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bodybeyondstories · 4 months

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Growth Notes - Sky's the Limit

Dwayne doesn't like house calls, but he will put away his therapist hat for a weekend to visit Sky, an old flame who's been through some big changes. Meeting his ex's new partner on the way, he realizes this syndrome may be having some weird knock-on effects.

Other stories in this series: Omar | Trevor

MaleTF // ass growth // dick growth // growth // size difference

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The only other occupant of the nondescript gas station convenience store was a girl behind the counter with jet black hair pulled into a ponytail in the back of a trucker hat. She glanced at me with mild interest as I walked in, her gaze a halo of lavender-gold eyeshadow framed with expertly sharp wings, resting in my direction just long enough to hold space for one, and only one, question.

“This is the third to last stop of the 84 bus line, right? Near the mountain access road?”

“Probably…?” she offered, softening the blow of nonchalance by shifting the intonation at the last minute and following it up with a half smile that could possibly be read as encouraging.

“Cool, great, thanks,” I said, turning awkwardly to busy my eyes with something as hers settled back on the phone that lay flat on the counter.

I double checked the text from Arun earlier that day. They had indeed said to take the 84 bus line almost all the way to the end, out to the boonies where the loosely defined mountain roads start appearing and they had said to meet them at the Come Again convenience store with the half-lit neon sign. So here I was, my phone barely in service, adjusting my backpack every few minutes and looking at random knick knacks hoping I was in the right place. Next to the gag nametags (they did have a Dwayne, which I appreciated) were what looked like self-produced postcards and flipbooks of the local cryptid sightings, large shadowy figures out of focus and out of range in the forest. This was normal paraphernalia in spots like these, but they had become more common as more men had become afflicted with this ‘macro syndrome.’ And in my line of work, they actually provide useful data. Maybe there’s a higher proportion of cases in the area, maybe they’re just drawn here because a protected forest may provide safer havens and more privacy than more highly populated spots. In one, someone was silhouetted by the sunset, leaning against what looked like a juvenile oak, with a massive hand wrapped halfway around the trunk, naked except for the tattered remains of denim shorts hanging off their waist. In another, blurrier one taken at night, a figure is turned toward the camera with what might be surprise, their body language leaning more strongly towards flight than fight, their half crouch and wide hips registering a familiarity that I could almost place. Could it be…

“Dwayne!” I was snapped back to reality by a jarring slap against my shoulder, throwing me off balance and almost sending me toppling into the display. “Oh, I’m so sorry, dude. Forget my own strength sometimes,” the figure continued with a chuckle.

The voice I recognized, and as I got my bearings I could confirm that it was indeed Arun’s beaming smile and signature thick mustache over pouty, full lips. I had met them a couple times but mainly knew them through social media. They were the partner of my ex boyfriend, Sky, and they were picking me up to take me deeper into the mountains to the cabin they shared. For months, Sky had been trying to convince me to come up for a weekend getaway out of town, and I had finally relented, figuring I could call it a writing retreat and maybe get some work done. Worried I would get lost on my own, Arun was to be my chauffeur from the very fringe of town to the house somewhere in the woods, and now here they were, in the flesh. Golden yellow beanie matched by glittery gold eyeliner, contrasting with a bulky work jacket and noticeably oversized pants. It didn’t seem Arun’s style from what I remembered, but they were in the mountains now, and I guessed they had to look the part. They also seemed much wider than the figure that I had maintained in my mind’s eye, enveloping me in a big bear hug that threatened to lift me off the ground.

“So good to see you,” they said. “And sorry for being late, my supply runs always take longer than I expect and I was counting on the bus being delayed per usual. Hope you weren’t waiting too long.”

“Nah, he just got here,” said the attendant with renewed interest. “We’ve been chattin’ it up. How’s my dearest Sky?”

“A handful, as always,” said Arun with a friendly nudge into my side, one I was ready for this time. “I see you’ve met Lacy,” they said to me. “Our next door neighbor.”

“By next door they mean like five miles,” Lacy said to me. “By the way, thanks again for the help with our roof. Sasha is making Sky one of her famous sweet potato pies. Finished the big brick oven just to scale it up.”

“Oh he loves those, he’ll be so happy,” said Arun, clapping his hands together in delight.

“The roof? Are you and Sky into contracting these days?” I offered, trying to ingratiate myself into the conversation.

“Not exactly,” said Arun. “Sasha has all the know how, but Sky is…pretty useful for big projects.”

“Both of you are, you’re a dream team! You should go into business.”

“Hmmm, we’ll see,” said Arun with a nervous laugh. “Still dealing with a lot of adjustments on the property.”

—

Once Lacy and Arun had eventually finished shooting the shit, Arun ushered me out of the convenience store and into a pickup truck parked out front. It looked only several years old, with a decent amount of rust around the edges and mud sprayed along the side, albeit with some newer looking reinforcements around the body. “You should see the chassis,” Arun mentioned. “Got it reinforced by a guy who works with monster trucks, the suspension on this thing is phenomenal.”

It was another hour of driving before we would reach the cabin, for a while on the county road that the bus dropped me off on, then some less than well maintained backroads through the woods. It was scenic to say the least, as we climbed slowly up into the foothills, late afternoon sun lighting up the autumn-toned valley in the distance and casting auspicious shadows over some small, sleepy town. The trees had reached that point where they painted waves of reds, oranges, and golds across the landscape and had just started to let go of their leaves as if cut neatly by the chill that sharpened the air. I had regretted putting this trip off for so long, but it looked like I had accidentally picked the right time in the season to pop in. On top of that, Arun was an eager conversationalist, filling the space between us with the very prominent, and very endearing, lisp that ran under his soft voice.

“Sorry if I’m talking your ear off,” they said, their eyes scanning the winding curves ahead of us. “It’s just we never get visitors out here. And Sky is such a homebody, he’s always so nervous about leaving the property or venturing out any farther than Lacy and Sasha’s. I’m hoping to drag him out somewhere while the weather’s still nice. Need to get the truck upgraded again before that. Always adjusting for that l’il dude,” they laughed. “But in the meantime, we have you!” They patted my leg in appreciation, smothering my thigh. I couldn’t help but notice their hands were huge. While the left was steering, the right was nimbly working the gear shift, but I didn’t think they could both fit together on the wheel, which looked dwarfed by just a few fingers. I didn’t remember noticing that in the past, but I had only met them in passing a few times.

“So it seems like you two are doing pretty well,” I said. “Not that I was concerned or anything, it’s just I work with a lot of folks who have Sky’s condition and it can really strain relationships.”

“Well that’s one way to put it,” said Arun, their eyes lilting briefly among the clouds, “but yeah, we’re doing great! We’re really making it work, adjusting to his needs, growing through it all. Pun intended.” Their bright smile in my direction.

Not that I was concerned about how my ex was doing for any nefarious reasons. I was genuinely happy to see things going so well with Arun. When Sky and I had ended things years ago, it had been amicable. I was drowning in grad school and he was trying to get his art career off the ground, and we just couldn’t find a way to fit the pieces together. We decided to take a ‘break’ that ended up lasting indefinitely, but we kept in touch. Of course I missed him, I still miss him. When things were going well, it was like sparks flying, and when they weren’t…they weren’t. When Arun came into the picture, it seemed like they provided the grounding force in Sky’s life that he really needed, and I was happy to see it. So when Sky first texted me about his diagnosis, I immediately began to worry about things potentially falling apart.

I try to be careful around the ethics of providing any sort of unofficial counseling, especially for a condition that so little is still known about, but I cared about him, so of course I talked through the changes with him, what to expect, connections to resources and support groups. I also just enjoyed having an excuse to reconnect. We had drifted apart for years and I got to become reacquainted with the life he had built. And like always, some things have a knack for staying the same.

“You know how much he enjoyed being a l’il guy,” Arun reminisced.

“Yeah, he was always really good at being 5’6”.”

“So good at being 5’6”!” We both laughed. “And I mean he’s still a l’il guy. He’s my l’il guy. Just…in some ways and not others.”

I had known some of the highlights of Sky’s growth based on our previous conversations, but Arun used our time together to fill me in on their more in depth story.

“There was kind of the predictable denial phase,” they said. “Sky kept downplaying things or mentioning how his posture was really improving through yoga or he was just gaining some weight, but I was like no, you’re definitely bigger. Like all around. This one time we were out with some friends singing karaoke and the seat of his pants just blew out right there on stage. And by then none of his clothes reached down near his ankles anymore so it was hard to keep denying it. He was pretty embarrassed about it.”

“Did he finish the–”

“Of course he finished the song,” Arun sighed with an exasperated roll of their eyes.

Sky had reached out to me shortly after being diagnosed, when, according to him, he suddenly found himself rising slightly above Arun’s six foot frame. Judging by the text conversations between me and Sky, Arun seemed to think it was cool but their partner was acutely annoyed.

“For a while it was neat because we could kinda split a wardrobe,” Arun said. “But Sky’s not a fan of my fashion sense. He kept wanting to adjust things or buy me things that were actually just for him. Then eventually, well…he was starting to stretch out even my roomier stuff. So we start getting creative, adjusting things, sewing new pieces. There are some great resources out there for how to size up your wardrobe. But also, after a while, he just wasn’t really going out as much. I think our friends were a little weird about it, you must know how people can get freaked out, but he didn’t want to address it directly. Just poured himself deeper into work.”

“Yeah, I remember him mentioning that,” I said. “Focusing more on his studio work.”

“Mmhm! Well eventually we had to move the studio into my place, since his old apartment was kind of a hovel. Not that I was complaining. It was getting past time for us to at least experiment with cohabitation. We were practically already there. And I had someone to clean the tops of the shelves. And the door frames. And the air vents…”

“I remember feeling too cozy in Sky’s old place,” I laughed. “But when did you move out here? I haven’t heard much from him in a while, he kind of disappeared.”

“Hmm, maybe after the third or fourth renovation? Sometimes he would kind of get…stuck moving around the house, and got pretty self-conscious about it. In the city, you only have so much room to make room, ya know, and I think he started feeling pretty cramped. One time the door frame caught around his hips and I had to shove him through. But then it just crumbled around him. Plaster everywhere, it was a whole thing.”

“...Huh.”

“I thought it was hilarious but he seemed pretty upset about. Which I get. I was planning on overhauling that entire part of the house anyways, but we figured we could officially move in together somewhere new. And get some space from all the hustle and bustle and attention. I make enough to support us and I can work from anywhere, so we were flexible, and my former boss was trying to get rid of this property out in the middle of nowhere. It was fate!”

After winding along some side road of a side road, we rolled onto a patch of gravel that looked like it served as a makeshift parking lot, pulling up next to a shiny new 4x4 utility vehicle. The cabin was on the other side of a clearing, and turned out to be much more than the glorified shack that I had pictured in my head. Arun hadn’t mentioned much about what they do for work, beyond the fact that it’s some sort of cushy consulting gig that lets them work from the comfort of what looked to be a two-story glamping experience that apparently they could afford. It was a picturesque, stately log cabin that looked like it was designed to catch the soft light of the setting sun, partially covered in vines and partially under construction. What looked to be the newest addition was a big sliding barn door along the side that ran most of the way to the roof, capped by a small balcony with a handful of houseplants and late season herbs.

I hopped out of the truck, stretching my arms over my head to elicit some satisfying pops from my back and shoulders, taking in my surroundings. The ground was a carpet of partially decomposed leaf litter and humus, a colorful expanse marked by strangely shaped depressions spaced evenly across the scene.

Arun had taken off his jacket and begun to unload the storage totes, crates, and bags full of stuff, as well as what looked like some carpentry and construction materials, that over-filled the truck bed. With this haul, one would think we were preparing for societal collapse and had to hunker down until the summer months. I was impressed by how effortlessly they seemed to be throwing things around, balancing a stack of crates in one hand as they hoisted some two by fours in the other. But I was blown away by the image of Arun in a tank top. They were a wall of muscle across their chest and back, pecs, traps, and lats bunching and flexing visibly as they moved. They looked like a career bodybuilder, exploding with striated, pumped musculature, the straps of their tank top holding on for dear life across the shelf of pecs. But attached to their boulder shoulders was what confirmed my initial suspicions: their arms were massive. Not just a crescendo of muscularity like the rest of their body, but disproportionately extensive. In the few times we had met, I didn’t remember them looking like they had the strength and wingspan to lift their truck and start benching it like a toy.

“Like I said, we’re always adjusting, growing through it all,” said Arun, acknowledging the fact that I was dumb staring. “Can you grab this one?” they asked, pushing a crate towards me. “I think it’s just produce, shouldn’t be too heavy.”

I was only mildly offended as I lugged my single crate full of wholesale groceries, watching their wide lats and massive traps hold several times any weight that I could ever hope to move, as they half-walked, half-waddled towards the cabin, dropping off the first load near a cellar entrance. On the way, we passed by a spiral staircase in the middle of the clearing that led to seemingly nowhere. Just a wooden platform with some plain railings about twenty feet off the ground. We got everything unloaded after one more trip, not that I was all that much help, but Arun still showed their appreciation with a hefty pat on the back. Thankfully, they remembered to hold back this time and not send me careening into the side of the house.

“Hey, babe!” Arun called, using their dinner plate sized hands as a makeshift megaphone. “I’m back. Lacy sends her love.” They moved toward the wooden structure, muttering “He’s probably taking a nap” as they lumbered up the steps.

Not knowing what else to do, I figured I might as well start moseying up with Arun, since even though they looked like they were going nowhere, they seemed like they knew where they were going. But I was caught off guard by the slight drop of my foot into another one of those weird depressions in the leaf litter. I studied it again for a few seconds, the shape of it right on the tip of my tongue, brought forward in my mind by the sound of leaves and twigs crunching en masse, the light periodic thump against the ground getting closer and closer behind me. It was like a really, really big…footprint.

“Finally,” bellowed a familiar voice. “You’re home.”

I turned, with disbelief and intense recognition, to see Sky coming around the corner of the cabin, rubbing sleep out of his eye and stretching his arms wide with a deep, satisfying yawn, letting one hand casually graze the vines training off the balcony as he made his way over to Arun.

My eyes went through the checklist of my usual mental image of Sky. His hair was an undercut with a messy bun on top and dyed its usual lavender, though the roots had really grown out. His nails were painted a charcoal gray, fiddling with the straps of a tight fitting tank top cropped right below his nipples. The curves of his hips swished back and forth with all too familiar gait that said he was excited but didn’t want to reveal that too strongly, under a short skirt that looked to be made of large pieces of fabric sewn together with some skill, elastic run through for a waistband. It was just what I expected to see from Sky chilling out in some cabin in the woods. I just hadn’t been planning on him being almost as tall as the cabin itself.

Suddenly the platform, with Arun waiting patiently for their beau, made a lot more sense. Sky crossed the space between them with a handful of steps, walking up to the platform where Arun was just above eye level. They leaned down to place their huge hands on either side of Sky’s face, giving him a series of tender kisses wherever they could reach.

“Hey, bug. You get into trouble without me?” Arun asked.

Sky nuzzled his face into Arun’s slabs of pectoral muscle, but with the size difference it looked like him shoving his large head against Arun’s entire torso. “I really missed you. You know I get nervous without you. It can be scary out here alone. And also…” he bit his lip and tightened his grip on the railing, threatening to crush the wood in his hands without even trying, before Arun shot him a stern look that said that accident had already occurred in the past. “And also,” Sky continued, “I need that–”

“I know, I know,” Arun cooed, holding Sky’s head against their chest with those massive arms. “But look, we have a guest!” He swept a hand towards me, watching this surreal dynamic from the ground.

“Oh! Dwayne, it’s so good to see you,” exclaimed Sky, realizing, as he stepped closer to me, that I was right at the height of his prodigious package tenuously wrapped in what looked like some sort of makeshift jockstrap. His cheeks blushed as he tried to cover his manhood and still failed with both hands. I remember him being decently hung but it seemed like his junk really took off faster than the rest of him. “Sorry, it’s usually just me and Arun,” he said, crouching down for an awkward hug. Quickly realizing his chest was too broad to even attempt, I settled on wrapping my arms around his neck, my face brushing against the familiar expanse of warm stubble along his cheek. He smelled just like I remembered. Instead of breaking the embrace, I felt the ground leave my feet and with a whoosh of air and suddenly I was up on the platform with Arun before I fully realized what had happened.

“Sometimes it’s easier to talk this way,” said Arun, noticing my slight disorientation, “but you gotta warn people dude, remember?”

In my line of work, I felt like I had seen it all, but it was immediately obvious that Sky was one of the more extreme cases, which explained the inconsistent behavior and strange disappearance months ago. In the event that someone grows past a certain threshold, they’re deemed a significant risk to civil society, whether through infrastructural damage or social disruption, and some health agency comes and picks them up for ‘further treatment’, though it’s never been clear what that means. We’re technically supposed to report the risk of this happening, but I’m not a snitch. And besides, sometimes things get too hot and they take an extended vacation or just…disappear into the woods.

I’d known Sky had the syndrome since he was first diagnosed, and of course we’d spoken about his developments over time, but it was still surreal standing on that platform and getting a good look at him in the flesh. He was still the same, shy, anxious twink but it was like someone clicked the Scale function and started scrolling up. He had the exact same mannerisms as we caught up about life, just magnified, leaning his elbows on the platform and resting his chin in his palms as he gazed intently at me with those big, deep brown, thoughtful pools of his eyes. Things hadn’t worked out between us, but it had been an amicable split, and there was still some mutual attraction there. This was complicated by the realization that, like his dick, his perky bubble butt that I used to be obsessed with had ballooned cartoonishly with his growing body, two planets defying gravity and threatening to take out whoever’s in the path of the swish of his hips. As he bent down to pick up our things and bring them in the cabin, I could have passed out into Arun’s strong embrace right then and there.

Arun worked their magic with a grill and a camp stove, whipping up a feast in the waning hours of daylight. “I was thinking ramen!” they exclaimed, as if they weren’t already stirring the noodles around what could only be described as a cauldron. Sky sat cross legged with an entire platter spread across a tabletop in his lap, practically inhaling a meal that could’ve fed a family of five.

“It’s kind of hard for me to cook,” he said, with an apologetic squint in his eyes. “But we’re working on some bigger equipment, right?”

“One project of many,” said Arun, with sage-like grace. “But I like taking care of you,” they said, with a loving pat to Sky’s round buns covering the ground. I wondered how much of Arun’s day to day just consisted of keeping Sky content, in more ways than one. But they seemed genuinely happy keeping their partner satisfied, leaning against one expansive hip as they ate from their own plate.

As dusk progressed to night, we hung out by the fire. Sky laid on his side with his massive head on Arun’s lap, hips forming a small hill in the darkness. He gave the appearance of trying to cuddle up as close as possible to his partner, even though they were comically mismatched for the task. Nonetheless, Arun gave lazy caresses along Sky’s ears and cheeks, interspersed with a kiss here and there.

“When I was in town, I passed by that new club, Bamboo,” said Arun. “Have you been?”

“Ugh I don’t get out anymore,” I said. “But I heard they have sufficiently messy circuit parties.”

“Sufficiently messy is our thing, we should go sometime!”

“You remember what happened last time,” said Sky, stifling a yawn.

“Yeah, yeah, but anything is possible with some good ol’ fashioned communication and planning,” said Arun, showing an impressive dedication to steadfast optimism. “But maybe somewhere less crowded. Like the beach?”

“Hmm,” he perked up. “Maybe,” earning an approving peck from his partner.

—

The interior of the cabin had been majorly renovated to remove most of the second floor, leaving a single multi use sitting room + office space + bedroom in a cozy loft with a private balcony. This weekend, it was a guest room for yours truly, though according to Arun I was their first guest in this place. “First of many,” they hoped. It overlooked the open space of the rest of the house, which was dominated by an expansive bed covered in a sea of sheets, blankets, and quilts. Sky, who apparently still insisted on being little spoon, looked adorable curled up against Arun, completely dwarfing him except for those huge arms wrapped snugly around his chest.

I fell asleep thinking about the beach. Sky and I had loved taking trips there when we were together. He always seemed at peace with the lapping of the waves, toes dug into the warm sand, salt flecked wind coming off the water. I just loved seeing his bubble butt in a wet speedo. And of course, seeing him happy.

I dreamt of waking up on a lazy afternoon during one of our beach days, my sun kissed skin touching an open book whose words I couldn’t make out. I turned to my left, expecting to see Sky but only seeing an empty towel. Over here, said his disembodied voice, but my head on a swivel, I couldn’t seem to find him. No, over here, again. Looking out to the sea, I could just discern his figure out in the water, walking slowly in toward the shore. The sun hanging low in the sky, his silhouette only gradually seemed to be getting closer, but did seem to be growing much, much bigger. As his body emerged from the water and I could make out more of his features, I saw that he was naked, pendulous dick swinging down towards his knees, the globes of his ass eclipsing the Sun as it fell slowly to the horizon and he rose higher and higher in the sky. As he reached the shore, I could feel his foot falls reverberating across the beach. I missed you, he bellowed, taking up my entire field of vision, one gargantuan hand reaching down and–

I woke in the early morning, coming back to reality with the aftershocks of the dream still bouncing around my head. Strangely, I could still feel the reverberation of the foot falls on the beach, realizing it was something along the outside wall. I ignored it for a bit, hoping to catch some more sleep, before an especially strong vibration shook the bed.

“Ooo, be careful. I don’t want to wake Dwayne,” I heard Sky outside, trying to whisper.

Bleary eyed, I rolled out of bed, stumbling to the balcony. Looking down, Sky was crouched on all fours, bracing himself against the wall with one hand. He was naked, his massive bubble butt arched behind him as he rocked slowly back and forth. My half-asleep mind thought he was just doing stretches, but I caught myself before announcing my presence and reassuring him that I was already awake. His soft moans sounded unmistakably familiar, the exact sound he used to make when I would…oh.

Arun’s head was completely enveloped in Sky’s ass cheeks as, I now assumed, they were eating him out for breakfast. I could only see their ripped torso and muscle butt, also totally nude, coordinating their entire body for an olympic size rim job. Their arms were covered in a sheen of sweat as their hands gripped the underside of each cheek, sinking into Sky’s jiggly booty, and occasionally giving him an energetic slap (full strength this time).

“Are you ready?” Sky whispered, then an unintelligible, muffled response from Arun deep in his cheeks.

I was about to tip toe back inside to give them some privacy when I noticed what Sky was waiting on. I don’t think I had fully registered the appendage attached to Arun’s crotch because I didn’t know what to make of it, but I quickly realized why they had worn such baggy pants yesterday. Their dick looked like it could rival Sky’s leaking monster oozing a puddle of precum on the ground. As I watched, it had progressed past the semi hard log resting against Arun’s shins, appearing to inflate as it grew and grew, crawling along the ground before, miraculously, lifting itself into the air several feet in front of Arun.

“Almost there,” said Arun, after pulling their head out of Sky’s cheeks, taking thirsty gulps of air. They started to take deep, intentional breaths, their face contorting in concentration as their monster cock reached full hardness, pulsing and twitching against Sky’s taint. “You ready?” they asked, waddling backwards to position their heavy dick at Sky’s waiting hole.

“Please, it’s been so long,” said Sky.

“It’s been like two days,” chuckled Arun, before plunging their unbelievable tool into their partner, eliciting a deep moan of pleasure from Sky. If they had had any more concern about waking their guest, it was long gone, lost in the grunts and groans of what sounded like mind blowing wake up sex. Arun settled into a rhythm of powerful thrusts, using their monstrously long arms to move Sky up and down their pole, Sky moving in tandem as he rocked back and forth on his partner’s dick. Sky’s own massive member slapped against the bottom of his sternum with a wet thwack as his beach ball sized nuts distended toward the ground. He settled into an even deeper arch as Arun apparently hit the spot, both of them building toward monumental orgasm. As Sky painted the wall with what must have been gallons of cum, Arun seemed to do the same to his insides, jizz leaking out of Sky’s hole as Arun continued pumping in orgasmic bliss.

Sky cooed as Arun slowly pulled out, taking small steps back in order to reveal foot after foot of unimaginable dick to the morning air. I was still having trouble mentally processing the image. Sky having become a literal giant I think I had successfully wrapped my head around, that wasn’t my first rodeo, but for some reason my brain rejected the unreality of what looked like several feet of schlong extending from Arun’s crotch. Sky shivered as Arun’s massive head popped out of his hole, Arun’s dick audibly slamming against the ground as they leaned back in to rest their head on Sky’s gargantuan booty, breathing heavy with exhaustion. Sky leaned his head back with a final post-coital aftershock of pleasure, sighing deeply into the morning mist and letting his eyes dance in the swirls and eddies, before landing on me, frozen in rapt fascination.

“Oh! Uh. G’morning,” he said, cheeks red as the sunrise.

#I named him Dwayne in my head in the very beginning of this series and never said this man's name until now lollll

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takerfoxx · 4 years

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Um...

Right. Okay, so here we have the finale of season one, and with the announcement that we are indeed getting a second cour (ha! Called it!), they wisely did not wrap anything up but instead cranked up the momentum, ending things on a literal cliffhanger.

So...huh.

Now, there are two principle points I’d like to focus on here. And the first ought to be obvious.

=ahem-

SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!

MAIN EVENT OF THE MAGICAL GIRL BRAWL! WE HAVE KNIGHT OF JUSTICE SAYAKA MIKI TAKING ON HOLY SHARPSHOOTER MAMI TOMOE, IN HER SECOND EVER TITLE DEFENSE! KOUHAI VS. SEMPAI! STUDENT VS. MENTOR! WILL THE IMMOVABLE OBJECT BE ABLE TO TOPPLE THE IRRESISTIBLE FORCE, OR HAS SAYAKA BROUGHT A KNIFE TO A GUN FIGHT? FIND OUT, ONLY ON PPV!

Yeah, okay, that happened. The third ever one-on-one fight between two of the classic megucas, and this one involved BEST GIRL Sayaka Miki, whom I’ve been waiting desperately for.

I mean, Sayaka vs. Mami! Can you get any more hype than that?

So...why was I not as hype as I ought to have been?

Well, the answer to that is simple. It’s because somebody got really excited after seeing the fight and decided to post spoilers all over social media before I could see the episode, spoiling Sayaka’s big entrance and the fact that she fights Mami for me! I mean, she even opened with her signature fire extinguisher spot! I would’ve flipped my shit!

See, this is why I use the spoiler break! So I don’t do that to someone else!

But all griping aside, the fight really was amazing. Sayaka gets unfairly dismissed as the scrub of the group, mainly due to her getting absolutely trounced by Kyoko in their 1v1 and later succumbing to despair, but let’s face it: she was a rookie, one with no real training, made to find her own way while being compared to veterans like Kyoko and Mami, Homura the cheatspammer, and Madoka’s sheer unnatural potential. Sure, she powerleveled in Rebellion Story, but that was due to supernatural means.

Well, I mean, more supernatural than usual.

Here, we get to see what would have happened had Mami survived to train Sayaka properly, if Sayaka got some actual experience and learned to use her abilities.

And she kind of kicks ass.

I mean, my girl straight up tanks a Tiro Finale, even going so far as getting her own arm blown off in what was probably the franchise’s goriest scene yet, and simply snatched her own hand out of midair with her regenerating arm! She went head-on with superpowered Mami Doppel (I think?) and held her own?

I mean, it didn’t last, because superpowered Mami Doppel, but she still made a good showing of herself. Which leads to Iroha summing her Doppel (of course) and...Yachiyo summoning hers, because apparently she could always do that? And...um...

Yachiyo. Dude.

I’m sorry, but that whole...scorpion thing they were going for might have worked as a full witch, but with Yachiyo’s head sticking out the front with her on all fours just looked really, really stupid. Like, distractingly stupid.

So anyway, them working together manages to be enough to bring down Mami (whom apparently has transformed into an Uwasa by this point?!), but the whole museum comes crashing down and Iroha is dragged away by Mami, who by this point is quite coocoo, as is her wont.

So yeah. Awesome fight. Interested to see if Sayaka sticks around to help Yachiyo, and if we’re getting more of Kyoko. I presume Madoka and Homura make their debut next season.

So...now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about the thing I’ve been puzzling over for a while now.

We see Touka give her big Hitler-esque speech with the WoM gathered below her in their cult robes. Rena’s not having it and tries to leave, but gets blocked off by the others. And apparently Yui, Felicia, and Sana are either up to something and trying to blend in, or they’ve decided to say fuck it and join up. And apparently Kuroe is there too! Wonder where she’s been.

But anyway, here’s what’s got me all twisted up.

We’re clearly not meant to like the WoM. Alina’s a psycho, Touka’s got that empty-eye grin that’s used to denote villains, their acolytes wear cult robes, Touka’s speech was clearly meant to evoke Nazi Germany, they’ve brainwashed one of the OG’s, everything about how they act and how they’re framed is meant to portray them as the bad guys.

Except...pretty much everything in Touka’s speech was...right? Like, completely? Everything she said about being victims of the Incubators’ scam is exactly what the fans have been saying for years. And she genuinely did find a way out of it, a way to channel negative energy into a temporary witch form without becoming a full witch. She stopped the wish/witch cycle dead! That’s amazing!

So what’s the catch? Why are they the bad guys? I mean, ditch the robes and give the leaders’ an attitude adjustment, and I don’t see how they could be.

Well, I have some theories about that. Of course there is a catch, because this is still PMMM, and I would bet my left arm that it has to do with the Uwasas. We never did get an explanation as to what they were for, but given that their whole purpose is to lure people in, I’d say that they’re the ones providing the necessary fuel for the Doppel system to work. I recall Touka saying something to that effect during her speech, so probably in order to save themselves, the WoM need to prey upon normal humans, harvesting their emotional energy the same way the Incubators harvested that of magical girls? I mean, hell, a lot of what Touka has said has made me believe that she’s kind of a magical girl supremacist, one who sees it as their right to lord over normal people.

Plus, apparently the weird writing when Mami went ham noted her as actually having become an Uwasa (or so I’m told), so what if that’s what Uwasa are? What if they really are kind of witches, ones created from WoM members? Which would also make Touka a bit of hypocrite.

Also, Walpurgisnacht is fucking coming. Fuck.

So that was the first season of Magia Record, something I went into with plenty of reservations but did eventually get won over by! I mean, I didn’t love it, and still consider it the weakest of the three shows I watched this season, but I still liked it a lot, flaws and all. Solid 7.5 out of 10, and hopefully season two will ramp things up, now that all the gang is established the plot is finally moving.

And that new ED was dope.

#puella magi madoka magica #pmmm #magia record #yachiyo nanami #iroha tamaki #touka #alina grey #sayaka miki #mami tomoe #reaction

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sinceileftyoublog · 4 years

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Little Kid Interview: Pry It Open

BY JORDAN MAINZER

A man comes home from work and finds his wife’s clothes strewn about on the floor. In that situation, most people with a healthy amount of pessimism would assume infidelity. The narrator in Little Kid songs assumes rapture. Indeed, Transfiguration Highway, the latest from the Toronto band fronted by singer-songwriter Kenny Boothby and their first for Solitaire Recordings, juxtaposes country-leaning, classic rock instrumentation with stories of people yearning, classically misguided, downtrodden, or lost. And unlike much of their previous material, the songs are tight and concise, circling with banjo, harmonica, and drums as opposed to minimal and drawn out guitar exercises, leaving Boothby’s words for maximum impact. Take “Thief On The Cross”, where Boothby not-so-secretly wishes other bands who they’ve known and made it big would take them along, revolving around a chugging guitar riff, banjo plucks, and celebratory bar-room piano. On the opposite emotional spectrum is “All Night (Golden Ring)”, a gentle duet between Boothby and multi-instrumentalist Megan Lunn, about another famous duet partnership, Tammy Wynette and George Jones, who eventually recorded purely for commercial reasons post-divorce and Jones’ abuse. Even Boothby’s sneering, whispered vocals on the title track effectively mirror the subtleties of his observations about the way his hometown had changed, as he logically muses along over a slinky bass line and 4/4 drum beat.

As much as he describes the characters like the one in “I Thought That You’d Been Raptured” as a joke, Boothby certainly uses the songs on Transfiguration Highway to process his own life. He grew up Christian and essentially learned how to play music through church, listening almost exclusively to Christian music till he was a teenager. Though gender and power dynamics play a role in the negative behavior of characters fake and real, like the idiot husband or Jones, Boothby’s analysis of the rest suggests a sort of hymnal reverence, or at least the possibility of goodness. The down-on-their-luck gamblers on the Whitney-esque “Losing” are treated with an exasperated smile. And on closer “Pry”, Boothby sings repeatedly, “I’ll pry it open,” not just referring to his heart but the gates of heaven. There’s room for ya if you’re kind.

I spoke with Boothby in late July about Transfiguration Highway, Christianity and Christian music, and his love-hate relationship with Bob Dylan. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: What is your current relationship with religion in general?

Kenny Boothby: I guess I wouldn’t be comfortable saying I’m a Christian, per se. I’m culturally Christian, if that makes sense. I was raised that way. But I wouldn’t say Jesus is my savoir or anything that would have to be on that checklist for a lot of people. It’s part of my history--I value it for a lot of reasons, but I wouldn’t be comfortable saying I’m a Christian in any way, really. It sticks around because I like the imagery and it shaped my worldview, for better or worse, in a lot of ways. It’s a complex relationship.

SILY: I know you’re influenced by Christian music--not what people think of, like contemporary Christian rock--but hymnals.

KB: I grew up listening to almost exclusively Christian music till I was a teen. Some of those bands still stick around and are important to me, but largely, it wasn’t a very artful group. Nowadays, even the ones I would still listen to wouldn’t meet the people’s requirements either, like Sufjan Stevens or early Pedro the Lion. That’s the closest thing that could be considered Christian music I still listen to. But I learned how to play music at church, so in a sense, there’s a Christian tradition of music that I’m part of in a way.

SILY: On the lead track on the album, “I Thought That You’d Been Raptured”, the character in the song, his first thought when he saw his wife’s clothes on the floor was not that she was having an affair but that she’d been raptured. Would you say this character is naive, and naive because of religion?

KB: Hmm...to me, the character’s made to be a bit of a joke to me. I view him as a stupid man. [laughs] Walking in and making these assumptions. Maybe he’s entitled and out of touch with the relationship himself, like some of the things he lists about the relationship and why he should have gotten to heaven. So, naive, but also arrogant. I connect it to religion, but it wasn’t meant to be a send-up of Christianity, almost more of a gender-based thing. This is a man who is so unaware of his wife’s needs and that she’s looking for attention elsewhere that his first thought is he’s done everything right. But I guess it could come across that way.

SILY: I love the moment where he comes in and sees a crucifix above the bed, and thinks, “As I watched, his limbs were spreading out,” and the two people intertwined in bed also have limbs spreading out. It’s like this is the moment where his innocence, or whatever was blocking him from realizing what was going on, was lost.

KB: That makes sense. I often write songs kind of quick--it feels like a very long process, but often, the active time I’m sitting there writing is kind of short. That day, especially, was less than an hour of sitting there and assembling words. Some of it is not as intentional as it may seem, but when you say that, I’m like, “Cool, right on!” It’s interesting what the subconscious mind can whip up sometimes.

SILY: This record more so than anything else you’ve made sounds bigger. Why did you make that choice at this time in the existence of the band? Did it have to do with signing to a new label?

KB: When we made it, we didn’t have a label or anything attached to it. The process was the same, though we had access to a tape machine for the first time and could record live to tape. Artistically, it’s sort of the logical next step for us. But Dan [Rutman] from Solitaire, I’d been in touch with him for a while because my friend [Brigitte] Naggar from Common Holly is on the label. I knew he was kind of interested. I got the sense he wasn’t super into it at first but maybe he needed it to grow in on him. After the label decision, we did decide on a grander roll-out with visualizers and that sort of thing, because that’s on the label’s side. That’s Dan’s expertise: How do we get people hyped on this more. Before, we were like, “Let’s do a post on every social media saying, ‘Hey, this’ll be out in a month.’” And then a month later, we’d put it out. There wasn’t much thought to it. Anything that’s grander is more on the PR front: label expertise, money being paid to publicists. It comes across as more of a grand thing, and that’s cool and what we were hoping to get out of the label. To have more people hear it. The process for making the album was more or less the same--what was bigger was the social media and the storytelling to entice people to listen.

SILY: What was the inspiration behind the sequencing of the record?

KB: That’s something we always take a long time thinking about and noticing during recording, like, “That’ll be a good first song,” or, “That could be a closer.” It’s something we start to agree on pretty early. But then when you pick the track list, it can be really difficult. This one was hard to sequence. I think it was the last day of recording at [bassist Paul Vroom’s] old place, The Pharmacy, and me and Meg sat down, and I wrote down the titles of the songs on an old piece of paper. I took a sharpie and was writing the key for each song on there as well. Some of them ended on a different key, so I was thinking about the circle of fifths. There were some that didn’t work well that way, but there were some that ended abruptly enough that the key could change and it felt okay still. I approached it that way and then showed it to Meg, and she recommended switching two of them or something, and then we both looked at it and thought, “That seems pretty good.” We showed it to the rest of the band, and everybody kind of agreed that it worked.

Another funny detail: I wrote the keys on each one, but then I also put a cowboy hat on top of the ones that had kind of a twang to them, and I think I was trying to spread the twang evenly across the album.

SILY: Does “I Thought That You’d Been Raptured” segue into “What’s In A Name”?

KB: It does. That’s not necessarily a planned thing, but I noticed [the former] landed on an “A” chord and the other song starts with an “A” chord. It worked musically and was an interesting second track.

SILY: There’s a nice level of variation from track-to-track, from aesthetic to time signature to lyrical themes. And then the couple short tracks, “Candle Out” and “Gill”, are nice breaks.

KB: That’s kind of different for us. We often have very long songs. This album has some of our shortest ones: The average track length is probably three-and-a-half minutes, maybe 4, which is almost a normal song length. Those really short ones are new for us. “Candle Out” was a musical idea I had, and it was just about all you could do with the idea, and “Gill” was just an instrumental that I wrote about my friend who passed away. The day of her funeral I was playing and I came up with it. But yeah, we were kind of kicking around with them, trying to figure out what to do with them. “Candle Out” seemed like a good closer for the side, and we thought about opening a side with it, too. Definitely, they’re breathers and sequenced accordingly to be in a similar spot in the track list on both sides.

SILY: “Gill” precedes the longest track on the album, “Pry”, that fits more with your past material. “Pry” almost seems to be not the emotional climax in terms of the narrative but the peak of emotional feeling on the record.

KB: It’s probably the most sincere song on there, and maybe the most personal, to be honest. More than usual, there’s storytelling on this one, but that one was a feelings song. The lyrics are fairly simple in the effect that they’re not building on each other like a story, but maybe they’re harder to decipher for that reason. It’s the simplest in a lot of ways, but I feel strongly about it in a different way I do something like “Rapture” for sure.

SILY: The repetition of the lyrics definitely mirrors the repetition of a lot of the chords.

KB: It’s a two-chorder, for sure. There’s a little twist at the end, some surprise chords, but it’s mostly these two. It’s something I used to do a lot more often, but we’re getting really into the fucky chords these days.

SILY: Were there any newfound instrumental influences on this record?

KB: That’s a good question. The most obvious touch point when you turn the record on is Bob Dylan. I have kind of a love/hate relationship with Bob Dylan--I feel strongly for him, and I mostly love him, for years now. If you know that, there are lyrical hints or subtitles in other songs that are based on Bob Dylan. He’s been an influence, though I don’t know if I’ve ever really sounded like him before. “Losing” is a traditional Canadian, Neil Young/The Band kind of vibe. That one was written, I had the piano line for a while and was picturing a soft country rock kind of song. That day, it was [electric guitarist/drummer Brodie Germain], Paul, and I, and I showed them the song. We did the initial guitar, bass, and drums all together. Brodie was the right drummer to be on that one since he was raised on classic rock and Neil Young. We felt, “That’s nice we have a song that has that kind of feel,” because if we’re together, we’re having some beers and it always ends up we’re listening to some Neil Young song and talking about how just slow enough the drum beat is. The piano was new. I was basing so much around the piano. Every song has some, and some are centered around it, but I’m not sure where that influence came from other than I’ve been playing my piano a lot more.

SILY: The Dylan influence is an interesting one, because in his music, he has the same relationship with religion or religious allusions that you do.

KB: That’s something that connects me with him for sure. His Christian records are terrible--I can’t listen to them--but I have really low tolerance for 1980′s music and the production at that time. I think those are late 70′s, but he was just starting to get to that shiny sound. And the lyrics are just fucking brutal on them too. When he went full Christian, that was a really bad scene. All my favorite records of his are in the first six or seven, and they do have a lot of little references. “Highway 61 Revisited”, the song, is a big influence.

SILY: Have you heard the new releases from Dylan and Neil Young?

KB: I’ve listened to the Dylan one just once. I liked it okay. I was enjoying the music of it, thinking it was produced in a fairly tasteful way for his more recent stuff, and the playing on it was great. Some of the lyrics were good, some were kind of garbage. I really don’t like really direct rhymes, like if you rhyme “truck” with “duck”. When it’s a full-on rhyme, I’m cringing, to be honest. Some of Dylan’s rhymes, I just know what he’s gonna say next, and it pisses me off. Like it’s too obvious...Here I am criticizing Bob Dylan’s lyrics. I’m not trying to do that. But a lot of them on this album I was cringing at.

The newly unearthed Neil Young album [Homegrown] of course is pretty cool. I like his records from right around that time a lot, so it’s cool to have another piece from that time in his career. I kind of see why it was shelved, though. It’s not as strong as some of those. But there’s some cool stuff. I actually really like the weird one with the glass, and he’s telling a story, and somebody’s sliding their finger around a glass. It’s really strange. I appreciate that’s in there for sure.

SILY: Did you have live dates that were affected by the pandemic?

KB: The only ones we had set in stone were from the release weekend. We were gonna be playing in Toronto and Montreal and Kingston, all within a pretty short drive within Canada. In September, we started the process of booking a tour, which is now of course not happening. It’s a bummer since we never really toured before, and I made the decision that I would more seriously be a musician this year for at least the next few years as opposed to having to take time off to do tours and stuff. Nature had another plan, so to speak, and now I can’t do that. [laughs] It’s frustrating, but mostly, I missed the release shows quite a bit. There’s always that date on the horizon for a long time, and the celebration of it is the show, and the catharsis happens there and I feel free of the album after that show. But there are a lot of other musicians for whom it’s been more painful financially and otherwise.

SILY: Have you considered doing a live stream from a socially distant venue or your practice space?

KB: That would be really cool. We were trying to get this grant to do a distant concert film. I don’t think we got it since we haven’t heard back. But when it’s safe for us as a band to get together or when we all feel comfortable, it would be cool to try. Like a Radiohead [In Rainbows - From the Basement] kind of vibe. I’m hoping we could have other songs finished. Maybe when shows are back we could play the album through.

SILY: What else is next for you?

KB: In December, Brodie was here. In November, he played a few shows with us. He moved away to the UK but was back for about a month and a half. We thought, “He’s here, let’s record some stuff.” We recorded six or seven songs. Some of them are super long, some of our longest, so we almost have enough for a record already, but we aren’t sure they’re all keepers. Mostly, I have to write a lot of lyrics to flesh it out, and that hasn’t been flowing too much. I’ve written a couple in a couple months. In this next month, I’m off work for a month, so I should more seriously write some stuff. Hopefully we have an album done in the fall.

SILY: Is there anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately that’s notable?

KB: I’ve been listening to the album DAMN. by Kendrick Lamar really consistently for the last four months or so. I’ve just been digging into that one, seeming to get more into it every time: the lyrics, the depth of the album is really sinking in for the first time for some reason, though I liked it when it came out. As far as newer records, I like the Phoebe Bridgers record a lot, and Tenci’s My Heart Is An Open Field, and Empty Country, the guy from Cymbals Eat Guitars’ solo album I’ve been digging a lot. Lately, because I’ve been working, I’ve been listening to a lot of mellow stuff that I feel like I could do in the background: Emily Yacina, Advance Base. That’s fairly routine stuff for me. Those are all kind of #kennycore kind of records. I think I’m looking for that comfort in these weird times.

SILY: Would you call Little Kid #kennycore?

KB: [laughs] I hope so. That’s the goal. Make it sound like something I would like to listen to.

Transfiguration Highway by Little Kid

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elsiesmith672 · 4 years

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6 Underrated Marketing and Sales Assets Your Business Needs

Which marketing and sales assets do you use in your business? Probably quite a few!

I’m talking about things like: targeted landing pages; email sequences, sales call scripts, explainer videos, and so on. We all know them and we all rely on them to keep our businesses growing.

Well, today I’d like to talk about something different.

Today, I want to discuss assets that can seriously boost your sales and marketing efforts… except you aren’t using them. Maybe you think they’re not cost-effective; maybe you find them too boring or basic; or perhaps you haven’t thought about using them at all.

This week, let’s show some love to these underrated assets and explore how exactly they can help you grow your business!

Read on, and you will learn:

The #1 way to generate more leads from your content

How to instantly improve your outbound sales process

A free, highly visible asset you already have but aren’t using

A simple way to add a personal touch to your marketing

And more. Let’s dig in!

(If you’d prefer to listen to this week’s article instead of reading it, click here to jump to the audio version.)

1. Stand out from the competition with custom graphics

I know, I know. You want customers to judge your brand by your content and your ideas… but here’s the thing:

Those are not the first things your audience will notice about your business.

The first element that will stand out to them is your aesthetic. Your design, your choice of colors — that sort of thing. If your brand can make an impression on a purely visual level first, you’ll have a much better chance of getting your content noticed, too!

That’s why it makes great business sense to invest in memorable, distinctive custom graphics for your branded content. Blog post images, social media pics, video thumbnails, infographic designs, website graphics…

…all of these will raise the perceived value of your brand and show it off to potential customers — even before they get to your written content!

Bottom line is, investing in custom graphics is a great way to get your content noticed and improve your audience’s experience. Also, it’s extremely affordable, and can be tailored to fit any visual style, such as:

Cartoons and comics

Stock photos

Data visualizations

3D graphics

And many, many more. If you want to make your branded content stand out more and be more memorable, visuals are the first thing to examine.

2. Generate more leads with content upgrades and lead magnets

Would you like your content to convert better? Here’s the easiest way to do that: promise your audience additional value in exchange for their contact info.

You can accomplish this by offering your potential customers access to lead magnets and content upgrades. These assets expand on your existing content with additional advice, solutions, and resources. And in order to get them, people need to give away their personal details — name, email address, phone number, etc.

What’s the difference between a lead magnet and a content upgrade? Great question!

Lead magnets are general-purpose assets that you offer to everyone who visits your website. You can do it through a pop-up, a dedicated landing page, or a persistent opt-in form on your site.

Content upgrades are bonus resources that build on one, specific piece of content. They’re extremely targeted and only accessible to customers who just consumed said content. Normally you offer content upgrades through dedicated calls to action and opt-in forms at the end of articles, videos, infographics, etc.

Content upgrades and lead magnets are incredibly effective at capturing high-quality leads for your business. So if you’re not using them, now’s the time! Check out our past guides on how to create these assets for your business:

The Draw Shop’s guide to lead magnets: Part 1 and Part 2

14 types of content upgrades you can create for your brand

3. Take advantage of “free real estate” in your email signature

Yes, your email signature can be a sales and marketing asset. It’s very prominent, dozens of people see it every week, and it costs you absolutely nothing to use. And yet, all this time you’ve just been putting your name and company role in there!

It’s time to use that “free real estate” for something more creative, don’t you think? Here are a few ideas to start you off…

If you have a killer piece of content you’re proud of, this is the place to show it off.

You can also direct people to sign up for a freebie from your email signature.

Need more respondents for a survey? Link to it with a short call to action.

This one’s for the social (media) butterflies: put your socials into your signature.

If you did an awesome talk, point people to the video of it, or even just the slides.

Even if you have nothing to show off — for the record, I don’t believe you! — you can always turn your signature into something intriguing, like “Ask me about that time I said no to a $100 million dollar acquisition deal.” Just make sure it’s true, relevant to your brand, and interesting.

Oh, and speaking of email…

4. Boost outbound ROI with clever follow-up emails

Engaging, memorable, and persuasive follow-up messages can absolutely transform your communication, sales and marketing included.

For example:

If you have an outbound sales process and you want to increase your conversions, start by leveling up your follow-up game. Even catching an extra 10% of prospects who slip through the cracks will seriously boost your bottom line!

And if you need to secure backlinks, pitch a potential affiliate, publish an article off-site, or snag a big-name guest for your podcast… guess what? Solid follow-up will dramatically improve your odds in all these cases.

Follow-up emails are great for more than sales and marketing, though. They will serve you well when locking down delayed payments, reaching out to job seekers, collecting testimonials, scheduling case study interviews… you name it.

Finally, follow-up emails hit the sweet spot between automated marketing and personal, high-touch marketing. Here’s why…

Once you’ve created a follow-up email, or a series of emails, for a specific scenario, that’s it! Going forward, you can just reuse them again and again, only making slight tweaks to personalize the message. And for bonus brownie points, you can automate your follow-up process with a CRM like HubSpot.

Bottom line is, follow-up emails are an awesome asset for any entrepreneur. Craft them, use them, love them!

5. Wow new customers with personalized thank-you videos

Nothing impresses your customers more than marketing with a personal touch. Real, authentic brand interactions are rare these days, because let’s be honest: they’re a big investment. They take time and attention to implement, and they don’t scale easily.

But there’s one type of bespoke, intimate marketing that I believe can benefit any business, even if your funnel is 100% automated…

Personalized thank-you videos.

Why do I like thank-you videos so much? Because they hit the “sweet spot” between intimacy and scale. Yes, you have to show up on camera and thank your customer by name for their purchase. And even at 30-60 seconds per video, it adds up.

But on the other hand, thank-you videos are much less demanding than a phone call or a face-to-face meeting — but feel just as personal. And unlike either of those, you don’t even have to interact with the customer in real time!

And finally, you can partially automate the process. Imagine this:

A new order comes in. Someone on your team gets assigned a thank-you video and receives all the relevant info about the customer. They record a 30-60 second clip, paste the video link into a custom email template, then feed it into your CRM, hit Send… and done!

And just like that, you took a high-touch strategy that doesn’t scale and enhanced your existing marketing funnel with it. Go you!

6. Earn undivided attention with a powerful Elevator Pitch

Converting cold leads into paying customers is hard. Before you can earn someone’s money, you have to earn their attention first. And in our fast-paced, easily distractible world, it’s almost more difficult than getting someone to buy from you!

An Elevator Pitch is designed to cut through all the distractions and grab your prospects’ attention as fast as possible. It’s a single, memorable statement about your business that you can deliver in 30 seconds or less. And it has ONE job — getting potential customers excited enough and curious enough to say the 3 all-important words…

“Tell me more.”

I know what you’re thinking, “There’s no way I can hook people on my business in 30 seconds!” I disagree. My team has already helped dozens of businesses formulate an irresistible Elevator Pitch — and we want to create one for you, too.

All you need is to hop on a 30-minute consultation with one of our expert copywriters here at The Draw Shop. They will help you define the problem you solve, how you solve it, and the life-changing results your customers will see from working with you.

Then we’ll transform your input into a unique Elevator Pitch for your brand — a powerful 30-second statement scientifically designed to stand out, delight, persuade… and convert.

And we’ll top it off with a one-page, one-of-a-king infographic that makes your pitch into an engaging visual story! That one is a valuable marketing asset in its own right — you can use it to…

Share it with your team

Feature it on your website

Use it in your email signature

Put it on the back of your business card

Spread it on social media

And more!

Interested?

Visit this page to book your appointment, and create your

#Ceative Design Agency

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khaleesimaka · 7 years

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Cherry Bomb

Here’s my 2nd entry for Reverb 2017.

I had the pleasure of working with @nori-wings whose art you find here and @soundofez whose version fic can be found here. Please check them out and leave them nice comments ❤︎

Summary: A year has passed since Soul and Maka broke up when she proposes they go back to being friends like they were before. The only problem is being friends is hard when you're still in love. College Exes AU.

Read on FFN or AO3 or below.

“Would you like to buy some flowers or chocolates for your special someone?”

Soul blinked down at the girl in front of him. She barely reached his shoulders, her dark hair tied in twin pigtails, and a blindingly bright smile. In either hand she held the two previously mentioned items, lifting them as if tempting him to pick one. A beautiful set of chocolates in a very pink box paired with red and white carnations beamed up at him in a dazzling mix of colors to celebrate the holiday. He should have known to avoid the quad during Valentine’s season considering he never partook in the annual sweetheart sale the student clubs put on.

Usually when he walked across the quad, people ignored and bypassed him thanks to the permanent scowl etched on his face and the pissed off glare he gave them. It was part of his charm; something everyone who had known him for the last two years had associated with him no matter if he were walking alone or with someone else. He was proud of his reputation. It gave him a moment of peace when he left the confines of his dorm.

Except, for some odd reason this girl had the balls to approach him and even had the audacity to ask if he wanted to buy something. Since when did Soul Evans buy anything from the clubs?

Then his gaze dropped to the badge placed over her heart, and his own gave a traitorous lurch. It was the same club she was a part of; the one she had created their first year in college; the one she had hounded him down in the dorms for when he refused to put his signature on her petition. The same club she would have never tried to form had they not met. Seeing the badge now, it’s generic Protect the Environment slogan arching over a tree, twisted his stomach and left his chest heavy.

It stirred old memories within. Opened old wounds he had tried to heal since the break up.

“I’m gonna pass,” he said, pushing past her.

“A-are you sure? You don’t wanna give your girlfriend something? I’m sure Maka would--”

He growled under his breath at the mention of her name and roughly pulled out his phone to drown himself in the cool tunes of Miles Davis. Anything to pry the memory of her out of his mind.

Close to a year had passed since him and Maka broke up, and somehow she still managed to wiggle her way into his life no matter how much he rathered she didn’t. It was worse enough he still lived in the same dorm as her and knew her schedule, he didn’t need to be reminded of her on his way back from class. He didn’t need to be reminded how in love with her he still was even after spending so long telling himself he wasn’t. He didn’t need to be reminded of the past he shared with her every time he turned around.

Unfortunately for him, though, he wasn’t going to get off that easily apparently.

Everyone said falling in love was easy, but they never mentioned how hard it was to fall out of it.

Then again, it was what he deserved for how badly he fucked up.

“May I inquire why you insist on coming to my room after your morning class is over?” Wes asked in way of greeting when Soul walked into his dorm room and collapsed on his bed. “Just because I’m your brother, it doesn’t give you the right to just waltz in, you know. I could’ve been fucking someone.”

“Your room is close to the main doors,” Soul said, his voice muffled by the pillow.

“It wouldn’t kill you to walk an extra ten steps to your dorm.”

“Probably would. Have you ever seen 1000 Ways to Die? Pretty sure there’s an episode about it.”

“Or maybe it has something to do with a certain someone leaving her dorm at this exact time,” Wes teasingly commented. “I would imagine she’s heading out the door right now. If you hurry and leave, you can probably catch her and have a chat with her. Maybe talk things out so you don’t hide out here anymore.”

“Nice try, but she doesn’t wanna talk. I don’t wanna talk. We broke up. We both moved on. Hakuna matata, the past is in the past, and all that other Disney bullshit,” Soul waved off, flipping himself over on the bed so he was staring at the ceiling instead of smothering himself in Wes’s pillow. Dying from the fumes of Calvin Klein cologne wasn’t the way he planned to go.

“We? I didn’t know we were speaking French.”

“You know what I mean, Wes,” Soul growled. “Maka,” he ignored the sting in his heart from speaking her name, “and I have both moved on. Stop acting like there’s something else ‘cause there isn’t.”

The sound of a chair squeaking told Soul his brother was giving him a sly smile with her perfectly plucked brows arched and tilt of the head for added effect. The same expression his brother had given him since the incident and every time the topic of his ex-girlfriend was brought up. The one that told anyone who knew Wesley Theodore Evans well enough that he knew the details of what had happened in great detail and was practically bursting to meddle in his brother’s love life.

“Oh, come off it, little brother. You and I both know that’s a bold-faced lie ‘cause if it was true, you wouldn’t be in here hiding out. Would you?”

Silence fell between them save for the low hum of the air conditioner. Soul bit the inside of his cheek so his mind could focus on another pain besides the hurt searing his heart. He had managed to go a month without wallowing in his own heartbreak, and he wasn’t going to break his streak no matter what.

Maka had moved on from him. He could do the same.

“I’m not hiding,” Soul said, his voice low and quiet. “I’m tired. It’s not my fault your room is closer to the doors than mine.”

“Soul.”

He flinched at the rough, sharp tone of his name coming from his brother’s mouth. It had been a while since Wes had to reprimand him for anything, and Soul had almost forgotten what it sounded like. Compared to their parents, Wes’s scolding was always ten times worse with the most effect on Soul which was more likely because out of everyone in the world, Wes was the one person he never wanted to disappoint.

A few seconds later, Wes was standing akimbo over Soul, his mouth arched down in a frown that didn’t suit his pretty boy face at all and brows furrowed. Dread prickled over his chest at the sight of it, and he knew he had fucked up. He probably should have gave in and admitted to the truth when he had the chance. Whatever Was was about to say, it was definitely worse than succumbing to defeat.

While Wes was the funny, teasing brother who seized every opportunity to embarrass Soul, he was also the kind of brother who picked his words carefully and knew exactly what to say for the right effect.

Sighing, Wes closed his eyes and rubbed at his temples. “I get it, Soul. I do. You loved Maka -- still love her -- and don’t wanna see her walking to class, but this isn’t healthy.”

Brown, tired eyes snapped to red before he continued.

“Not seeing Maka or talking about her is gonna make it harder for you to get over her. You two broke up, and you realized it was a mistake only to have her reject you so you hurting is normal. But you gotta get over this instead of hiding out and wallowing in your own pain.”

“I’m not wallowing.”

“You are, and you know,” Wes said, pointing a finger at him. “It’s been six months, Soul. We’ve had a whole semester and winter break for you to distance yourself from her and get over her, but you live in the same dorm as her. Hell, she goes to the same school. You two are bound to see each other at some point. It’s better if you get passed this awkward situation so you can live your life normally.”

Wes fell silent for a second. His gaze pulled away from Soul’s which was his tell that he knew something his brother didn’t, and it urged Soul to know what. Especially if it had to do with the topic of Maka.

“Or maybe you should talk to Maka. Apologize for breaking up with her and for your outburst. Maybe there’s a chance she wants to be friends or something,” Wes shrugged.

Soul’s interest in what his brother knew crumbled.

Whatever it was, it certainly didn’t have anything to do with Maka and talking things out.

“Sure,” Soul snorted. “I’ll go talk to her. Right after I discover another universe where Maka and I aren’t broken up ‘cause that’s the only way she’d talk to me.”

Pushing himself off the bed, Soul checked his phone for the time and determine if the coast was clear or not before standing up and stretching. His brother, for all his good intentions, was in the wrong, and he knew it. Maka didn’t want to talk to him. She had cut him off from every social media platform they were on, and he was more than sure she had his name on her phone as some profanity so she knew if he ever tried to contact her. They were done, over, and there was nothing he could do to change it.

“I thought you were gonna give me some brotherly advice, but now you’re just speaking from your ass,” Soul grumbled, picking his backpack up from where he had dropped it. “Thanks for letting me crash here.”

“I wasn’t letting you do anything. You invited yourself into my room,” Wes mumbled under his breath. Louder, he said, “I’m not speaking from ass about Maka, though. I heard from a reliable source she might still have feelings for you.”

Ignoring the small crack of hope in his chest, Soul shook his head and waved his brother’s words away. “Whoever your source is, they’re lying. I was there for the break up, the incident in August, and I know Maka doesn’t want anything to do with me anymore.”

He hated how soft his voice went at the end, the pain stinging across his heart at his own words, and prayed Wes would pretend along with him it hadn’t happened.

The clap on his shoulder and light squeeze of his brother’s hand told him otherwise.

“I really think you should listen to me just this once, little brother. Muster up the courage and talk to Maka. It might go smoother than it did before.”

For a split second, he almost considered to do exactly so.

Maybe it was the sincerity in Wes’s words or the simple fact he was older and wiser than his little brother, but Soul almost considered to talk to Maka about the break up.

Almost.

Sometimes, even with how much more knowledgeable Wes was about the world than he, Soul knew what the the right thing to do was and what wasn’t in certain situations. And in this particular situation, he knew better about than Wes did.

Between him and Wes, Soul knew Maka better, and he knew if he went to talk to her, she’d only ignore him or break his heart more through her words, and his need to stay away from embarrassing situations was far greater than how much the break up was killing him inside. It was best if he continued what he was doing. He had survived this long, at least. Another year of averting Maka’s path wasn’t about to hurt him more.

“I’ll see you later,” Soul said before leaving his brother’s dorm.

After a day filled with two more classes and one nap, Soul found himself in Liz’s dorm room.

He tried to keep his focus on her half the bedroom to save himself from falling victim of old memories once again, but it was more difficult than he expected. Maybe it was the familiar green stuffed llama sitting on top of her bookshelf or the contrast of her need to be impeccably neat and organized compared to Liz’s messy and disarray half of the room. Or maybe it was the doodles Maka drew on her white board to help motivate her, so adorable and comforting they brought a smile to his face.

Either way, Soul’s gaze continuously drifted over to her side of the room. His heart tugged and coiled at the contentment it brought to him. So familiar and warm, but so far away at the same time.

Soul hated how much he missed the before.

“See anything you like?” Liz asked as she handed him the CD he came to retrieve.

“Not really,” Soul said, pulling his gaze away from the framed photo of Maka and Liz. He remembered a time when it was him in the picture instead of Liz. “I thought you said you cleaned your room.”

“I did. I put my dirty clothes in the hamper so I can wash them later. Technically that is cleaning.”

“It wouldn’t kill you to at least make up your bed or put your school shit where it goes,” Soul muttered.

“God, you sound like my roommate.” Liz’s smirk irked him more than it should have. “Why should I make up my bed if I’m just gonna sleep in there later? ‘Sides, you’re one to talk.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You really wanna give cleanliness tips when your room looks like a tornado crashed through it?”

Liz sat down on her bed prompting for Soul to take the chair at her desk.

“That’s mostly ‘cause my roommate is a tornado,” Soul sighed. Waving the CD, he added, “Thanks for letting me borrow this, by the way. I’ve been looking everywhere for it.”

“And let me guess, torrents and Youtube were all bogus since they copyrighted the shit out of the music before releasing it.”

“I mostly meant I couldn’t find it in stores or iTunes since it was a limited release. I don’t like downloading music illegally. You know that, Liz.”

“Right. How could I forget Mister I’m Too Cool For You is actually afraid to do anything illegal.” She scoffed. “Like ripping music from Youtube will actually get you jail time. No one cares about that kinda shit, Soul.”

His only response was a shrug and slight shake of his head. Soul was fully aware of Liz’s watchful eyes as he once again found his own drifting to Maka’s side of the room. Seeing it now and remembering their past together, he wondered how he ever thought she wasn’t anything except a daddy’s girl. How he couldn’t see passed the bubblegum pink bedspread to notice the leather jacket in the background and realize Maka had always been more than what she seemed to be.

If only he wasn’t such an idiot back then. They’d probably still be together.

“She won’t be back for another hour so you still have time to kill,” Liz said, drawing Soul out of his thoughts. When his gaze met hers again, she shrugged and added, “She’s starting her tutoring sessions for Stein’s biology class today, and apparently the freshman are nervous as fuck for their first quiz so she wants to help ease some of their worries.”

“Thanks, but I didn’t care to know,” he sighed in an attempt to appear aloof on the matter. Though, the knot in his stomach did loosen slightly.

“As if I’d believe that, Soul. I’ve known you long enough to know when you’re bluffing. I’m not an idiot.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Brow quirked, Liz said, “Soul, you do realize everyone close to you knows you’re still attracted to Maka, right? You act like a love sick puppy when anyone mentions her.”

“I’m not a love sick puppy,” he muttered under his breath.

“And I’ve heard from a very reliable source you hide out in Wes’s room every Tuesday and Thursday morning ‘cause you don’t wanna see her. You’re obviously avoiding her which is hilarious since you’re the one who broke up with her. Guess you didn’t take well to her rejecting you back in August, huh?”

“First, I’d appreciate it if you and Wes didn’t talk about me when you’re fucking each other,” Soul said. “Second, I’m not avoiding her. I go to Wes’s room ‘cause it’s closer to the doors than mine! It’s not my fault he decided to be an RA for our dorm! And, third, let’s not talk about what happened in August.” He ran a tired hand through his hair. “I’d rather not be reminded of that, okay?”

“You mean you’d rather not remember how she totally ignored you when you stood over there like James Dean,” she jutted her chin toward the door, “and asked if she wanted to maybe get back together.”

Soul growled under his breath to play down the twisting feeling in his gut at the memory.

Liz let out an airy laugh. “Your face turned so red when you realized she wasn’t going to respond. You were so embarrassed.”

“I came here for a CD. Not to be embarrassed.”

“Soul,” Liz placed her hand over his in the short distance between them and smiled. “I love you, you know that, and you’re like a brother to me. So trust me when I tell you, what you did was stupid and you probably could’ve gone about things another way for different results.”

A small flicker of hope sparked in his heart at her words.

“Maybe if you tried to at least be friends with Maka, she’d say yes this time,” Liz added.

Just like that, the hope died.

Withdrawing his hand from under hers, Soul smirked and shook his head. “God, you need to stop hanging around my brother. You sound just like him.”

Frustration flashed across blue as Liz scowled.

“Maybe if you listened to one of us, you wouldn’t have to mope around and hide out in his room! You know none of this isn’t healthy for you, Soul. You can’t live out the next year trying to avoid Maka every turn you make! You’re gonna make yourself sick. Again.”

He opened his mouth to give a snide remark, but came up short because she was right.

Catching his silence, Liz continued. “I don’t want to break the trust Maka has with me, so all I’m going to say is maybe instead of going the direct get back together route, you should go the friend one. You and Maka were great when you were friends. It might be a nice do-over for you two.”

His gaze lifted to meet hers before falling to the floor again. The voice in his head screamed at him to ignore Liz and his brother and all their suggestions because they were wrong -- wrong, wrong, wrong -- while his heart spoke the opposite.

Deep down, he knew Liz was right.

Out of everyone in the dorm, she was the only one who knew Maka the best since they had been roommates since freshman year. Liz was the one Maka was closest to, the one she would confide to about her own secrets and worries, and Soul knew that. When they were dating, Maka had told Liz things he didn’t think she would and was teased about it mercifully the next day by the girl. She was the only person he could trust when it came to Maka.

“If it’ll change the topic, I’ll think about it,” Soul sighed. “Sound good?”

Her grin was almost devilish as she said, “Sounds good.”

About ten minutes before Maka was meant to return, Soul said his goodbye to Liz and left the dorm room.

He was halfway to his room when he heard the familiar twinkle of Maka’s laugh and his heart gave a warm lurch at the sound. Matters were made worse when his head popped up to see her waving to one of the freshman who lived in the dorm before turning to go down the same hall as him. His heart sunk when her smile disappeared upon seeing him, and the bile taste of disappointment crawled up his throat. Any hope he had felt earlier when talking to Liz vanished.

Somehow, he should have known everything the girl told him was a lie.

Liz, while she was her roommate, she didn’t know Maka either.

At least, she didn’t know Maka like Soul knew her. She didn’t know when Maka had the right mind to ignore someone and hate them, she did it with every fiber of her being. She didn’t know when Maka decided someone was utter trash, she kept them at a distance and never tried to make amends with them. Maka was the type of girl who held grudges, despised her father for years for cheating on her mama, and rarely, if ever, forgave anyone who broke her trust.

Soul assumed breaking up with someone without a warning or explanation filed into breaking their trust with them as well.

It was harder for him to breath as he felt his steps grow closer to Maka. Anxiety weighed heavily in his heart with each passing second, and his palms sweatier. The voice in his head told him to keep his attention to the floor, to only mark her shoes when she passed, but his gaze was more traitorous than he expected.

The moment they passed each other, red met green.

His heart clenched and heated at the same time, the hope from before flickering once again, but this time it didn’t extinguish right away. Unlike earlier with Wes and Liz, his wishful thinking wasn’t coming from a second party. It was from the actual thing, the actual person he needed confirmation from, because he knew Maka. If she hated him, she wouldn’t dare give him a second glance or any if she could help it, and she had looked at him.

Maka Albarn had given him a second glance.

She hated him, despised him with every fiber of her being.

All she wanted to do was gouge his pretty, bedroom eyes out and wipe the handsome smirk clear off his face for what he had done to her. Anger boiled deep in her belly like scorching water in a pot at the sight of him down the hall, and the memories of their together seared her mind like a hot iron. It was the hint of comfortable warmth beneath them that enraged her the most; the tug of her heart and tingle of her fingertips as she craved to smell him, touch him, feel him again.

But she refused to give in to temptation.

Soul Evans had hurt her. She trusted him, allowed him to fill the walls of her cold, dead heart for two years, and what did he do? He decided she wasn’t good enough and broke up with her. His explanation had been half-hearted at best, and the way he avoided her for weeks afterwards when she wanted to talk were the worst. Out of all the men her life, he was the last on the planet who deserved her forgiveness or for her to give him a second glance. Even if there was longing in his gaze the few seconds she caught it before walking down the hallway.

Still, even with rage roaring under her skin, Maka felt her heart tighten. Felt the way desire pricked her skin as she grew steadily closer to him; felt the heat of his body before he was a hair’s breadth away from her. She hated how he still held her heart in his hand.

Maka tried to keep her attention toward the ground as they passed, but her eyes, ever the traitor’s that they were, gave him a second glance, and her heart stuttered. She remembered the color of his better than anything else; how they watched her from across the room, how they softened when she spoke, how they drank up her body in the silence of the night. It was probably her most prominent memory of their relationship she had. Yet, she still wasn’t prepared when jade green locked onto wine red.

Growling to mask the feelings burrowing back to the surface, she pulled her gaze away from him and stared back down the hall to where her dorm was. She refused to busy herself with any thoughts of Soul Evans or why he had been down her hall instead of his own. Refused to turn around and call out his name, see if it still sounded, tasted, the same like so long ago.

He had hurt her. He didn’t deserve her.

He was the scum of the earth, she reminded herself as she slammed her dorm door shut. She swatted the stupid teddy bear he had given her off her bed trying to remember why she even kept it.

#soul eater #soulxmaka #soma fanfic #khalee writes

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scottadamsblog · 7 years

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The Systems President

Was President Trump’s first attempt at getting a healthcare bill a failure?

Your answer to that question probably depends on whether you are a goals-thinker or a systems-thinker.

If you see the world in terms of goals, you would say the healthcare bill did not get enough votes on the first try, and therefore it is clearly a Trump/Ryan failure.

But if you see the world in terms of systems, things look a lot better. I talk about the advantages of systems over goals in my book. The quick summary is that a system is something you do on a regular basis that improves your odds of success in a non-specific way. Systems-thinkers choose paths that allow them to come out ahead in the long run even if they appear to be “failing” along the way.

For example, if you are a founder of a startup that doesn’t work out, you usually end up with new skills. Maybe you also gain new contacts in the industry, more insight into the market, and that sort of thing. Those new assets make your odds of success on the next startup far better.

College students are systems-people. They go to class and study every day without knowing precisely where their careers will lead them. All they know is that a college degree gives them more options and better odds of success. That’s a good system.

I’ve blogged about my main system in life that involves building my Talent Stack. I figure out which skills I need to add to the ones I already have to make myself unique and valuable in the marketplace. For example, right now I’m building out my skillset for livestreaming over Periscope and YouTube. That skill goes well with my blogging. I don’t know exactly where that all ends up, but I know my options will increase with my Talent Stack.

With that bit of background on systems, let’s get back to healthcare. As a systems-thinker, I don’t see the first attempt at a GOP healthcare bill as a failure. I see it as part of Trump’s normal systems-thinking approach. The tell for a good system is that failure puts you AHEAD. And that’s exactly what happened.

By the way, I told you during the campaign that one of Trump’s signature moves is creating two ways to win and no way to lose. He did that again with healthcare. Here were his two ways to win:

1. Healthcare bill gets passed on the first try. Trump looks like an effective leader. The details of the bill get improved over time.

2. The healthcare bill does NOT pass on the first try. This softens up the far right by branding them villains. Now they have to compromise on the next bill or watch as centrist Democrats enter the conversation. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on Obamacare, and the conditions for compromise are IMPROVING EVERY MINUTE. That’s what the Master Persuader tells us happens when you “walk away from the table” like you mean it. Trump just walked away from the table to go work on tax reform. If you watch his Twitter feed, you know he is winking at the public and telling us to stay tuned on healthcare.

Meanwhile, a fascinating thing is happening outside of government. Watch how many private citizens are looking into the details of healthcare reform and even proposing their own solutions on blogs and articles. The nation is engaged on the topic in a way that looks like a self-organizing system. All the public needs is some sort of common website that is designed to discuss the pros and cons of the various ideas in plain language so the best ones can bubble up to the top.

I’ve blogged before that the United States is no longer strictly a Republic. Social media creates a direct-democracy option in the sense that public opinion can be so strong that politicians have to bend to it. But social media only has power if it can focus on something specific. Until the public comes up with its own healthcare plan, social media is powerless.

But consider our unique situation. As far as we citizens can tell, Congress is no longer functional for any issue that has as many lobbyists as the healthcare topic. They can’t get it done on their own. Too many industry-created roadblocks.

Social media, and the weight of public opinion, could overcome any roadblocks in Congress by making it impossible for politicians to get reelected if they ignore the public’s preferred plan. But the public has no preferred plan. There is only public confusion about the options.

As a citizen, I call upon the Trump administration to help the public create a system to sort out the best healthcare options for the country, free from the pressure of lobbyists. Just tell us which website to look at, and we’ll do the rest. When we (collectively) have a good set of proposals (let’s say three different plans), Congress can turn them into bills and vote. If the public takes sides with one of the bills, that helps to neuter the lobbyists. Lobbyists know politicians need to get reelected. And that means lobbyists are helpless when the public and the politicians are on the same side.

I don’t like living in the “can’t do” country. If Congress can’t get healthcare fixed, the public appears ready and willing to fill the gap. All we need is a preferred website to focus that energy.

Better yet, let’s see the debate on healthcare as a limited engagement reality TV show. Bring on the experts on each mini-topic (such as selling insurance across state lines) and have them try to convince a panel of business-expert judges that their plan is the best.

I’d watch it.

---

You might enjoy reading my book because it talks about systems being better than goals.

I’m also on...

Twitter (includes Periscope): @scottadamssays

YouTube: At this link.

Instagram: ScottAdams925

#healthcare #Trump

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articlesubmissionsitesloto3-blog · 4 years

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

Link

It is difficult, these days, to be a fast-casual pasta restaurant. You can’t just be a fast-casual pasta restaurant, quickly serving low-key bowls of carbs. Now you have to be a fast-casual pasta restaurant fit for influencers. Or at least that’s what the Pastagram seems to think.

The Pastagram is a fast-casual pasta restaurant that is designed for weekday lunch breaks, but also Instagram. “Every single detail is thought of as to be the most photogenic as possible,” the press release promises, “catering to a customer base that — today more than ever — seems to give aesthetics as much importance as food quality.”

The “trendy spot” in New York City’s Financial District features “trendy teal blue décor” and also many shapes of pasta, handmade daily, to be paired, mix-and-match style, with many types of sauces. In the press release, the word “trendy” is repeated many times. Is New York City’s Financial District trendy? No, I would say, with all due respect to the New York Stock Exchange. Then again, millennials are the largest generation in the US workforce now, so maybe even workday lunches must be fit for Instagram.

This is how we live now. Restaurants aren’t just experiences; they’re experiences that are supposed to live forever online. A space does not just have to be attractive; it must be photogenic, which is different, which you know if you have ever watched America’s Next Top Model or seen a photo of yourself. This is true even if the space in question is located in a claustrophobic business district filled with angry people wearing lanyards with keycards on them.

Technically, anything you post to Instagram is “Instagrammable,” in the same sense that anything that will eventually break down in your body when you consume it is “food.” But saying a restaurant is “Instagrammable” means it tends to follow variations of the same script. The Verge identifies the necessary elements: neon signs “bearing modestly sly double entendres”; elaborate painted murals of wild animals; artistic custom floor tiles, often bearing “branded greetings.” Other frequent tells: whimsical paper products printed with twee phrases in custom fonts; distinctive patterned tiles or wallpaper; a strong signature color; great light. The Pastagram has many of these things, or at least gestures toward them.

There is something alarming about this homogeneity, but it’s also perversely heartening, how we are all the same. Deep down, we just want to post a picture of a vegan cupcake on a gently distressed table.

“It’s a young place, in a way,” explains Luigi Porceddu, who opened the restaurant, the younger, faster sibling of the more upscale Sola Pasta Bar, with partner Andrea Pedrazzoli. The name came from Pedrazzoli’s 19-year-old brother. “Pastagram, it sounds like Instagram,” Porceddu tells me, “but for us, in Italy, a gram is a unit of measure as well, that we use for pasta.” Originally, they were going to call it Yes We Pasta!, only that seemed too political, and anyway, “you can’t use something that is not around anymore.” So now it’s the Pastagram. “It’s catchy,” he says. “People, they remember the Pastagram.”

But did they originally set out to build an Instagram restaurant, or did that come later, once they had the name? Who can say. “That’s the most beautiful part when you create a restaurant,” Porceddu tells me. “You might have an idea, but then you shift the idea on the go, even before you open. So it was, like, many ideas coming at the same time.”

He is excited about all the Instagrammable details at the restaurant: pop-art-covered chairs, “ceramic art with spaghetti inside,” a pair of hanging monkey lamps, an intense proliferation of the color turquoise. Turquoise is elegant, Porceddu explains, and also universally appealing. “Everyone can love a turquoise, I think,” he says.

But at the Pastagram, as far as I can tell, nobody is ’gramming.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, I eavesdropped as two businessmen discuss one of their son’s ADHD diagnosis. Should they try medication? His wife thought no. He wasn’t sure. One table over, a post-teen man and woman were engaged in an animated conversation about what I eventually figured out was a dog with separation anxiety. I wondered if they were also considering medication. They really should, I thought but did not say, just in case they were going to start Instagramming. They did not.

It was not for lack of tools. Everyone had a phone, either in hand or on the table. A trim man neatly ate Alfredo and checked baseball scores. A different man with neon headphones ate spaghetti and meatballs while watching videos about food, but not the food we were eating. He Instagrammed nothing. On his screen, a hot pot sizzled.

In the corner by the window, under a neon display of pop-arty lips, a round-faced woman kept holding up her phone and gazing at it. She’s totally about to Instagram, I thought, but then it turned out she was Facetiming with her boyfriend, who wasn’t Instagramming either. It was like she didn’t even know this was an Instagram restaurant.

It would be up to me. The problem is that, despite the name, and despite the neon lips, the Pastagram is not very Instagrammable at all.

It is hard to capture the monkey lamp without also photographing the top of someone else’s head. Rachel Sugar/Vox The requisite neon sign! Rachel Sugar/Vox The aforementioned ceramic heart with spaghetti is an unsettling ode to pasta. Rachel Sugar/Vox Yes I Pasta’d (fusilletti with pomodoro sauce). Rachel Sugar/Vox

It’s true that I am not very good at Instagram, that my phone is old, that I am generally embarrassed, despite my generation, to take photos in public. It is also true, I think we can agree, that even with these caveats, none of these photos are great. They feel extremely attainable. The light is cold. The textures are flat. It’s hard to get a picture without accidentally capturing someone else’s head. Nobody looks casually glamorous at the Pastagram. They look like frazzled people eating pasta.

Like Porceddu said, there are a lot of “fun” details at the Pastagram. The monkey lamp is fun. The heart with spaghetti: also fun. The lip display is fodder for Instagram, although the extremely visible wires perhaps undercut its impact somewhat, and my fusilletti with pomodoro sauce and extra tomatoes was quite tasty. What you cannot see in the picture is the white, square, plastic-feeling table it was served on, or the plastic fork I ate it with, which came wrapped in further plastic and did not strike me as very ’grammy.

“The pastas that do well on Instagram are creamy and cheesy,” a colleague told me gravely when I told her about my troubles. “Fusilli is not an Instagrammable pasta.” For the purposes of documentation on the internet, I had ordered wrong. But the light was still the light, and the table was still the table, and there is only so much cheese can do. I searched Instagram for photos taken at the Pastagram. I found four, all of bowls of pasta.

I am not alone in my assessment: The opinion of the New York Post’s restaurant critic is that the Pastagram is tasty but, appearance-wise, “isn’t worth a click.” If anything, he sees that as a victory against the scourge of social media: “Although millennials might howl, it’s excellent news that Pastagram is more successful at serving decent, inexpensive Italian dishes than it is at reaching social-media ‘influencers.’”

It’s true that the Pastagram is much better at making pasta than it is at being a backdrop for Instagrams. What is fascinating is that it wants to try. It is a normal little quick lunch spot, with some good details and ugly floors and mediocre light and a weirdly sexy Instagram, and it wants to be a photogenic star.

It is uncanny to see a restaurant strive and miss on Instagram; it’s like seeing a casual acquaintance post thirsty selfies in ill-fitting jeans. Mistakes reveal effort, and effort is the antithesis of Instagram success. The Pastagram hasn’t put in the effort to look effortless, and the result is that its wires show; it is too much and not enough at once.

It is relatable, in a way. I also would like to be an influencer, and am not. I also like pasta. I am not, I think, alone in either of these beliefs. And so perhaps the Pastagram is exactly the restaurant we need right now, a metaphor for 21st-century urban life. The Pastagram would like to be a very specific type of cool, and isn’t, and still tries anyway. Soon, it’s getting a special “backdrop” for shooting better photos, according to the Post. Probably, it won’t help. It is who it is, and like the rest of us, it is not an Instagram celebrity. It is a pasta restaurant.

And isn’t that okay? Can’t we just eat our lunches, sometimes, and remember them in our minds? Maybe. Certainly, a lot of fast-casual restaurants are harnessing the power of Instagram, to great effect, and it makes sense: It’s great to have your customers do your marketing for you, reminding their friends of your existence when you pop up in their feeds.

At the same time, the truly Instagrammable restaurant remains the exception, not the rule. There are only so many By Chloes and Cha Cha Matchas, restaurants whose Instagrammability alone is a selling point. Even in the age of Instagram, a lot of restaurants mostly just serve food, which is good, because even in the age of Instagram, a lot of people mostly just want to eat it.

Original Source -> At the Instagram restaurant where nobody is Instagramming

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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megadarkbouquettidalwavethings · 6 years

Text

Shooing Carolers Away for a Love That Stays

At some point during that idyllic fall, I developed a cough that wouldn’t go away. Rachel encouraged me to see a doctor. When I finally did, the doctor sent me for a precautionary X-ray, but the machine was broken, so I left, relieved to return to my life as a busy recent college graduate.

The cough remained, however. A few hospital visits later, I learned I had an aggressive form of pediatric leukemia that can also occur in young adults. When I sought a second opinion, I was admitted on the spot.

Only months earlier I had graduated from Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus, having majored in directing and acting. I even forfeited a winter break to study in Russia at the Moscow Art Theater. Now, at 22, I had never been so happy with my life — going to auditions and rehearsals, applying for jobs, and seeing Rachel in between.

I told her I had cancer over dinner at Whole Foods.

“You don’t have to stick around for this,” I said.

I thought we would end things there, but she showed up at Sloan Kettering days later, finding me in pediatrics with greasy hair and wearing size 14 pink sweatpants, provided by the unit. And she kept showing up.

The morning of the carolers, my body tensed as a team of doctors, nurses and students stopped by on their rounds. They frowned at my chart, seeing I hadn’t gained any weight. At 5 feet 6 inches, I weighed only 93 pounds.

“When can I get this feeding tube out?” I asked.

“Not today.”

When they asked how I was feeling, I said, “I think I’m a little anxious?” And Ativan was added to the long list of prescriptions brought to me in tiny plastic cups.

Continue reading the main story

Lying in bed, I could easily imagine the carolers’ lives. They were probably unemployed musical theater actors hired to sing basic harmonies while wearing velvet costumes. Later they would go to a Christmas party with other actor friends, and if someone asked, “What are you working on?” they would say, “Oh, nothing right now. But I’ve got this day job singing Christmas carols for children with cancer. It’s so rewarding.”

In high school, I spent nights and weekends during the holiday season in medieval garb, going to Christmas parties that hired our choir to sing carols for their guests, something I used to joke about in the dorm. It wasn’t until hearing the carolers that I realized how much I had loved singing our jazzed-up version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

During one of the performances of “Deck the Halls” that day, I had tried to hum along, but my vocal cords produced only a strained rasp. Losing my voice meant sacrificing yet another anchor of my identity, a new loss added to the long list I didn’t want to say out loud. If I were to talk about my inability to sing, or how my leggings no longer fit snugly over my hipbones, it would make those losses feel more real.

As predicted, a volunteer appeared in the doorway and said, “Do you want to hear the carolers?”

“No,” I said.

“No,” my roommate said. I liked her already.

Allison was 20. She had started her sophomore year of college in September but left a month later because of “a cold that wouldn’t go away.” She had a blog and often posted about her treatment on social media.

Meanwhile, my Facebook feed had just a few photos of me with a shaved head, enough to make an acquaintance think I was going through a rebellious phase. Although I envied Allison’s online presence, I realized that my disengagement was more about shame than self-preservation.

“How long is your treatment?” I asked.

“Six months.”

Her answer staggered me. By the time she finished, I would be only a quarter of the way done.

“Why?” she asked. “How long is yours?”

“Two years.”

“Why so long?”

“I don’t really know,” I said, embarrassed.

Continue reading the main story

Unlike Allison, I hadn’t asked questions. Ignorance was my survival technique.

That night, long after the carolers had left, there was a quiet knock on the door.

“She’s here,” I thought, and a moment later Rachel walked in with her signature lightness. Her positivity was stubborn but welcome in that room, where my parents and I didn’t even notice that the sun had gone down. We were still stunned to even be there. We had thought I would be an outpatient. No one knew the side effects would be so extreme.

Rachel came bearing gifts, one in a cookie tin and the other in a wrapped cardboard box.

Opening the tin for my parents, Rachel said, “I made these for you.” Inside were blueberry muffins.

“Wow, thank you,” my father said.

“Yes, thank you, Rachel,” my mother said, her tone softer than the polite tolerance from when they first met at the hospital weeks ago.

My parents left so Rachel and I could be alone (well, almost alone — a curtain separated us from Allison). After they stepped out, I felt nervous and relieved because it was the first time Rachel had seen me this sick. I couldn’t pretend I was anything other than how I appeared — skinny, balding, a tube stuffed up my nose and taped to my face.

I patted the side of my bed, gesturing her to come closer.

She handed me my gift and squeezed in beside me — another twin bed. Unwrapping my present, I felt my dry hospital skin against her soft, warm clothes.

“It’s silly,” she said nervously.

That she would feel nervous struck me as ridiculous. Making those blueberry muffins had instantly made her part of the family.

“It’s a Russian stacking doll,” she said, “but a tree.”

I held the wooden Christmas tree, which was painted black with gold, green and red ornaments and a glittery gold top. I opened it to find a series of round, smiling Santas stacked inside, each smaller and more thoughtfully painted than the previous one.

Continue reading the main story

“It reminded me of you,” she said. “It’s unique and pretty, and because you went to Russia, so ——”

“I love it,” I said, placing the gift prominently on my nightstand.

Now, six years later, I have neither leukemia nor Rachel. Still, her gift sits on my coffee table every December, a reminder of when I was so sick, but so grateful. That gift meant I had a person, one who not only made baked goods for my family, but also gave me a silly stacking doll just because it had made her think of me. It meant I existed outside of the hospital, carried along in someone’s thoughts as she walked through a Christmas fair.

In the bed, Rachel held me close, and I folded easily into her arms.

“I’m sorry I’m so small,” I said, letting her in on my fearful inner monologue.

“Shh,” she said.

In the quiet that followed, I knew I loved her. Loving her wasn’t a choice or something I needed to say yet, but it became my one untouchable thing. As my body disappeared, I still had a person to care about. Unable to sing, speak normally, walk without help, look at a screen or read a book, I existed because I loved.

Continue reading the main story

LESLIE GAUTHIER

The post Shooing Carolers Away for a Love That Stays appeared first on dailygate.

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thederivativeofrad · 6 years

Text

Update

We’re doing informative speeches in my COM101 Public Speaking course, (surprise, surprise), and so far there have been five, one of which was mine which quite frankly I wasn’t impressed with compared to how I had been performing.

The other four have been phenomenal, but one so far has stuck with me in a way that I don’t particularly care for. That was a speech about drug addiction, the popularity of heroin, the effects of heroin, and discussion on how we can begin addressing this problem.

As I’ve discussed before, I am on medication for my seizures. They have been diagnosed as stress related and are being treated with Lamotrigine. This drug is not only an anticonvulsant, but it is a rising treatment for bipolar disorder. My neurologist went as far as to say that the medication I’m taking isn’t preventing my seizures directly, it is levelling my emotions to the point where my stress doesn’t build up the same way and they have since ceased.

My first couple of months and quite long periods here and there have been pretty nice. Again, as mentioned, the medication makes me feel like a person again, not like some hallow shell. The thing with being a person is that you’re not happy all the time. Not everything is easily dismissible. In fact, my neurologist said that this will not always affect my mood for the better.

As a medication for bipolar disorder, the point of this medication is not to make one feel better in the traditional sense of how we think of better, rather, it is to level moods and keep violent mood swings from being present. This allows one to work through their emotions, to manage what they’re feeling, while not having to deal with constant swings between mania and depression. This has been radically helpful in my growth as a stronger person, and it’s amazing what less than a year can do.

Those aren’t the drugs we’re collectively worried about, though. Those aren’t considered able to be abused. They don’t give you a high, they’re not something you’d buy illegally unless you needed them and couldn’t afford them at market price without insurance.

What people talk about are

Drugs.™

like marijuana, adderall, coke, meth, heroin, acid, ecstasy, nicotine, alcohol, shrooms...

So many drugs that we can’t even keep track of all the names and the street names and what they do and what they look like, how much they cost and how easy they are to find in your neighbourhood.

I was surrounded by cigarette smoke, not at home but everywhere else. Growing up, every restaurant had a “smoking” section, the world was an ashtray, if so and so you knew didn’t smoke half their family did. It was social, like drinking always has been, and it was very much accepted socially. The smell gave me a headache. A brief whiff of cigarette smoke will give me a massive headache for a couple of hours. The last time I had a solid breath of second hand smoke I almost threw up and was holding my head throughout the last class I had for the day.

It’s not a quick I need to vomit feeling, either, it’s more of a slow something’s wrong... I don’t quite know b--oh lord

Still, I think about it.

I think about how people describe smoking, how it makes them feel, how their stress melts and they can think for a minute. I still see people smoking or chewing I think it’s disgusting I can barely hold down the lunch I forgot to eat but...

Vaping.

Now there’s something that doesn’t have the same apparent consequences.

It doesn’t give me a headache, it’s not shamed publicly, it doesn’t smell bad, it doesn’t stain clothes or teeth or upholstery, it doesn’t leave ashes or butts in the sand at the beach or on the pavement in parking lots or the grass of parks. It can be classy, just like smoking used to be.

People do it just to do it, they do it for nicotine, they do it for THC, CBD, probably E and ten or fifteen other drugs that you can fit in a mod and it’s glorious because no one knows the wiser. What a way to try nicotine to see if it’s really sweet relief. What a way to be high in public and not even feel high at all.

But we’ve all thought about smoking at one point or another, we just decided it was either too gross, too risky, [inclusive] or too expensive.

Let’s take a step back to take two forward.

The speech the girl gave in class today referenced this Reddit thread that consists of an addict explaining what heroin feels like. A few replies down, a particular individual said this:

I'm glad to hear that you're well. I've always been curious about heroin. Not enough to try it, but I'm grateful for an honest account of what it's like. Your story sated my curiosity.

It didn’t sate mine. It sparked mine.

It felt like the internal conversation I’ve had about nicotine; what does it feel like to be chill to be functional and happy without these excess feelings surrounding it? Excess feelings that other drugs provide, like pot. I’ve done the pots.

I’ve consumed marijuana recreationally and medically. I’ve let it lull me to sleep and I’ve stayed awake to feel my head spin like a rolodex and to laugh at someone playing Tetris just because it’s so amazing to me how well they’re doing.

I’m happy, I guess, in a sort of artificial way, but I’m actually just more open--not really reserved in that time. I’d like to think I’m already fairly genuine, but pot makes me more open than I could ever be sober.

I laugh at small things when I’m high because I’m amazed and I don’t hide it.

I cry at small things when I’m high because I’m sensitive and I don’t hide it.

I think thoughts I don’t let myself think when I’m sober because I can’t keep myself from thinking them. They’re not all good thoughts.

Is that me, though?

...

No.

I don’t particularly think so.

I don’t think some of the things I think are reflections of who I am. I don’t think some of the things I laugh at are funny or that some of the things I cry about are sad or hurtful. I don’t feel like marijuana uncovers who I am, I feel like it puts on a different colour mask that’s fun and sometimes relaxing to hide behind, but it’s not normal, it’s not how I think of myself being, nor how I want to be consistently.

So I’m not going to eat a cookie and go to class no matter how well I can hold my composure if I focus on doing so. That’s just wearing the mask and not even embracing it. That’s a mask on top of that mask.

After so many masks it gets hard to see, so what was the point of trying to clear your head if you can’t manage to get a decent view?

So...

About that heroin...

I get the point of how the individual described the drug. He starts off with how wonderful it [is] and lets that spiral until his life [is] encompassed by it. Even so, how does that first bit actually feel? What’s it like to experience a high that doesn’t put you in the clouds, but keeps you on the ground just with rose tinted glasses? Does it feel like love? Does it feel warm? Does it feel like doing the things you want to do because there isn’t anything negative eating at you preventing you from doing what you want to do all the time because why would you ever do anything that you enjoy how dare you say you enjoy anything in the first place

I can’t do

Anything

I enjoy without

Thinking

I can’t just sit back and listen to music I have to listen for the key the time signature the chords the rhythms the lyrics the notes the harmonies the dynamics the intonation the breathing of the vocalist

I can’t read I can’t watch movies I can’t consume media because I can’t shut my mind off for ten seconds in the “what happens next” category to just enjoy and let what happens next happen I have to guess and if I’m wrong I have to figure out what happened and why am I so stupid why couldn’t I figure it out

I can’t just sit back and eat my dinner I have to deconstruct it and figure out how it was made and where everything was sourced from and how many steps it took to get to where it is now and oh no is this under-cooked or just funny coloured or is it rotten or poisoned no no you’re crazy it’s just different than the rest of it for no particular reason other than that it’s organic matter and is imperfect or is it who touched this how can I get money from this if I get sick

I can’t lie down and go to sleep where did that sound come from WHERE DID THAT SOUND COME FROM WHERE DID THAT SOUND COME FROM

What if I could just live?

What if heroin could help me to just live?

...

Well, thankfully, it’s not that bad anymore.

It used to be. My medication makes it better, but it’s not perfect. I still feel bad sometimes and I still get that light headed feeling sometimes that makes me feel like I’m going to wake up somewhere that I wasn’t the last I recall and that’s honestly the worst feeling I’ve ever had in my entire life. I would take a large amount of physical suffering over having to face that again.

That’s one of the reasons I don’t try these things, but it really just comes down to the fact hat no matter how horrendously scarred I may be I’ve determined that figuring out if heroin feels as good as cuddling isn’t worth giving up the guaranteed comfort of cuddling. It boils down to a fairly simple conclusion:

I’m not stupid.

I won’t ever do these drugs.

I won’t drink, I won’t smoke, I won’t shoot up, I won’t huff.

I won’t take my life figuratively or literally through these poisons.

I’m not afraid of becoming an addict.

...

However,

I’m afraid of not ever overcoming the curiosity of being an addict.

I’m afraid I will never grow out of eyeing vapour mods.

I’m afraid of my intrusive thoughts

My considerations of self destruction

I won’t act on them, but we’re not any less afraid of the things we’ve been shown we should not logically fear.

We all have a handful of things we fear to some degree.

I’m not afraid of becoming an addict.

I’m afraid of the part of me who would already be

But he’s not in charge

I am.

Done out, peace update.

#personal #update #rant

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evening-laced-moon-archived · 7 years

Text

Readmored Because It’s Super Long and Detailed (AKA I Can’t Control My HCs Someone Help)

Tagged by: I stole it. Pretty sure it was from @wayfaringtrainers. Tagging: DO THE THING.

➥ what is your character’s full name?: Yuugetsu Ione Wheeler ➥ when were they born?: September 7 (She’s 16 in the main verse. Yes, her parents married and had a child rather early.) ➥ what are their parent’s names?: Jacob and Sera Wheeler ➥ do they have any brothers or sisters?: None. ➥ what kind of eyes do they have?: Very sharp, kinda almond-shaped eyes, though they seem more like cat’s eyes in terms of general shape. They’re very pale, an almost unnatural icy blue color that makes them appear even sharper, especially if she’s glaring daggers at someone. In the Shifter verses, they have a very faint, almost undetectable pattern on them, and they glow slightly if her emotions get the best of her, though it’s hard to tell unless the lighting is dim. In shifter form, they’re red in the Gardevoir verse, dark blue in the Absol verse, and, for some odd reason, pinkish orange in the Charizard version (unless she Mega Evolves, in which case they’re electric blue.) ➥ what kind of hair do they have?: Naturally black, but bleached and dyed lavender. despite this, it’s soft and silky, to the point where you can’t even tell that it’s dyed until you realize that her parents couldn’t have given her that hair color genetically. It’s usually styled in waves that tumble down to the top of her calves, though she may change it for Contest performances. In her Shifter forms in their respective verses, they are naturally turned the respective color for whichever Shifter species she has turned into. Orange for Charizard, pale green for Gardevoir, and white for Absol. ➥ what is their complexion like?: Very pale, soft and silken, like the feeling of custard pudding on your tongue. Her vain and whimsical nature demands that she takes care of her appearance, so she makes sure that she washes her face twice daily. Her skin is pleasantly cool to the touch. It’s rather warm in her Charizard verse forms. ➥ what body type are they?: Thin, dainty, and small. Not very curvy, even as an adult, something she considers a blessing. It’s something very akin to a typical ballerina’s build, almost completely made of lean muscle. Due to her medication and her already high metabolism, she loses weight too quickly and actually has to have a high-calorie diet to avoid losing too much weight. This is why she gets away with eating what she does. ➥ what is listening to their voice like?: A soft, but clear voice. Due to her maternal lineage, her singing voice soothes/revitalizes any who hears it, depending on the kind of song she’s singing. She can control her voice to a frightening degree, and can add “effects” to her voice, like making it seem like it’s echoing, among other things. Her main voiceclaim is momocashew. For a general idea of what her voice sounds like, here are a wide variety of examples of what kinds of voices she can pull off. (Note: some of them are a little deeper than what she sounds like, but you get the idea. In the duets/choruses, the voice in question is momocashew and Cure Parfait) While this is a wide variety of voices, it’s not a perfect representation, so keep that in mind. And here’s a (shitty) voice reel for the Umbra Incident event dialogue voiced by the mun herself, to give a better idea of what she sounds like. ➥ what do they hate most about themselves?: The fact that she isn’t good enough. In her shifter verses, particularly the Charizard version, she hates her non-human forms. Really, while she still views herself above most, she considers herself worthless, and the only people she views as actually decent people are those she views as above her (Her parents, Stahl, June, Shiori, Erebus, Shi, Lana, her idols/role models, etc.) ➥ do they have a favorite quote?: She has a few. “Those who tell only the truth are hypocrites, but not all hypocrites tell the truth,” is a quote she’s infamous for (it’s actually a quote the mun is infamous for irl,) and she may or may not quote games and anime from time to time. ➥ what sort of music do they enjoy?: Many genres, like Artcore, jazz, Jpop, orchestral, electro, traditional, folk, and even rock and metal (except screamo.) She hates rap, American pop, and country music, and other genres along those lines. Playing something she hates in her vicinity will result in either an anxiety attack, an ass-kicking, or both. Her blog playlist is a good place to look for what kind of stuff she likes. ➥ have they been cheated on by a partner?: No, She’s yet to enter a romantic relationship. Though, because of how picky she is, the people she does choose to enter a relationship with her are highly unlikely to cheat. ➥ have they ever lost someone close to them?: Defaults to no. Though some verses/interactions may change that in the future. ➥ what is their favorite sound?: Her music, certain instruments, the peaceful sounds of nature, the sounds of her Pokémon enjoying themselves. ➥ are they judgmental of others?: YES. It’s one of her biggest vices. She judges more on how one chooses, especially on how they choose to present themselves. She outright refuses to judge people on things they cannot change. ➥ have they ever been drunk?: No, even in her 21+ verses. She’s had plenty of alcohol in those verses, yes, but never gets drunk. That’s a big no for her. She knows her limits, and only drinks to enjoy the drink, not to get drunk. .➥ what are they like when they stay up all night?: Normal. She’s very used to staying up late, waking up early, and a general lack of sleep. She might be a bit sleepy, but other than that, there’s nothing of note. ➥ have they ever been arrested?: Detained and questioned in the Umbra Aftermath, but released, being found technically innocent due to the situation of which she committed her crimes. ➥ what evokes strong memories for them?: Nimbasa City, misty forests, the seaside, lake shores, evolution stones/Mega Stones/Z-crystals, Giratina, injured Pokémon, PreCure, Ecruteak City, Castle Rozenkreuz. ➥ what do they do on rainy days?: Work on side projects, bake, play video games, make more Contest outfits or gifts for others, sit in the Gym as per usual, or even go outside in the rain and enjoy the feel of the droplets against her face. Sera has likely given up on telling her not to, especially as she never seems to catch a cold. ➥ what religion are they?: Basically a spin on Hellenism, with slight Wicca influence. She worships the Legendaries, particularly Arceus (because of her lineage, of course.) Rarely, she may perform small rituals or leave offerings at the shrines or resting places of the Legend in question. ➥ what word do they overuse the most?: No word in particular, unless I’m forgetting, but she uses a lot of antiquated/eloquent/advanced vocabulary that some may have a hard time understanding. ➥ what do they wear to bed?: Either fleece/Ariados silk/flannel pajamas or oversized anime T-shirts. She’s a closet nerd. ➥ do they have any tattoos or piercings?: Ears pierced, and she has many pairs of earrings (usually given to her as repayments for the favors she does for her jeweler,) ➥ what type of clothing are they most comfortable in?: Formal or semi-formal, usually wearing something she made herself. Lace, flowers, frills, and semiprecious stones often decorate her outfits, though sometimes she may turn to the basics; dress shirts, combat boots, pencil skirts, peacoats, dusters, blazers, trenchcoats, boleroes, and other modern-city wear. She might be in anything from menswear to lolita clothing to even cosplay, and her Contest outfits will often show the wide range of things she’s willing to put on. Do not expect her to wear bright colors or “distasteful” clothing. The girl has class, dammit. To the surprise of many, she owns a fedora. ➥ what is their most disliked food?: Tamato Berries, and anything else that’s spicy. Otherwise, she’s not too picky, though low-quality/fast food has a tendency to upset her stomach, and she doesn’t like the stuff anyways. As long as it’s fresh and not too processed, she’ll probably eat it. ➥ do they have any enemies?: OH BOY. Other than Vathek in the Aftermath verse, she has quite a few, partially because she has recurring challengers that push the wrong buttons, and partially because of her reputation on social media (there’s a reason she avoids it.) The girl has clubs of haters who would love nothing more than to see her dead, and she knows it. When approached by them, she even goes out of her way to mock them, taunt them, and in general, piss them off. She takes joy in it, too. ➥ what does their writing look like?: Practiced and elegant. Really fancy handwriting, especially her signature, although if she’s in a hurry, she tends to favor a more simplistic font. Practicing her handwriting was one of the ways she practiced controlling her ADHD-induced tendencies, especially when she was younger. ➥ what disgusts them? DISRESPECTFUL PEOPLE. Yuugetsu shows respect when it is given to her, but people who are rude off the bat piss her off. People who are shitty in general are subject to being on her shit list. The underbelly of society in general is something she wishes she could purge from the world. I’ll have to go into detail on this one later.

#outoftwilight #Songs of the Soul (headcanons)#Fairytale; Dawn After the Nightmare #Fairytale; A Monster In Their Midst - Charizard #Fairytale; A Monster In Their Midst - Absol #Fairytale; A Monster In Their Midst; Gardevoir #Fairytale; The Corrupted Pixie's Soul #Fairytale; A Spring Fairy's Dream

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elsiesmith672 · 4 years

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6 Underrated Marketing and Sales Assets Your Business Needs Which marketing and sales assets do you use in your business? Probably quite a few! I’m talking about things like: targeted landing pages; email sequences, sales call scripts, explainer videos, and so on. We all know them and we all rely on them to keep our businesses growing. Well, today I’d like to talk about something different. Today, I want to discuss assets that can seriously boost your sales and marketing efforts… except you aren’t using them. Maybe you think they’re not cost-effective; maybe you find them too boring or basic; or perhaps you haven’t thought about using them at all. This week, let’s show some love to these underrated assets and explore how exactly they can help you grow your business! Read on, and you will learn: The #1 way to generate more leads from your content How to instantly improve your outbound sales process A free, highly visible asset you already have but aren’t using A simple way to add a personal touch to your marketing And more. Let’s dig in! (If you’d prefer to listen to this week’s article instead of reading it, click here to jump to the audio version.) 1. Stand out from the competition with custom graphics I know, I know. You want customers to judge your brand by your content and your ideas… but here’s the thing: Those are not the first things your audience will notice about your business. The first element that will stand out to them is your aesthetic. Your design, your choice of colors — that sort of thing. If your brand can make an impression on a purely visual level first, you’ll have a much better chance of getting your content noticed, too! That’s why it makes great business sense to invest in memorable, distinctive custom graphics for your branded content. Blog post images, social media pics, video thumbnails, infographic designs, website graphics… …all of these will raise the perceived value of your brand and show it off to potential customers — even before they get to your written content! Bottom line is, investing in custom graphics is a great way to get your content noticed and improve your audience’s experience. Also, it’s extremely affordable, and can be tailored to fit any visual style, such as: Cartoons and comics Stock photos Data visualizations 3D graphics And many, many more. If you want to make your branded content stand out more and be more memorable, visuals are the first thing to examine. 2. Generate more leads with content upgrades and lead magnets Would you like your content to convert better? Here’s the easiest way to do that: promise your audience additional value in exchange for their contact info. You can accomplish this by offering your potential customers access to lead magnets and content upgrades. These assets expand on your existing content with additional advice, solutions, and resources. And in order to get them, people need to give away their personal details — name, email address, phone number, etc. What’s the difference between a lead magnet and a content upgrade? Great question! Lead magnets are general-purpose assets that you offer to everyone who visits your website. You can do it through a pop-up, a dedicated landing page, or a persistent opt-in form on your site. Content upgrades are bonus resources that build on one, specific piece of content. They’re extremely targeted and only accessible to customers who just consumed said content. Normally you offer content upgrades through dedicated calls to action and opt-in forms at the end of articles, videos, infographics, etc. Content upgrades and lead magnets are incredibly effective at capturing high-quality leads for your business. So if you’re not using them, now’s the time! Check out our past guides on how to create these assets for your business: The Draw Shop’s guide to lead magnets: Part 1 and Part 2 14 types of content upgrades you can create for your brand. 3. Take advantage of “free real estate” in your email signature Yes, your email signature can be a sales and marketing asset. It’s very prominent, dozens of people see it every week, and it costs you absolutely nothing to use. And yet, all this time you’ve just been putting your name and company role in there! It’s time to use that “free real estate” for something more creative, don’t you think? Here are a few ideas to start you off… If you have a killer piece of content you’re proud of, this is the place to show it off. You can also direct people to sign up for a freebie from your email signature. Need more respondents for a survey? Link to it with a short call to action. This one’s for the social (media) butterflies: put your socials into your signature. If you did an awesome talk, point people to the video of it, or even just the slides. Even if you have nothing to show off — for the record, I don’t believe you! — you can always turn your signature into something intriguing, like “Ask me about that time I said no to a $100 million dollar acquisition deal.” Just make sure it’s true, relevant to your brand, and interesting. Oh, and speaking of email… 4. Boost outbound ROI with clever follow-up emails Engaging, memorable, and persuasive follow-up messages can absolutely transform your communication, sales and marketing included. For example: If you have an outbound sales process and you want to increase your conversions, start by leveling up your follow-up game. Even catching an extra 10% of prospects who slip through the cracks will seriously boost your bottom line! And if you need to secure backlinks, pitch a potential affiliate, publish an article off-site, or snag a big-name guest for your podcast… guess what? Solid follow-up will dramatically improve your odds in all these cases. Follow-up emails are great for more than sales and marketing, though. They will serve you well when locking down delayed payments, reaching out to job seekers, collecting testimonials, scheduling case study interviews… you name it. Finally, follow-up emails hit the sweet spot between automated marketing and personal, high-touch marketing. Here’s why… Once you’ve created a follow-up email, or a series of emails, for a specific scenario, that’s it! Going forward, you can just reuse them again and again, only making slight tweaks to personalize the message. And for bonus brownie points, you can automate your follow-up process with a CRM like HubSpot. Bottom line is, follow-up emails are an awesome asset for any entrepreneur. Craft them, use them, love them! 5. Wow new customers with personalized thank-you videos Nothing impresses your customers more than marketing with a personal touch. Real, authentic brand interactions are rare these days, because let’s be honest: they’re a big investment. They take time and attention to implement, and they don’t scale easily. But there’s one type of bespoke, intimate marketing that I believe can benefit any business, even if your funnel is 100% automated… Personalized thank-you videos. Why do I like thank-you videos so much? Because they hit the “sweet spot” between intimacy and scale. Yes, you have to show up on camera and thank your customer by name for their purchase. And even at 30-60 seconds per video, it adds up. But on the other hand, thank-you videos are much less demanding than a phone call or a face-to-face meeting — but feel just as personal. And unlike either of those, you don’t even have to interact with the customer in real time! And finally, you can partially automate the process. Imagine this: A new order comes in. Someone on your team gets assigned a thank-you video and receives all the relevant info about the customer. They record a 30-60 second clip, paste the video link into a custom email template, then feed it into your CRM, hit Send… and done! And just like that, you took a high-touch strategy that doesn’t scale and enhanced your existing marketing funnel with it. Go you! 6. Earn undivided attention with a powerful Elevator Pitch Converting cold leads into paying customers is hard. Before you can earn someone’s money, you have to earn their attention first. And in our fast-paced, easily distractible world, it’s almost more difficult than getting someone to buy from you! An Elevator Pitch is designed to cut through all the distractions and grab your prospects’ attention as fast as possible. It’s a single, memorable statement about your business that you can deliver in 30 seconds or less. And it has ONE job — getting potential customers excited enough and curious enough to say the 3 all-important words… “Tell me more.” I know what you’re thinking, “There’s no way I can hook people on my business in 30 seconds!” I disagree. My team has already helped dozens of businesses formulate an irresistible Elevator Pitch — and we want to create one for you, too. All you need is to hop on a 30-minute consultation with one of our expert copywriters here at The Draw Shop. They will help you define the problem you solve, how you solve it, and the life-changing results your customers will see from working with you. Then we’ll transform your input into a unique Elevator Pitch for your brand — a powerful 30-second statement scientifically designed to stand out, delight, persuade… and convert. And we’ll top it off with a one-page, one-of-a-king infographic that makes your pitch into an engaging visual story! That one is a valuable marketing asset in its own right — you can use it to… Share it with your team Feature it on your website Use it in your email signature Put it on the back of your business card Spread it on social media

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vdbstore-blog · 7 years

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New Post has been published on Vintage Designer Handbags Online | Vintage Preowned Chanel Luxury Designer Brands Bags & Accessories

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Beauty queen: how Pat McGrath revolutionised makeup | Fashion

In 20 years of interviewing actors, musicians, designers and artists, my audience with Pat McGrath has been the most difficult. Not because she’s chilly or aloof (she’s tactile, warm, prone to outbursts of laughter and the lavish use of “darling”), but because not a minute goes by without a passerby interrupting to tell her how much they admire her, and to my frustration, she spends much of our precious allotted time indulging them.

“You look beautiful, darling,” she purrs to one beauty blogger, as worried publicists look on impatiently. “Let me get someone from my team to do your makeup! It’ll be gorgeous on you,” she says to another. She stops again to pose for a photograph with actor Olivia Palermo (who seems under no illusion that she might be the main attraction here), then again to reel off some social media content and to check an assistant has her trainers. By then our “intimate chat”, in a bustling Parisian penthouse, is rather up against it, because McGrath is due to get on a motorbike to the Ritz, where an unnamed celebrity is waiting to be made up for the red carpet.

She promises a follow-up within days, and so begins almost a fortnight of postponements, briefing calls, time-zone complications and several profuse apologies as beauty’s biggest hitter paints, dusts and blends her way across dozens of faces and two continents. Truly, I have interviewed more accessible Oscar winners.

‘I just love cosmetics’ … Pat McGrath. Photograph: Ben Hassett

The reason I’ve been granted this extremely rare face time with the world’s most influential makeup artist is that she’s just launched her eponymous makeup line, Pat McGrath Labs, in Europe. The brand has already smashed the US, where McGrath lives in two New York West Village apartments, one above the other, though she is barely ever in either. She’s mostly on the road, working on magazine covers for the likes of Vogue, Harpers and W, the faces of celebrities such as Rihanna and Kim Kardashian, on advertising campaigns for Versace, Prada, Louis Vuitton and Gucci, and designing the makeup looks for around 80 major fashion shows per year (she is widely acknowledged as the most prolific catwalk makeup artist of all time). She travels from one fashion capital to another with dozens of makeup cases and a huge team of between 25 and 90 devoted artists to carry them all. “The most we’ve ever taken is 87 trunks,” she tells me. “I’ve collected everything for about 25 years. I’d go into a department store now and buy everything. It’s who I am. I just love cosmetics.”

McGrath qualifies this by telling me that she has filled 4,000 square feet of storage with products and says “You couldn’t get anyone more makeup addicted than me”, perhaps because she knows her passion for face paint isn’t immediately apparent. Much like the most celebrated fashion experts wear only black (she does, too – today she’s in a long black skirt, matching shirt and her signature wide black headband), the world’s top makeup artist doesn’t appear to be wearing the stuff herself. “I wear very natural makeup but it’s made up out of five foundations to make that perfect skin and my lipstick might be three different lipsticks mixed together, so it’s a kind of obsession in a different way,” she laughs.

If beauty is McGrath’s addiction, her single mother was her pusher. McGrath was raised in Northampton by Jean, whose love of God was matched only by an extraordinary fascination with everything fashion and beauty. From as early as McGrath can remember, working class, Jamaican-born, Jehovah’s Witness Jean was schooling her in advanced aesthetic awareness. “My mother was obsessed with makeup,” she says. “She would stand in front of the TV and we’d have to guess what she’d done differently with her eyes. I’d think: ‘Get out of the way!’ But she wouldn’t move until I’d told her.” Together they would analyse the makeup looks of Old Hollywood film stars, identifying which had inspired fashion designers that season.

Jean encouraged McGrath to be creative with makeup, mixing pigments from scratch to get exactly the right colour, adding heat to the skin with her fingertips to give it a healthier glow and soften the look of foundation. She explains: “She always put on a full face of makeup then got in the bath to get that dewy finish. It was next level, but this is where I got my makeup tips from – at seven years old!” Together, Jean (a talented dressmaker) and McGrath would go and look at Vogue patterns, then off to the market, where all the fabric buyers sold their remnants, before deciding which makeup would best go with the clothes.

A model with makeup by McGrath at Christian Dior show, 2008. Photograph: Penske Media/REX/Shutterstock

Whether they could find makeup to suit their skin colour was another matter entirely. To say women of colour were under-served by beauty brands in 70s and 80s Britain is a woeful understatement. “There was no makeup for women of colour,” she reminds me. “NOTHING. That’s what my mother’s search was all about. When we were out shopping we were always looking for a product that, probably by accident rather than design, worked for us. Where there was no ashiness, no ‘white cast’ [an effect commonly caused by talc in caucasian-skewed makeup], probably from some makeup line that had either discontinued it or gone bust.”

She concedes that this may be why she initially became known for colourful and avant-garde makeup, rather than for the “nude” shades that were so popular in the late 80s. Back then the dominant makeup look was matte and flat textured, created with products that had insufficient pigment for darker skins, which gave skin a sculpted but almost lifelike quality. Then, as sometimes even today, the word “nude” was commonly used as a euphemism for tones present in caucasian skin.

The teenage McGrath was drawn to looks that were a little leftfield, and got her big break “while stalking Spandau Ballet outside Radio 1”, wearing new romantic garb and bold lipstick on her eyes, cheeks and lips. She was spotted by presenter Janice Long, who pointed at McGrath’s face and asked: “Will you do that on me?” She recalls: “I didn’t even know that was a job. She said it was, so I went home that night knowing what I was going to do with my life.” She later moved to London and through the club scene, got her break doing makeup for Soul II Soul, who appeared frequently in the credible fashion press. Soon she was working for the Face and i-D, where 18-year-old stylist Edward Enninful had just been made the industry’s youngest ever fashion director. The two became close. Her bold makeup translated well into his striking photo shoots and stood out during the 1990s grunge era, when makeup was often downplayed to the point of non-existence.

It proved to be just one of many hugely creative and influential collaborations in McGrath’s career (she has been the go-to makeup artist for designer Miuccia Prada and photographer Steven Meisel for years), but is the longest and perhaps the most personal one. Both Enninful and McGrath describe the other as their “best friend”, and a few days after we meet, it’s announced that she is to be beauty editor-at-large at British Vogue, where he took the helm last week (the first man, and first person of colour, to do so). This explains why she remains so tight-lipped when I ask what she thinks he might change at Vogue, only assuring me that he will do great things. “Of course he’ll do amazingly!” she almost bellows. “He’s lovely. I remember when I first met him, when he had just started working at i-D, and he was so shy. He’s so quiet when he speaks, but now he says: ‘I’ve become loud because I’m with you’,” she laughs, before adding, more seriously: “I’m so proud of him, it’s amazing to see.”

McGrath with Edward Enninful, 2009. Photograph: Patrick McMullan/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

The appointment of Enninful, a British Ghanaian, is seen by many as a sign that mainstream fashion media – where black cover stars and senior staff members are still exceptional – is finally becoming more inclusive. McGrath is cautiously optimistic. “I think you always want things to get better and that’s been my view ever since I’ve been in this industry. So it’s great to see there’s more diversity, but it could always get better.”

She concedes that her side of the industry is as culpable. “It’s the same with the beauty companies because there is a whole planet out there. How can you not address the whole world – what are you thinking?” She is determined that no one should have to do what she and her mother (who died in 1992, as her daughter’s career was taking off) had to, and mix their own colours to match. For Pat McGrath Labs, she explains: “I was working all the time with pigments to make sure they work on all skin tones, particularly to make sure dark skin doesn’t become ashy, pigments that are so rich they work on everybody. Because a lot of the time when you buy a normal shadow, it doesn’t always work on every skin tone – it’s chalky or too light – so that’s my main aim, to bring makeup for all skin tones to the fore.”

She’s interested in diversity in colour, but also in shape, size, gender classification, and for her own brand, has made a point of using models of different types. “It’s about pushing boundaries. I believe absolutely, the world wants something different, people want back their individuality.” Despite working with mainstream stars such as Cara Delevingne, Bella Hadid and longtime friend and collaborator, Naomi Campbell, McGrath’s public approbation has made stars of African-American writer, model and “plus-size” body-positive pioneer Paloma Elsesser; Jason Dardo, the American drag queen and burlesque dancer (otherwise known as Violet Chachki), and gender fluid model, former RuPaul drag race contestant and makeup artist Kurtis Dam-Mikkelsen – all of whom she discovered while browsing Instagram.

Beauty is quite technical, quite nerdy now. So it’s my time, because I am that woman

All of them stretch the beauty industry’s notoriously narrow perimeters. She’s proud of all her young collaborators. “I remember when I first saw Paloma on Instagram. I reached out to her and she became one of our muses and now that she’s working for so many brands, it’s so inspiring. I’m just so happy that all of my girls, and my boys as well, are doing so well. I’m watching what’s happened with Miss Fame (alter-ego of Dam-Mikkelsen) getting a contract (with L’Oreal) – these genius young people who started out with me and now they’re fronting beauty campaigns, or getting tons of editorial work, and it’s amazing to see how well they’re all doing, it’s brilliant”.Social media was a turning point for McGrath. It’s fair to say Instagram and YouTube have done for makeup artistry what MySpace did for music, giving young beauty talent a global showcase, as well daily access to, and inspiration from, the world’s biggest established artists. Thanks to the photo-sharing app (on which she currently has 1.4 million followers, a number matched only by fellow British artist Charlotte Tilbury), McGrath’s appeal has expanded way beyond the once insular world of high fashion. Does she mind that nowadays, seemingly everyone on Instagram wants to be a makeup artist? “No, I think it’s amazing”. She follows upcoming artists obsessively, reposting their images, even asking them to join her team. “They encourage me, I encourage them. A lot of my team met through social media. We had a contest called Backstage with Pat McGrath, which had 30,000 entrants and we chose 40 people to come and experience what’s it’s like on the road when we’re doing shows, and they just loved it. I met some brilliant people.”

Pat McGrath Labs taps into what beauty conglomerates are only just realising: the power of the online beauty geek. These makeup obsessives – men, women, young, old, black or white – reside in the sparkliest corner of the internet and revere beauty as high art. These are the fans who wait at their computers for a big product launch to “drop” at 6am, and who can, in all likelihood, namecheck studio system makeup artists, forgotten 1930s burlesque stars and the exact shade of Marilyn Monroe’s hair colorant (Dirty Pillow Slip, since you ask).

Christian Dior 2007. Photograph: Penske Media/REX/Shutterstock

Everything about McGrath’s launch was geared towards this community of anoraks, and capitalises on the internet’s ability to take what would constitute an unworkable niche in local territories, and make it a hugely successful global concern. McGrath’s first, and for several months, only product, was Gold 001 – a single, dry, metallic pigment that liquified with a special mixing solution. Launched on limited, numbered release and advertised only through McGrath’s social media accounts, it sold out in six minutes. “I was so overwhelmed,” she says. “I had only planned to do it as a one-off for fun, for the makeup addicted fans. Suddenly I was getting phone calls from around the world.”

Now, four times a year, another new professional-grade product – a holographic eye gloss, almost neon blue shadow, a balm stick and nude pigment for achieving McGrath’s signature “hyper-real skin” (formerly achieved by layering several different consumer products), is launched to similar frenzy. Each is encased in simple plastic factory packaging (“No weights, no metals,” she says, “the jewel is the product itself”) to keep down the already high price (from £55 in the UK, $40 in the US). Neither seems to put buyers off – in fact, many apparently never open their sequin-stuffed ziplock bags to fish out the product itself, preferring to keep their precious collector’s item pristine.

In this Instagram age, says McGrath, the number of beauty obsessives is vast. “People don’t want to be bored any more. They really do want to try new things. I know from talking to my girlfriends who aren’t even in the industry, the way women speak about makeup is no longer: “Ooh, look at this lovely mascara.” They talk to me as though I’m in a lab, using a thousand words to describe it. It is actually quite technical, and I do believe people love what they see at the fashion shows and editorial, and want to try it. It’s now a nerdy approach. And so it’s my time, because I am that woman. Now, ‘the makeup obsessed’ is everybody. An air stewardess recently told me her eight-year-old daughter watches complex how-tos on YouTube.”

Many of McGrath’s most outlandish catwalk looks have quickly become crossover hits. Dense, glittery eyelids with thick black brows for John Galliano, opaque gold lips at Prada, chunky, stick-on face jewels for Givenchy, metallic highlighter everywhere from Dior to Versace – all were copied by high street brands, and adopted widely.

But while the beauty industry was happy to copy McGrath’s looks (or even engage her as a consultant – she has helped to create products for Giorgio Armani, Max Factor, Dolce & Gabbana and Cover Girl Cosmetics), most weren’t confident in selling the real thing. “I spoke to makeup executives about my own line for the past 15 years and they’d say: ‘You know, nobody knows you, nobody really wants the kind of stuff you do in shows in real life.’ And then I joined social media and all I’d hear from thousands and thousands of people was that they did.”

She has no time for industry snobbery over social media beauty trends, such as contouring and dark, painted-on eyebrows. “Just the fact that people love makeup is wonderful. If you want to be out there in a thick, black brow, then go there, girl! But at the same time, people love it when they’re shown exactly how to do it well. Not everyone’s going to do things perfectly but the fact that people are trying, and are excited by cosmetics, always means something to me.” She’s all for clearing the smoke and mirrors of the fashion world. “When I remember how much joy the fashion industry brought to me, how I’d watch the 50 seconds of catwalk footage, twice a year at the end of News at Ten, and get goosebumps, well, it was life-changing. Imagine as a young kid now getting to see everything they’re seeing? It must be so inspiring.”

Christian Dior, 2011/2012. Photograph: Michel Dufour/WireImage

Nowadays, she finds inspiration by obsessively studying films, art history and photography. She insists she enjoys the pressure of having to come up with 80 or more entirely new concepts annually for the shows. “I love to be challenged. I can spend a good hour or two (in makeup trials) trying to make some concept a reality. But that’s what I enjoy the most, I love it.”

Isn’t it exhausting? “I always lose my voice by the end of show season,” she says, “but this is something I’m obsessed with, something I’ve always wanted to do. It brings me joy. When you’re at shows, there’s a nervous energy. You want to make everything that you do perfect because can you imagine seeing the clothing I get to see on a daily basis? It’s exquisite, so the last thing you want to do is have the makeup let that whole collection down. It’s pressure, but I love it”.

Back in Hotel Shangri-La, McGrath is now more than an hour late for her celebrity appointment and as she promises me another chat, we are interrupted yet again, by a young woman wearing red lipstick newly daubed in dense, sparkly glitter from Pat McGrath Labs. Her mouth looks like Dorothy’s ruby slippers, her eyes are almost tearful with happiness at meeting her idol. McGrath grabs her warmly by the shoulders and squeezes. “Oh my God, look at that lip! Isn’t it gorgeous? Wait till you go in daylight, it’ll be amazing!”

Pat McGrath Labs is available now, exclusively at Net-a-Porter.

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