” Jon asked.

“Yeah…it did.”

#Damijonweek2018 #JonDamiweek2018 #Damijon #super sons #Damian wayne #jonathan kent #jonathan samuel kent #fic #fanfic #robin #superboy

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wickedbananas · 6 years

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Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 4: On-Page Optimization

Posted by BritneyMuller

Chapter Four of the Beginner's Guide to SEO rewrite is chock full of on-page SEO learnings. After all the great feedback you've provided thus far on our outline, Chapter One, Chapter Two, and Chapter Three, we're eager to hear how you feel about Chapter Four. What really works for you? What do you think is missing? Read on, and let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Chapter 4: On-Page Optimization

Use your research to craft your message.

Now that you know how your target market is searching, it’s time to dive into on-page optimization, the practice of crafting web pages that answer searcher’s questions. On-page SEO is multifaceted, and extends beyond content into other things like schema and meta tags, which we’ll discuss more at length in the next chapter on technical optimization. For now, put on your wordsmithing hats — it’s time to create your content!

Creating your content

Applying your keyword research

In the last chapter, we learned methods for discovering how your target audience is searching for your content. Now, it’s time to put that research into practice. Here is a simple outline to follow for applying your keyword research:

Survey your keywords and group those with similar topics and intent. Those groups will be your pages, rather than creating individual pages for every keyword variation.

If you haven’t done so already, evaluate the SERP for each keyword or group of keywords to determine what type and format your content should be. Some characteristics of ranking pages to take note of:

Are they image or video heavy?

Is the content long-form or short and concise?

Is the content formatted in lists, bullets, or paragraphs?

Ask yourself, “What unique value could I offer to make my page better than the pages that are currently ranking for my keyword?”

On-page optimization allows you to turn your research into content your audience will love. Just make sure to avoid falling into the trap of low-value tactics that could hurt more than help!

Low-value tactics to avoid

Your web content should exist to answer searchers’ questions, to guide them through your site, and to help them understand your site’s purpose. Content should not be created for the purpose of ranking highly in search alone. Ranking is a means to an end, the end being to help searchers. If we put the cart before the horse, we risk falling into the trap of low-value content tactics.

Some of these tactics were introduced in Chapter 2, but by way of review, let’s take a deeper dive into some low-value tactics you should avoid when crafting search engine optimized content.

Thin content

While it’s common for a website to have unique pages on different topics, an older content strategy was to create a page for every single iteration of your keywords in order to rank on page 1 for those highly specific queries.

For example, if you were selling bridal dresses, you might have created individual pages for bridal gowns, bridal dresses, wedding gowns, and wedding dresses, even if each page was essentially saying the same thing. A similar tactic for local businesses was to create multiple pages of content for each city or region from which they wanted clients. These “geo pages” often had the same or very similar content, with the location name being the only unique factor.

Tactics like these clearly weren’t helpful for users, so why did publishers do it? Google wasn’t always as good as it is today at understanding the relationships between words and phrases (or semantics). So, if you wanted to rank on page 1 for “bridal gowns” but you only had a page on “wedding dresses,” that may not have cut it.

This practice created tons of thin, low-quality content across the web, which Google addressed specifically with its 2011 update known as Panda. This algorithm update penalized low-quality pages, which resulted in more quality pages taking the top spots of the SERPs. Google continues to iterate on this process of demoting low-quality content and promoting high-quality content today.

Google is clear that you should have a comprehensive page on a topic instead of multiple, weaker pages for each variation of a keyword.

Duplicate content

Like it sounds, “duplicate content” refers to content that is shared between domains or between multiple pages of a single domain. “Scraped” content goes a step further, and entails the blatant and unauthorized use of content from other sites. This can include taking content and republishing as-is, or modifying it slightly before republishing, without adding any original content or value.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons for internal or cross-domain duplicate content, so Google encourages the use of a rel=canonical tag to point to the original version of the web content. While you don’t need to know about this tag just yet, the main thing to note for now is that your content should be unique in word and in value.

Cloaking

A basic tenet of search engine guidelines is to show the same content to the engine's crawlers that you'd show to a human visitor. This means that you should never hide text in the HTML code of your website that a normal visitor can't see.

When this guideline is broken, search engines call it "cloaking" and take action to prevent these pages from ranking in search results. Cloaking can be accomplished in any number of ways and for a variety of reasons, both positive and negative. Below is an example of an instance where Spotify showed different content to users than to Google.

In some cases, Google may let practices that are technically cloaking pass because they contribute to a positive user experience. For more on the subject of cloaking and the levels of risk associated with various tactics, see our article on White Hat Cloaking.

Keyword stuffing

If you’ve ever been told, “You need to include {critical keyword} on this page X times,” you’ve seen the confusion over keyword usage in action. Many people mistakenly think that if you just include a keyword within your page’s content X times, you will automatically rank for it. The truth is, although Google looks for mentions of keywords and related concepts on your site’s pages, the page itself has to add value outside of pure keyword usage. If a page is going to be valuable to users, it won’t sound like it was written by a robot, so incorporate your keywords and phrases naturally in a way that is understandable to your readers.

Below is an example of a keyword-stuffed page of content that also uses another old method: bolding all your targeted keywords. Oy.

Auto-generated content

Arguably one of the most offensive forms of low quality content is the kind that is auto-generated, or created programmatically with the intent of manipulating search rankings and not helping users. You may recognize some auto-generated content by how little it makes sense when read — they are technically words, but strung together by a program rather than a human being.

It is worth noting that advancements in machine learning have contributed to more sophisticated auto-generated content that will only get better over time. This is likely why in Google’s quality guidelines on automatically generated content, Google specifically calls out the brand of auto-generated content that attempts to manipulate search rankings, rather than any-and-all auto-generated content.

What to do instead: 10x it!

There is no “secret sauce” to ranking in search results. Google ranks pages highly because it has determined they are the best answers to the searcher’s questions. In today’s search engine, it’s not enough that your page isn’t duplicate, spamming, or broken. Your page has to provide value to searchers and be better than any other page Google is currently serving as the answer to a particular query. Here’s a simple formula for content creation:

Search the keyword(s) you want your page to rank for

Identify which pages are ranking highly for those keywords

Determine what qualities those pages possess

Create content that’s better than that

We like to call this 10x content. If you create a page on a keyword that is 10x better than the pages being shown in search results (for that keyword), Google will reward you for it, and better yet, you’ll naturally get people linking to it! Creating 10x content is hard work, but will pay dividends in organic traffic.

Just remember, there’s no magic number when it comes to words on a page. What we should be aiming for is whatever sufficiently satisfies user intent. Some queries can be answered thoroughly and accurately in 300 words while others might require 1,000 words!

Pro tip: Don’t reinvent the wheel! If you already have content on your website, save yourself time by evaluating which of those pages are already bringing in good amounts of organic traffic and converting well. Refurbish that content on different platforms to help get more visibility to your site. On the other side of the coin, evaluate what existing content isn’t performing as well and adjust it, rather than starting from square one with all new content.

NAP: A note for local businesses

If you’re a business that makes in-person contact with your customers, be sure to include your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) prominently, accurately, and consistently throughout your site’s content. This information is often displayed in the footer or header of a local business website, as well as on any "contact us" pages. You’ll also want to mark up this information using local business schema. Schema and structured data are discussed more at length in the “Code” section of this chapter.

If you are a multi-location business, it’s best to build unique, optimized pages for each location. For example, a business that has locations in Seattle, Tacoma, and Bellevue should consider having a page for each:

example.com/seattle example.com/tacoma example.com/bellevue

Each page should be uniquely optimized for that location, so the Seattle page would have unique content discussing the Seattle location, list the Seattle NAP, and even testimonials specifically from Seattle customers. If there are dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of locations, a store locator widget could be employed to help you scale.

Hope you still have some energy left after handling the difficult-yet-rewarding task of putting together a page that is 10x better than your competitors’ pages, because there are just a few more things needed before your page is complete! In the next sections, we’ll talk about the other on-page optimizations your pages need, as well as naming and organizing your content.

Beyond content: Other optimizations your pages need

Can I just bump up the font size to create paragraph headings?

How can I control what title and description show up for my page in search results?

After reading this section, you’ll understand other important on-page elements that help search engines understand the 10x content you just created, so let’s dive in!

Header tags

Header tags are an HTML element used to designate headings on your page. The main header tag, called an H1, is typically reserved for the title of the page. It looks like this:

<h1>Page Title</h1>

There are also sub-headings that go from H2 (<h2>) to H6 (<h6>) tags, although using all of these on a page is not required. The hierarchy of header tags goes from H1 to H6 in descending order of importance.

Each page should have a unique H1 that describes the main topic of the page, this is often automatically created from the title of a page. As the main descriptive title of the page, the H1 should contain that page’s primary keyword or phrase. You should avoid using header tags to mark up non-heading elements, such as navigational buttons and phone numbers. Use header tags to introduce what the following content will discuss.

Take this page about touring Copenhagen, for example:

<h1>Copenhagen Travel Guide</h1> <h2>Copenhagen by the Seasons</h2> <h3>Visiting in Winter</h3> <h3>Visiting in Spring</h3>

The main topic of the page is introduced in the main <h1> heading, and each additional heading is used to introduce a new sub-topic. In this example, the <h2> is more specific than the <h1>, and the <h3> tags are more specific than the <h2>. This is just an example of a structure you could use.

Although what you choose to put in your header tags can be used by search engines to evaluate and rank your page, it’s important to avoid inflating their importance. Header tags are one among many on-page SEO factors, and typically would not move the needle like quality backlinks and content would, so focus on your site visitors when crafting your headings.

Internal links

In Chapter 2, we discussed the importance of having a crawlable website. Part of a website’s crawlability lies in its internal linking structure. When you link to other pages on your website, you ensure that search engine crawlers can find all your site’s pages, you pass link equity (ranking power) to other pages on your site, and you help visitors navigate your site.

The importance of internal linking is well established, but there can be confusion over how this looks in practice.

Link accessibility

Links that require a click (like a navigation drop-down to view) are often hidden from search engine crawlers, so if the only links to internal pages on your website are through these types of links, you may have trouble getting those pages indexed. Opt instead for links that are directly accessible on the page.

Anchor text

Anchor text is the text with which you link to pages. Below, you can see an example of what a hyperlink without anchor text and a hyperlink with anchor text would look like in the HTML.

<a href="http://www.domain.com/"></a> <a href="http://www.domain.com/" title="Keyword Text">Keyword Text</a>

On live view, that would look like this:

http://www.example.com/

Keyword Text

The anchor text sends signals to search engines regarding the content of the destination page. For example, if I link to a page on my site using the anchor text “learn SEO,” that’s a good indicator to search engines that the targeted page is one at which people can learn about SEO. Be careful not to overdo it, though. Too many internal links using the same, keyword-stuffed anchor text can appear to search engines that you’re trying to manipulate a page’s ranking. It’s best to make anchor text natural rather than formulaic.

Link volume

In Google’s General Webmaster Guidelines, they say to “limit the number of links on a page to a reasonable number (a few thousand at most).” This is part of Google’s technical guidelines, rather than the quality guideline section, so having too many internal links isn’t something that on its own is going to get you penalized, but it does affect how Google finds and evaluates your pages.

The more links on a page, the less equity each link can pass to its destination page. A page only has so much equity to go around.

So it’s safe to say that you should only link when you mean it! You can learn more about link equity from our SEO Learning Center.

Aside from passing authority between pages, a link is also a way to help users navigate to other pages on your site. This is a case where doing what’s best for search engines is also doing what’s best for searchers. Too many links not only dilute the authority of each link, but they can also be unhelpful and overwhelming. Consider how a searcher might feel landing on a page that looks like this:

Welcome to our gardening website! We have many articles on gardening, how to garden, and helpful tips on herbs, fruits, vegetables, perennials, and annuals. Learn more about gardening from our gardening blog.

Whew! Not only is that a lot of links to process, but it also reads pretty unnaturally and doesn’t contain much substance (which could be considered “thin content” by Google). Focus on quality and helping your users navigate your site, and you likely won’t have to worry about too many links.

Redirection

Removing and renaming pages is a common practice, but in the event that you do move a page, make sure to update the links to that old URL! At the very least, you should make sure to redirect the URL to its new location, but if possible, update all internal links to that URL at the source so that users and crawlers don’t have to pass through redirects to arrive at the destination page. If you choose to redirect only, be careful to avoid redirect chains that are too long (Google says, “Avoid chaining redirects... keep the number of redirects in the chain low, ideally no more than 3 and fewer than 5.")

Example of a redirect chain:

(original location of content) example.com/location1 >> example.com/location2 >> (current location of content) example.com/location3

Better:

example.com/location1 >> example.com/location3

Image optimization

Images are the biggest culprits of slow web pages! The best way to solve for this is to compress your images. While there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to image compression, testing various options like "save for web," image sizing, and compression tools like Optimizilla, ImageOptim for Mac (or Windows alternatives), as well as evaluating what works best is the way to go.

Another way to help optimize your images (and improve your page speed) is by choosing the right image format.

How to choose which image format to use:

Source: Google’s image optimization guide

Choosing image formats:

If your image requires animation, use a GIF.

If you don’t need to preserve high image resolution, use JPEG (and test out different compression settings).

If you do need to preserve high image resolution, use PNG.

If your image has a lot of colors, use PNG-24.

If your image doesn’t have a lot of colors, use PNG-8.

There are different ways to keep visitors on a semi-slow loading page by using images that produce a colored box or a very blurry/low resolution version while rendering to help visitors feel as if things are loading faster. We will discuss these options in more detail in Chapter 5.

Pro tip: Don’t forget about thumbnails! Thumbnails (especially for E-Commerce sites) can be a huge page speed slow down. Optimize thumbnails properly to avoid slow pages and to help retain more qualified visitors.

Alt text

Alt text (alternative text) within images is a principle of web accessibility, and is used to describe images to the visually impaired via screen readers. It’s important to have alt text descriptions so that any visually impaired person can understand what the pictures on your website depict.

Search engine bots also crawl alt text to better understand your images, which gives you the added benefit of providing better image context to search engines. Just ensure that your alt descriptions reads naturally for people, and avoid stuffing keywords for search engines.

Bad:

Good:

Submit an image sitemap

To ensure that Google can crawl and index your images, submit an image sitemap in your Google Search Console account. This helps Google discover images they may have otherwise missed.

Formatting for readability & featured snippets

Your page could contain the best content ever written on a subject, but if it’s formatted improperly, your audience might never read it! While we can never guarantee that visitors will read our content, there are some principles that can promote readability, including:

Text size and color - Avoid fonts that are too tiny. Google recommends 16+px font to minimize the need for “pinching and zooming” on mobile. The text color in relation to the page’s background color should also promote readability. Additional information on text can be found in the website accessibility guidelines. (Google’s web accessibility fundamentals).

Headings - Breaking up your content with helpful headings can help readers navigate the page. This is especially useful on long pages where a reader might be looking only for information from a particular section.

Bullet points - Great for lists, bullet points can help readers skim and more quickly find the information they need.

Paragraph breaks - Avoiding walls of text can help prevent page abandonment and encourage site visitors to read more of your page.

Supporting media - When appropriate, include images, videos, and widgets that would complement your content.

Bold and italics for emphasis - Putting words in bold or italics can add emphasis, so they should be the exception, not the rule. Appropriate use of these formatting options can call out important points you want to communicate.

Formatting can also affect your page’s ability to show up in featured snippets, those “position 0” results that appear above the rest of organic results.

There is no special code that you can add to your page to show up here, nor can you pay for this placement, but taking note of the query intent can help you better structure your content for featured snippets. For example, if you’re trying to rank for “cake vs. pie,” it might make sense to include a table in your content, with the benefits of cake in one column and the benefits of pie in the other. Or if you’re trying to rank for “best restaurants to try in Portland,” that could indicate Google wants a list, so formatting your content in bullets could help.

Title tags

A page’s title tag is a descriptive, HTML element that specifies the title of a particular web page. They are nested within the head tag of each page and look like this:

<head> <title>Example Title</title> </head>

Each page on your website should have a unique, descriptive title tag. What you input into your title tag field will show up here in search results, although in some cases Google may adjust how your title tag appears in search results.

It can also show up in web browsers…

Or when you share the link to your page on certain external websites…

Your title tag has a big role to play in people’s first impression of your website, and it’s an incredibly effective tool for drawing searchers to your page over any other result on the SERP. The more compelling your title tag, combined with high rankings in search results, the more visitors you’ll attract to your website. This underscores that SEO is not only about search engines, but rather the entire user experience.

What makes an effective title tag?

Keyword usage: Having your target keyword in the title can help both users and search engines understand what your page is about. Also, the closer to the front of the title tag your keywords are, the more likely a user will be to read them (and hopefully click) and the more helpful they can be for ranking.

Length: On average, search engines display the first 50–60 characters (~512 pixels) of a title tag in search results. If your title tag exceeds the characters allowed on that SERP, an ellipsis "..." will appear where the title was cut off. While sticking to 50–60 characters is safe, never sacrifice quality for strict character counts. If you can’t get your title tag down to 60 characters without harming its readability, go longer (within reason).

Branding: At Moz, we love to end our title tags with a brand name mention because it promotes brand awareness and creates a higher click-through rate among people who are familiar with Moz. Sometimes it makes sense to place your brand at the beginning of the title tag, such as on your homepage, but be mindful of what you are trying to rank for and place those words closer toward the beginning of your title tag.

Meta descriptions

Like title tags, meta descriptions are HTML elements that describe the contents of the page that they’re on. They are also nested in the head tag, and look like this:

What you input into the description field will show up here in search results:

In many cases though, Google will choose different snippets of text to display in search results, dependent upon the searcher’s query.

For example if you search “find backlinks,” Google will provide this meta description as it deems it more relevant to the specific search:

While the actual meta description is:

This often helps to improve your meta descriptions for unique searches. However, don’t let this deter you from writing a default page meta description — they're still extremely valuable.

What makes an effective meta description?

The qualities that make an effective title tag also apply to effective meta descriptions. Although Google says that meta descriptions are not a ranking factor, like title tags, they are incredibly important for click-through rate.

Relevance: Meta descriptions should be highly relevant to the content of your page, so it should summarize your key concept in some form. You should give the searcher enough information to know they've found a page relevant enough to answer their question, without giving away so much information that it eliminates the need to click through to your web page.

Length: Search engines tend to truncate meta descriptions to around 300 characters. It’s best to write meta descriptions between 150–300 characters in length. On some SERPs, you’ll notice that Google gives much more real estate to the descriptions of some pages. This usually happens for web pages ranking right below a featured snippet.

URL structure: Naming and organizing your pages

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. URLs are the locations or addresses for individual pieces of content on the web. Like title tags and meta descriptions, search engines display URLs on the SERPs, so URL naming and format can impact click-through rates. Not only do searchers use them to make decisions about which web pages to click on, but URLs are also used by search engines in evaluating and ranking pages.

Clear page naming

Search engines require unique URLs for each page on your website so they can display your pages in search results, but clear URL structure and naming is also helpful for people who are trying to understand what a specific URL is about. For example, which URL is clearer?

example.com/desserts/chocolate-pie

example.com/asdf/453?=recipe-23432-1123

Searchers are more likely to click on URLs that reinforce and clarify what information is contained on that page, and less likely to click on URLs that confuse them.

Page organization

If you discuss multiple topics on your website, you should also make sure to avoid nesting pages under irrelevant folders. For example:

example.com/commercial-litigation/alimony

It would have been better for this fictional multi-practice law firm website to nest alimony under “/family-law/” than to host it under the irrelevant "/commercial-litigation/" section of the website.

The folders in which you locate your content can also send signals about the type, not just the topic, of your content. For example, dated URLs can indicate time-sensitive content. While appropriate for news-based websites, dated URLs for evergreen content can actually turn searchers away because the information seems outdated. For example:

example.com/2015/april/what-is-seo/

vs.

example.com/what-is-seo/

Since the topic “What is SEO?” isn’t confined to a specific date, it’s best to host on a non-dated URL structure or else risk your information appearing stale.

As you can see, what you name your pages, and in what folders you choose to organize your pages, is an important way to clarify the topic of your page to users and search engines.

URL length

While it is not necessary to have a completely flat URL structure, many click-through rate studies indicate that, when given the choice between a URL and a shorter URL, searchers often prefer shorter URLs. Like title tags and meta descriptions that are too long, too-long URLs will also be cut off with an ellipsis. Just remember, having a descriptive URL is just as important, so don’t cut down on URL length if it means sacrificing the URL's descriptiveness.

example.com/services/plumbing/plumbing-repair/toilets/leaks/

vs.

example.com/plumbing-repair/toilets/

Minimizing length, both by including fewer words in your page names and removing unnecessary subfolders, makes your URLs easier to copy and paste, as well as more clickable.

Keywords in URL

If your page is targeting a specific term or phrase, make sure to include it in the URL. However, don't go overboard by trying to stuff in multiple keywords for purely SEO purposes. It’s also important to watch out for repeat keywords in different subfolders. For example, you may have naturally incorporated a keyword into a page name, but if located within other folders that are also optimized with that keyword, the URL could begin to appear keyword-stuffed.

Example:

example.com/seattle-dentist/dental-services/dental-crowns/

Keyword overuse in URLs can appear spammy and manipulative. If you aren’t sure whether your keyword usage is too aggressive, just read your URL through the eyes of a searcher and ask, “Does this look natural? Would I click on this?”

Static URLs

The best URLs are those that can easily be read by humans, so you should avoid the overuse of parameters, numbers, and symbols. Using technologies like mod_rewrite for Apache and ISAPI_rewrite for Microsoft, you can easily transform dynamic URLs like this:

http://moz.com/blog?id=123

into a more readable static version like this:

https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

Hyphens for word separation

Not all web applications accurately interpret separators like underscores (_), plus signs (+), or spaces (%20). Search engines also do not understand how to separate words in URLs when they run together without a separator (example.com/optimizefeaturedsnippets/). Instead, use the hyphen character (-) to separate words in a URL.

Geographic Modifiers in URLs

Some local business owners omit geographic terms that describe their physical location or service area because they believe that search engines can figure this out on their own. On the contrary, it’s vital that local business websites’ content, URLs, and other on-page assets make specific mention of city names, neighborhood names, and other regional descriptors. Let both consumers and search engines know exactly where you are and where you serve, rather than relying on your physical location alone.

Protocols: HTTP vs. HTTPS

A protocol is that “http” or “https” preceding your domain name. Google recommends that all websites have a secure protocol (the “s” in “https” stands for “secure”). To ensure that your URLs are using the https:// protocol instead of http://, you must obtain an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. SSL certificates are used to encrypt data. They ensure that any data passed between the web server and browser of the searcher remains private. As of July 2018, Google Chrome displays “not secure” for all HTTP sites, which could cause these sites to appear untrustworthy to visitors and result in them leaving the site.

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations on surpassing the halfway point of the Beginner’s Guide to SEO! So far, we’ve learned how search engines crawl, index, and rank content, how to find keyword opportunities to target, and now, you know the on-page optimization strategies that can help your pages get found. Next, buckle up, because we’ll be diving into the exciting world of technical SEO!

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