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kanene-yaaay · 3 years

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5+1 - [Part 2]

5 times Iida was tickled and the one he wasn’t

[PART ONE]

Kanene’s note: What a helloooo! I am baack! Gosh, look at me! Having a posting schedule! Who would say, huh? xDD Well, I hope you like this >u<

Warnings, fun facts, random things and stuff:

* This characters don’t belongs to me! They all belong to the anime/manga Boku no Hero.

* This is a SFW tickle fanfic with family tickles, so, if you don’t appreciate this kind of content, please, look for another blog. There are a plenty of very greeat arts in this site!! ^w^)b

* This is Lee!Iida with Ler!Aizawa and Nemuri sprinkling some tease here and there. All relationships are platonic. Around 1.500 words.

* Sorry for any spelling, pontuation and grammar mistakes! Any and every advice is very very welcome! \(-w-)/

* Look at the window and find something that is worth smiling for. Don’t forget to drink water, sleep and eat! <33

[~*~]

“Iida Tenya.”

“Ooooh noo,” Nemuri added from the spot on the floor where she sat, pampering and spoiling Shouta’s cats with plenty of snacks, a sharp grin gleaming at the boy who came running from the kitchen and now looked from a side to another with a panicked expression on his face, fast to move his arms in an ‘abort mission’ sign to the woman. “Looks like someone is in trouble! ~”

“Nemuri-san, please I ask for you to control your voice!!” Tenya whispered in a volume that most people would categorize as a shout, especially with Shouta’s hero trained hearing. Nemuri, though, just expanded her wicked grin as the nine old boy didn’t realize the dark figure arriving right behind him. “He can’t know I am here!”

“Aw, my dear,” she pouted in fake empathy at Iida’s inevitable fate, scratching Pudding under her chin, her loud motor like purring echoing in the silence. “But Shouta already knows.” Iida stilled as a statue when a shadow loomed over him, starting to turn around, slowly. “He always knows.”

“Gotcha.”

His quirk activated a second before Aizawa erased it with his own, making the blue haired one stumble on his own legs, almost falling on the ground if it wasn’t for the arms that grabbed him in a firm hug, fingers worming their way to his armpits, prodding and digging on the awfully ticklish flesh there.

“What,” Shouta started, with a tune that tipped on bored, his plain face contrasting to the smaller’s puffed cheeks as he wiggled and shook with the contained giggles. “Did I say about my orange flavored jelly packs, huh?”

“Aww, is the itsy bitsy Tenya ticklish? Can’t he take all the tickly-tickly-tickly tickles his favorite grumpy uncle gives to him? Huh? Aww, my poor ticklish boy.” Nemuri teased, ignoring the glare her friend sent on her direction in favor to stare at Tenya, who went redder at her words, a couple of squeaky snorts escaping from his lips.

“I will remind you what I said about eating my jellies without permission: don’t. Never. Do not look. Do not touch and especially, do not even think about eating it.” Aizawa highlighted the last phrase by blowing a raspberry right behind Iida’s neck, leading the boy to squeal, uncontrolled laughter following it almost immediately. The taller man did his best to keep a serious face, principally as the arms of his ‘victim’ rocked up and down, from the left to the right and in random patterns without even being able to get themselves enough control to attempt to stop him. “And you did, so now you will face the consequences. It’s only logical.”

“A-Aizahahazawa-san I, I cahahahAAH!” Shout cut the other’s protest by throwing him in the air, resting his hands on his sides when he caught him again, slightly clawing his stomach with his fingers, fishing uncontrollable, bubbly giggles from him. “Please, please! I can-'' Snort. “I can ehehexplain!” Yelp. Half words, Half pleas. Giggles. Giggles. Giggles. “I hahahave the right, Aizawa-sahahahan!”

Shouta contented himself in making the younger squirm – left, right, left, left, right and repeat – from a side to another by tapping his fingers on his sides repeatedly, sometimes giving a quick scratch only to gain another yelp, pretending to think about the proposal for a little less than a minute.

“No.” He decided, spidering his fingers merciless on the death spot. Iida threw his head back, crackles flying from him in a waterfall of shrieks and squeaks.

“Come one, Shou! Let the boy speak! As much I love this lovely, absolutely adorable laughter that makes you want to tickle and tickle him forever and ever, and aww, wouldn’t you love it, my dear? To get all the tiggles-tickles you could ever want for all eternity?” Iida kicked and shook his head in protest, more pleas falling from him, face and neck in flames. “I think he has the right to defend himself.”

“Which side are you?”

“No side deserves my awesome presence.” Aizawa rolled his eyes. “What is the matter, Shou? Afraid that you will lose in a logical battle with baby Tenya?”

“Ihihihi am NOT ahahaha baby!!” Iida protested through his hysterical laughter, nothing giving him more strength than correct factually incorrect statements. “I ahahahaham a very hehehealthy chihihihih- – No! Not there! – chihihihild! Mom said so!”

Nemuri hid her snickers behind her hands, receiving a very unamused yowl from Pudding, the cat demanding her to come back to her ear scritches immediately. The woman resumed to her wishes.

Shouta recognized a bait when he heard one, but watching the way tears started to appear in the corner of the younger’s eyes, he decided to bite it.

He adjusted him so the boy would be resting on his hips, his hand resting calmly on his ribs, a much less ticklish spot.

“You have fifty seconds.”

“WHAT!” Iida stared at him in disbelief, turning to look at Kayama in the search of reinforcements, and being gifted with nothing more than a joyful shrug, his brother’s best friend being very glad in just watch the chaos unraveling in front of her and, unnoticed by the other two who were caught up on the silliness, the camera carefully hidden behind Pudding’s fluffy form. “That ihihisn’t even a minute! It’s impossiblehe to mahahake a good defehense under this condici- conditionaries… undeheher that pressure!”

“Conditions.” Aizawa offered, “and heroes work under pressure. You want to be one when you grow up, right?”

“Yes!” Iida’s smile got even bigger than it already was, his eyes also becoming even brighter, shining with the determination of his new challenge.

“Good,” the tired adult smirked, starting to count with his fingers as the seconds went by. “Start to talk then.”

Tenya tried to clear his mind, together with keeping his resolve strong enough to not visibly squirm or titter every time Aizawa made any infinitesimal move. He never thought he would really be able to convince his uncle to let him make a true attempt to escape from this, therefore he didn’t possess any good enough reason to explain besides the ‘it was orange flavored and oranges are delicious!’

A sentence pulled him out of the frenzy of thoughts dashing on his brain at full speed. “You have twelve seconds now.”

“WHAT!” Tenya cried, seriously thinking about just pushing Shouta’s arms away and trying to run to the safety of the guest room.

“You seem to have a problem keeping track of the time.” The small kid nodded at his direction and Aizawa almost felt bad by his next move.

Almost.

“Let me help you, then.”

The underground hero poked an index finger on the lowest rib, vibrating on the sensitive spot for a few pieces of second, tearing a sputtering guffaw as Iida realized the true meaning of his words. “One.” He pressed another rib, and another, and another. “Two. Three. Four…”

“Noho! Wait! Wait!!”

“Five… Six. Seven…”

“Oops. It looks like you’re running out of time, sweetheart.” Nemuri added, unhelpfully. “Well, let’s just hope the mean Shouta won’t attack those awfully ticklish knees of yours when the time is over, right?”

“NOHOT MY KNEHES!”

“Good luck. Ten. Eleven. Twel-”

“YOULIED!”

Aizawa stopped.

“What?” He blinked one, two, three times. As if the meaning of the rushed words would become clearer. “No. I hid it and I was very clear in saying you couldn’t touch it. There is no lie here.”

“There is! A lie of omiz-” Iida closed his eyes, concentrating on the word and controlling the few giggles that still slipped from his mouth. He wanted to be a hero and heroes succeed through the pressure! “omission! Which means hiding! You hid the information so you were lying to me, so I… I… I taught you a lesson!”

They stared at each other for what seemed a lifetime.

Aizawa huffed a chuckle, lowering the boy to the ground, trying to not be blinded by the excitement and proudness exhaling from the younger when he realized that he succeeded in “logicing” his way out of the playful “punishment”, beaming on the ball of his feet at both adults.

“Good. In a fight, using your opponents’ words against them can be an important tool. Also, as a physical opening, don’t forget that I was carrying you, which means that if you hit the back of my knees hard enough I would weaken my grip and that would give you the opportunity to run. I would try to not hurt you when I fell, so that is also a weakness you could exploit.” After a thought, he added. “Try to do that the next time Hizashi tickles you.”

“You are a bastard.” Kayama replied, earning an exasperated gasp from Tenya. “Not you, dear. I am talking about Shouta.” That did nothing to alleviate the boy’s rebellion, his lecture of how ‘This isn’t the proper vocabulary of a hero’ was soon interrupted as the apartment door flew open, Ingenium walking through it. He immediately extended his arms, hugging his brother when the aforementioned jumped on him, part of the exhaustion of a day’s work being eased by the younger attics.

“Tensei! Tensei! I already did all my homework and I brushed my teeth and I played with the cats so they would not be sad or bored and I ate all my greenies and also-”

“-ate all my orange jelly packs.” Aizawa completed.

“And Aizawa-san tickled me because of it! Using very villainous techniques even though he is a very good and skilled hero! But then I won! I showed him logic and, and, and then he let me go!”

“Oof, that sounds like a very exciting day!” Tensei ruffled the boy’s hair, fondness dripping in waves from his acts and words. “But you don’t need to worry anymore about Shouta, the Grumpy Tickle Monster because now I am here!” Tensei posed in a poor representation of All Might's usual pose. “Ready to protect you!”

“Oh.” A dangerous tune marked Shouta’s grin and voice, making the blue haired hero to shiver with all the teenagerhood memories that this brought over. “Don’t get over yourself, assuming you’re out of danger, too.”

A wobbly smile took over Tensei's expression as Shouta cracked his knuckles, preparing himself for a chase. “Don’t think I don’t know exactly who told him where I hid my jelly packs.” The older Iida got his younger brother on his arms, flexing his legs, preparing to not give up so easily.

Aizawa decided he was feeling merciful today.

“You have three seconds.” Iida gasped in protest, an argument on the tip of his tongue. “Run.”

#Playful tickles #!#Aizawa the tickle monster is back/lh #xDD #Nemuri is there to tease and see some chaos #Lee!Iida #Ticklish!Iida #Ler!Aizawa #Bnha tickles #Bnha tickling #Kanene's fic #Kanene's Fanfic #5+1 fic #Kid!Tenya #Nemuri and Tensei make a quick appearence but techinically don't participate of the tickling part #I am with some mean headache and stuff so sdfghyujidfjh no rambling tags today

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castielgeralt · 3 years

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How to Study Plot and Character in Your Favorite Stories: 5 Easy Steps

What if I told you the best way to learn how to create amazing plots and characters in your own stories was by purposeful osmosis? First, of course, I might have to explain that “purposeful osmosis” means reading lots and lots of books and watching lots and lots of movies–and consciously studying what it is about them that works. With that explanation out of the way, chances are you’re in agreement. But chances are, you’re also not entirely sure how to actually make this happen. Just how do you figure out how to study plot and character in other people’s stories?

Not too long ago, Wordplayer K.M. Updike (she of the rad initials!) emailed me, asking:

[What is] your process for studying the plot, structure, character arcs, etc., of the books you read and the movies you watch? I’ve been wondering for a while how one goes about studying the writer’s work as they read/watch.

This is an excellent question. After all, it’s easy for Stephen King to say:

Don’t get me wrong: this is a tremendous piece of advice. But it’s also pretty vague.

That’s it? We just … read? And the answers will, what? Come to us?

Yes, actually. To some extent anyway. The more we read and watch good (and bad) stories, the better our own storytelling instincts will get–without our having to do even one thing more.

But in the interest of upping our game here, how about we do a few things more? Today, I’m going to give you an actionable plan for how to study plot and character (and lots more) in your favorite stories.

1. Start With an Action Plan

The first step in being purposeful is, of course, to have a purpose. Often, you may simply want to observe the books you read and the movies you watch generally, letting the story’s own strengths and weaknesses guide your study. But it can help you dig down deeper if you have a list of things you want to consciously pay attention to.

I recommend a short list. The shorter, the better, in fact.

Why? Because your brain can only keep track of so many tangents at once (says the woman with twenty tabs open in her browser). You’ll get better results if you focus on one or two primary elements or techniques at a time.

For example, lately, I’ve been concentrating on dialogue (both because it’s something I’m working on myself and because I’m planning a series of blog posts on dialogue for sometime next year). I watch the ebb and flow of dialogue, taking note of what works and what doesn’t. What’s the effect–and why did the author intend it?

This isn’t to say, of course, that you can’t also take note of anything interesting, in any category, that reveals itself. But only consciously follow certain rabbits down their holes.

2. Arm Yourself With Highlighters and Pens

Jane Eyre: The Writer’s Digest Annotated Classic (Amazon affiliate link)

This is for serious studiers only. Seriously, I only do this one when I’m in full battle mode (e.g., like when I was dissecting Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, so I could write about its brilliant techniques in Jane Eyre: The Writer’s Digest Annotated Classic).

This is where you’re going to want to divide your studying into a few more categories–one for each color of highlighter. Go through the book, highlighting appropriately, whenever you find an interesting passage. Write notes with abandon in the margins. Then, when you’ve finished, go through again and type up your notes, expanding on them to fully record your reactions and new knowledge.

I say this is only for serious studiers primarily because this is a fast track to interfering with reading-as-pure-pleasure (and also to making a mess of your paperbacks).

This is rigorous studying at its best and will require your full brain power. No reading-to-get-to-sleep when you’re doing this.

3. Break Down the Structure

The surest way to get a grasp on plot and story structure is by consciously breaking down the structure in books and movies–as I do regularly for the Story Structure Database. How do I do this?

Start with an easy shortcut: divide the total page count of a book or the total running time of a movie by eight. Why? Because the major structural moments happen at each eighth of the story:

1. Inciting Event (12%)

2. First Plot Point / End of the First Act (25%)

3. First Pinch Point (37%)

4. Midpoint / Halfway through the Second Act (50%)

5. Second Pinch Point (62%)

6. Third Plot Point / Beginning of Third Act (75%)

7. Climax (88%)

For movies, I use my handy dry-erase board notebook to note the approximate minute of each turning point, so I can easily watch the run time and take note of what’s happening.

For books, I use little Book Darts bookmarks to mark the appropriate page at each turning point.

This way, I’m not totally adrift within the story. I can watch the clock or the page count and know to be on the watch for the respective structural moment roundabout there.

This is a fabulous way to grasp story structure as a whole and, just as importantly, to understand how the various structural elements can manifest in vastly different ways from story to story.

You can study my many examples in the Story Structure Database.

4. Examine Your Reactions

Whenever you finish a story, give yourself a moment before rushing off to the next thing. Just sit there and think about your reactions to what you just experienced. Ask yourself:

How did the story make you feel?

What did you like about it?

What did you dislike?

Do you think it was an objectively good story?

Did you dislike it anyway? Why?

Do you think it was an objectively problematic or even bad story?

Did you like it anyway? Why?

Within the answers to these questions lies your greatest opportunity for growth as a writer. If you can distill your often nebulous feelings about a story down into logical facts about what made you feel that way, you will then be able to add other authors’ effective weapons to your own arsenal.

I use this technique after every story I read or watch. It’s where I get the ideas for fully half the posts on this site.

5. Transcribe the Prose

This trick is especially useful if you’re trying to crack the code of, not just great storytelling, but great writing. What is it about some authors’ prose that makes it sing so effortlessly and powerfully? The whole point of great prose is that it’s flawless: we’re not supposed to think about it, we’re not supposed to see the cracks where the pieces are joined together. If we saw the cracks, that would defeat the whole purpose.

As a result, simply reading great prose isn’t always the most effective way to learn how to write awesome prose of your own. What you need to do is sit down with a notebook and pen and a favorite book–and start transcribing passages. I recommend doing this longhand, with an actual pen, since this will slow you down and force you to think about and absorb each word and punctuation choice.

I used to do this every day, and it never failed to amaze me how it allowed me to suddenly see the building blocks the authors had used in crafting their prose. Their seemingly inimitable mastery of wordcraft was suddenly within my grasp. It was something I could learn–and that you can too!

Afraid Studying Will Ruin Your Reading? Don’t Be

Although you can learn from other authors, such as me, who break down stories and share what they’re learning in blogs and books, you’ll get more out of the experience by also doing it yourself. Start approaching your book reading and movie watching purposefully with an intent to logically identify and utilize the tools handed to you by authors you love.

But what if it ruins your reading and watching?

It’s true, it might. Some authors use these practices and find themselves growing hypecritical. But, frankly, it shouldn’t. The more I learn to identify how other authors are using the craft, the more I appreciate their stories. Give it a try. You’ll transform both your appreciation of stories in general and your own writing.

#thalia romme

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twinklebrain · 4 years

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Indulgence

A ficlet. Qiao Chusheng likes spoiling Lu Yao. Lu Yao is happy to be spoilt. Bai Youning is not happy.

No spoilers. I’m just trying to get into QCS’s head a bit. Not too sure where and if this ficlet will go any where.

Excuse the grammar. If you like it come say ‘hi’!

Qian Chusheng makes no secret over the fact that he enjoys indulging Lu Yao. Anyone with half a mind could see his obvious give-ins to Lu Yao’s every whim and fancy. All it takes is a slight downward pout of those very kissable lips, plus the barely there widening of baby-doe eyes, and Chusheng acquiesces without any further hesitation.

“You need to stop spoiling him,” chides Bai Youning as Lu Yao exclaims with unmasked glee over the receiving of yet another expensive present.

Unperturbed by the tightening of her thin lips and the glaring dark eyes, Chusheng humours her with the standard, “I’m not. It’s parked under his consulting fees.”

But as her nagging became a regular mantra, Chusheng starting plying his responses with mild bite.

“It’s not like I’m not paying for your meals too.”

“Did you forget about the time I paid for the apartment’s renovation? Last time I recalled, you lived there too.”

“Aren’t you getting front page by-lines each time he completes the case? Shouldn’t you be happy that Lu Yao is willing to continue working for me, and therefore allowing you first-hand access to all the clues and solution?”

But the bites don’t do anything to inhibit Youning’s onslaught; if anything, they rile up the daughter of one of Shanghai’s most revered mafia bosses even more. The Mercedes Benz was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back as she proclaimed loudly in exasperation, “Chusheng-ge! Have you gone mad? Don’t forget your position as Inspector. What will people think? It’s not right to let him wrap you around his fingers like that!”

Chusheng’s eyes narrowed dangerously, the words, ‘those who live in glass houses should not throw stones’ on the tip of his tongue. But he bites them back; he does not relish the thought of being called up by Bai Qili on claims that he was ‘bullying his precious princess’. From the day he was adopted by the Bai patriarch, he learned that there are dire and painful consequences to saying ‘no’ to Youning. Bai Qili’s threatening snarl to throw him back out into the streets was more than enough to keep Chusheng silent on all of Youning’s future shenanigans. For the sake of survival, he chose instead to smile blithely at her orders. Call it being ‘grateful’, ‘knowing one’s place’; it doesn’t really matter because the truth is, without Bai Qili, there is no Qiao Chusheng. He may not be a learned man, but he is not stupid. Chusheng knows that there is no such thing as a free meal; Bai Qili didn’t pick him up because he took pity on him, but because he knew how to use Chusheng’s fists and street smarts to his favour. Bai Youning doesn’t throw a princess tantrum for no reason, it’s because she enjoys pushing Chusheng’s buttons and seeing how far he would go to take her side instead of her father’s.

Qiao Chusheng is also acutely aware that the fist can only command so much respect, and it is useless when it comes to stopping people from gossiping. Since he accepted the role as police inspector, he knows people give him a wide breath because of who his benefactor is; without Bai lao-ye, he is no one. So despite whispers within and outside his force that he was nothing more than a puppet for the Bai patriarch, Chusheng continues to turn a blind eye on Youning’s so-called ‘investigative reporting’; so long as the case is cracked and Bai Qili doesn’t lose face over the incident, he can withstand all forms of backstabbing and slander.

Having lived most of his adult life on the whims of others, even at the expense of his own wants, Chusheng is thus, more than familiar to the idea of being being used. And if push comes to shove, he has no qualms either of using others as tools to get what he needs.

That is, until he meets Lu Yao.

To the untrained eye, Lu Yao appeared no different from the Bai family; their relationship was after all, build upon a business transaction – you help me solve the case, I pay you for your services. But unlike the father-daughter duo who wanted to use Chusheng for their own personal gain, Lu Yao seemed genuinely vested in building a relationship with him, even to the point of wanting to help him hone his skills and earn the respect of his fellow peers.

“Aiya Inspector Qiao, can you use your eyes for once and look at the crime scene properly?”

“Come on Inspector Qiao, use that brain of yours and think, I’m sure you can see there are loopholes in his alibi.”

“I know it’s late, but since your lights were on I figured you’re still working on the case. Well you can put that thing on hold because I’m hungry. If you pay for supper, I’ll share my thoughts.”

“I haven’t touched anything! I swear! A-Dou can vouch for me. I was waiting for you before I started investing the scene.”

“Of course I didn’t run away! I was worried about you!”

“Bravo Inspector Qiao! You’re finally using your eyes and that clever brain of yours.”

He had entered the agreement with full knowledge that Lu Yao saw him as a ticket to a free meal, both literally and figuratively. And for the most part of their early interaction, Chusheng treated Lu Yao as nothing more than just another means to an end, an end that would expand Bai Qili’s influence in Shanghai. But somewhere along the way their barter came a change. Though Lu Yao asks for many things, a German-made oven, a British toaster, and other random odds and ends, he never seemed to recall what he asked for, and is always genuinely surprised and grateful for the gifts. Increasingly, there are even moments of embarrassment, as if Lu Yao is caught with his hands in the cookie jar, while his mouth is already stuffed full of cookies.

Such moments give Chusheng pause; he has no doubt over Lu Yao’s excellent memory, and so can only wonder if Lu Yao actually cares for his gains, or does he use the exchange as an opportunity to test the boundaries of their relationship?

“Are you absolutely sure I can have this?”

“Well, maybe not the big vase, how about the little one?”

“You know I’m going to bake you a cake next time you visit. Put lots and lots of strawberries because I know you like them.”

“If you get the wine I promise I’ll cook you dinner. Need to break out the new stove you know.”

Each time Youning interjects with ‘That’s too much!’, Lu Yao wiggles an eyebrow and huffs, “Bai Youning you keep quiet. You’re not the one paying.”

Chusheng can’t help but laugh at the bickering; he may not be able to openly counter Youning, but through Lu Yao, he feels a sense of triumph that finally, there is someone with the guts to push back.

“Qiao Chusheng, what’s with that devious grin on your face?”

Chusheng breaks out from his reverie as he turns his attention to the lanky man on the sofa seat next to him; all long arms and legs spread out as if it was the most comfortable position in the world. He doesn’t miss the playful glint in the doe-eyes.

“I was just thinking that you would look nice in a blue jacket,” he responded airily.

Lu Yao had the decency to blush, “If you keep buying me nice things I’m never going to want to leave you.”

Chusheng stares back, as a slight pink creeps into Lu Yao’s pale cheeks. His consultants averts his eyes as he pulls himself upright before mumbling, “Ah, well, you know, what I mean to say is, I haven’t solved this case yet.”

Chusheng finally smiles, as he leans forward into Lu Yao’s space, “But you will.”

Lu Yao rolls his eyes, but his smile matches Chusheng, “But I will.”

Chusheng enjoys indulging Lu Yao. And no one is going to tell him to do otherwise.

***

#my roommate is a detective #qiao chusheng #lu yao #mriad #明国侦探

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apptg554 · 3 years

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Friends First Dating App

Bumble is a dating app that allows you to make new connections, whether you’re looking for a partner, to make new friends, or to expand your professional network. Making the first move on Bumble could change your life! DISCOVER OUR AMAZING FEATURES. Top Filters: Find your right date or next BFF and get an unforgettable first online encounter. Nov 18, 2020 The female-centric Bumble dating app burst onto the scene in 2014. Since then, the founder has launched the buzzy BFF mode as a way for women to meet women simply wanting friends. And though the swipe-happy app is a hit with younger millennials, there are success stories belonging to those born before the early ‘80s.

Friends First Approach To Dating

Is Bumble For Friends Or Dating

Dating is fun and all, but group dates are in again these days, too, especially with all the group dating apps out there. Not only do group dates take away from the pressure of one-on-one dates, but they’re also fun. Several brains are better than one, right? You may think you know all the local hot spots, but once you start a group chat in an app, you’ll soon realize the possibilities are endless. Plus, plenty can be social and not date-y, if that’s more your thing.

And, no two social/group dating apps are quite the same. After all, in general, there seem to be dating apps catered to everyone — adventure-seekers and travelers (like MeetMeOutside), ones where heterosexual women need to make the first move (like Bumble), and even ones for beard-lovers (like Bristlr), to name a few — and such is the case when it comes to group social outings, too.

Some only give you a limited amount of time, like 24 hours, to make plans while others coordinate the date for you — all you need to do is show up. Simple enough, huh? And others even include your first round of drinks. Sign. Me. Up.

Here are some social/group dating apps you need to try — so you can no longer make excuses that there’s no one around to go out with.

Check out Bustle's 'Save The Date' and other videos on Facebook and the Bustle app across Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire TV.

1. Tinder Social

Now, you can go on group dates and outings via Tinder Social. Looking for a fun night out? Just create a group (which looks a lot like a group text) and an activity to do, like hitting up that new bar in Midtown. Even though you can only be in one group at a time, it’s NBD — your group expires at noon the next day anyway.

It’s perfect for making last-minute plans tonight. Plus, you can go back and forth in your settings between being on Tinder solely to date, one-on-one, and Tinder Social. Or, if you’re like me and are already coupled up, you and your bae can go on Tinder just for the social aspect.

2. Squad

With Squad, you pick up to five Facebook friends to be part of your “squad,” which you can switch up anytime. Plus, you can also have multiple squads. You create a group name and tagline, the latter meaning your goal — going to such-and-such bar tonight or a Mets game this weekend. Then, check out other squads and let the swiping left or right begin. Once you match with another squad, you have 24 hours to message and make plans. Oh, and instead of a bio, you describe yourself via three emojis (and you can still write a bio if you so choose) — which is awesome and so 2016.

3. Grouper

With Grouper, you anonymously pick out friends-of-friends to meet IRL. If you mutually match, the app plans a “Grouper” for you — drinks between their friends and your friends. Plus, there is no messaging when you use Grouper. None! The app does all the work for you: time, place, and coordinating with everyone involved. The best part? It’s about friends meeting up with friends. “Dating” does not even have to be part of it, though if you do find you have a love connection with a friend-of-a-friend, it’s pretty great (like having a letter of recommendation, of sorts).

4. CLIQ

Let’s say you and a couple friends want to meet some new people IRL. Just log onto CLIQ and then you can match with another group of friends. First, you’ll choose some topics you’re interested in. Then, the app will take it from there and send you “Goodies” based on your interests and suggest places for you to check out. Via “Huddle,” you can also chat with members of your CLIQ privately. With the app, CLIQs can also choose not to be private and post status updates, pics, videos, and location posts, so followers can see what you have going on and where.

5. Entourage

First, choose one or two friends and start a group with them. Then, the app suggests nearby groups to you and you can “like” or “pass.” When you and another group match, you can start up a group chat. Then, let the planning-to-meet-IRL begin. The only downside? Currently, Entourage is only available in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco, but let’s be optimistic that it’ll expand to more cities soon enough.

6. Cheers

Cheers, formerly known as Who’s That, is a social app that connects you to people at over 30 Boston-area bars. The company recently rebranded and also formed a partnership with Absolut Elyx, Absolut’s new luxury vodka — and continues to have a partnership with Fireball Whiskey, as well. With the app, you create a group with friends and swipe through other groups going out in your city. When you see people you want to get drinks with, tap “Cheers.” Like other swiping apps, you get a match when there’s mutual interest. Then, “Pick a Place” in the conversation to meet for drinks. Your concierge will make a reservation and you’ll get the first round of drinks free. Yep, free. So easy. (Though I hope it expands to other cities, too.)

Images: Fotolia, Tinder, Squad, Grouper, CLIQ, Entourage, Cheers

Whether you’re looking for true love or a quick hookup, dating apps have become the go-to for finding what you’re craving. But what about friends? After using Tinder and OKCupid for dating, I was actually more interested in finding new pals and I figured I could keep using the same tools but with a different purpose.

I’m open to love but not looking for it. I’m taking a very chill approach to new relationships these days, preferring to let the right connection come to me rather than chasing it. That said, I’ve always found dating apps really interesting and I love dating, so even though I’m not looking for romance, I still enjoy that aspect of it. Why not keep the parts of dating I enjoy and use the same approach to simply find cool people to hang with?

I’m upfront about it. I state in my profile that I’m looking for friendship so it’s clear to anyone perusing my stats what I’m open to. I also make sure to talk about it explicitly before I meet anyone in person. A dating site isn’t the typical place for people to find platonic connections, so I make sure I’m upfront about it. I have no interest in leading people on.

Friendship is more important to me than partnership. Don’t get me wrong, I love being in a relationship, but the older I get, the more I realize that a solid network of good friends is much more important. I want to have a community of amazing people around me more than I want to find “The One.” I’ve spent way too much time giving up my friendships for the sake of whichever relationship I was in at the time. Now it’s time to start putting friendship first.

An online connection doesn’t mean a real-life romance. Even if I meet someone online who I think could be an incredible partner, you never know until you’ve actually met them. I’ve met a few guys who, on paper and from our messages, seemed like real keepers, only to find there was no chemistry in real life. In those situations, I was open to keeping them as friends rather than scrapping all that potential because the spark of romance wasn’t there.

Friends First Approach To Dating

Not everyone has the same idea. Unfortunately, some people aren’t into it. Some of those dudes just dropped off the face of the earth when they realized I wasn’t interested romantically. I get it, they were looking for something specific and I just wasn’t on board. To me though, it just seems like a shame to shut off the possibility of platonic connection just because I wasn’t DTF.

It’s hit and miss. Just like searching for real-life romance through a screen doesn’t guarantee a connection, neither does looking for friends. I love dating because it’s an opportunity to meet an entirely new human being and friendship dating is no different. That said, some people just do not fit together and there’s a lot of time spent awkwardly sipping coffee over a forced conversation, calculating how many minutes until I can politely exit the interaction.

I’ve had some weird dates come out of it. Even if I say on my profile that I’m looking for friends, and even if that’s explicitly stated before we meet, there are still some people who equate dating apps with, well, dating. On the one hand, that’s totally fair enough. On the other hand, we’re all adults here and we (hopefully) all understand the concept of consent. When one of us is looking for friendship and the other is only interested in hooking up, nobody wins.

If we can use apps for romance, why not for friendship? We’re living in a world that is steadily becoming more and more digitized and if we can use technology to find our soulmates, why can’t we do the same to find friends? There’s an app for that, right? The social stigma around online dating has pretty much disappeared, but when I tell people I find friends online, I still get some funny looks.

Is Bumble For Friends Or Dating

The tech world is catching on. For a hot minute, Tinder launched a version of the app created for exactly this purpose. Unfortunately, the idea tanked, probably because as a hook-up app, it’s not particularly geared towards meaningful connections. Nevertheless, there are a bunch of other apps that are designed for exactly that market if, like me, you’re not opposed to finding cool people through the power of the internet.

“Sponsored: The best dating/relationships advice on the web. Check out Relationship Hero a site where highly trained relationship coaches get you, get your situation, and help you accomplish what you want. They help you through complicated and difficult love situations like deciphering mixed signals, getting over a breakup, or anything else you’re worried about. You immediately connect with an awesome gecoach o”n text or over the phone in minutes. Just click here…

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rebelrecovery · 4 years

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Book Notes:

This one is one of the better quit lit books I’ve read - Belle writes with blunt honesty, and I love the way she envisions the alcoholic voice in her head as a big bad wolf rather than a wine witch.

Below are the parts that were most helpful for me...

I thought, I can’t start drinking now, there isn’t enough. Not enough for what? To fade out. To be numb. Because despite what I may have said, I never wanted one glass of wine with dinner. I wanted three glasses. What’s the point in one glass? And despite what I may have said, I never drank because I liked the taste. [...] I drank to get fuzzy. I wanted to be slightly numb, to take the edge off. I spent a lot of time taking the edge off and then trying to maintain the edge taken off, but I usually ran into problems of sobering up too quickly, or drinking too much. There was no magic formula for edge-off-ness. I tried to find it. I tried having beer before wine, I tried eating first, I tried drinking on an empty stomach. There may have been a four-minute window of edge-off-ness and then I spent the rest of the night trying to find the four-minute window again.

I never want to do this again. I never want to wake up in the middle of the night both wishing I was dead and hoping I’m not dying. Let me not vomit, please, and I promise I will cut back on the drinking. I never want to feel this bad, feel so hopeless, alone, scared, dark. I am definitely drinking too much. I should face that. I should stop drinking for a week, take a break. I’ll start tomorrow. After the work party. After vacation. Next week. After the birthday. The first of the month. On a Monday. I promise.

I had tried to stop drinking plenty of times on my own, but never managed to quit for more than a couple of days. Usually I’d declare my sobriety in the morning and then open a bottle of wine by 6 p.m. that same night. Then I’d quit again the next morning. No wine for one day. For two days. Then the voice would start. Is it time yet? You can drink now. Celebrate sobriety with a glass or two. You’ve done well. You are going to break this non-drinking stretch anyway, so you might as well drink now. Drink tonight and quit later. What about now. Is it time to drink yet? Fuck it, I’m going to drink, this is ridiculous. I’ve already quit for a week. Let’s celebrate sobriety with some alcohol.

If alcohol was in the house, it spoke to me, then I drank it. Even if I didn’t really enjoy it. I was drinking because it was the thing I did. No enjoyment. No taste. No feeling except for exhaustion. Like a hammer banging on my head. Did you ever try buying a case of wine, thinking that if it was around all the time you’d feel less compulsive about it, and drink less? Ha. Really. Who was I kidding? With a case of wine in the house, I drank more. Of course I did. We never had a wine collection or a wine rack or a wine cellar or a liquor cabinet either. Alcohol didn’t last long enough to be collected or displayed or shared.]

I had lots of drinking rules and guidelines for myself, and over time, bit by bit, I broke all of my rules. I’m only going to drink on special occasions or when socializing. Only on weekends.” But of course, you and I both know that only drinking on weekends is tricky. Because what about Sunday night? Is Sunday part of the weekend? What about Thursday? Maybe the weekend is four days long. Maybe it is, in fact, most of the week. Controlled drinking is not very successful—you know this already because you’ve tried it. If we have to control our drinking, it means that our natural, default tendency is to have one, and then another, and then another. Any plan we make is very difficult, if not impossible, to adhere to. You tried moderation. You did. You maybe didn’t call it moderation. You tried making rules for yourself. When you realized that you were drinking more than you wanted to, before you ever saw this book, you did things like alternating every second glass with water, or switching from hard stuff to beer, or trying to skip days. You tried to drink only on weekends, or only have one, or only . . . or only . . . or only.

Normal drinkers measure their alcohol consumption like I measure my corn on the cob consumption—which is to say, not at all. Just like I have days without corn, normal drinkers have plenty of days without alcohol but they’re not keeping track. I don’t pay attention to whether you are getting more corn than me, and a normal drinker fills up glasses around her without worrying about who’s getting how much. And yes, it’s true that corn on the cob is my favourite of all summer things to eat, but I have never planned days around when I can eat it. I have never gone out at 11 p.m. to get more corn. I’ve never worried about running out of corn.

A ‘bottom’ in the sober world describes the point where you quit drinking. If you have a ‘high bottom’ then you quit when your problems were smaller. Poor concentration, missed deadlines, an inability to take advantage of new opportunities, procrastination, crappy sleep, many days of feeling ill. A ‘low bottom’ is where the micro problems have grown into larger holes, and might include health, relationship, money, or legal issues. My high bottom looks like this: drink with dinner, and after, plan to drink less, continue to drink the same amount, try to quit for a month and manage nine days, start again, not keep my promises to myself. Wonder what the hell is wrong with me. Suffer with crappy sleep, extra pounds, wasted money.

If alcohol is an elevator that only goes down, the goal is to step off, not to ride down any more. Stop drinking now. Start feeling better now. I stepped off early. But I’m not naive. I know where that elevator was going. If I stopped ‘before there was a problem’ then I was fucking lucky, plain and simple. Because even stopping where I did, it was hard to do. Really hard.

The “Drink Now” voice, which I call Wolfie, will say anything to get us to drink. Nothing is off-limits. Wolfie hits below the belt. Wolfie talks smack. Wolfie with a megaphone said to me: You’ve had a long, crazy day. Have a drink. You’ll just have one. It will take the edge off. You have blown this whole thing out of proportion. You need to cut back, not quit. A hundred fucking days? You’ll never make it anyway.

I knew I had a very loud Wolfie “Drink Now” voice in my head that insisted that a glass of wine with dinner was normal. I also knew that there was another very quiet, very tiny mouse-like voice, that said: You have to stop. You know what this internal conflict is like.

I felt moderately stable until something happened, like if I got frustrated, or mad, or sad, or bored, or if something good happened and I had to celebrate. I had completely maladaptive coping strategies. I didn’t have the skills to try anything else to feel better because—duh—I’d been using wine as my only coping mechanism. I’d overused wine as a feel-better tool for so long that I literally couldn’t remember one single thing I could do instead to ease my mood.

Booze isn’t a solution to a problem. It’s a very temporary pause button (manhole cover) with horrendous consequences. It’d be like turning to heroin. It isn’t the right solution for the problem. It gets between me and my life, between me and you, between me and serving, between me and fun. It affects my weight, my sleep, my enthusiasm. It blunts, fills, numbs, fills time, expands into the space allowed. Adds nothing, feels bad, sad, argumentative, irritated. Isn’t the real me. My life has so much MORE good stuff in it when the wine is gone. There’s nothing to escape from, it isn’t bad here, there’s joy and beauty and ease here. Don’t need to ‘go’ anywhere else.

The voice that is YOU, when you’re 50 days sober, says “I know sometimes I feel like drinking but I’m not going to because I don’t want to have a new Day 1. I’ve done enough drinking in my past. I know that Day 1 is rotten.” The voice that is YOU says: “I want something different and better and I don’t know what that is yet, but I know I want to try this sober thing.” We end up in a place where even if bad shit happens, we do NOT think about drinking.

Picture booze like a Big Wolf With Black Eyes, he represents the voice in your head. Now you have to very calmly starve the wolf. Or better yet, you have to dehydrate him by not giving him anything to drink. At first he’ll be mad at you. “Where’s my drink?” You’ll say: I have all this free time now. I can’t talk to you, Wolfie. I’m running, baking, singing, reading, cleaning, spending time with my kids. I’m paying my taxes, cleaning off my desk, enjoying the weather. The wolf will taunt you. “Everyone else is drinking, why can’t you?” You’ll say: Sorry, Wolfie, can’t hear you. I’m too busy cranking up the volume on my new iPad that I bought with all the money I’ve saved.” The wolf will nearly be dehydrated. He’ll try a few more last-chance, desperate attempts. “You’re broken,” he’ll snarl. “You bitch, you can’t be fixed, you’ll always be a fuck-up, you suck at this, you might as well quit now.” And you’ll say: You want to fight? I’ll win. I’ve got so much more energy now that I’m sleeping through the night. I can outrun you Wolfie. I’m light on my feet now. I’ve got so much more spunk, clearer thinking. I’m planning to take over the world, Wolfie, me and my clear-headed genius. What is that? Sorry I can’t quite hear you. Your voice is so quiet, Wolfie. Are you nearly dehydrated? You’re going to dry up and turn to dust. Puts palm of hand up to lips and blows across the surface. Dust disperses, Wolfie is specks of grey in the air. And then gone.

Being sober is a relief. Quitting drinking is like putting down a backpack of rocks that you’ve been carrying around for a long time. It’s like a deep breath that fills your lungs. Being sober is feeling proud of yourself. Being sober is easier than drinking. Too much of our brain space is used trying to manage alcohol consumption. The “Drink Now” voice is exhausting. All of that time we spend planning to drink—thinking about drinking, wondering how much alcohol there is, trying to figure out how we’re going to get out of that work obligation because we’re hungover—all of that can stop. You have been drowning out who you really are. Literally. Banging yourself on the head with a bottle or two of wine. That’s not you. The real you is in there. Drinking is a way of hiding from who you really are. I can honestly say that being a non-drinker is unicorns and parades compared to drinking.

There is a point in each day when you will most feel like drinking. I call this the witching hours. Typically it’s around dinner time; for me it was 6:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. If you were to plot the duration of the witching hours on a graph, the period of time gets predictably shorter and less intense each day. Having a replacement drink is a good idea. Your brain is used to having something to drink at this time of day, so you can plan a lovely replacement drink. I have found that bitter drinks deal with cravings better than sweet drinks.

We are so used to using alcohol as our only treat, that we need to learn new treats. You can have bubble bath, trashy magazines, flowers, oven mitts, bad TV from Netflix, time alone, cheap earrings, or savoury pancakes. Perhaps you’ll plan to have steak every Friday for the first six weeks. And if you don’t eat steak, then substitute salmon or sushi or marinated tofu in that category. You spent money drinking, so you can invest some of those Wolfie dollars to support your sobriety. Here are some examples of things I’ve treated myself to: fuzzy blankets, silver jewelry, deluxe candles, essential oils, chocolate croissants, lovely beads, thrift shopping, craft supplies, gourmet ground coffee, a gorgeous teacup, a bouquet of flowers, a potted basil plant. The largest was a countertop dishwasher. The trick is to either find something that you want but don’t need, or to splurge on a more deluxe version of something you were going to buy anyway. Like shampoo or lipstick. I have always struggled with confidence and my inner critic is a real bitch. The concept of self-care is relatively new to me and these gifts remind me to treat myself kindly.

One of the reasons we drink is in search of an ‘off’ switch: to quiet our brains, to escape responsibilities, to have ‘me’ time. If there are coping strategies that are adaptive (make things better) versus maladaptive (make things worse), then drinking is maladaptive. While it may be an off-switch, it creates many other problems at the same time.

We are not taught, explicitly, how to deal with uncomfortable feelings, or how to self-soothe. So we reach for available tools, however malformed. Did your parents ever sit you down and have a conversation with you about what you can do if you feel overwhelmed, exhausted, irritated, freaked out, lonely, or depressed? Did they give you strategies and tools to help you with Changing the Channel in Your Head? No. Mine neither. Did they model for you how they dealt with disappointment, their feelings of not fitting in, or how they coped with the occasional overwhelming sense of dread? If they did model for you, was it with something other than cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, or a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken? Did your parents have ‘self-care’ time where they made it clear that they needed to recharge batteries, to unwind. Did they lock themselves in the tub with big mounds of lavender bubble bath and candles? Did your father go for a run when he was feeling stressed, or to delineate the mark between ‘work’ and ‘home’ and did he tell you he was doing this, explicitly, so that you could learn to do the same? No?

in your first months sober, you will get a crash course in adaptive self-care strategies, whether you want it or not. One of the most important things you will do is learn to strategically avoid ‘overwhelm’—I use this word as a noun, it’s a thing on the horizon, like fog. Your life is like a video game. You can see potential bombs, things advancing, that could blow up and throw you off course. Your job is to navigate them. You don’t walk right into a bomb and hope for the best. You don’t test yourself by repeatedly doing difficult or stressful things. Instead, you ask someone to carpool, you decline social activities, and you simplify meals. Your job is to reduce overwhelm. All around you, there are lists of things to do and when you first quit drinking you are going to take it easy. When you first quit drinking, you are going to remember that being overwhelmed is our number one trigger. You will instead do less. Learn to be slothful. Embrace the art of underachieving.

Here are my top three tools for overwhelm: exercise, tub, and bed. I probably use exercise four times a week, specifically to help with my mood. I’m in the tub anytime I’m feeling antsy, or as my reward at the end of a day of catering. And as far as sleep is concerned, I have been known to go to bed at 7:30 p.m. in early sobriety, because I had no other way of dealing with life. I knew I didn’t want to drink, and I had no idea what else to do except ‘hide’.

When we are drinking, we use alcohol to fix everything—or so we think—and we don’t develop any other self-soothing, comforting, or change-the-channel tools. Turns out—who knew—there are at least 578 other ways to shift how you feel. There are things you’ve done before, perhaps by accident, things that once you remember them, and try them, you think “OK, good, I feel better.” Like when you change the sheets on the bed you feel better. And when you have a nap you feel better. And when you snuggle on the couch with a fluffy blanket and braid your cats’ tails together you feel better. Especially if you add hot chocolate. A change of location works. If you’re at home, go out. If you’re out, go home :) If you’re alone, get with some people. If you’re overwhelmed in a group, hide in the bathroom and read sober blogs on your phone. Yes, really.

I made a list of the ways to change my state. It had 30+ things on it. They included: listen to loud music, play guitar, sing, talk on the phone, write a letter longhand, take a bath with candles, light candles anywhere in the house, clean my desk, clean anything, go for a run, make tea, plan meals, test a recipe, read a magazine, brainstorm with clients, design a new logo, read light fiction, read self-help, make a puzzle, go for a walk, take pictures, go swimming, watch a good movie, go to a concert, go to see a movie at the theatre with popcorn, listen to podcasts, do volunteer work, find an audience and do some kind of public speaking, write in my journal, play cards, explore a new part of the city, go to the art gallery, the museum, write a restaurant review.

If you’re an introvert, or if you’re a non-joiner like I am, then asking for any kind of support or encouragement seems hard. But here’s the truth. The simple act of reaching out might make you feel weak, but it’s actually a sign of strength.

When Wolfie says that being sober sucks and that it’s too much to give up, you can remind him that you are also giving up the following: • feeling like death in the morning • waking at 3 a.m. with guilt and dread and horror • vomiting • spending dumb money (like money spent in bars, expensive bottles of wine in restaurants, buying rounds for people, impulse shopping online) • emailing and texting random people • hooking up with random people • falling down • hiding bottles • arguing with your partner • alternating stores so they don’t get to know you • cringing when it’s time to take out the recycling.

And here are a few of the things that you can focus on instead, the things you GET by being sober: • you sleep through the night • your skin looks great • your health improves • your marriage improves • your kids talk to you again • your family will now take your calls after 6 p.m. • you can drive the car in the evening • you have the beginnings of a hobby • you can read a book and remember it • you can watch a movie and stay awake for it • you can actually cook the food in your fridge instead of eating popcorn for dinner • you lift your head, look around, and feel like things are ‘possible’ • you feel proud of yourself.

Keep a short journal of your own, particularly for the first 60 days. By keeping a daily record you can see the grass grow. And you can more clearly identify that some periods of time are shitty but that they don’t last, and they’re followed swiftly by easier days. You can start your journal with this entry. Start with a list of 10 things: 1. The way I drink has affected my ___ 2. And my ___ 3. And my ___ 4. It’s caused problems with ___ 5. And ___ 6. It’s made me feel ___ especially when ___ 7. I nearly had a disaster when ___ 8. And this was just about a disaster too: ___ 9. I’m tired of waking up feeling like ___ 10. People who will be relieved that I am sober: ___

It’s entirely possible to have sober fun, of course it is :) Those of us who are longer-term sober have plenty of fun. There’s nothing better than waking up without a hangover, without regret, without shame. There’s nothing better than being on a beach and being sober and watching a sunset. There’s nothing better than coming home at the end of a long night, or dancing until 4 a.m., knowing that you had a fabulous time, that you rocked it all without a drink. To think that you need alcohol to have fun is Wolfie talking. You were fun when you were 12 years old. You’ve had hilarious pee-your-pants laughing with your best friend and it didn’t involve alcohol. Wolfie tells you that kind of shit to encourage you to drink, but it’s not true. Can you dance sober? Turns out you can. Who knew.

If you are in prelapse, then you will want to do things right away that might make you feel better. Even if you have to try things mechanically, one after the other. You’ll say “I got enough sleep that didn’t work, had a nap that didn’t work, went for a run that didn’t work.” Then you go on to the next thing. You have a treat, that didn’t work. You watch bad TV, that didn’t work. You read blogs, write in your journal, comment on blogs, listen to audios, email somebody, reach out, go to a meeting, listen to something inspirational—you go through the toolkit. And here’s something that will seem obvious when I say it: If the first tool doesn’t work, it does not mean that the whole thing is hopeless. It means that you go on to the next tool.

You are more likely to be successful if you: • Reach out for support. It’s hard. Do it anyway. • Sign up to have a sober penpal. Email your penpal every day. • Share real stuff, don’t exaggerate, and don’t leave things out. Be truly honest with at least one person in your life about your booze stuff. • Reach out instead of drink, cry instead of drink, walk instead, email me frustrated instead (the people who don’t email are more likely to get alone in their head with Wolfie who will always say that drinking is a good idea). • Remember that successful treaters do MUCH better. It’s shocking how much better they do. Once you figure out the self-care treat thing, you’ll find this whole sober experience to be much easier. If you resist treats, don’t understand them, don’t think they apply to you, then I worry about you (see below). • Get enough support, load on a lot to begin and then ease off as time goes by and you feel stable. Be cautious. Don’t fuck with sober momentum. • Tell on Wolfie—share when you’re having weird thoughts, externalize the voice, tell on your inner addict. • Read stuff that supports you and turn away from what doesn’t. You don’t read about moderation, you don’t read blogs that get under your skin, you turn away from people who repeatedly relapse if that makes you feel wobbly. • Protect your sobriety, avoid situations and people that may trigger you. Your sobriety is a like a little chick that can easily get squished in traffic.

Write in a journal every day for your first 30 days sober, no matter what (can be private, or anonymous on a blog, doesn’t matter).

Read sober blogs at least one hour a day, every day.

Rethink your evening routine

Have a bath/shower every evening, early, so that it sets the mood for the rest of the night.

Plan and purchase replacement drinks that you can have during the witching hours. Bitter is better.

Schedule something to coincide with Wolfie time

Get yourself daily treats for the first two weeks, and then something every two days thereafter.

Get as much sleep as humanly possible. Take naps. You will need a lot more sleep than you anticipate.

Go to bed every time you feel crappy, when you feel you’re about to drink, or when you are agitated and need a time-out. Bed is a good, safe place to hide.

Sober first. If you push yourself too hard, and load on too many goals at once, Wolfie comes in with “this is all too hard.”

Pretend, for a while, that you’re sick, that you have the flu, that you need to take good care of you—very, very good care.

Try to do some kind of physical exercise every day, even if it’s only for 10 minutes

Rent/stream new TV shows and movies as your sober treats, that you can watch only if sober.

Give up any ideas of a clean and tidy house for now.

Please know that crying is totally normal, required, and necessary.

Take pictures of things that you’re grateful for now that you’re sober. It can be simple things like a good cup of coffee, the view from the window, your girls playing dress-up. You can do a sober photo project.

Avoid overwhelm as much as possible. In fact, strive for “underwhelm” and engage in some truly slothful behaviours. It’s OK to be in your jammies watching a show on your iPad. You’re sober. Sometimes bed-snuggle time is required.

Pet your cat, dog, or horse. You know already that this makes you feel better.

Listen to sober audio and podcasts. Find specific topics or episodes that resonate with you. Listen to them on repeat.

Accept that sober motivation is like deodorant: it needs to be reapplied every day. Stop feeling like you should be able to do this if you ‘try harder’. You will need to ‘try different’.

Ask for help.

Accept help.

Ask for and listen to advice from other successfully sober people.

See irritating people as people with struggles. We were irritating too. We were dealing with stuff that other people couldn’t see. Drop your shoulders and see that woman as lonely, or hurt, or needy. She’s not trying intentionally to make you crazy.

Share the nonsensical things that Wolfie tells you—share with another sober person who will truly ‘get it’. Be shocked and then amused that we all hear virtually the same thing.

Find some small activities to do in the evenings to help occupy the empty time. It doesn’t take long for regular life to flow back into the spaces that alcohol consumed, but to begin it’s helpful to have some projects. Decluttering is helpful. It’s cleaning up, from the outside in.

Have something you can wear, some special piece of jewelry, that reminds you that you’re sober and that you’re special. Rub the jewelry. Bestow it with super powers.

Find ONE person that you can be 100% honest with about your drinking, about your thinking, your worries, your struggles, your excitement, and your joy. That might be a counsellor, sober mentor, a coach, sponsor, or a sober friend. You should have at least ONE person who truly gets what it’s like to be you.

Accept that the first time you do everything, it’s going to be a little weird.

When you are facing a shitty hard thing, or a weirdly tempting event (like a staff party), then plan a sober treat you’ll have AFTER you’re home again, safe and sober. Don’t skip this step. Wolfie likes to come in with “where’s my reward” after we do something hard. So you want to remember to have these treats pre-planned.

Be pretty darn proud of yourself.

You have to celebrate your successes. No one is coming in to do this for you. It’s you. It’s up to you.

Walk out of your office, cross the street, have a cry, get a take-out coffee and a pastry, call it a sober treat, email me that you’re doing OK, and then go back to work. Even if you remove yourself ‘briefly’ from whatever situation is making you feel crazy, you can give yourself some time to settle and feel better.

Find tools that work and keep using them. Don’t drift from your sober supports. You know how people stop taking their blood pressure medication as soon as they feel better? Whatever you’re doing is working, so keep doing it.

Know that Wolfie wants to get us alone in our head, where he can say: “Drinking seems like a good idea. You can probably have one.” Resist this kind of wolfie-solo-nonsense-manipulation by reaching out, telling on your inner addict. Wolfie is a bully and hates it when we share.

What you’re doing is for YOU. Your partner is on their own road. You can do what’s best for you.

#sober #alcohol #alcoholism #alcohol use disorder #recovery #healing #growth #self care #self improvement #motivation

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mnchysmanuscripts · 4 years

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Twenty Twenty

It’s that time of year again, waves of resolutions are washing across my timeline and a sense of self-improvement is in the air. If you think for a second I’m going to miss out on an opportunity for easy compliments and encouragement, you clearly don’t know me that well. But, I’m not a huge fan of New Year’s resolutions. Creating pass/fail goals over long stretches of time that necessitate radical changes to your lifestyle without accompanying radical changes to your lifestyle never seem to work out. I am a huge fan of yearly themes, however. In fact, I had one for 2019.

Last year was the Year of More. I knew that once I started college I wouldn’t have nearly as much temporal freedom as I once had to waste away and accomplish nothing of value, and so I resolved to branch out and expand my both literal and figurative palate as much as possible before school started. It’s hard to state exactly how successful the year was without concrete data, but I was able to accomplish a few of my goals. I picked up new skills that I use still routinely, I massively expanded my pool of artistic inspiration and intellectual stimuli, I tried a bunch of weird/scary foods, traveled to far off places without my mommy, and moved to a new city across the country. All of these are great victories, but the actual moment to moment of the year was pretty much how the moment to moment of my life had been before it. One of the main goals of the Year of the More was to finish creative projects I had always wanted to but never found the time or place for. That, obviously, didn’t pan out. As it turns out, you can’t do more things just by saying you’ll do more things. Productivity doesn’t really work like that.

Your brain loves crossing out items in a to-do list. There’s no greater feeling in the world than accomplishing your goals and seeing men cower at the sight. But, doing things is hard. It requires time and effort, both of which are limited resources. Not to mention, while your brain loves a completed project, it hates actually performing the actions necessary to complete them. If it’s a matter of life or death, your brain can compel you to do almost anything, but it will continuously try to weasel out of every other scenario until it reaches that point. Besides, your deadline isn’t that urgent. Maybe it won’t be a big deal if you don’t get started right away. You’ve been so good lately too, you deserve a break. You can always get it done tomorrow. It’s here, when your brain is confronted with ambiguity of necessity and genuinely plausible excuses, that it becomes all too easy to become distracted and procrastinate. The problem is multiplied when you have multiple projects you want to work on, because even the act of deciding what project to work on can trigger you to hesitate and become distracted. When you’re distracted, you’re not doing work and you aren’t really having fun either. It’s hard to not feel guilty booting up that video game when you know you should be working, but it’s equally as hard to pry yourself away from it once you start playing. You’re stuck in the middle, all because there was no clear decision to be made. In your hesitation, your brain defaulted to the path of least resistance and you’re paying for it. This sort of thing would happen to me nearly every day of my life. And it wasn’t just my laziness, there’s something else at play here too.

Across the nation, our best and brightest are being round up and employed at a handful of mega-corporations with a singular purpose: to find cool, new ways to sell things to you. This is not a conspiracy, this is not science fiction, this was cutting edge ten years ago and now it’s just taken for granted by everyone who thinks about it for more than a second. Your favorite social media is not a neutral platform that you come to socialize and consume content on. It is a business, and as a business it has the sole purpose of making money, and the way these business makes money is by selling ad space and by selling your data to advertisers. The longer you look and the more you refresh, the more advertisements you’ll see and the more data you’ll leave behind. All the while, that social media platform is making money. Many people I know, perhaps even you reading this sentence right now, get the vast majority of their social interaction and consume the vast majority of their media through these systems which have been designed with the sole purpose of maximizing the amount of time spent looking at advertisements. To accomplish this, social media platforms (and by extension the promoted user generated content on said platforms) intentionally make their websites as addicting as possible. They develop algorithms to show you the posts that will keep you the most engaged, for better or for worse, because they need to keep your attention for as long as possible. It doesn’t matter if you have AdBlock and aren’t literally seeing advertisements, the systems these websites are built on still affect you and are still extremely dangerous. We have become addicted to refreshing the page in the hopes that we will get to see and consume more and more content like pigs at a trough, all for the benefit of the pasty nerds and rich people. Just to be clear, I’m not above this. You aren’t stupid for closing that tab just to reopen it moments later. Like I said, our best and brightest are intentionally designing these systems for their job. They are preying on the mind’s easily exploitable ability to become distracted and using it for possibly the most evil goal fucking imaginable. Facebook broke your brain to spam you with pop-up ads.

And so, as a result of being a scatterbrained creative with too much time on my hands and a stable internet connection, I have the worst of both worlds. I’m pushed by my lack of severe lack of self-discipline and easily distractible set of hobbies, and pulled by algorithms designed by a team of the nation’s top scientists to be as addicting and time-consuming as possible, into becoming a strange being consisting only of wasted time and untapped potential.

But no more, I say. It’s time I take matters into my own hands. These distractions are like the brambles of a jungle-- chaotic and ever-growing. I must cleave through them with my machete and create the sort of life I want to live in. It’ll be a life without distractions, without addictions. It’ll be a life of intentionality, of clarity. I will conquer this jungle.

2020 is the Year of Conquest. I’m taking back my life and making sure I live as intentional of a life as I possibly can. What’s so painful about distractions is how they can eat away an afternoon or an entire day you promised yourself you would spend working. I’m not going to never play a video game ever again, quite the opposite. I’m simply going to clearly define times where I will work and times I will play, there can’t be anymore ambiguity. When I’m working, I’m working. When I’m playing, I’m playing. And, of course, I will try as hard as I can to wrestle with my addiction to social media. I’m not leaving the internet, obviously. I will still use social media but, again, in an intentional manner. I will not allow my tools to seduce me. My phone does not get to beckon me to it with notifications and interrupt my work. I will use it when and only when I choose to.

All this might sound a bit vague, but that’s how themes work best. The Year of Conquest is simply the prompt, the starting point for a whole roster of specific resolutions. I fully intend to get more specific and walkthrough my actual plans/goals for the year, but if I just start listing them all right now then I’ll get a dopamine rush that’ll satiate my self-improvement appetite and I’ll end up not actually doing them. In general though, I’m going to use a combination of incentivizes, disincentivizes, and structural lifestyle changes to try and lead a more intentional life. These carrots, sticks, and tracks definitely can and will be explained in a future post but again that’s a story for another time. Probably tomorrow, it’s my bedtime.

(Send me asks and give me some feedback. It makes me happy to know people are actually reading.)

#munchuscript

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aerinmelina · 4 years

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Growing up, I used to spend summers with my mom’s parents. They lived in a lakeside community which was also near an ocean, and I enjoyed fishing and swimming and boating and crabbing and such as a teenager.

Anyway. During the summer between my 6th and 7th grade years, my parents bought a house and decided to surprise me by having it all ready by the time I came home from my grandparents’ house at the end of the season. I remember walking into the house - I’d been there before, because it had previously been owned by friends of ours - and my mom said we were house-sitting when I asked her why we were here when our friends weren’t. She then led me from room to room and kept asking questions like, “Why do you think they put this in here?” and “Why do you think they painted this room pink?”

I wasn’t stupid. I know that Something Was Up. I just never imagined that my parents would have bought a house at all, let alone this one.

“Maybe they’re expecting a daughter?” I said. It wasn’t a baseless assumption; the couple who had owned the house previously were young and the wife had been pregnant.

“No, it’s because this is your room now!”

My thoughts at the time?

Pink. Oh my gosh. It’s pink. Whyyyyyyy.

Hang on. Is my mom letting me move in with this family? I mean. I’ll miss my dad and brother. But like. Why this family? I like them fine, but I don’t want to live with them.

(^^That is literally how far fetched I believed the idea of my parents owning a house was. They were terrible with money. The worst. And houses cost money. Lots of it.)

Anyway. My mom was offended that I was offended because my room was bright pink when, at the time, I was going through this tomboy phase and liked all things blue and black and she knew that and she painted my room anyway in her attempt to “girlify” me, which was not lost on me at all, and which I was equally annoyed with.

I digress. I had a new, pink bedroom in a new-to-us house. With a back yard. Which wasn’t next to a metal factory, so that meant my brother and I could actually play outside without like. Worrying about getting metal shavings imbedded in our feet. (Story for another day.)

Along with this move came a switch in middle schools. My parents fought hard to keep my brother in his elementary school, but they didn’t even ask to try and keep me in my middle school. I was 12. I would have to make brand new friends. I was pretty shy. I was not happy about this. At all.

I remember going to my new school to fill out enrollment forms and such. The school was literally 3 minutes away from our new house, just up the street; I would be walking to and from school every day, something which I was actually kind of looking forward to. If I could look forward to anything. I hated this. I didn’t ask to move. Our apartment had been just fine.

Anyway. Sitting in the main office at the new school, I was given a list of elective classes and was told to number them in order of my all-star favorite to please-don’t-put-me-in-this-class least favorite. The office staff told me that because I was enrolling so late, a lot of the classes had already filled up, but they would do their best to put me in the classes I wanted to take along with the standard courses that every student would be taking. I looked at the list. Choir :), Accelerated P.E. (wow that sounded like a nightmare), Art :), Metal Shop!!, Wood Shop!!, Drama (nah), Speech (Super Nope!!!), and a few others which I’ve forgotten by now.

My list went something like this:

Choir

Wood Shop

Art

Metal Shop

Accelerated P.E.

Drama

Speech

Speech was at the absolute bottom of my list. The office staff told me that the teacher for Drama and Speech was amazing, talked him up, and asked me why I didn’t want to take that class. I said I was shy and had a fear of public speaking. Duh. They kind of grimaced and looked at each other, then said, “We’ll do our best,” and sent my mom and I on our way back home.

I wasn’t surprised when I saw Speech on my class list a week or so later. I wouldn’t have it until second semester, thankfully, but I was already dreading it.

Seventh grade at this new school wound up being a lot of fun, if I’m being perfectly honest. I hated being the new kid at first, but made friends with another new kid who was way more outgoing than I was, and together we eventually made friends with more people. I have lots of stories to share there, but today I wanted to talk about Speech Class.

My speech teacher was, well… let’s call him Mr. Jones. He was outgoing, had clear expectations, was pretty mellow, and honestly? He was charismatic and the entire student body loved him.

I was a nervous wreck when I stepped into his classroom for the first time (and for most of the following times thereafter as well). For whatever reason, I had no problems singing solos in front of the whole school (and I did so twice that year), but the idea of public speaking was petrifying. And I even had lots of opportunities to practice that through both my church and school.

(I know I’m not alone in this sentiment.)

One of the first things Mr. Jones told us was that by the end of the semester, we would be able to deliver speeches and oral reports without using “filler words” such as “like”, “um”, and “er.” He also told us that our vocabulary would expand considerably, thanks to weekly tests he would be giving us (noooo). And we would be delivering speeches to one another on a weekly basis as well, on a variety of different subjects, and those speeches would increase in length as the semester drew on. All students were to compliment each presenting student on something they did well with each speech they gave, and critique would be solely left to Mr. Jones to provide. (Which was good, because let’s face it, 7th grade kids can be positively evil to each other.) Mr. Jones made it clear that we were not to judge or criticize anyone else’s speeches, and told us that he trusted us to keep each other’s speeches confidential. He explained that he wanted his classroom to be a safe place for us to talk about whatever we wanted; things we enjoyed, books we loved, problems we had, negative life experiences, positive life experiences, etc.

These were all very important factors which, honestly, influenced and changed my life for the better. I’ll get into that in a bit.

Mr. Jones’ class was tough. And I was terrified. I tried to drop his class, but was assured by the office that all of the other half-year elective classes were full; I didn’t have any other options. So I bit the bullet and decided to try my best. I would call no more attention to myself than I absolutely had to, I would try to not fail the vocabulary tests, and I would listen to others and provide sincere compliments. I would also - gulp - do my best at giving public speaking a shot.

I don’t exactly remember the method which Mr. Jones used in order to get us to stop using “filler words” in our speeches, but it worked. I don’t remember specific vocabulary words I was forced to memorize, but he was right; my understanding of the English language, and the number of words in my arsenal, greatly expanded. And I learned several important lessons:

Courage doesn’t mean that there’s an absence of fear. It means that you follow through with what you know is right, regardless of however much fear you are feeling.

Sometimes we are given tasks which we feel are way above our ability to manage. These are times when we must challenge ourselves to rise to the occasion.

(Going along with #2) You never know what you are capable of until you are put to the test. You’d be surprised at what you can personally accomplish.

Other people have different experiences than you; you can choose to listen and learn from their experiences, and you can 100000% do so without being a jerkface to them, too.

Teenagers are capable of respecting the people around them, are capable of empathy, and are capable of keeping confidentiality/maintaining bonds of trust. These are powers which teenagers do possess, and powers which they absolutely can control, utilize, and choose to exercise. (I was deeply impressed by my fellow classmates.)

One semester of a speech class didn’t cure my fear of public speaking. Not at all. But it did give me valid tools which I still use to this day. It gave me a lot of confidence in my capabilities to gather my thoughts on a piece of paper, organize them into a cohesive flow, and then be able to read those thoughts aloud without stumbling all over them. Mr. Jones laid the foundation for me to begin to think critically. To really consider my words before I write or say them. He drilled into my brain that I had a voice, and that it was a voice worth sharing and being listened to. Those are lessons I will never forget. And, because of Mr. Jones and everything I learned from him, I entered a career field which ultimately led to me speaking in public on a regular basis. I am a leader in my office. I provide training for our new and existing employees. I am aiming to become a manager within the next couple of years.

I’m still nervous when it comes to public speaking (especially during those times when I am speaking in a courtroom). I will probably always be nervous about it. I have been extremely close to vomiting from nerves in the past. But you know what? I’ve spoken before, I’ve survived, I’ve been successful at it, and I’ll do it again in the future. My confidence really started to blossom with my 7th grade speech class, where I received tons of practice, and that practice was further compounded by other speaking opportunities at school and church as well.

Mr. Jones was an excellent human being. He was well-loved for a million reasons. He believed in us, and we didn’t want to prove him wrong.

I believe in you, too. I say this, because I know that a lot of you need to hear it. I’m being sincere. I believe in you. You can do hard things. You can make it through.

#aerinm tells stories #my life #i wanted to share these thoughts in the hopes that they could help you #you are capable of more than you think you are #and you can be courageous #courage #bravery #i believe in you

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scottxlogan · 4 years

Note

for the ask game: 50, 52,53

Thanks for asking! These are fun to answer :)

50. Weirdest story idea you’ve ever had.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I have like the strangest, most vivid dreams all the time that I feel can translate to these really great story ideas. I put a bunch of them in a file for a list of potential stories down the road lol. As for something I’ve actually written that is the weirdest story idea I’ve ever had someone asked for a fic that was a body swap with Scott and Logan. Admittedly the idea has been done in many platforms before with different characters, but I’ve never tackled it. To me that was probably the weirdest story idea I’ve ever had in dealing with the intricacies of how each character would respond to that situation and what they would do being trapped in the other’s body in a situation where it was just the two of them together sorting it out. To me that was probably the weirdest story idea not because the idea in itself was weird, but that the execution was a challenge.

52. How did writing change you?

Excellent question! By nature I’ve always been a very introverted person, so in being able to use the platform of writing it has given me a voice and a means of self-expression that has always kind of been there, but I might not have been bold enough to put out there in a different platform. When I was in high school my best friend and I had a terrible fallout with one another during the summer that caused me to close myself off a bit. At the time I pulled out an old typewriter that belonged to my parents (which says something in itself) and I sat there the entire summer writing a story from start to finish that was about 100 pages. At the time it felt like such an accomplishment (even though the story was terrible lol) and it helped me to get through a really dark period because it gave my mind something to do beyond sit and agonize about what was bothering me. It was a bit of a turning point because in writing it offered up a certain sense of catharsis through the years. Perhaps this leads more so into the next question, but I would say how writing changed me is that it allowed me to open up my mind, to expand my horizons and not only expand my knowledge base, but to learn to evolve past the standards that society might have upon a person. It forced me to step outside of myself and learn new things, to research places and situations that maybe I might not have thought about before I decided to take the leap. Writing helped me grow as a person and as an artist and I think that’s how it changed me because it gave me a means of really seeking out a deeper sense of understanding and meaning in the world around me. Writing opened so many doors that I never knew were closed before and now, well it changed me in the sense that I’m no longer afraid to open those doors. It gave me a voice and a passion that I always knew was inside of me waiting to come out :)

53. What does writing mean to you? I might have already answered that one a bit lol, but writing to me is really important to who I am as a person. My parents have always said I’m someone who has it ‘difficult’ because I’m equally analytical and creative and the path I’ve taken in my life has played a tug of war in both directions. In writing I’ve been able to open the door to new worlds and gain an understanding of others. The characters (both original and established) I write really resonate in my brain and have become a big part of my world. I was always curious about human nature and psychology and it has given me an opportunity to delve into that along with self-expression along the way. Writing is essential to me like eating or breathing. Sometimes I tend to push it aside and ignore it when there are other things that I’m passionate about working on, but ultimately it is the one place where I feel like I find the most artistic freedom. I know there’s always room to grow in it, but when I’m writing something that I’m really passionate about or feel really inspired by it gives me this elated feeling of accomplishment. It is almost as if the characters take on a life of their own and I’m merely a tool to voice their personalities on the page. They allow me to tell their story and share it with the world. Maybe that sounds a little crazy, but it is that feeling that really inspires me to keep writing. In short writing is like the ultimate treat to me where I allow myself to let go and give in to my creative nature.--------

Wow, yeah...so that was probably more than you were asking for in those answers, but thanks again for asking them. It is good to remind myself what it is that I love about writing, so thank you :)

#writerask #random #slightly ot #writing #writing challenges #crow-sizna #askgame

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is6621 · 4 years

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Yes, This Hairdryer is a Status Symbol - By Madison Wood

After taking a brief inventory of my hairstyling hot tools, I have realized that I own two curling irons, a curling wand, a flatiron, an “air spin brush” (don’t ask, it was on sale), and a hairdryer. SIX hot tools. Like many women, I feel as though as soon as I get really good at using one of these tools, there’s something new and fancy that promises to make my hair perfect (spoiler alert, it never does). And usually, the tool is within a price range that makes the semi-impulse purchase justifiable (think $150 or less).

But this time is different. I’m putting my foot down. I refuse to buy this. Not because I don’t want it (trust me, I REALLY REALLY do), but because it costs $399! Take a look at it…. Absorb it and all it’s crazy, robotic, futuristic glory. What is this witchcraft? But wait, if you really want to be extra, there is a version in 23.75kg gold that costs $449!

Brought to you by Dyson (yes, the vacuum cleaner company), comes the most ludicrously expensive hot tool imaginable, the Dyson Supersonic Hair Dryer. This tool is quiet, powerful, and engineered to complement all different hair types. There are a lot of articles available describing the mechanics and innovation of the motor… but I would prefer to keep that magic a mystery.

And just went I didn’t think it could be more outrageously pricey (and desirable), Dyson released an expanded hair styling product, the “Dyson Airwrap™” and it collectively broke my brain and the internet.

The Airwrap™ package contains a variety of attachments that straighten, curl, and/or smooth, in addition to drying your hair. Priced even higher than the original Dyson Hair Dryer, the Dyson Airwrap™ costs $549. In spite of that insane price point, within 24 hours of being released, the Dyson Airwrap™ was sold out EVERYWHERE.

How Did Dyson Hair Products Become SO Famous?

1. Really, really good targeted ads

This thing is following me. No matter where I go, no matter the device, browser, platform, I see this monstrosity. Yes, I understand how targeted digital marketing works, and of course, I clear my cookies and browsing data…. but I continue to be haunted by the Dyson Supersonic Hairdryer or Dyson Airwrap™. Dyson is investing A LOT of money in digital advertising, and I can’t lie, it might be working. Let’s be clear, after researching Dyson this blog post, I’ll never ever escape theses ads.

2. Sponsored Articles

Dyson has been sponsoring hair styling articles in popular online publications and blogs such as Refinery29, Hello Giggles, Elle, and InStyle. In these articles, beauty writers and editors offer insights on how to style a variety of hair types. A few article titles include:

This Beauty-Editor-Approved Hair Tool Might Just Change How You Style Your Hair (Refinery29)

If You Have Curls, You'll Love This New Dyson Supersonic Attachment (Refinery29)

How I get my hair to look just like Blake Lively’s (Hello Giggles, via Yahoo)

The Best Hair Dryers to Protect and Volumize Fine Hair (InStyle)

Sometimes it is not immediately apparent that the articles are sponsored or endorsed by specific brands or products, and the publication receives a cut of proceeds resulting from the purchase of products from their site. For example, CNET named the Dyson Airwrap™ one of the 8 best beauty gifts for 2019. It’s important to keep this in mind as we enter the holiday season and every eCommerce site posts its “best gifts” lists (i.e. “Shape Beauty Awards 2019: Best Hair Products” where the Dyson Airwrap™ also appears)… these items do not usually end up on the list by happenstance. Some sites even use sweepstakes, contests, and giveaways as an opportunity to amplify sponsored products and brands. Recently Elle magazine received thousands of contest entries in their recent Dyson Airwrap™ giveaway. All of these impressions come at a cost, and usually, it is not cheap.

I am not saying that there are not honest reviews of the products out there. Often the product is provided to beauty editors to try (for free) in hopes that the trial will result in an appearance in the publication. While the publication still needs to disclose the gift (via FTC standards), their reviews can still be completely trustworthy. An article on The Daily Beast is titled “The Dyson Supersonic Hair Dryer Really Is As Impressive As It Claims” (link below in sources). Another article on Vice Media draws in readers with the sassy title “The Dyson Hair Dryer Is Totally Worth It, Unless Your Time Is Worth Nothing”. Each of these product reviews praise the Dyson Hair Tool Suite, and seem to be legitimate!

3. Celebs and Influencers

Celebrity and social media influencers alike have become major advocates for the Dyson hair styling suite of products. Of course, we can assume that many of these are sponsored endorsements, but the number of impressions collected through these posts has propelled the Dyson products into the “Must Have” stratosphere as a status symbol of the stars. Jennifer Aniston’s hairstylist styled her hair with the Dyson Supersonic hairdryer for her recent Apple TV+ premiere for “The Morning Show”, a highly publicized event. Aniston’s hairstyle was covered by multiple publications and her hairstylist was very vocal about the Dyson tools in her arsenal.

The celebrity hairstylist, Jen Atkin, (stylist to the Kardashians and has several million Instagram followers) claims that the Dyson Hair Dryer is a “Game Changer”. Atkin is outspoken about her partnership with Dyson and continues to advocate for the product in a variety of high profile ways. (Pictured below with Dyson founder and chief engineer Sir James Dyson)

In her November 2019 spread in Vogue, Tracee Ellis Ross demonstrated how she styles her signature natural curls with the Dyson Hairdryer.

4. Product Placement

The British reality TV show, Love Island, became a worldwide sensation in the past couple of years due to the show being made available for streaming on Hulu. In the first several seasons, contestants used a variety of styling tools to get ready each day; in more recent seasons (especially this past season), contestants each have a Dyson Supersonic hairdryer, which is prominently displayed in several shots each episode. There are 54 episodes per season of Love Island, so if the Dyson dryer was featured a minimum of twice per episode, it will have appeared well over 100 times. Considering Love Island viewership was over 3.3 million for the UK premiere alone… that is a LOT of impressions for the Dyson Hair Styling Suite. [Yes, she’s using a $399 hair dryer to blow dry her eyelashes… ]

In conclusion, I will probably never be able to stomach the price point for either the Dyson Supersonic Hair Dryer or Airwrap™; however, through a variety of different approaches, Dyson has made their hair tool styling suite into a highly coveted status symbol worldwide.

SOURCES:

https://www.shape.com/lifestyle/beauty-style/jennifer-aniston-natural-waves

https://people.com/style/jennifer-aniston-wears-natural-hair-texture-red-carpet/

https://www.cnet.com/news/best-beauty-gifts/

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/wedding-hair-routine-tips

https://www.refinery29.com/en-ca/dyson-supersonic-new-attachments-curls

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/hair-look-just-blake-lively-002846868.html

https://www.instyle.com/hair/hair-products-tools/best-hair-dryer-for-fine-hair

https://www.vogue.com/article/tracee-ellis-ross-beauty-secrets-curly-hair-guide-foundation-free-skin-red-lip-twiggy-lashes

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-dyson-supersonic-hair-dryer-really-is-as-impressive-as-it-claims

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kz4eda/the-dyson-hair-dryer-is-totally-worth-it-unless-your-time-is-worth-nothing

https://www.shape.com/lifestyle/beauty-style/beauty-awards-2019-best-hair-products

https://www.elle.com.au/beauty/dyson-competition-21117

https://observer.com/2016/09/kardashian-hair-guru-jen-atkin-calls-this-400-blowdryer-a-game-changer/

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keepyourpantsongohan · 5 years

Text

Take It As Read

That their feelings might have shifted from simple friendship into something deeper through missions and work and the Great War wasn’t all that strange. (Sakura Hiden Ch. 1) | Discord Secret Santa for @ranembi | AO3 |

“Sakura,” says Ino, not bothering to hide the concern in her tone. “Mind explaining to me what you’re doing again?”

“Fūinjutsu,” announces Sakura, as though it’s obvious.

“Fūinjutsu,” Ino repeats dubiously. She tilts her head as far as she can so she can make some attempt to meet Sakura’s eyes. “And you need to be upside down for this seal to work?”

Sakura does what probably constitutes a shrug by her standards, but from Ino’s vantage point looks more like some strange form of push-up. “That’s what the textbook says,” she replies easily.

Scattered objects throughout the surrounding field really should have given all the clues Ino needed. There’s a notebook, like the ones Sakura carries when she’s researching a new concept and needs to write ideas down for later examination. Sakura’s headband lays on the ground, probably taken off when she’d discovered how uncomfortable it was to have metal pressing into her head while doing a headstand. There’s a book, and a bag which has loose papers spilling out. There even seems to be an empty bento box, indicating just how long Sakura has been at this activity so far.

Ino stares heavenward, and then sits down on the grass in front of Sakura. Her knees are going to stained green by the end of this, she’s sure. “Need a spotter?” she asks, with half a smile.

While she has no doubt that Sakura could hold herself in this position for a full day if she needed to, Ino would be lying if she said she hadn’t come to the training field looking for Sakura’s company. And by now she’s learned that even Sakura’s weird ideas are usually good ones. A good mind, her father would probably say, if he were here. And she’s inclined to agree.

“Actually, I could use your help with the next few directions,” Sakura says, lifting one hand from the ground to point behind her. “Could you read from that book?”

Ino picks up a large, weathered, brown tome that looks as if it’s been burned in several places, and suffered water damage in others. She hefts it up into her grasp and runs her hand along one of the pages. “Sakura, this thing is like a hundred years old. And half the page is gone. How can this help you learn about sealing?”

Sakura’s face lights up. “It came from Tsunade-shishō’s grandmother, Uzumaki Mito,” she explains. “She was the forerunner to storing chakra in our foreheads! Her seals have lessons I can’t even begin to comprehend.”

It’s easy to forget how much her friend enjoys research, not just the practical applications, but the mechanical breakdown of chakra that none of their other classmates had ever taken such an interest in. Though Ino loves being able to heal people, theory had been the most boring part of their lessons. But Sakura had taken to it like a moth to a flame. Same old Sakura, she muses, sighing.

“These instructions are probably outdated,” Ino says first, and Sakura swats at her knee. “But I think the section after, ‘Head to the earth,’ says something like… ‘Your knees at your limit?’ How does that work? This doesn’t even involve any hand signs!”

Sakura tucks her knees in closer to her chest, still, to Ino’s dismay, upside down. “She probably means the Gate of Limit, in the abdomen,” Sakura says, her voice now partly muffled by her knees.

Ino lays down on the grass, perpendicular to her friend’s wayward limbs, so she once again has a better chance of looking at Sakura’s face. “Are you trying to release your inner gates?” she asks. The question is asked lightly, but their shared gaze is serious.

Sakura’s brows draw together. “I’m not interested in destroying my chakra pathways,” she declares firmly, lifting her face a bit. Ino’s shoulders sag in relief. “But the Gates are about how chakra flows, right? So I think this is about ensuring that my chakra is in the right position to flow as quickly as possible.”

In principle, it’s not so different from the kata they learned at the academy. But that had been focused on stamina, and it’s hard to imagine that the best flow of chakra for any body part is positioning oneself as if they are performing in a circus.

“Chakra flows best through gymnastics?” Ino asks.

“It flows through dedication and control,” says Sakura proudly. It would look a lot more dignified if it weren’t for her position. She crosses her eyes at her companion. “Now quit distracting me and read.”

Ino snorts. “You like it when I distract you,” she says. She picks the book up anyway.

Sakura’s cheeks are pinker when she looks at her next, but Ino’s not sure how much of it is teasing and how much of it is prolonged excess blood flow to the head. “It says something about… asking questions. That’s what it looks like to me at least. There’s a lot missing from this section.”

Frowning, Sakura asks, “Can you show me?”

Ino holds the book up to her friend’s face, adjusted for her angle. “See?”

Sakura hums to herself. Ino watches her think for a moment. “That might be the symbol for healing,” she muses. “Which would mean the brain, the Gate of Healing.”

A giggle escapes Ino reluctantly. “How are you going to fit your brain into these acrobatics, Billboard Brow?”

The nickname has its intended effect. A light sparks in Sakura’s eyes, visible even from their awkward positions. “The same way I do everything important, Ino-pig,” Sakura teases. “With a little teamwork.”

Ino leans her head back. “Lucky for you, teamwork is my specialty. What do you need?”

“Hold my face,” Sakura orders.

Skeptical as she is, Ino lets the book fall open on her stomach so she can lean both hands up to cup Sakura’s cheeks. Although Sakura’s warm face is a welcome feeling beneath her hands, she murmurs, “And this isn’t distracting?”

Sakura bares her teeth at Ino’s palm playfully, halfway between a smile and a good-humoured warning. “You’re holding the wrong part. It’s my temple where the tenketsu point is located, and you know it.”

“Sorry,” Ino says, not the least bit sincere. She shifts her hands upwards, still grazing the tops of her cheekbones, but with her thumbs resting at Sakura’s temples. “Better?”

Sakura clears her throat, and offers a low, “Yes,” which is quickly followed by a more intent, “I do still need you to read the next instruction.”

The section following had been less damaged, so she doesn’t need to give the book more than a passing glance to deliver the newest ancient instruction. “It says, ‘Your lotus in line.’ You know, this reads more like a cipher than a textbook. Are all of Mito-sama’s notes like puzzles?”

Sakura’s expression becomes solemn. “People feared fūinjutsu a lot in those days, according to Tsunade-shishō. If it were all laid out clearly, then it’d be easy for someone to misuse it.” Ino’s eyes must give away something of her alarm, because Sakura adds, “This book may be about medical sealing, but that doesn’t mean people wouldn’t want to steal them anyway.”

Ino can’t completely call herself a stranger to that notion. Given their powers over the mind, whenever Konoha has wanted something that didn’t belong to them, her people were often the ones sent out to retrieve it. Still, by some miracle, or more likely, by their teacher’s iron will, their medical units have come out of it all surprisingly unscathed. So much so that they’ve been able to expand at a higher rate than any other village, in large part thanks to her and Sakura’s efforts. It’s jarring to hear of a time where they might not have been so lucky.

“Medical seals, huh,” Ino contemplates aloud. It’s certainly outside the boundaries of the normal medical ninja studies. “What is this seal even supposed to do?”

“If I’m reading it right, it should be able to hold someone in stasis, so a single seal can prevent someone’s physical condition from changing. If everything works out, then this could become a crucial tool in making sure no shinobi dies en route to medical treatment.”

Ino lets out a soft, impressed breath. There’s a reason Kakashi-sensei gives her so much leeway in running the new medical programs. “And if you’re reading it wrong?”

“Then it’s a very bad homemade cure for a cold,” says Sakura, with a bit of amusement in her voice. “The mystery is part of the fun, I guess. ‘Lotus in line?’”

“Yes. If these steps are referring to chakra pathways, then she must be talking about the spine, right?”

Sakura leans her face into Ino’s palm. “Now you’re catching on,” she says cheerfully. “It’s probably about the alignment of my body. I have to straighten my back.”

Shifting forward while still keeping her hands on the ground beside her head proves to be tricky, and when Sakura pitches forward a little too far, Ino reaches out a steadying hand to her midriff, resting along her side to offer support. This time, she isn’t sure if the warmth is Sakura or herself. “How aren’t you dizzy by now?”

Sheepishly, Sakura admits, “I am, a little. I’d been doing this for a while before you got here.” She lifts one hand again to join Ino’s, slowly but steadily guiding her fingers back alongside their counterparts.

Though she doesn’t rebel against the change, Ino does offer her thoughts. “Somehow I can’t see the Shodai Hokage’s wife doing this.”

With a chuckle, Sakura nods, the movement made odder by her stance. “It would make for a strange-looking statue.”

“Especially if she got the Hokage to do my part.” They share a moment of pause at that, suddenly reminded that they have both seen their village’s first leader in person, and giggle. Narrowing her eyes a little, Ino adds, “Although he could probably provide some kind of back support to prevent strain.”

“I get exactly the kind of support I need.” A teeter follows which belies her claim, Ino wonders if Sakura might be more woozy than she’s letting on. Ino opens her mouth to protest, but Sakura interjects before she has the opportunity to voice the admonishment. “Next step, please.”

Pulling up her own knees, Ino gives the text the exasperated look that her company won’t allow. They’re at the part of the page which has most suffered from burns, and it is harder to make things out clearly. She says as much, and then offers, “I think it might be saying to close your eyes. From what I can make out, the only way the strokes on this page makes sense is if they’re referring to, ‘Light unseen.’”

Sakura abides by the request, letting her eyes fall shut. “That instruction’s pretty simple. Are you sure that’s all it says?”

“Oh, and one more thing.” Ino’s eyes flicker away. With a split second look at the book she says, “It says you study too hard, and you should take a break from being a hero to spend time with the people who love you.” She presses her thumbs lightly into Sakura’s temples.

Sakura opens one eye. “We spent a whole day shopping together last week!”

They had. Sakura had shown up at her doorstep in the morning, just as Ino showed up to this field, enthusiastic words about antlers and herbs flying out of her mouth. Through their missions, Ino has discovered her own preference for healing lies more with the mind than the body, but she’d been more than happy to spend the day trotting between stalls and shops, if only to share in the earnest ambition to learn.

Ino’s positive that Sakura is the only person in the world who can describe the psychoactive effects of plants in a way that keeps her attention.

“This cactus would be perfect for a case study on hallucinogenic plants,” Sakura had said, when they’d stopped by the Yamanaka flower shop. “Do you know what this means?”

“No, but I do know what a cactus means in the language of flowers,” she’d joked, smiling, only to receive a pointed elbow at her side. But she’d listened afterwards, to Sakura’s research methods, and about all the shinobi she could help. That we could help together, Ino had thought, supposing she could spend a hundred days like this, in her mother’s flower shop and in the market with her best friend, a woman who wants to save the world twice over.

A fondness wells up in her at the thought, she pushes it down, electing to squish Sakura’s face beneath her fingers.

“Collecting supplies for medicine doesn’t count,” Ino counters. She puts on her best stern expression, though it’s hard to maintain it through the affection. “You’re Konoha’s youngest lead medic. You should know how important it is to rest.”

“You might be right,” concedes Sakura, through the web of Ino’s fingers, “but we always end up talking more than resting.”

A fair point, if Ino were trying to play fair. But she isn’t, so she grins. “It’s not my fault I’m so interesting.”

Sakura closes her second eye. It appears she isn’t playing fair either, because she smiles into Ino’s hands and says, “If I make enough progress out here, I’ll show you interesting.”

These kinds of words are commonplace between them now. The types of phrases that had once been the very reason they’d grown apart, directed elsewhere. Always the suggestion of more, in a way that makes Ino’s head as dizzy as Sakura’s is. Like Sakura, Ino thinks there might be some kind of breakthrough just waiting to happen, but each is content to share in quick bursts of heat that mark the road of anticipation.

It’s Ino’s turn to flush. She covers it up with a sigh, and offers what she knows. “Lead with your heart.”

Sakura looks bemused, but responds with endearing sincerity, “I am.”

Tilting her chin towards the book, she clarifies, “No, I mean, that’s what it says. ‘Lead with your heart.’”

“That’s… vague.”

Every instruction is vague, by Ino’s estimation. It’s sort of the whole point. While she’s spent enough time around interrogation and subterfuge to understand the necessity for encrypting information, it’s not a very practical way to learn new jutsu. “No kidding. You don’t think it’s a Gate thing, do you? Because no matter what Mito-sama’s texts say, there’s no way you should open the tenketsu point at your heart. You saw what happened to Gai-sensei.”

Shaking her head, Sakura says, “It’s not that kind of jutsu. Maybe it’s like with the brain? You just have to stimulate blood flow to the area.”

Ino arches an eyebrow. “Are you asking me to grab your chest, Sakura?”

Both of Sakura’s eyes fly open. “Ino!”

“It’s a valid question!”

“I’m asking you to put your hand over my heart,” Sakura gripes, face even brighter than her hair. “It’s completely different.”

“I don’t see how it’s that different,” Ino mutters, but she does as she’s been told, and moves one of her hands from Sakura’s face to precisely where she knows Sakura’s heart will be. She can feel its swift pace, probably from either exertion or embarrassment. “So, is it working?”

“I’m not sure. Does my chakra feel any different to you?” Eyes closed again, Sakura gathers her chakra in her fingers, and lifts one hand to place it over Ino’s again. This time, she doesn’t move it away, letting the green light of her jutsu envelop them both.

Ino tries to sense if there’s something new about the energy she knows almost as well as her own, but all she can focus on is the soft weight of Sakura’s hand, pressing her own to her heart. For once, she finds herself a little short of words, so she lays there, staring in wonder at her off-kilter, brilliant, ridiculous best friend.

“Ino?”

“Hmm?”

Sakura laughs, still maintaining her jutsu, a pleasant tingle against the back of Ino’s hand. “My chakra? Has it changed?”

Narrowing her focus away from Sakura to simply their overlapping fingers proves difficult, but she’s not a Yamanaka for nothing. “The chakra itself isn’t different,” she observes carefully. But after another moment of contemplation she says, “The rate of discharge is, though. It’s a little faster, and more steady than the crests and troughs of your normal medical ninjutsu.”

The look on Sakura’s face is nothing short of ecstatic as they lock gazes again. “I’ll take it.”

“It might just be your own progress as a shinobi that’s changed it,” Ino reminds her, but can’t help but share in her happiness.

“I know. But it’s one step closer than I was yesterday.” Sakura lets her body drop, bracketing Ino with her legs. “That’s enough for today,” she says, a smile overtaking her face.

“I’ve never known you to give up anything so easily,” Ino teases. With Sakura hovering above her like that, her hair tickles Ino’s face, so she reaches out and tucks a few strands behind her ear. Ino thinks for one long moment about leaning upward and closing the gap between them, but can’t bring herself to part with seeing her content expression.

“I’m not giving up,” she insists, face the colour of cherry blossoms, but eyes no less bright. “I’m following Mito-sama’s advice.”

“Oh? And what is that?”

“I’m letting my heart lead.” Sakura takes Ino’s hand, and pulls her up. In a moment, her bag hangs on one shoulder, while the other bumps into Ino’s as they lock their arms together. “C’mon, you owe me dinner.”

“Awfully ungrateful of you to make your research assistant pay,” says Ino, in tones of mock consternation.

Sakura rolls her eyes and leans her head on Ino’s shoulder. “Then I owe you dinner. We’ll stop at the market to pick up supplies.”

“Eating your cooking might be one of the biggest dangers a kunoichi could face,” Ino says, but she intertwines their fingers and lets Sakura guide her onward anyway, laughing all the while.

#sakura haruno #ino yamanaka #sakuino #inosaku #sloaners secret santa #ranembi #mine #fanfiction #long post #ayesha talks anime #hope you enjoy!!!

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spacetimewithstuartgary · 5 years

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ION BEAMS AND ATOM SMASHERS: SECRETS OF MOON ROCKS On July 20, 1969, as Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder from the “Eagle” lunar landing module, he found himself surrounded by a sea of grey -- an expanse of powdery dust no human had ever seen in person. The iconic print made by his left boot marked but the first step on a long journey of discoveries about the Moon and our own world -- both of which hold secrets that scientists are only beginning to uncover. Fifty years after the Apollo astronauts collected samples of Moon rocks and dust during their forays across the lunar landscape, there are still mysteries to be solved, and one University of Arizona scientist is looking for answers. Jessica Barnes, an incoming assistant professor in the UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, was recently selected by NASA to receive access to preciously unopened Moon rock samples. Under NASA’s Apollo Next Generation Sample Analysis, or ANGSA, program, Barnes will be granted access to Apollo 17 sample 71036, which contains almost four ounces of rock. Several samples from that mission were initially processed under nominal laboratory conditions, protected from air exposure by a nitrogen cabinet at room temperature, and placed into cold storage within one month of return. “When these samples were brought back, the curators had the foresight to say, ‘In this moment, we don’t have all the methods to answer all the questions these samples could help us answer,’ and so they locked some away for future study,” Barnes says. “They realized that future technologies would allow us to do things that would have been impossible at the time, and that people would come up with new questions. It’s really exciting because we’re at that point in time now.” Barnes is on a quest to find out where water came from in the early solar system and how it has evolved over time. Previous research, including some of her own work, suggests that certain space rocks known as carbonaceous chondrites brought water with them when they impacted Earth and Mars, and potentially some of the larger asteroids. It is no coincidence that Bennu, the target asteroid of the UA-led OSIRIS-REx sample return mission, is a carbonaceous chondrite. “To understand where water in the solar system came from, and particularly how it ended up on Earth, Mars, and in the asteroid belt, we have to consider the Moon,” says Barnes, whose current research focuses on tracing water meteorites, including some of Martian origin, and Moon samples collected during Apollo 11, 14, and 17. “Understanding how life on Earth began is intimately tied to the story of how water arrived here. Lunar samples are critical pieces in this puzzle because unlike Earth, where the oldest rocks have largely been erased by plate tectonics, the Moon’s ancient rock record is still intact.” About 4.6 billion years ago, when a swirling nebula of gas and dust began collapsing into a disk that would give rise to our solar system, the rocky planets and the carbonaceous chondrites were developing in different places and at different times, Barnes explains, which poses a problem for the scenario involving early asteroids as harbingers of water. “It was only 10 years ago that water was discovered on the Moon, not only on the surface, but also inside minerals,” Barnes says. “In science, that is a pretty short timescale, and we don’t have it all figured out yet. How much water is there? Did it come from the Earth during the great impact that we think created the Moon, or was it given to the Moon later? Is it distributed uniformly or in patches within the Moon’s mantle?” To find answers to such questions, Barnes, who wasn’t even born when the Apollo astronauts crisscrossed the lunar surface on foot and with their rovers, is using technology that wasn’t invented until the early 2000s. “When you first receive your sample, you don’t know what you are looking at, so you start with a visual analysis,” Tom Zega says, pointing to a simple dissecting microscope, like the ones used in introductory science labs. Zega is an associate professor of planetary sciences, and materials science and engineering, and co-investigator on the ANGSA project. He also is director of the Kuiper Materials Imaging and Characterization Facility at the LPL, a state-of-the-art facility designed with one goal: extract as much information as possible from samples, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial. Studying a piece of Moon rock under an optical microscope is only the first step in a series of analytical techniques UA researchers have at their disposal. At the end is a 12-foot-tall transmission electron microscope, or TEM. Funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA, its serial number is “1” because it is the first of its kind in the world with this exact configuration. Its 200,000-volt electron beam can probe matter down to 78 picometers, scales too small for the human brain to comprehend. “If you want to know what an atom from the birth of our solar system looks like, I can show you,” Zega says. To get a sample to where it gives up that much detail of its origin and history, however, requires a suite of complex instruments and expertise that no single discipline can provide. “Today, all the interesting science happens at the intersection of various fields,” Zega added. “In my group, we have cosmochemists, quantum chemists, astrophysicists and astrodynamics, among others. This work requires a unique mix of knowledge and skills. Take the TEM, for example: it’s a quantum-mechanical tool, so you have to be an expert in physics, materials science and chemistry, all at the same time.” Another instrument, called an electron microprobe, allows researchers to discover certain properties of a sample by scanning it with an electron beam. As it does, a spatial image of the sample emerges, in this case revealing an abstract, speckled landscape of light and dark areas that cosmochemists can read like a map. “Heavier elements appear brighter, and lighter elements appear darker,” Zega says. “So this tells us, for example, where and how much iron there is compared to oxygen in a lunar sample.” When Barnes moves to the UA this fall, after wrapping up her current research at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, she hopes to be able to expand the capacities of the Kuiper Materials Imaging and Characterization Facility with a next-generation NanoSIMS instrument, which stands for nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry. The beauty of this technology, she says, lies in its ability to analyze isotopes, essentially different “varieties” of chemical elements, at very small scales -- less than one-fiftieth the width of a human hair. Measuring the composition of different volatile elements such as hydrogen and chlorine in the rock tells the researcher something about the chemical make-up of the magma from which the rock crystallized and how its chemistry evolved over time. “These data allow us to understand the chemistry of the Moon’s interior,” Barnes says. “Ultimately we are able to say something about how the Moon evolved and where its water came from.” The possibilities don’t end here. To a curator during the Apollo days, a focused ion-beam scanning electron microscope, or FIB-SEM, would have sounded like utter science fiction: By smashing the bonds between atoms inside the sample with a beam of heavy gallium ions, the instrument works essentially like a nano scale excavator, Zega explains. “Except that compared to other FIBs, which act like shovels, this one is a scalpel,” he says. FIB-SEM allows scientists to cut out tiny pieces from a sample with high precision and analyze only those pieces. This technique recently enabled Zega’s team to discover a grain of dust forged in the death throes of a star long before our solar system was born. “What we want to know from our samples is, how well do they conform to how we think the solar system formed based on astrophysical models?” Zega says. The same applies to the origin of the Moon, Barnes says. “It’s not just analytical instruments that have improved. In the last 10 years, major advancements in impact simulations and numerical modeling have allowed the community to simulate the speed, size and number of the bodies that might have been involved in creating the Earth-Moon system.” Analyzing samples from extraterrestrial bodies goes beyond the origins of the Earth and the Moon, of course. They are critical pieces in the puzzle because they allow scientists to test hypotheses about formation processes in the solar system based on simulations and models. “We have had lunar samples here for decades,” says Timothy Swindle, director of the LPL. “Our faculty have been studying the composition of the Moon for a long time, and what’s so special about these samples is that they were valuable 50 years ago, and they will be valuable 50 years from now.” “Being able to study these previously unopened samples is like a whole new lunar sample return mission,” Barnes says of the value of studying 50-year-old Apollo samples. “Not only do we get to be a part of the history of opening these samples, but we also will be using this opportunity to study how curation practices, such as ambient versus cold storage, affect our ability to measure a lunar water signature. “It’s exciting because this has never been done before.” TOP IMAGE....A NanoSIMS isotope ratio image showing water-bearing minerals (colors) in a sea of water-poor glass (black) in Apollo sample 10049. These were the last phases to crystallize from the lava as it cooled on the surface of the Moon. The scale bar on the lower left measures about one-fiftieth the width of a human hair. (Image: Jessica Barnes) LOWER IMAGE....Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt stands next to a steep-walled crater named Shorty on Dec. 13, 1972. The UA's Jessica Barnes is among the scientists selected by NASA to be granted access to previously unopened samples, including some collected during NASA's last manned mission to the moon. (Photo: NASA)

#space #science #Astronomy #physics

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cindylouwho-2 · 5 years

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RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, June 2019

Welcome to my latest summary of recent news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & ecommerce! This covers articles I came across from May 31 to June 21, although some may be older than that.

(Unfortunately, a few of this edition’s entries were lost somehow, & I could only remember one of the missing, so if you know of an article/post that should be included, please let me know, & the piece will be added here as well as to the next post.)

My busy few months are now mostly over, so I will have more time to get working on this Tumblr, new blog posts & the new forum I want to start; expect more frequent updates starting in July.

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES

Shopify is going to run fulfillment centres for its US customers within the next 2 years. “Right now Shopify will offer early access for merchants who ship between 10 and 10,000 items per day, and by the end of the year the company aims to offer two-day shipping to 99 per cent of the United States.” They announced other plans at the same time, including better shop tools.

If you have your own website, conversion rate optimization is something you should be looking at. Why? Because “[a] simple tweak on a landing page can double or even 10x that page’s conversion rate” which can be much easier to do than doubling your traffic. [Note that this is not a short article; it’s a full guide.]

Matching searcher intent is a crucial part of great rankings. This long article tells you pretty much everything you need to know on making that happen with your content, with real examples for their site.

Mary Meeker released her annual internet trends report; shorter summary here. “If you're looking to connect with the next generation, you should be maintaining at least some awareness of gaming culture, which is where attention is increasingly shifting.” “Some 51 percent of the world — 3.8 billion people — were internet users last year, up from 49 percent (3.6 billion) in 2017...E-commerce is now 15 percent of retail sales. Its growth has slowed — up 12.4 percent in Q1 compared with a year earlier — but still towers over growth in regular retail, which was just 2 percent in Q1...Customer acquisition costs — the marketing spending necessary to attract each new customer — is going up.

ETSY NEWS

Etsy retired several of its Support/Help email addresses, including [email protected], all without any official announcement.

You can now link photos to variations - but only with one variation, not both.

Etsy’s annual report for 2018 is out; I didn’t see much new here, but if you catch something, please leave a comment or send me an email so I can add it to this summary. [They actually mentioned “abilities” in their list of things they accept diverse ranges of, but as usual, they only give any details about gender, race/ethnicity and sexual orientation. Disability is invisible for them.]

A new bunch of US states will have state taxes charged for online sales as of July 1.

Ryan Scott will be Etsy’s new Chief Marketing Officer as of June 24.

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES

Google broke with tradition & decided to warn SEOs about the core search algorithm update that started rolling out on Monday June 3 and ended on the 8th. There are multiple reports of some UK news companies taking a hard hit while others picked up visibility. It’s still too early for much comprehensive analysis, but here is a summary and another more recent one.

At the same time, Google also rolled out an update that increases site diversity in search results, often limiting each website to 2 entries in Google’s top pages. Think of it as Google's approach to “clumping”. They insist it is separate from the core algorithm update. Early analysis finds that it didn't change much for most searches.

Websites sometimes rely too much on Google traffic, which is dangerous whenever they change something (i.e., daily). Here are 5 ways to make your site/pages more resistant to algorithm updates.

Most decent SEO tools cost some money to get the full value, but here is a list of 55 free tools including keyword research, stats, linking, and technical tools. (Some have paid versions as well, but just ignore what you don’t need.)

SEO sometimes requires stating the obvious; check out this tweet with a graphic from an SEO conference.

Rand Fishkin did a major review of clicks from Google search, & found that nearly 50% of US google searches result in a click (often questions such as weather, or spelling). Only 45% led to clicks on non-paid links, & non-Google companies. But “for every click on a paid result in Google, there are 11.6 clicks to organic results. SEO is far from dead.” Search Engine Land did a TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) summary here.

Fishkin also has some good insights on making a profit through SEO. [video and full transcript] I think the point about having a strong profit margin is really important - it is going to get more expensive to sell online as time goes on. Etsy is not the only provider trying to squeeze more pennies out of its customers. (Fishkin’s whole push lately is that you must be a known brand to survive; I am reserving judgement on that for the moment.)

Most blogs haven’t done their SEO correctly, but you can fix that. [video & full transcript]

Hate it when your site/business gets mentioned online, but they don’t link to you? There are ways to get other companies to link to you.

The latest Google mobile search redesign has folks pitching fits about how ads now look like organic search results. For your own website & other sites where it is possible, make sure you have a favicon that stands out from paid ads. [If you Google “CindyLouWho2″ on mobile, my blue fossil coral avi shows for my website & this Tumblr blog.]

Voice search isn’t taking off like people thought it would, although around 30% of Americans use virtual assistants regularly.

Is audio SEO going to be a thing? Dr. Pete looks at Google’s decision to post podcasts in search results.

CONTENT MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA (includes blogging & emails)

Facebook announced its move into cryptocurrency with Libra, which will launch in 2020.

Contrary to some reports, it seems that fewer people are using Facebook regularly. While time spent on FB drops, Instagram in particular is seeing more interaction.

Getting the right image sizes and dimensions is really important for each platform; here is an infographic on all image sizes for Facebook.

“[T]he right time for you to post on Facebook will be different than the right time for someone else to post on Facebook.” A summary of multiple studies on the topic, with tips on using your Facebook Analytics to narrow this down for your business.

After banning mass messaging earlier this year, WhatsApp is prohibiting sending newsletters through the app as of December.

A decent guide on using Twitter for your business. “...tweets with images get 150% more retweets”.

Thinking of running a Twitter chat? Here’s a complete guide, including Hootsuite templates.

You can get new content ideas from Reddit. “Reddit.com saw 542 million visitors in March 2019 alone.”

Pinterest is expanding its shopping program, now called Pinterest Partners, to provide more shopping opportunities on the site.

A study of the 500 top-followed Pinterest accounts shows that home decor is most popular among influencer topics. [infographic with text.]

Short video platform TikTok is still showing rapid growth. “Digital wellbeing is more important than it has ever been. Since tech companies started optimising for user engagement, the user is unable to escape the app. You will always feel dissatisfied when you close the app, because the notifications keep on coming and the content never seems to end. To us it seems, TikTok has taken this idea to another level and built the user experience to deliberately create addiction.“

ONLINE ADVERTISING (SEARCH ENGINES, SOCIAL MEDIA, & OTHERS)

Using Google Ads for your website? Make sure you avoid these 7 common mistakes.

Google now allows you to target people who are “regularly in your target locations” - but it doesn’t really define how they calculate that.

Instagram Shopping is most popular with younger people (at least in the UK).

Good tips on improving your Amazon ad effectiveness, especially cost-effectiveness.

Some tips on Microsoft Audience ads, and how to get the most out of them. It includes some good general tips, like looking at your profit margin.

Facebook produced an infographic on how to best create FB ads, especially, for mobile.

STATS, DATA, OTHER TRACKING

Google has purchased analytics company Looker; Etsy uses the platform already.

The Google Search Console is now giving users 90 days of data for some reports.

Here’s a new WordPress plugin that tracks clicks on pdfs on your site through Google Analytics.

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS

Paypal has developed “a customizable e-commerce platform”.

Amazon has extended 1-day Prime delivery. Their ability to do that largely depends on how they are taking control of the shipping methods used, moving away from using other big companies.

Amazon closed Spark, its social media competitor, and it redirects to a page of customer-curated collections.

Some Goodwill stores are now selling thrift items on online platform OfferUp.

Opinion article: is feature-driven retail preventing people from buying?

BUSINESS & CONSUMER STUDIES, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE

Human brains like stories, which is why you should use them in your marketing. “Stories do another thing: They trigger the release of this neurochemical called oxytocin, which is known in some circles as the love drug. About 10 years ago, all we really knew about oxytocin is that it’s released when, say, a mother is with her baby. But what we’ve discovered since then, through the work of neuroscientists like Dr. Paul Zak, is that stories trigger the release of oxytocin in much the same way.”

Sell luxury goods? The market is changing as younger people make up a larger chunk of the core. Millennials will make up 50% of the market by 2025. The article has some interesting stats on the luxury resale market: “Overall 45% of true-luxury consumers participated in the second-hand luxury market, and more than one-fourth (26%) have bought pre-owned goods” which is a trend some luxury vintage sellers might want to watch.

Generation Z prefers personalized content & isn’t as worried about privacy as older generations.

US adults now spend more time on mobile devices than they do watching tv. Much of that time is spent on mobile apps instead of browsers, & audio (podcasts & music streaming, mostly) accounts for a large chunk of time spent.

US retail sales grew by half a percent in May, less than predicted.

MISCELLANEOUS

As the US looks at starting an antitrust case against Google, articles are reminding the government what other countries found, and what they should be looking at now. Businesses big & small have filed complaints.

The Google Cloud outage on June 2 that took down YouTube, Snapchat and Shopify among other sites points to the need for everyone to have a backup system. [Remember, Etsy is also moving all functions to Google’s cloud.]

Sick of writing product descriptions? Imagine if it was your full-time job, and you didn’t have any hand in making or curating the products.

#seo #search engine optimization #search engine marketing #etsynews #analytics #stats #Social media #contentmarketing #ecommerce #smallbiz #cindylouwho2newsupdates

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ithacamoma · 5 years

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20 QUESTIONS FOR: TAMMY SALZL

image courtesy of the artist and DC3 Art Projects

1.Name:

Tammy Salzl

2.Occupation(s):

Artist, Sessional Teacher in Senior Level Painting at the University of Alberta.

3.Where are you from and what is your education?

I was born in Edmonton, AB, into a gigantic dysfunctional family with 18 aunts and uncles, 42 first cousins and barely one parent. I spent my summers being tortured as an English speaking city slicker in French speaking prairie farm communities. Retreating into art and stories and animals was the salvation I didn’t find in the fundamentalist religion I was periodically thrown into. For my undergrad I did 2 years at ACAD (Now called AUArts), and finished my BFA at the University of Alberta. I received my Masters in Studio Arts (Painting) at Concordia University in Montreal 2014 and have been expanding my practice to include video and multimedia installation since graduation.

4.Where do you live/work (neighbourhood/city/country)?

For the past 3 yrs I’ve been splitting my year between the Southside of Edmonton, AB. and Parc Ex in Montreal QC. I have family in both places, which makes this both possible and necessary.

5.Does your location affect your practice?

Definitely! Emotionally, psychologically and logistically. I’m lucky to be able to spend time in both eastern and western Canada. Sometimes they seem like entirely different worlds and it’s a privilege to be able to step into both. It broadens my field of vision.

6.What is your favourite tool in the studio?

I have two favourite things. My glue gun, because I love glueing stuff, it makes me feel like a little kid again! I also love it when I have a fresh, unused brush in hand.

7.Where do you look for your source material?

Everywhere! Movies, books, (I love sci-fi books, and I just finished 2 books by Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century - so gooood!) mythology, ecology, weird/wondrous animals (like the barrel eye fish or the Aye-aye), bus stops, Edmonton’s River valley, back alleys in Montreal, weird stop motion animations, the fresh sights, sounds and smells that come with travel, looking at art and, occasionally, the bottom of my wine glass.

8.What is you daily art world read?

I email subscribe to a bunch of art blogs (like Hyperallergic and artdaily.org etc), and I also try to read Border Crossings and Canadian Art magazines, but honestly a lot of my art world reads come from instagram. Cuz you know… pictures.

9.What is your daily non-art-world read?

I love science and nature blogs. I really enjoy nature.com, naturecanada.ca, futurism.com/, and for quick global news stuff I like Quartz Daily Brief. It’s hard…you don’t want to be ill informed yet it’s so bleak out there…I think overexposure to media can be harmful. I try to find a balance.

10.What role does writing play in your practice?

Sadly, not much. It’s an inescapable task for every artist, and one I dearly wish I could escape. That said, aside from the necessary evil of artist statement/proposal/grant type of writing, I sometimes play at creative writing. I make little one page tales that turn into paintings, or I write a short narratives based on something I’ve made. I’ll often have automatic writing embedded in my underpaintings, and if you look hard enough you can sometimes find traces of a word here and there.

11.What role does research play in your practice?

Because I peddle in tales, I research the history, culture, psychology, pop culture, philosophy of whatever traditional tale or mythology I’m referencing, and how others have interpreted those tales over time - even if I’m referencing something like Dr. Seuss. I often tie that into the research I do out of my interest in ecology and nature. For me, working representationally means there is intension in everything. I try to have layers of meaning and make work that engenders multiple interpretations. I research the symbolism and history of objects, places, animals, colours , etc. With my installations there is a lot of material research involved as well.

12.What role does collaboration play in your practice?

Since expanding my painting practice into intermedia work, I’ve done quite a bit of collaborating in the form of “I don’t know how to do this technical thing so I need to find someone who does”. It’s taught me a lot in terms of learning to communicate and work with others. As a solitary person, it’s a challenge for me, but I also find it incredibly rewarding and enriching. Also, a couple of years ago 4 female artist friends and I began an art collective called IFPP (incubator for phantom pregnancies) We’ve staged a couple exhibitions and have some upcoming shows, and it’s been really great. You learn a lot about yourself in a collaborative process, and it’s exhilarating ending up with this thing you helped create, but in a mind hive kind of way.

13.How does success affect your practice?

Ideas of success are pretty subjective, no? Speaking in terms of non-commercial success, I would say it helps drives my practice forward. It gives you the incentive and confidence to keep going, to make more, to take risks and think bigger. Sometimes commercial/monetary success can do the opposite because you’re expected to make more of the same, sellable stuff - to keep the formula and not colour outside those lines.

14.How does failure affect your practice?

Failure is an opportunity to learn, and can lead to amazing things. I suck at it. I can be super stubborn and fight with a painting that’s not working for days and days. I’m often my own worst enemy. I’m learning to walk away, to turn the bloody thing facing the wall and only come back to it when I can be more objective - when I’m in a better place to paint over the 100 hours invested and start over.

15.What do you identify as the biggest challenge in your artistic process?

My own stubbornness! My own rules and obsessiveness and need for control. I can get restrained by fear of making something ‘bad,' and I struggle to let myself play more, to let myself ‘fail’. I can get too caught up in my own head. I struggle with a lot of self doubt. A dear friend of mine recently sent me a beautiful quote by Robert Hughes in an attempt to assuage my doubt:

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”

I’m not so sure this is the case, but it’s nice to hear!

Also, like so many of us, I struggle socially and will hide in my studio rather than go to an art opening when I know I should be trying to make “connections”. Wine helps tremendously in all my struggles.

16.Who are some historical artists you are thinking about?

This fluctuates a great deal. I often find myself interested in artists I thought I didn’t like years ago, and will lose interest in artists I thought I loved. Art crushes come and go. I just bought a Frida Kahlo book and am rediscovering my fascination with her.

17.Who are some contemporary artists you are thinking about?

Everyone and no one in particular. I was in LA last January and saw an amazing Outsider Art show at LACMA. There was a piece by Greer Lankton titled, “Candy Darling” depicting a transgender actress who was featured in several of Andy Warhol’s films and was one of Lankton’s icons she looked up to as a trans woman. It’s exquisite with an edgy sexuality - totally blew my mind. I also saw some Mark Bradford works at The Broad that really surprised me. You have to be in front of them to understand how profound, beautiful, raw and sophisticated they are.

18.How do you describe what you are making now?

Right now I’m bouncing all over the place with various mediums. I’m working on a new series of oils, sort of taking the piss out of patriarchal old fables and the misogynistic way they portrayed women by retelling them through a contemporary lens. I’m also making a series of small, intricate “naughty fairies” made out of Sculpey (imagine tinker bell-like creatures going down on each other), some larger installation pieces that incorporate a variety of materials - video, sound, found and crafted objects, and I just completed my first short narrative video with footage shot on an artist residency I did in Norway last year.

Sometimes I feel like I’m spreading myself too thin and there’s an invisible pressure to focus on one thing, but I’m a storyteller and I use whatever mediums best suites the tale. I think everything I do remains distinctly me, it all has connective threads. Generally I paint in the morning and move onto video and sculpture in the afternoon/evening. Painting is mentally challenging in a very singular way; it’s super humbling and I need a fresh, rested brain to do it.

19.Who is an artist that you think deserves more attention?

Oh man. Too many to count. Seems to me art world trends often translate into amazing artists not getting their due. I think Canadian artists in general deserve more of the international spot light. There’s so much talent here.

20.How can we find out more about you (relevant links etc)?

I keep my website pretty up to date, including upcoming shows and press links etc.

www.tammysalzl.com

#20 questions #art #Artist Interview #tammysalzl #canada #ithaca moma

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lovehaswonangelnumbers · 5 years

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December 2018 Energy Report ~ Finishing What You Started

December 2018 Energy Report ~ Finishing What You Started,

FCGCT Commentary: We are moving from the mind, to the Heart… not the balancing of the two. The brain acts as a conduit while the heart processes. The mind conflicts with the Heart, and is the cause for imbalance, pain, fear, suffering and more. The mind… the ego, blocks the Heart, as it Edges God Out. Let go of the mind, and solely flow from the Heart, connected to the Unified Heart in Unity Consciousness. Let go of wants and needs and move toward a paradigm grateful receiving. We are moving into a paradigm of passion for co-creation in love everywhere present. Desires are EGO traits, true passion is expanding love into creation with pure intent and creation of New Earth energy. Passion must be in aligned intention of new earth = heart. Change must be embraced, accepted, and allowed, as LOVE is the only frequency that will move forward. Change is positive and with it comes expansion. Allow change and embrace the energies pouring out from Mother of all Creation.

December 2018 Energy Report ~ Finishing What You Started

from Jennifer Hoffman

Can you believe it’s the final month of 2018? What a year it has been and this month is an energy wrap-up as we put the finishing touches on a year of spiritual initiation (an 11 year) and prepare for a year where creative energy, intention, and manifestation, all 5D energies, will dominate. Are you ready for 5D creation? If you aren’t sure what that means I’ll explain it in this article and just to get you started, it’s about being the CEO – that’s Chief Expansion Officer – of your energy, managing your energy container, setting good boundaries, and creating the energy path to fulfill your intention. To prepare for that the theme for December is efficiency and how we manage our use of our energy.

December opens in a completion cycle which is perfect for the final month of the year. Think of tying up loose ends, finishing what you started, taking care of your life’s business and re-organizing your priorities. Did you take on too much? Maybe it’s a good time to re-assess your commitments and let a few go. It’s OK to tell someone that you cannot meet a commitment and have to let it go. In fact, it’s far better to do that than to try to force yourself to honor a time or energy commitment you wish you had never said yes to and that you allow to drain your energy with regret, self judgment, and anger.

This is why I said the theme for December was efficiency because we need to learn how to be efficient in how we use our energy. Efficiency means to perform in the best possible way with the least amount of waste of time, energy, and effort. This month we can do an efficiency review of our energy and ask the following questions:

Is this situation the best use of my energy?

Am I doing things that I enjoy doing and being part of?

Have I over-committed my energy resources, am I giving and not receiving anything in return?

Is there another potential for my energy that I have not considered yet?

These questions don’t mean that you stop doing things for others, that you don’t exercise kindness and compassion, and that you pull your energy from everything. They do give you the opportunity to reconsider your own options before you give to others and to ensure that you are not over-committed, drained, tired, stretched to the limit, and unable to meet your own energy needs.

To explore the full potential of 2019’s creative options we will need to have full control of our energy so we have the energetic resources to expand into our new potentials and possibilities and not have energy leaks and drains sapping our resources. To do this we will have to learn to say no to people and situations that are not an efficient use of our energetic resources. That may be hard to do at first but remember that often the people you think you disappointment by rejecting their requests for assistance are merely inconvenienced because they have to ask someone else (see my article on Disappointed or Inconvenienced at this link).

So what does December have in store? First, the month opens with a Mercury retro which ends on December 6 and Mercury is at 29 Scorpio, recalling the long Saturn retro over this degree from June to September 2015. We also have 4 planets at 29 degrees of their sign. This is the degree of completion which contains all of the energy of that transit for us to reconsider, re-assess, and release before we take that next step. What an excellent message for December.

And we have a new moon on December 6 at 15 Sagittarius and a full moon on December 22, the Equinox, at 0 Cancer. Remember from the November Energy Report, from November through April 2019, all new moons are at 15 degrees, the degree of alchemy, and all full moons are at 0 degrees, the degree of absolute potential. 0 is no thing, where infinite potential exists because it is energy that has not yet taken form, which we do with our intention. It’s great support for our creative path in 2019. Every month we’ll have support for creation and transformation and unlimited potential.

One interesting astro point – Mars is in Pisces all month and moves into Aries on January 1. Mars rules Aries, the first sign of the zodiac so with its Pisces transit in December it is bringing us full circle, the Alpha becomes the Omega, the initiate completes their path and achieves mastery. I first wrote about this in the March 2015 energy report, which you can read at this link.

It is interesting that the new year will begin with Mars in its own sign of Aries, the sign of the pioneer, way-shower, and new beginnings, at the critical zero point, the very first degree of the zodiac. Another example of the alpha becoming the omega, coming full circle into energy congruence, becoming 360 within our Divine Trinity, and aligning our humanity with our divinity in a flow of congruent harmony.

Do we need any more proof of the powerful creative potential that we are stepping into now?

The Solstice of December 21 and is followed by a new moon at 0 Cancer representing home, family, the mother, and emotions. We have a lot of Chiron activity again this month, so look at the Martyred Healer paradigm you may be engaged in and start thinking about moving into your Empowered Mastery. Emotions impact our energy field, our health, our mental state, and every aspect of our lives. Pay attention to your emotional energy this month, and watch how your emotions either drain your energy or expand it.

November ended with a surprising announcement, the death of George HW Bush, a former US president. His death marks an important release of a significant amount of 3D density as he was a major cornerstone and embodiment of that paradigm of domination, power, greed, and control. There was a noticeable lifting of energy with his passing and we’re going to see more of the dismantling of this 3D power structure in December and in 2019. Jupiter’s entry into Sagittarius supports truth, justice, and higher thought and actions. Anything less than that will no longer be supported by the collective energy.

And finally December 2018 has a 5 energy, the number of transition from material to spiritual. Look at how 5 is written, it can become an 8 or a 6. The 6 is Virgo, representing detail, judgment, and service, and the 8 represents infinity, empowerment, and rebirth or destruction. Virgo is either in service as a servant or of servant as a Light Beacon or master.

The 8th sign of the zodiac is Scorpio, which has three representations – the phoenix which rises from the ashes of its destruction to be reborn, stronger and more powerful than before, the scorpion which stings itself with its own tail, or the eagle, which soars high in the sky with very clear sight that either focuses on minute details or sees far ahead into the horizon. These are key topics this month, they figure prominently in how we will use the creative energy of 2019 to expand into new and wonderful possibilities, and they are also described more in my upcoming book, which will be published this month.

It’s a powerful month so get complete and give yourself closure, learn to manage your energy resources, become your own Chief Expansion Officer (CEO) and start thinking about what you want to create in 2019.

~~~~~~~~~

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bypeopledigital · 3 years

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Your eCommerce business Need an outstanding ecommerce website design

Nowadays, we do pretty much everything on the web and that incorporates shopping. Which is the reason there will never be been a superior chance to be in eCommerce business.

eCommerce business web composition tips and thoughts

These days, in case you're selling anything regardless of whether that is tennis shoes, salad dressing, or something in the middle you need to bounce on board the eCommerce business site train. An eCommerce business webpage offers you the opportunity to construct your image, associate with more clients, and sell more items yet provided that you have the right web composition.

Website composition is basic while making a web based business site. Great eCommerce business website architecture is tied in with utilizing the right tones, textual styles, pictures, words and illustrations to persuade guests to make a buy. Your eCommerce business web composition ought to draw in likely clients, give incredible client experience and present your shop in the best light. Now a days eCommerce website design is one of the best important part for increase your potential customers.

Along these lines, not exclusively does your webpage need to look great and feel on-brand, however it additionally needs to drive your site guests to make a move and, you know. purchase your items. Yet, how, precisely, do you do that? How would you plan the sort of eCommerce business webpage that will have items taking off your virtual racks?

Here are the best 11 eCommerce business website composition tips to assist you with taking your shop to a higher level:

1. Keep it basic

One of the top standards you should remember during the eCommerce business configuration measure is "KISS" keep it straightforward, senseless!

With regards to planning an eCommerce business site, basic is in every case better. The more components you have on the page (Colors! Standard Ads! ALL THE POP-UPS!), the more it detracts from the whole reason behind the site bringing a deal to a close.

You needn't bother with a huge load of extravagant accessories on your web based business site everything they do is go about as interruption. Keep your plan clear, clean, and basic and maintain the attention on the deal.

2. Focus on marking

With regards to shopping on the web, individuals need to purchase from set up brands not unremarkable eCommerce business destinations that resemble a front for attempting to take your Mastercard data.

Assuming you need to assemble the trust you need to drive genuine deals with your eCommerce business, you need to place some genuine idea into your marking. Your marking resembles the DNA of your eCommerce business; it's who you are as an organization, what you're about, and how you're unique in relation to your rivals and it has a gigantic impact in building an association with your crowd and driving deals. eCommerce website need to digital marketing for boost your business.

Assuming you need to take full advantage of your web based business configuration, set aside the effort to characterize your image and afterward imbue that marking into your plan. In case you don't know who you are as a brand, that is alright! You're simply going to need to do a little business soul-looking before you get planning. Ask yourself inquiries like:

On the off chance that my image was an individual, who might it be?

In the event that I needed to portray my image in three words, what might they be?

What makes my image unique in relation to other eCommerce business shops out there?

What show improvement over any other individual available?

When you know what your identity is, you can work it into the marking of your eCommerce business website. Furthermore, that marking? It'll assist work with trusting with your crowd and drive genuine deals simultaneously.

3. Adopt the thought process of a site guest

Assuming you need your web based business web architecture to interface with your crowd, you need to think like your crowd. Eventually, there are only a couple of things your potential clients need in a web based business experience a webpage that is not difficult to explore, all around planned, and makes the most common way of shopping simple, clear, and bother free.

Furthermore, assuming you need your eCommerce business shop to succeed, you would be wise to give them those things.

During the plan interaction, come at the situation from your guest's perspective. What sort of format will be simplest for them to explore? How might you arrange your items such that bodes well for the end client? How might you improve on the checkout interaction?

At the point when you think like your client, you can expect what they need from your eCommerce business store and afterward plan your website to address those issues.

4. Use tone for your potential benefit

Picking the shadings for your web based business webpage is about something other than saying "Indeed, red is my #1 shading, so. we should make every one of the things red!" Color is a very integral asset and on the off chance that you comprehend the brain science behind shading, you can utilize it for your potential benefit (and drive some genuine deals simultaneously).

Various tones can rouse various sentiments, feelings, and activities from individuals in this way, assuming you need your eCommerce business webpage to change over, you need to utilize those shading motivations for your potential benefit. Now a days, eCommerce mobile app develop with the website. so, you can grow your business and attract new customers through mobile app.

In this way, for instance, assuming you need individuals to make a buy, make the buy button stand apart with a brilliant shading like red. As per shading brain research, red rouses sensations of energy and enthusiasm, which are driving components behind spending and studies show that creating a button red can expand changes by an astounding 34%.

Or on the other hand, assuming you need to up your validity, fuse blue into your website architecture. Blue isn't just an all around cherished shading, but on the other hand it's been displayed to build sensations of trust, making it a go-to in the business world (there's an explanation blue shows up in the greater part, everything being equal).

The fact is, shading is one of the most incredible assets in your plan tool stash and in the event that you realize how to utilize it, it can gigantically affect your eCommerce business plan.

5. Utilize top notch pictures

In the realm of website architecture, it's generally expected information that pictures increment changes (for instance, one late contextual analysis showed that fusing more significant pictures into a web composition expanded transformations by more than 40%). What's more, that is much more evident with regards to eCommerce business.

Getting proficient pictures of every one of your items (and having pictures of your item from numerous various points) goes far in building certainty and confidence in your clients. On the off chance that they feel sure that they realize what they're purchasing, they're bound to make a buy. Be that as it may, in case there are no pictures of the item they need to purchase (or simply a solitary, bad quality picture), they will feel more reluctant to make the buy and your transformations will tank accordingly.

Help yourself out and have a lot of excellent pictures of whatever you're selling on your eCommerce business webpage. Your transformations will much obliged.

6. Make your substance searchable

You can go through days creating long portrayals for the items on your eCommerce business website, however we have news for you nobody will understand it.

Exploration shows that most site guests just read about 20% of the text on some random page. Rather than perusing content in exactly the same words, they basically examine the text searching for key data in this way, assuming you need to make yourself clear (and drive deals simultaneously), you need to make your substance readable.

The simpler to filter your substance, the almost certain your crowd will retain your key informing and the more probable you'll have the option to make a deal.

7. Make it look proficient

The premise of an eCommerce business webpage is that you are requesting that your site guests buy something from you. What's more, accordingly, you're requesting that they turn over delicate data, similar to their Visa data. Which they're not going to feel happy with doing if your site doesn't look profesh.

Putting resources into an expert site is an absolute necessity assuming you need to construct entrust with your clients and fostering that trust is an unquestionable requirement assuming you need your web based business store to succeed.

The fact is, assuming you need your clients to treat you in a serious way, you need to show them you view yourself pretentiously and the best way to do that is with an expert website composition.

8. Utilize social evidence

One more approach to construct that very significant trust? Social confirmation.

At the point when you're planning your eCommerce business website, search for approaches to show your potential clients the positive criticism you've gotten from your current clients. Add an evaluations area where individuals can rate your items (and afterward get as numerous 5 star surveys as you can). Add a tributes area where you include client photographs with a statement or two with regards to what an extraordinary encounter they had working with you. Request that clients survey your items and what they like with regards to them and afterward add them to your blog.

The more your site guests see that others have had a positive encounter shopping on your site (regardless of whether that is through surveys or tributes) the more reliable you'll show up and the more your changes will go up therefore.

9. Make classes simple to explore

Nothing and we don't mean anything will kill a deal quicker than inconvenient item pages. On the off chance that your site guests need to click around ten distinct menus before they discover the item they're searching for, they will scram quick and snap their direction right to a contender's site.

Make your item classifications and item pages simple to explore. Make it simple for your clients to look for items and to channel items by things like tone, size, or item type. The simpler you make your classes and pages to explore, the simpler it will be for your clients to discover what they're searching for and the simpler it will be for them to make a buy.

10. Make checkout a breeze

Make your checkout page plan spotless, basic, and simple to explore. Give your clients the alternative to enlist for your site or to look at as a visitor. Make everything about the cycle gem understood: what data you need to handle the buy (and where they need to enter it), the diverse delivery choices accessible (and the amount they cost), and what to do on the off chance that there's an issue with their request or they need to do a return. When the buy is finished, direct your clients to an affirmation page so they know it all.

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