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sylvielauffeydottir · 3 years

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Hello, it is I, your friendly neighborhood historian. I am ready to lose followers for this post, but I have two masters degrees in history and one of my focuses has been middle eastern area studies. Furthermore, I’ve been tired of watching the world be reduced to pithy little infographics, and I believe there is no point to my education if I don’t put it to good use. Finally, I am ethnically Asheknazi Jewish. This does not color my opinion in this post — I am in support of either a one or two state solution for Israel and Palestine, depending on the factors determined by the Palestinian Authority, and the Israeli Government does not speak for me. I hate Netanyahu. A lot. With that said, my family was slaughtered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I have stood in front of that memorial wall at the Holocaust memorial in DC for my great uncle Simon and my great uncle Louis and cried as I lit a candle. Louis was a rabbi, and he preached mitzvot and tolerance. He died anyway.

There’s a great many things I want to say about what is happening in the Middle East right now, but let’s start with some facts.

In early May, there were talks of a coalition government that might have put together (among other parties, the Knesset is absolutely gigantic and usually has about 11-13 political parties at once) the Yesh Atid, a center-left party, and the United Arab List, a Palestinian party. For the first time, Palestinians would have been members of the Israeli government in their own right. And what happened, all of the sudden? A war broke out. A war that, amazingly, seemed to shield Benjamin Netanyahu from criminal prosecution, despite the fact that he has been under investigation for corruption for some time now and the only thing that is stopping a real investigation is the fact that he is Prime Minister.

Funny how that happened.

There’s a second thing people ought to know, and it is about Hamas. I’ve found it really disturbing to see people defending Hamas on a world stage because, whether or not people want to believe it, Hamas is a terrorist organization. I’m sorry, but it is. Those are the facts. I’m not being a right wing extremist or even a Republican or whatever else or want to lob at me here. I’m a liberal historian with some facts. They are a terrorist organization, and they don’t care if their people die.

Here’s what you need to know:

There are two governments for the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza. In April 2021, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas postponed planned elections. He said it was because of a dispute amid Israeli-annexed East Jerusalum. He is 85 years old, and his Fatah Party is losing power to Hamas. Everyone knows that. Palestinians know that.

Here’s the thing about Hamas: they might be terrorists, but aren’t idiots. They understand that they have a frustrated population filled with people who have been brutalized by their neighbors. And they also understand that Israel has something called the iron dome defense system, which means that if you throw a rocket at it, it probably won’t kill anyone (though there have been people in Israel who died, including Holocaust survivors). Israel will, however, retaliate, and when they do, they will kill Palestinian civilians. On a world stage, this looks horrible. The death toll, because Palestinians don’t have the same defense system, is always skewed. Should the Israeli government do that? No. It’s morally repugnant. It’s wrong. It’s unfair. It’s hurting people without the capability to defend themselves. But is Hamas counting on them to for the propaganda? Yeah. Absolutely. They’re literally willing to kill their other people for it.

You know why this works for Hamas? They know that Israel will respond anyway, despite the moral concerns. And if you’re curious why, you can read some books on the matter (Six Days of War by Michael Oren; The Yom Kippur War by Abraham Rabinovich; Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergmen; Antisemitism by Deborah Lipstadt; and Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis). The TL;DR, if you aren’t interested in homework, is that Israel believes they have no choice but to defend themselves against what they consider ‘hostile powers.’ And it’s almost entirely to do with the Holocaust. It’s a little David v Goliath. It is, dare I say, complicated.

I’m barely scratching the surface here.

(We won’t get into this in this post, though if you want to DM me for details, it might be worth knowing that Iran funds Hamas and basically supplies them with all of their weapons, and part of the reason the United States has been so reluctant to engage with this conflict is that Iran is currently in Vienna trying to restore its nuclear deal with western powers. The USA cannot afford to piss off Iran right now, and therefore cannot afford to aggravative Hamas and also needs to rely on Israel to destroy Irani nuclear facilities if the deal goes south. So, you know, there is that).

There are some people who will tell you that criticism of the Israel government is antisemitic. They are almost entirely members of the right wing, evangelical community, and they don’t speak for the Jewish community. The majority of Jewish people and Jewish Americans in particular are criticizing the Israeli government right now. The majority of Jewish people in the diaspora and in Israel support Palestinian rights and are speaking out about it. And actually, when they talk about it, they are putting themselves in great danger to do so. Because it really isn’t safe to be visibly Jewish right now. People may not want to listen to Jews when they speak about antisemitism or may want to believe that antisemitism ‘isn’t real’ because ‘the Holocaust is over’ but that is absolutely untrue. In 2019, antisemitic hate crimes in the United States reached a high we have never seen before. I remember that, because I was living in London, and I was super scared for my family at the time. Since then, that number has increased by nearly 400% in the last ten days. If you don’t believe me, have some articles about it (one, two, three, four, and five, to name a few).

I live in New York City, where a man was beaten in Time Square while attending a Free Palestine rally and wearing a kippah. I’m sorry, but being visibly Jewish near a pro-Palestine rally? That was enough to have a bunch of people just start beating on him? I made a previous post detailing how there are Jews being attacked all over the world, and there is a very good timeline of recent hate crimes against Jews that you can find right here. These are Jews, by the way, who have nothing to do with Israel or Palestine. They are Americans or Europeans or Canadians who are living their lives. In some cases, they are at pro-Palestine rallies and they are trying to help, but they just look visibly Jewish. God Forbid we are the wrong ethnicity for your rally, even if we agree.

This is really serious. There are people calling for the death of all Jews. There are people calling for another Holocaust.

There are 14 million Jews in the world. 14 million. Of 7.6 billion. And you think it isn’t a problem the way people treat us?

Anyway (aside from, you know, compassion), why does this matter? This matters because stuff like this deters Jews who want to be part of the pro-Palestine movement because they are literally scared for their safety. I said this before, and I will say it again: Zionism was, historically speaking, a very unpopular opinion. It was only widespread antisemitic violence (you know, the Holocaust) that made Jews believe there was a necessity for a Jewish state. Honestly, it wasn’t until the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that I supported it the abstract idea too.

I grew up in New York City, I am a liberal Jew, and I believe in the rights of marginalized and oppressed people to self-determine worldwide. Growing up, I also fit the profile of what many scholars describe as the self hating Jew, because I believed that, in order to justify myself in American liberal society, I had to hate Israel, and I had to be anti-Zionist by default, even if I didn’t always understand what ‘Zionism’ meant in abstract. Well, I am 27 years old now with two masters degrees in history, and here is what Zionism means to me: I hate the Israeli government. They do not speak for me. But I am not anti-Zionist. I believe in the necessity for a Jewish state — a state where all Jews are welcome, regardless of their background, regardless of their nationality.

There needs to be a place where Jews, an ethnic minority who are unwelcome in nearly every state in the world, have a place where they are free from persecution — a place where they feel protected. And I don’t think there is anything wrong with that place being the place where Jews are ethnically indigenous to. Because believe it or not, whether it is inconvenient, Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel. I’ve addressed this in this post.

With that said, that doesn’t mean you can kick the Palestinian people out. They are also indigenous to that land, which is addressed in the same post, if you don’t trust me.

What is incredible to me is that Zionism is defined, by the Oxford English Dixtionary, as “A movement [that called originally for] the reestablishment of a Jewish nationhood in Palestine, and [since 1948] the development of the State of Israel.” Whether we agree with this or not, there were early disagreements about the location of a ‘Jewish state,’ and some, like Maurice de Hirsch, believed it ought to be located in South America, for example. Others believed it should be located in Africa. The point is that the original plans for the Jewish state were about safety. The plan changed because Jews wanted to return to their homeland, the largest project of decolonization and indigenous reclamation ever to be undertaken by an indigenous group. Whether you want to hear that or not, it is true. Read a book or two. Then you might know what I mean.

When people say this is a complicated issue, they aren’t being facetious. They aren’t trying to obfuscate the point. They often aren’t even trying to defend the Israeli government, because I certainly am not — I think they are abhorrent. But there is no future in the Middle East if the Israelis and Palestinians don’t form a state that has an equal right of return and recognizes both of their indigenousness, and that will never happen if people can’t stop throwing vitriolic rhetoric around. Is the Israeli Government bad? Yes. Are Israeli citizens bad? Largely, no. They want to defend their families, and they want to defend their people. This is basically the same as the fact that Palestinian people aren’t bad, though Hamas often is. And for the love of god, stop defending terrorist organizations. Just stop. They kill their own people for their own power and for their own benefit.

And yes, one more time, the Israeli government is so, so, so wrong. But god, think about your words, and think about how you are enabling Nazis. The rhetoric the left is using is hurting Jews. I am afraid to leave my house. I’m afraid to identify as Jewish on tumblr. I’m afraid for my family, afraid for my friends. People I know are afraid for me.

It’s 2021. I am not my great uncle. I cried for him, but I shouldn’t have to die like him.

Words have consequences. Language has consequences. And genuinely, I do not think everyone is a bad person, so think about what you are putting into the world, because you’d be surprised how often you are doing a Nazi a favor or two.

Is that really what you want? To do a Nazi a favor or two? I don’t think that you do. I hope you don’t, at least.

That’s all. You know, five thousand words later. But uh, think a little. Please.

#jumblr #free palestine #zionism #gaza #signal boost #antisemitism #jew tag

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shini--chan · 3 years

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I love you're writing skills! How would be the reader react when she travel the time back so like the 1600 in England?. And England would she see her in modern clothes. She want go back to her time(2020). Im so sorry for my bad English

Thank you, that is very sweet of you. Also don’t worry – your English probably isn’t as bad as you think.

If you want to see anything else set in that period, go and check that Pirate AU! Post. Now on to this here.

Yandere England – 1600s/Timetravler

Whether you would like it or not, you would find yourself hurtling through time and landing in England during the 17th century. Right in Puritan England to be precise, literally the worst decade to land into right after ending up in the middle of a battle. You would be wandering the countryside, in total confusion as well as in complete panic. That would be how Arthur would find you. He would be heading back home, utterly disgruntled by the state of affairs that he would have to suffer under. Then he would notice you, an alien entity by all means, in your strange clothing and foreign manners. First, he would consider just leaving you to your fate (which could be very gruesome) as the loon you would appear to be to him. Then he would remember the supposed Christian values of hospitality and altruism and approach you to take you home with him.

You would be both relieved and frightened to see somebody approach you. Through his clothing it would dawn upon you that you were really in the past. Despite fearing being deemed a witch or being interrogated or suffering from any other fate that would cross your mind, you would know that you would need help. The moment Arthur would open his mouth to inquire about you, the final nail would be hammered in the coffin. The Old English that would meet your ears would be absolute proof that was once history would be your present. A notion that would be affirmed when Arthur’s face would wrinkle in confusion when you would use your English.

Your strange use of his language would confuse, but would nevertheless ring a bell in the back of his mind. It would remind him how English had developed over the centuries. Would your way of using it just be a natural result of further evolution, hence making you a … timetravler? That would be at least what you would be trying to convey over the language barrier. Arthur would be sceptical at first, wanting to rule out all other possibilities before believe you. If you’d think him to be a fool, then you’d have something else coming. Then you’d try to use evidence to convince him.

Quickly, he grabbed the strange thing you were holding out to him. After giving you a brief mistrusting look, he would take a few steps away from you. A paranoid bastard as ever, he turned to stand in such a way that you couldn’t see everything he was doing while keeping an eye on you.

The thing that you handed to him was unlike anything he had ever seen before. It was rectangular and slim, smooth with its dark glass and opaque surfaces. He glimpsed his own cruel visage in the reflection. Was it nothing more than a strange mirror?

Then he went on to inspect the sides, the tips of his fingers finding a few elevations in the material. Curious, he pressed one of them …

… and nearly dropped it when the dark glass promptly lit up and it emitted a strange sound. You yelled besides him, suddenly directly at his side since your device had been endangered. He was sure that hadn’t his reflexes been so quick, then he would have to defend himself against a very enraged stranger. Instead, you glare at him, as irritated as you were, and tried to snatch your thing back.

Agitated by your action in turned, Arthur roughly pushed you away, sending you sprawling to the ground. You cussed at him, the aggressor recognising a few of the swears you tossed at him but not finding himself bothered enough to respond and instead staring at the picture that had manifested.

There was a colourful background, the nuances and lines and shadows showing a painting that was far more realistic then any he had ever seen before. In front of it, a series of number shined at him. One set was probably the time, he deduced, while the other was most likely the date from how it was written.

2021 …

That was nearly 400 hundred years in the future. He looked at you, observed how you had picking stones out of your scraped and bleeding palms.

Despite your disagreeable demeanour, you would likely prove very useful to him.

He would promptly take you with him, trying his best to convey to you through gestures and miss-matched words that he would only want to help you. If you prove define, then he would coerce you into following him by taking your smartphone hostage. Once you would calm down, then you would rationalize that this would probably be the best option you could receive and concede his wishes.

Arthur would keep you in his house, ensure that all the servants would steer clear from the rooms he would house you in, and gradually butter up to you, with all intentions of drawing the details of his future out of you. Other than that, he would intently observe you, knowing that the behavioural patter say a lot about a person, and in extension, give clues about the environment they grew up in. And needly to say, he would be very surprised by some things.

“You know, it is the third time you demand to be allowed to wash yourself this week. Don’t you think you are going too far? There is miasma in the water, and if you continue like this, not only will you render yourself a fool, but you’ll also become sick”, he chided you as he watched you hauled a bucket up the stairs.

As weak as you were, you were struggling with your heavy load, evidence to the lack of physical labour you had done in your life. It made Arthur ask himself if everybody in the future would be as weak and spoiled as you are, or if you were just the exception.

Either way, while manners and etiquette called for him to ease your burden which you evidently couldn’t manage on your own, he found the sight of you straggling up the flight of cold stone steps far too amusing to intervene.

With trembling arms, your set down the bucket and stared at him, eyes shooting daggers up at him. “In case you didn’t know, it is dirt that actually makes people sick. It is cleanliness that prevents infection. Which is why you would do well to wash daily as well!”

With a frown, Arthur picked up his shirt to sniff it. In his opinion, he didn’t stink, so he didn’t see what you were making such a fuss about. He was also sure he had understood you correctly – the two of you had managed to sort out things to the extent that you could communicate fairly well.

“I think that changing underclothing daily and bathing once a month to be sufficient. And now, before you say anything, be sure to keep your attitude in check. I’ve had more than enough of it”, he told you.

He watched your face wrinkle and swore he heard you mutter: “Damn patriarchy and its superiority complex.”

He didn’t know whether to be alarmed about your very simplistic, black-and-white view of the world and your grievous oversimplifications of the current era or be amused about how you thought you knew everything. Either way, he would have to take your words about the future with a grain of salt – who knew just how skewed your recounts would be.

“I fail to see how this has to do with that. The matter at hand is about the guest treating the host with respect, expected courtesy allowing humans to live together. I could put you out on the streets if you keep being a brat”, he countered.

You grasped the handle once more, water spilling over the rim as you picked it up with both hands. “We both know that you wouldn’t do that. You value me too much.”

And oh, in what ways he was beginning to value you.

For one, he would detest how condescending you would be, due to having all the knowledge of the next centuries and all the benefits that would come with it. Yet, he would bare most of it. When he wouldn’t, he’d let his sharp-tongue and centuries worth of life experience come to light. He would mock you for your nativity and prod at you for being coddled and accustomed to yet-to-be luxuries.

Arthur would tell you that he would put effort in finding a way to send you back to your own time. That would be a shameless lie. He wouldn’t be interested in anything of the sort. Rather he would insist on you staying with him, to help him further his imperial ambitions. Besides, you would be the most interesting and riveting thing that would have happened to him in ages. He would quickly grow attached to you, and with you having nobody else than him (he would ensure that) in a harsh and foreign world of which you would truly know little, you would find yourself relying on him.

He might tell you that he is a personification. Secrets for secrets, after all. And with him providing proof of his semi-immortality and the absurdity of time travel having happened you would be inclined to believe him. England would also tell you that if you would return to your own time, he would be sure to seek you out, so that you can be back together again. Besides rising alarm bells in your head, you would find yourself asking just how much of the timeline you would end up altering with the scrapes of information that he would wheedle out of you.

#yandere england #yandere hetalia #time traveler #yandere hetalia x reader

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pidayforpi · 4 years

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Brother’s Sentiment

“Abner...why did you come all the way here?”

“Mr Whitewater Duck, a mail for ya.”

Abner “Whitewater” Duck had never been fond of his family. That’s why he chose to live alone, in a rural small town, instead of the bustling metropolis of Duckburg. He never showed up in any family gathering, nor sent his family a letter or a card. Abner was a loner, and he loved it that way.

The other Ducks had also learned not to disturb their lumberjack relative. They wouldn’t send a letter without a reply letter. They wouldn’t give an invitation only to be rejected or outright ignored. They knew Abner was a loner, and they knew he loved it that way.

But when the local postman handed him a letter sent directly from Duckburg by air, he knew he probably should read it before burning it in the campfire.

“The rich geezer or the broke bloke?” Jay questioned the confused duck. The blue jay bird only knew Scrooge and Donald, the only two relatives to have visited Abner in his faraway town. Abner actually guessed the sender to be one of them. But he was wrong. It was from someone he didn’t know.

“From Hubert and Dewford Duck.”

“Dear Cousin Abner,

Your brother would like to see you. Please come to Duckburg as soon as possible. Meet us at the McDuck Manor.

Love, Your Cousins Huey and Dewey Duck”

“Woo...Someone’s getting high-class...” Jay slyly commented, before receiving a shove from his friend. “Hey! Do you read your clients’ letters?!” Jay let out a chuckle while fixing his postman hat.

“Anyway, it seems like your lil’ bro is dying to meet ya. You should probably go-“ Jay stopped when he noticed the usually loud Abner had gone silent all of a sudden, his eyes covered by the brim of his hat.

“Need me to help send a reply, Whitewater?” Jay quietly uttered, confused and a bit scared by his friend’s unusual meekness. Abner sniffed softly, adjusting his hat with one hand and picking up his axe with another.

“No need. I will give them my reply in person.”

———————————————————

Abner felt like Duckburg hadn’t changed much. Autumn in Duckburg was gloomy as usual, or so he thought. He had not been to the city for half a decade.

Fethry was the only reason for him to go to the city. His younger brother was the only one in the family - and in his social circle - that Abner cared about. Fethry had always been the oddball of the family: He was not as thoughtful as Donald, not as brave as Della, not as lucky as Gladstone, not as helpful as Gus, not as creative as Kildare...

While Donald and Della were out adventuring, Gladstone was non-busily finding $20 notes on the ground, Gus was helping Grandma Duck (and himself) at her bakery, and Kildare was painting the town red (literally)...

Fethry was just lounging by the pond, daydreaming. At the end of a long lumberjack training day, Abner always joined his little brother by the same old pond, watching him look up to the crimson sky, look down to the bottom of the water. The brothers just silently lay down on the ground, until the orange sky faded to black, and Abner held his sibling’s hand as they walked back home under the starry sky.

Abner knew that Fethry, unlike himself, was never a loner. Fethry enjoyed company. Fethry yearned to be recognised. To be appreciated and be of use to others. Yet, being the anomaly of the bunch, talentless and a slow-learner, Fethry had nothing to offer.

“Not even our family give him a place to be in...” That might be one of the reasons Abner never felt the need to bond with his family.

Abner ignored the light mid-autumn rain, and walked down the streets to his uncle’s place with his brown hat covering his head. It was noon in Duckburg, yet the roads seemed lifeless and sad in the shower.

Abner picked up his pace, lest the shower became a downpour. He buttoned up his leather jacket, and hurried to the manor overlooking the city.

(7-3-2020)

———————————————————

“Pst...!Over here, Cousin...err...”

Despite not hearing his name, the voice of a child caught Abner’s attention. He turned to his right, and saw two young ducks hiding next to a bush.

“Dewey, you signed the letter. It’s Cousin Abner.” The duck with a red cap reminded his younger brother, who’s dressed in blue.

“You said it. I ‘signed’ the letter, only.” Dewey retaliated. Huey only rolled his eyes, and motioned Abner to come to them.

“Good afternoon, Cousin Abner. I am Huey Duck, and this is Dewey. Nice to meet you.” The duck in red politely introduced himself and his brother, and bowed his head.

“Yeah...umm...we sent you the letter. Did you...receive it...?” Dewey awkwardly asked while looking at his feet, avoiding Abner’s fierce eye contact.

“Why would I be here, otherwise?” Abner asked sarcastically. Abner would have been shouting at his nephews for their lack of common sense, and somehow attributing it to their city lifestyle.

But not when the two kids were the only clues he had to his little brother.

Dewey sulked after realising his mistake, while Huey swiftly cut in to break the weird atmosphere. “Long story short, Cousin Fethry wanted to see you.”

“...and he’s apparently your little brother...” Added Dewey, face still red with embarrassment.

Abner let out a slight sigh. “Lead me to him then. Will your ‘dear’ Uncle Scrooge give you a limousine ride?”

Dewey quickly put a finger on Abner’s beak with a quiet “shh”. After dramatically looking around like a criminal on the run, Dewey explained to Abner, “Please don’t tell Uncle Scrooge about this visit. Don’t even let him see you, no matter how much you want to meet him.” They obviously knew nothing about Abner.

“Uncle Scrooge doesn’t know about our invitation. He doesn’t even want us to visit Cousin Fethry again.” Huey added, his smile faded.

“Why?” Abner questioned, confused how their loving Uncle Scrooge would separate his family members from one another.

Huey, now grimly held his head down, stated, “Uncle Scrooge didn’t want Cousin Fethry to leave the underwater laboratory.” Abner was shocked, but stayed silent for the duckling to continue.

“Dewey and I visited Cousin Fethry a month ago. We answered his...call. Launchpad took us, without telling Uncle Donald or Scrooge, to the underwater laboratory according to the coordinates Cousin Fethry had given us. Together we went on an adventure to the depth of the ocean.”

“We met his team - which was just a bunch of glowing krill, by the way - and went scuba-diving...above undersea volcanoes! 3000 meters below the sea surface, facing scalding dreams of 400 degree Celsius...Oh, and he told us not to drink seawater. Duh.” Dewey cut in, adding in the details of their adventures, unaware of Abner and Huey’s lack of interest.

“Yes. But after getting back up to the surface, we were...well, caught. Uncle Scrooge was there at the lighthouse, the entrance of the laboratory. We were excited to share with him our adventure, when Uncle Scrooge just urged us into Launchpad’s ship. When Fethry was about to come along, Scrooge...”

Huey paused for a moment, still unable to believe the things he was about to say. “...he hit Fethry with his cane. Hard. And slammed the ship door on him. We left, under the order of Uncle Scrooge, while Cousin Fethry was still on the platform of the lighthouse, holding his right hand in pain.”

“The trip back to land was painfully quiet, but once we were back at the Manor, we couldn’t help but confront Scrooge about his actions.” Dewey said, trembling with anger. “‘He nearly got you lads killed!’ was the only reason Scrooge gave us. When we asked him why Fethry was not allowed to come with us, he just said that doesn’t concern us...”

Dewey bit his lips lightly, whispering just loud enough for Abner to hear. “As if a member of our family being trapped underwater by another member of our family for 4.5 years doesn’t concern us...”

“Fe-Fethry has been there for four...four and a half years...?” Abner’s eyes were wide open, blinking occasionally to hold back tears.

“...Yes. Uncle Scrooge never allowed him to leave the laboratory. Cousin Fethry only survived on fish and self-purified seawater. His only form of communication with the outside world was a tin-can-and-string phone, with one of the cans connected to Scrooge’s office. Cousin Fethry was ignored nonetheless, and we were the first ones to answer his call.” Huey continued.

“And the last call he gave us was about his wish to see you. He gave us the address to your town, and asked us to send a letter to you. That’s why you are here.”

A dead silence followed as the three ducks said nothing for a minute.

Abner eventually broke the silence with a question. “Why would Scrooge want to trap Fethry underseas for four and a half years?” Kildare he might understand, but why Fethry? Why the innocent, naive Fethry Duck?

“I guess you will have to find it out yourself, Cousin.” Dewey answered with a shrug. “Here are the coordinates to the McDuck Sub-lab. Launchpad won’t be able to drive you there, so you might have to hire a boat or swim there.” Dewey took out his phone to show Abner the coordinates. “You want a pen and a piece of paper to write it down?”

Abner took out his own phone, which very much surprised his cousins. “You know, living in the countryside doesn’t mean living in a cave.” Abner showed Dewey his phone number. “Send it to me through SMS.”

(8-3-2020)

———————————————————————————————

“Alrighty.”

Abner quickly searched the location of the coordinates. It really was in the middle of the ocean.

“May I ask...how would you plan to go there?” Huey asked, prompting Abner to look up from his phone. “Uncle Donald probably knows a few sailors...Probably.”

“I can manage it.” Abner said, picking up his brown leather bag.

“What’s that?” Dewey pointed at Abner’s belonging curiously.

“Oh.” Abner opened the zip and pulled out his trusty axe, holding it by the wooden handle. Its iron blade gleaming in the dim light. “You mean this?”

“Eek-!” Dewey literally jumped onto Huey, prompting the older brother to catch the duckling in his arms. The trembling duck in blue cried out for the only hero he knew. “Gizmoduck! Help!”

“Hey, you asked for it...” Abner tried to calm his cousin down, albeit still holding the axe in his grasp. He was trying to refer to Dewey asking for him to display his axe, but he was not the best with words.

“No———! I did not! Back off!” Dewey tried to move backwards, which nearly threw Huey off balance. “Gizmoduck———!”

“Hey! Keep it down. Didn’t you say not to alert anyon-“ Abner was interrupted when he heard rapid footsteps approaching them. Abner tried to hide himself, but a battle cry signalled him that it was too late.

“Don’t worry, citizens! Gizmoduck is here to rescue! Blathering Blather-“ A brown duck in a lab coat came rushing with a stack of lab reports. But the moment Fenton spotted the well-built lumberjack wielding a sharp axe, looking at him straight in the eyes, even the robo-hero fainted onto the ground, pieces of paper scattered around him on the courtyard.

An awkward silence followed.

Abner looked at the unconscious duck on the ground, the crying duck in blue, and the annoyed duck in red. “Weird city slickers...”

“Umm...You probably should go now, before anyone comes. I will take care of these two.” Huey spoke while dropping Dewey onto the ground. He held Abner’s hand sincerely, and whispered to him.

“Take Fethry away. Away from his misery.”

Even without Huey’s request, Abner would do that himself.

———————————————————————————————

Abner borrowed a wooden boat from a local fishermen duo. The duo offered a turbo jet, even free of charge. But Abner preferred the old-styled oar-driven boat, and insisted on paying for rent (of $1).

The weather that day was not the best for a sail, but Abner could not wait to see his brother. And he believed that his brother would think the same. He followed the GPS on his phone to the coordinates of the McDuck Sub-lab, and paddled against the current.

Despite living most of his life on land, Abner had learnt how to sail at a young age, thanks to his Junior Woodchuck training. He stopped paddling for a moment, and took out his Junior Woodchuck guidebook from his knapsack. On the first page was a photo of him, Fethry and their fellow teammates. At that time, both of them were ducklings. Abner just got his white feather coat, while Fethry was still a yellow-feathered child. Fethry was the most enthusiastic member of their Junior Woodchuck team. Being a Junior Woodchuck was the only thing Fethry could take pride in.

(9-3-2020)

Fethry was the reason Abner joined the scouting organisation. What was taught by the scoutmasters, such as building a campfire, pitching a tent, and (of course) bringing down a tree, had already been learnt by Abner from his lumberjack mentor. Yet, Abner let his brother demonstrate his skills as a Junior Woodchuck. He joined the organisation after an invitation from Fethry, to share Fethry’s joy and pride of being appreciated and praised by his juniors and seniors. Only as a Junior Woodchuck could Fethry truly be himself.

Abner took one last look at the photo, and closed the guidebook. He would be seeing him soon. In person.

———————————————————————————————

“Hey. You didn’t tell me about this thing here.”

Abner phoned Dewey when he saw the weird machine inside the lighthouse. There were so many buttons and levers on it, Abner didn’t know which would lead him down the lab, and which would set the lab on fire.

“Oh, now you are asking for help.” Dewey said sarcastically. “Not before you say sorry for trying to chop us up.”

Abner slapped his forehead with an audible sound, while Huey slapped Dewey with an audible scream. Huey caught Dewey’s phone with his other hand, and instructed Abner on the machine.

“Just pull the red lever and you are good to go. The one next to two stopwatch-looking thingie, with a green grid screen on top of it. There should be a green arrow pointing down once you pulled the lever.”

Abner pulled the lever as he was told, and the machine started rumbling. “Thanks Cos’.”

“My pleasure. A Junior Woodchuck always helps his fellow Junior Woodchucks.” Said Huey proudly before hanging up the phone. Abner was dumbfounded about how much his newly-met Cousins knew about him, as the elevator took him down to the depth of the ocean.

———————————————————

The elevator stopped suddenly.

Abner nearly lost his footing, before balancing himself with his axe. He tried pulling the lever, but there was no further response. The glass gate to a corridor of the lab only opened slightly, the gap too small for Abner to slide through.

Without any further way to proceed, Abner tried forcing the gate open with the poll of his axe. The glass gate easily gave way, rising up to the top automatically. Abner sighed, seeing how worn-out the lab was. At this point, he wondered if the lab was still in use. Everything looked like it was in ruins.

Abner looked around the corridor: The walls were dirty. The pipes were rusty and broken, with unknown chemical solutions dripping from the holes. The lighting flickered on and off, giving the place an ominous atmosphere. His surrounding was unnervingly quiet, except for the dripping of liquid. As if someone, or something, was waiting for him, watching him from the shadows. The smell was awful, a mix of seawater, chemical wastes and rotten organisms. The wall of the corridor read: “Tully Observatory”.

Abner was known to have nerves of steel, but even he could not help but feel scared. The lab was visibly dangerous. If the boys were not guided by Fethry, Abner doubted he would be here now. He would probably never receive the letter. The letter would have never been written. He held his axe close to himself, eyes darting left and right, up and down to look for potential dangers. He took out his flashlight from his knapsack, and turned it on, holding it in his left hand with his other hand grasping the axe tightly. He could feel his heart racing as he nervously shone the flashlight everywhere. But the light from the flashlight came out wobbly, largely due to his hand uncontrollably trembling.

“Man up, Whitewater!” Abner tried to give himself a pep talk. He was the strongest arm in his town, able to win any wrestling match without breaking a sweat, be it with men or beasts. But now he was alone, sweating involuntarily without a single enemy in sight. Abner was grateful he was alone, lest anyone saw him shaking like a damsel in distress. Yet, part of him was also wishing for company. Someone to fight alongside with him. Someone to give him courage and encouragement.

Suddenly, the light went out. For 1 second. 5 seconds. 10 seconds. 30 seconds...Abner dared not to move, and shone his flashlight in every direction. He wanted to make a run for the elevator, but his strong legs were weak with fear. Abner was near his breaking point. He knew something was there with him, as a hissing sound and a disgusting noise were heard. He strained his ears in the darkness, trying to predict where the enemy, or enemies, would ambush him from, but his head was in a daze. The sounds were getting closer, closer and closer to him. They were coming from all direction. Abner’s heart sank: He was surrounded.

At this point, Abner wished the lights would not turn on again, like a child covering his eyes to not see the monster in front of him. He would rather die in ignorance than die in fear. He dropped the flashlight, and held his axe to himself as tightly as both of his trembling hands could.

Finally, at the worst moment, the lights switched on. Abner came face to face with rows of sharp teeth on the wall of a tunnel to the abyss, with the tunnel stretching to unknown length. He was too late to run. Too late to close his eyes. The monster was right in front of him.

(10-3-2020)

———————————————————

Abner was, to a certain extent, glad that no-one would be there to save him, there to hear him scream. He wildly swung his axe forward, clumsily missing his target just in front of him. He swung again, missing the giant sea worm by half a metre. Despite how large in size they were, the invertebrates were quite agile.

Abner was no trained warrior, but his proficiency in wielding an axe was second to none. The fact that he kept missing his targets dampened his battle spirit: He didn’t have a chance against the monster.

Suddenly, just before going in for another careless attack, Abner felt his feet leaving the metal ground. Abner’s heart sank even lower when he was lifted off the ground. He frantically glanced around despite hanging midair: His feet was caught. He was caught.

Worse still, his hand slipped, thanks to his cold sweat on his palm and the disgusting, slimy substance of the beasts. He dropped his axe. His only weapon. He could only desperately look at his axe falling to the stone cold ground, away from his hand, until a loud clunk could be heard.

Abner had no time to fear for the worst. The monster quickly wrapped its body around the duck, squeezing the warmth out of him. Not even the strongest arm in the countryside could resist the constrictor. He tried pushing at the smooth, jade-green skin of the worm, with all the strength he could muster. It didn’t even bulge. Uh oh.

The predator, though without eyes, sensed its prey trying to push his way free. A quick coil pinned his arms to his body, immobilising those nasty limbs. Oh no.

With only his head and feet free, Abner knew that was the end for him. No way to help him escape. No way to struggle. No way to cry for help (at least, no one to hear him). He frantically thrashed around helplessly, heart pounding, eyes wide open with fear.

He made the long trip to Duckburg, met two of his distant cousins, knew his brother’s ordeal, went to where his brother was trapped, and now he’s going to die without even catching a glimpse of his brother. For four and a half years...he had no contact with his brother. And he would soon be no longer to hear from his dear Fethry forever.

The sea worm tightened its crushing grip, subduing even one of the toughest ducks in the world. Abner’s struggling ceased. He felt that his seemingly limitless strength had been squeezed out. Abner could only squirm weakly, watching as his predator loomed over his relatively small body. The pair of lips split to reveal the tunnel of fangs, seeming endless in length.

Perhaps he was already too late. There’s no way Fethry could fight this monstrosity. Perhaps Fethry wasn’t in the lab anymore. This was the way to see his brother. This was how the two brothers could finally reunite. Abner’s view turned black, as the ravenous maw closed in...

“Hey, meanie! Leave him alone!” A strange yet familiar voice shouted out, echoing through the corridor. Though muffled, Abner could recognise that voice. The voice he had missed for nearly half a decade, the voice he came here for.

Fethry rushed to the base of Abner’s captor, patting the worm’s body, rubbing his beak against it. “You wouldn’t hurt a kind soul, would you? You lil’ angel...We have to treat our guests with love and respect!”

Upon “hearing” Fethry’s persuasion, the sea monster let out a sad whine, stopping its swallowing albeit still trapping its prey in its mouth. It’s still not giving up.

Fethry started to get impatient, but reminded himself to fight with kindness. “That’s my big bro, our VIP. We have to show our Atlantis-tic hospitality! You are a good host, right? A good host gives his guest personal space and freedom. I know you can do it...” Fethry encouraged the sea worm with a light kiss to its smooth, slimy body. Satisfied, the sea worm spat its prey out onto the ground, and lowered its head for a pat from Fethry. It slithered back to the lab’s extensive tunnel system, along with its fellow sea worms. The corridor once again became silent, except for the dripping of liquid.

———————————————————————————————

Fethry rushed to his brother’s side, checking for breath and pulse. Both were weak, but at least detectable. Abner lied against the metal wall, still drained and dizzy from the near-death experience. He slowly opened his eyes, meeting his little brother’s.

Fethry pulled Abner into a hug, despite Abner still being covered in the worm’s secretions. Fethry didn’t care. He missed his big bro. So, so bad.

(19-3-2020)

From just a single hug, Abner could feel all the warmth that had been squeezed out returned to him. Even in a daze, Abner could feel his brother’s emotions, his smile and tears. Four and a half years, across the ocean and over the mountains, the two brothers had finally reunited. To think that should Fethry had arrived five minutes later, just less than a jiffy to rescue his brother from the foul, mutated creature, the two brothers would had been forever parted by the death door. Fethry couldn’t imagine waiting in solitude for so long, only to see his brother die in front of him. A mixed feeling of happiness, sadness, anticipation, loneliness and guilt flooded Fethry’s mind, his grip tightening around Abner’s waist.

Abner knew that mixed feeling was mutual. Although unable to hug back due to his arms still numb, Abner said nor did anything, letting the welled-up emotions fill his heart, and express themselves in the form of tears.

———————————————————————————————

It was Fethry who let go first. Once he did, the good old enthusiastic Fethry was back.

“Big bro! You really did accept my invitation! I am so happy!” Fethry jumped up and down, visually showing his unnatural happiness.

Abner felt something a bit off, but went along with Fethry for now. “Yeah. I...uh, read your letter. Or your cousins’ letter. They met me at the McDuck Manor, and guided me here to find you. You said you have-“ “Oh! So you met the two lil’ Donalds! They were cute, weren’t they? I especially like the Red Donald. He’s a Junior Woodchuck too!” Fethry interrupted before Abner could finish. Fethry was always the bubbly type, so Abner was used to his enthusiasm.

“Yea. Um...’Huey’ was quite helpful. The other one...not so much.” Abner said as he got up from the floor, his legs still weak and numb. His entire body was drenched, but he got neither the energy nor the motivation to dry himself right now.

“Um...I...” Abner looked down, hands messing with his hair aimlessly. Fethry looked at him with his huge, watery eyes, waiting for his brother. “Th...than...thanks for saving me just now. I...I don’t know what would happen if...if you didn’t co...come to he...help. Thanks, Fethry.” Abner managed to utter the last sentence of gratitude without stuttering. Abner never owed anyone anything, and now he owed his life to his dear brother.

“Aww shucks...It was nothing.” Fethry puffed his chest proudly. “A Junior Woodchuck always helps his fellow Junior Woodchucks.” Abner chuckled as he saw the resemblance between his cousin Huey and his brother. No wonder Fethry liked Huey so much.

“Come on! I’ll show you around.” Fethry proposed as he took off his jacket, and put it on Abner. “You’ll catch a cold, big bro. Wear this!” Abner wouldn’t want to make his brother’s coat dirty, but he couldn’t deny that he was freezing. Partly because his head was uncovered right now...

“That’s right! Where’s your hat?” Fethry pointed out, before Abner even noticed his hat missing. “Must have been taken by that...thing as a souvenir. Won’t risk taking it back.” Abner shivered at the thought of fighting those monstrous sea worms again, that feeling of pure fear still lingering in his head.

“Oh, no! Your head must be kept constantly warm to prevent...brain-freezing! A warm head is a happy and healthy head...” So Fethry’s still believing in that self-help book? “No, I’m fine. Just need a quick rest...”

“Here, take this on!” Without hesitation, Fethry took off his stocking cap, and put it on Abner’s head. Fethry never took his stocking cap off. Fethry was never successfully convinced to take his stocking cap off. Fethry never doubted that self-help book’s advice of keeping your head warm to keep it healthy. And now he’s taking his cap off on his own, under no pressure or threat, and putting it on someone else’s head, while leaving his head bare and unprotected? Fethry’s love for his brother was so great, even Abner couldn’t comprehend.

“Th...thank you, Fethry...” Abner uttered in disbelieve, fixing his new undersized jacket and stocking cap. “Don’t mention it! They look great on you!” Fethry smiled.

(20-3-2020)

“I’ll take you on a tour! You are our honourable third guest!” Fethry walked forward down the corridor, looking back to signal Abner to come with him. Despite still having questions...a lot of questions...Abner decided keep his beak shut for the moment. Questions could wait. He retrieved his axe from the floor, and let Fethry take his hand.

———————————————————————————————

“And now, we come to the abode of the one and only Fethry Duck. Behold!” Fethry said in a tour guild’s voice, as the brothers entered Fethry’s abode. The pod was inhabitable, but clearly in disrepair.

Fethry’s voice was optimistic and persuasive, but the fact that the pod, along with the rest of the lab, was not a homely place was obvious. The golden-yellow paint on the wall was tearing off. Every piece of fabric was sewed up again and again (despite Fethry’s fine sewing skills, the evidence that those cloths have been used for years was inevitably visible). Electricity was still supplied throughout the lab, albeit unstably, as it was generated by the “hydrothermal vents” (as Fethry had explained). Living here for four and a half years was, to a small extent, possible, especially given how adaptable and creative Fethry was. But would anyone want to live in such a condition for so long?

(21-3-2020)

A torn poster was decorated on the wall. The only phrases readable were the title “Signs of Ocean Madness” and a bullet point “Isolation for Long Period of Time”. Abner wouldn’t say Fethry had gone mad, but he sure did feel...different. Different from a person suffering from isolation for long period of time. Why was the poster there in the first place? One of the partly-torn bullet point involved the word “Pressure”, and Huey reported Fethry trying to “depressurise” himself from the deep sea pressure. Was Fethry trying to stay sane while being trapped here? Was the torn poster a symbol that he had failed?

“So this is where I live. Simple and sweet. Not too much, not too little.” Fethry showed Abner his “home” by spinning around. “My bed, my sofa my stove, my tea kettle, my dishes, my towel, my empty coffee bean jar...” Among the possessions Fethry listed, he missed one prominent item in the room. One type of household item that was in excess quantity and diversity: Cleaning goods.

Fethry didn’t mention it, but Abner knew that much cleaning chemicals and tools were unnecessary for a pod this small.

“...my cupboard, my curtain, my window, through which you can see the beautiful ocean view - well, in depth...and...Oh! My team!” Fethry dashed to the an even smaller storage room, before Abner could stop him. He took out a jar of seawater, which, on mild stirring, began to glow. Bioluminescent krill. It was the first time Abner saw anything bioluminescent other than fireflies. The krill were beautiful, but Abner had no more time. Abner was happy that his little brother was happy, but something tells him Fethry was not. Questions could wait, but it was too long.

“My team, meet my big bro. My big bro, meet my team-“

“Why-“ Abner cut him off before he could introduce his “team”. That was obviously not a team, whatever the nature of the team was. Fethry was obviously hiding something. There’s no way he could feel so happy.

Yes, he just met his “long lost” brother. But then he’s taking Abner on a tour around his prison, without hinting why he was sent to this prison in the first place, or his feelings when trapped in this hell. Fethry asked his cousins to send his brother a distress signal, and his cousins added additional information on how pathetic the situation Fethry was in now. Fethry might hide the truth from the boys, as they were still acquaintances, and Fethry might not want to badmouth their dear Uncle Scrooge in front of them.

But there’s no reason why Fethry would ask the boys to send a long distance mail by air to Abner’s town, urged Abner to come all the way to the McDuck Sub-lab, only to take him on a tour around the lab. There’s no reason why Fethry would hide the truth from Abner, the only family member he could trust. He couldn’t hide it.

Fethry was evading. And Abner could see through it.

“Why could I fend off the sea worms? Oh...You see, they feel affection...” The sea worm attack was an hour ago. “So instead of fists, you fight with kisses! Red lil’ Donald’s tactic worked! I should write that in my Junior Woodchuck Guidebook...”

Fethry put down the jar on the cupboard, took the guidebook from his bed, and began flipping through the pages to find a blank one. When he did, however, Abner put his right hand on the page, pushing the guidebook down. Fethry was wacky, but he’s not stupid. He knew he had been exposed. He’s just buying time now.

“Fethry, level with me. Please.” Abner requested firmly. “Why would Scrooge trap you here for four and a half years?” Fethry didn’t tell Abner he had been here for four and a half years, let alone the fact that Scrooge was the culprit.

The question pinpointed the problem at its core. There’s no escape for Fethry now. He dropped the smile on his face, and the guidebook in his hands. He lowered his head, and said nothing for the next minute. Abner waited, as Fethry was internally struggling to open the lid to his bottled-up feelings. Betrayal, rejection, isolation...

Fethry’s hands rarely balled into fists, his entire body shifted from shaking to trembling. Fethry could lie, but he couldn’t lie to himself. When those bottled-up emotions were let out, Fethry easily collapsed.

He fell onto his knees, his hands covering his face. Not even his hands could contain the flowing tears, which slipped through the gaps of his fingers. Four and a half years’ worth of buried sadness manifested into a pathetic wail, echoing in the small pod. He cried, screamed, shouted, cursed...It wasn’t the first time Abner saw his brother cry, but it was the first time he saw his brother cry this hard, this intense. Fethry hit the cold, hard ground with his fists. It surely hurt, but not as much as it was in his heart. Scrooge, Scrooge McDuck, Uncle Scrooge...Four and a half years, because of this man, this relative, this...”idol” of his.

Fethry needed some time. Some alone time. Abner watched as his brother expressed his feelings wildly in his so-called “home”, not saying a word, not doing an action.

In merely fifteen minutes, four and a half years’ time suddenly burst forward.

———————————————————

“So, the boys told you about what happened when they left...” Fethry, still looking down, stressed on the word “they”. He wasn’t allowed on board, on board the ship to freedom. That slap on the hand started to hurt again.

Abner sat on the ground to get to the same level as Fethry. Fethry had the answer to his own question.

“Ten years ago, I left from our hometown to Duckburg. I heard Donald and Della were going on adventures with Uncle Scrooge again, from Gladdy. Of course they wouldn’t involve me in their adventures. They wouldn’t even want me to know about their adventures.” Fethry said with a strong hint of sadness. It was after a visit by Gladstone Gander that Fethry left for Duckburg, but Abner never thought what really drove Fethry to his uncle was the postcard sent to Gladstone by Donald.

“I had been pushed aside, neglected and ignored for so long, I wanted to prove myself I could be as successful as anyone else. I wanted to prove that I am not just a Junior Woodchuck. I am more than a Junior Woodchuck. I am talentless. I am useless. I am weak. But I thought: Through determination and creativity, nothing is impossible. Isn’t this how Uncle Scrooge became the richest duck in the world? ‘Tougher than the toughies, smarter than the smarties...’, eh?” Fethry recited that phrase with pure bitterness. The phrase he once lived by had come back to bite him.

“When I arrived at Duckburg, however, Uncle Scrooge had stopped adventuring. Apparently, Della had laid three eggs, which are, of course, the three boys. Without Della, the adventure team stopped its operation.”

“‘That was my chance!’ I thought to myself. I could substitute Della as the third member while she waited for the eggs to hatch. After proving my abilities, I could become the fourth member of the team.”

“But Uncle Scrooge outright rejected my offer. ‘You are too incompetent,’ he coldly said to me. ‘Don’t think your Junior Woodchuck skills make you a genius.’ I understand. I am not as strong as Donald. I am not as brave as Della. But I have a heart for adventure as passionate as both of them. I am also a Junior Woodchuck like both of them. Somehow, being a ‘jack of all trade, master of none’ automatically makes you useless.”

“I tried to prove my worth as a team member. I had thought of possible locations for treasure hunting, researching the geographic and the fauna of those areas, thus working out the level of difficulty of different destination. I had also provided solutions, and self-invented gadgets if necessary. But all my proposals were not even given a glance. All my gadgets were not even given a trial. I understand Della was an irreplaceable member of the team. I wasn’t trying to replace her. I just wanted to be like her. Be a part of the team. Be...like Scrooge.”

“A man of miracles, hailing from the highlands of Scotland, travelled to the land of America at a young age of 18, gained his own bucket o’ gold from the gold rush at 20, and established his own company at the tender age of 22.5. Just four and a half years, Scrooge McDuck was already on his way to fame and glory. A man of miracles, indeed.”

(22-3-2020)

“And even the richest duck in the world couldn’t escape bad luck, it seemed. One day, I came to the McDuck Manor, and bumped into Donald with the three eggs. I didn’t need Donald to tell me what happened. It was all on the news. The niece of the richest duck in the world went missing in space. Poor ol’ Uncle Scrooge poured his heart and soul into saving his beloved niece. I had never seen him look that pathetic: His eyes were red with crying, his sleeves wet with tears. His feathers were all puffed up and ruffled. His office was in a mess. Oh, poor Uncle Scrooge.” Despite his wording and apparently sympathetic attitude, Abner could hear a strong satirical tone in his innocent little brother’s speech.

“Donald took up the responsibility to take care of the three little Donalds. I wanted to help, but Donald insisted on being the sole caretaker. Donald never like owing people things.”

“The only thing I can do is take care of Uncle Scrooge. Duckworth’s ageing body started to fail him, so I volunteered to help take care of my own uncle.”

“Those days were tough. Very tough. I believe Donald felt the same when raising three children on his own. Uncle Scrooge didn’t seem like himself. Once the owner of the world, now a pathetic old man. I did everything for him. Meals, cleaning, laundry, fetching newspaper, collecting mails, gardening...And he said my Junior Woodchuck skills meant nothing...”

“Dr Gearloose, as usual, helped in the repairing of electronic appliances, while Mr Duckworth helped deal with the press and the entrepreneurs. Those days were hard, but there, I found a meaning for my life. Despite I was just taking care of my uncle, I felt like someone appreciated me for the first time since I left the Junior Woodchucks. I felt like I was being treasured, being noticed. I was an apprentice of the legendary Scrooge McDuck!”

“I didn’t want his wealth or fame. I just want the attention he gets. Not the one from reporters, but from his family. That’s all I ask for: A place in this family. Where I can be myself, and be welcomed and accepted.”

“After a year or two, things started to get back together. The money bin was filled with coins and treasures again. The stock price of McDuck Enterprises was rising again. Even I was just being a caretaker, I felt like I had done something great for the family. I felt like I played a part to save McDuck Enterprises, and Uncle Scrooge himself. There weren’t any celebrations, but I was clapping my hands in my heart intensely when the news arrived.”

“Uncle Scrooge returned to his former glory. The last ray of sunlight at dusk seeped through the curtains into his office. Uncle Scrooge was asleep in his chair, tired from a day’s work. Even on a sunny day, autumn in Duckburg could be chilling. I took a blanket from the closet, and placed it on Uncle Scrooge. His drowsy ‘thank you’ was all I needed. Two words gave me the will to live on. A smile gave me the energy to move on. Just being by his side filled me with happiness. Just being with Uncle Scrooge gave me the meaning in life. I don’t need adventures anymore. I had found my position, my value.”

“But life just wouldn’t give ol’ Scrooge a break. Fate just likes to mess with people, you know?” Fethry’s voice deepened, signalling a dark turn of events.

“Five years ago, Mr Duckworth passed away. He had fought bravely against death for five years to witness the rebirth of Scrooge McDuck, but he succumbed to his disease on a beautiful autumn morning. The morning glory bloomed quietly in the garden, its speaker-shaped flowers listening to the silent prayers of the elderly duck.”

“We were afraid what happened five years before would happen again. It didn’t, in their eyes. But it did, in mine.”

“McDuck Enterprises didn’t fall into depression, but Uncle Scrooge did. It wasn’t very visible this time, and only Dr Gearloose and I noticed Scrooge’s abnormal behaviour. He had been working much. Too much. He could take care of himself. He ate, slept, bathed...but then it’s back to working time. The only socialising he did was with business partners. He only talked to Dr Gearloose about research and design. Nothing more.”

“Not being part of his enterprises, Uncle Scrooge didn’t talk to me at all. Except complaints about incomplete or imperfect houseworks. I still had my job, but the meaning was starting to fade. I was still Uncle Scrooge’s caretaker, but that’s all I was. I was treated as though I was being paid. I wasn’t appreciated. I wasn’t needed. Scrooge could take care of himself. What I was providing was no longer required. I was no longer important.”

“I was never appreciated in the first place. The one receiving the glory was Mr Duckworth, the forever faithful mister butler. He was the one who saved Uncle Scrooge. I was just pretending to be in his spotlight. Now that Mr Duckworth was gone, the spotlight ceased, and I realised I was the jester on the stage, not even close to a sidekick.”

(23-3-2020)

“I stayed by his side, taking the role of Mr Duckworth before a replacement could be found. Funny how I was now taking the role of someone else, like I always wanted, but I felt nothing. For half a year, I didn’t exist in this world. I was invisible, non-existing, intangible. Anxiety crept in as I realised my meaning in life getting away from me. I needed to be of use. I needed to contribute to McDuck Enterprises. Only then...I would feel Uncle Scrooge’s appreciation.”

“I asked for whether he needed any help. I had done all the necessary housework as possible, and asked for extra work for the Enterprises. The reply was surprising. Unfortunately surprising.” Abner frowned slightly as he knew what the job would be.

“‘Yes.’ He said. He introduced me to the McDuck Sub-lab, where I would be working as a scientist. The Sub-lab at that time looked nothing like this. Golden walls, brightly illuminated hallways, well-furnished laboratories...I was overjoyed when I stepped into the Sub-lab. I imagined how my life in the McDuck Enterprises would be: Me, working among elites from all over Duckburg, doing experiments and research with hundreds of Dr Gearloose, doing demonstrations and presentations in front of thousands of Scrooge McDuck...A life full of meaning was there in my reach.”

(24-3-2020)

Abner listened quietly, and kept his confusion to himself. Didn’t his cousins told him Fethry was just a caretaker of the lab?

“To think I could be second to Dr Gearloose, the greatest inventor in Duckburg, I was more than delighted. Childish it may seem, but I always aspire to be a scientist. A person who can change someone’s life. A person who can change the world for the better. I just find it meaningful to help others. Must be all that teaching back in the Junior Woodchuck.”

“That’s why I invited you to Duckburg at Christmas of that year, big bro.”

Fethry looked up, looking at Abner’s shocked expression. Abner seldom answered his family’s invitation. His family seldom gave Abner invitation. But that Christmas, five years ago, Abner accepted his brother’s invitation. He knew there must be a reason why Fethry, the one who knew him the most, would invite him to a family gathering on purpose.

———————————————————————————————

At the front door of the McDuck Manor, there he was: Fethry waving at his brother in the front garden, wearing a bright smile that warmed Abner’s heart in the evening snowfall. That was the first and only time Abner entered the Manor. He would never think of getting in there if it wasn’t because of that letter from Fethry.

Despite the Fethry’s warm welcome, the bright lighting and the fragrant aroma of wintry herbs, the inside of the Manor was colder than the outside. The Manor seemed unusually big, thanks to the lack of occupants. It’s true: Scrooge would stay in his office, while Gyro would stay at home. One hated Christmas, one hated human interactions in general. That “family gathering” was between the two brothers only.

Still, Fethry prepared everything himself: The invitation, the decorations, the hospitality, the food...That full-course meal was the best Abner had ever had. After all, which chef in all of Duckburg - or in the world - would know what he personally liked the most?

Together, the two brothers warmed up the three-storey manor. On the Christmas day five years ago, laughter filled the McDuck Manor. The long-gone festive atmosphere surrounded the Manor. The winter moonlight illuminated the once misery abode. For one night, a couch beside the fireplace became the most cozy place in the city. For one night, a plain bunk bed became the most comfortable place in the world.

For one night, a Christmas miracle was bestowed to the Duck family.

———————————————————————————————

But little did Abner know, the Christmas present given to him that year was a parting gift.

Fethry didn’t tell his brother about his new “occupation”. He wanted to invite his brother to his new working place for a tour once he started working there. But surely, that dream didn’t come true until now, four and a half years later.

“I wanted to celebrate with you, brother.” Fethry held Abner’s hand. “That was the best Christmas I had ever enjoyed ever since we grew up and went separate ways. I wish that Christmas night would repeat. That happiness and warmth I experienced would come back to me...” Fethry was close to tears, but held them back with a soft sniff.

“And then, I didn’t experience any Christmas at all for four years. The next spring, I was brought to the Sub-lab by a submarine, guided to the depth of the building complex, and left stranded here until now. Uncle Scrooge promised the other scientists would be joining me soon, but I should have known better. A tin can for communication? How silly of me. I watched as the Uncle Scrooge left with the only vehicle to freedom, and disappeared into the spring mist. I remembered I waved at him, smiling. I could imagine Scrooge doing the same, smiling at his gullible nephew.”

“While waiting for my non-existing colleagues, I did the only thing I know. The thing I once did to save the company: Caretaking. I found the cleaning goods in this pod, and made the whole laboratory sparkly cleaned, ready for scientists from all over the world to join me underseas.”

“For days, weeks, months, years...nobody came. The tin can must have rung countless times, but nobody answered. I tried joking, shouting, screaming for response, but nobody replied. I waited on the dock of the lighthouse for ships from McDuck enterprises, or just from any good Samaritan, but nobody even passed by in the murky sea. I don’t have a submarine, ship or boat. Even if I did, the only coordinates I have was of this cursed Sub-lab. I wouldn’t know where to go. Swimming back to land was suicide. I have learnt enough to know how dangerous the wonders of the sea could be. That’s when I knew: I am truly trapped in this deserted laboratory.”

“Food was running short. Clean water was running short. Fear was running high. Even with my Junior Woodchuck guidebook, I can’t survive on my own in the middle of nowhere. Worse still, the chemical waste and the hydrothermal vents were turning my sea companions into murderous monsters.”

“What started out small enough to fit my palm mutated into unmeasurable length. You aren’t the only one scared of those sea worms, big brother. The first time I met one of those, I knew I was going to die. Just one of those monsters, and I was immediately subdued. My eyes wide opened, my feet dangling midair. I was cornered, trapped, vulnerable. That was the end for me, I was convinced. That was where I would die. That was how I would die. Alone, scared, hopeless, helpless...”

“I cried. Pathetically. At the mercy of my predator, I didn’t use my hands to struggle. I didn’t use my hands to beg for salvation. I used my hands to cover my face, wiping away ever-flowing tears. That wouldn’t help, but I knew I couldn’t save myself anyway. I was weak. I would never be tougher than the toughies, smarter than the smarties. I just couldn’t. I cry when I am scared. I panic when I am startled. At the end, I am just a whiny kid.”

“My discovery about those worms was the result of that near-death experience. The monster loosened its grapple, from a crushing grip to a gentle embrace. It softly set me down onto the floor, and nuzzled my face. They may not have eyes or noses, but they can sense emotions. It must had sensed my sadness, and felt my tears dripping onto its smooth skin. These were my buddies, originally my predators. I was pathetic enough to treat my killers as my friends. I was pathetic enough to let those cold, smily skin give me warmth and comfort.”

(30-3-2020)

Fethry paused for a brief moment, before letting out a little laugh. “On the other hand...” He pointed at the torn poster on the wall. “That is what Scrooge gave me. A mockery, letting me know I’m going insane: My cries for help are just ‘signs of madness’. My fears of dying are merely ‘paranoia’...”

The laughter turned from a chuckle to a hysterical cackle. “When I look at that poster...That worn-out piece of paper bearing the logo of McDuck Enterprises, signed by Scrooge McDuck himself...” Fethry touched the window of the pod, looking at the deep sea outside. “My anger as scalding as the vocanlos, but my sorrow as blue as the sea.”

Abner looked at the jar of bioluminescent krill Fethry was hugging close to himself. The dim blue lights from the critters reminded him of the twinkling stars back at their hometown. Fethry must have thought the same: Whenever Fethry stared lovingly at his “team”, was he thinking of his hometown? Those carefree days observing the starlit night sky with his brother on the meadow. He used to make a wish to the stars every night. Was he doing the same to the krill? How many wishes had he made during those four and a half years?

“But...” Abner hesitated to say the question he had been wanting to ask. “Why would Scrooge do this to you?”

Fethry didn’t answer immediately, still looking at the deep sea. Abner patiently waited, silently worrying he might had asked a wrong question. Was it something Fethry had done? Did Fethry not have the answer?

“Uncle Scrooge wanted a start over.”

Fethry whispered, looking back at Abner.

“Ever since Della went missing, Donald went away, I was the only person who would remind Uncle Scrooge of his past, adventure days. After Mr Duckworth passed away, Scrooge wanted to move on. Falling into depression a second time taught Scrooge the only way to rehabilitation was to let go of the past.”

“I’m his life reset button. Only by removing me could Uncle Scrooge forget the past and return to his former success. When I realised I was trapped here, I understood Scrooge’s intention: Getting rid of me, dead or alive.”

Fethry showed a sad smile.

“At the end, I was saving McDuck Enterprises after all.”

———————————————————————————————

A faint ray of light pierced through the glass into the pod.

The sky must had cleared up. For light to penetrate through the deep ocean layers, the sunlight out there must be very bright.

The sunlight illuminated Fethry’s smile, like an angel trapped in hell, yet basked in heaven’s light.

And Abner’s going to free this angel from his underwater prison. He’s going to give his brother the salvation he had deserved for four and a half years.

Abner stood up, walking behind Fethry, and returned his jacket and stocking cap, helping him put on the clothing. Before he could decline the offer, Abner held his brother’s hand, helping him up.

“We’re getting out of here, Fethry.”

The younger brother replied with a nod and a smile, his watery eyes showing his gratitude and happiness.

Just like in the past, back in the rural hometown: A big brother holding his younger brother’s hand, walking home in the dark.

Axe in one hand, his brother’s hand in another, Abner walked through the ruined underwater lab for the second and the last time. What seemed like hell just an hour ago was a bit more homely now. The cold, metallic ground underneath was now the path to freedom.

Walking towards the wall labelled “Tully Observatory”, Abner faced the predator again. The sea worm came out of its hiding spot, tilting its head at the duo. Abner let go of his brother, dropped his axe voluntarily, and paddled towards the monster whom he had feared just a while ago. The duck embraced his predator, patting the head previously trying to devour him.

“Thank you for accompanying my brother.” Abner uttered, a bit unbelieving that he’s talking to a seemingly non-sentient being. Whether it understood or not, Abner felt that he must give his gratitude to the only company his brother had had until their two young cousins came to visit.

The sea worm let out a contented whine, like a cat’s purr. Despite having no limbs or visible sensory organs, that creature was quite sensitive. The invertebrate bent its body, seemingly trying to cough out something. Abner put out his hands to receive the “gift”, which was no other than his own brown hat.

Slightly disgusted, but heart-warmed, Abner gave the monster one last pat, put on the hat, before taking his axe and his brother’s hand again.

———————————————————————————————

The sky in the outside world looked like it had never rained before. The evening shade was a mix of aqua and orange, with sparse clouds a deep blue colour. Distant light from lighthouses and ships looked like twilight stars fallen from the sky, gleaming brightly on the water surface. The waves were calm, the breeze gentle, as if it was the start of a new journey.

Abner stepped onto the boat, putting his axe back into his leather bag, his knapsack beside him, while taking the oar in his hand. Fethry looked at the lighthouse one last time - his home for nearly half a decade - but his heart was now calm as the evening tides. He had left his sadness, wrath, despair, and agony down on the sea bed. Uncle Scrooge was right: Only by letting go of the past could someone move forward.

Fethry flipped a switch, turning the lights off. No need for the beacon of hope, now that the stars were in his reach. Fethry took a deep breath, and turned around to his brother.

“Let’s go home, big brother.”

(7-3-2020 ~ 11-6-2020)

———————————————————————————————

-Oh my god I finally finished it.

-This is actually the first fan-fiction I have started in my life, but the fourth to finish writing. This is also probably the longest story I will ever write. I’m sorry I’m impatient and lazy.

-Like “122,640 Days” (and “Hey Laddie”(?)), I wrote most of “Brother’s Sentiment” before and during my public exam. I’m sorry I’m a terrible student.

-(Okay back to the story) This story is an AU (?) of the Ducktales (2017) episode “The Depth of Cousin Fethry!” (S02E02), in which Huey and Dewey did not (could not) free Fethry after their visit to the McDuck Sub-lab, so as to give way for Fethry’s big brother Abner “Whitewater” Duck. The lab was not destroyed during the kids’ visit (sorry Mitzy no playing hero for you).

-I also tried to give a backstory as to why Fethry ended up in the lab in the first place, a description of Fethry’s feelings for being trapped for four and a half years, and a reason for Scrooge’s decision of trying to indirectly kill his relative, etc. These aspects were not explored in the series and were thus non-canon.

-Also non-canon was Scrooge’s road to fame as described in the story. I know there’s a detailed backstory about Scrooge’s rise to power (?), but I am not a real fan I didn’t do my research I’m sorry wanted to fit the time “4.5 years” so as to make a comparison between Scrooge and Fethry.

-The story was written (finished) at the start of Season 3 (up to S03E07). More of Fethry may be explored (Abner screen debut please), so the story really is all my imagination.

Two songs I listened to while writing (most of) the story:

Mitsuha’s Theme (三葉のテーマ), from Your Name https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NHefLo230SE

Kataware Doki (かたわれ時), also from Your Name https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy3NpQRJntc

———————————————————————————————

Thank you for reading my first story. Have a nice day!

#ducktales #ducktales 2017 #the depth of cousin fethry #fethry duck #abner duck #whitewater duck #story #storyteller #long story

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fratboykate · 4 years

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Have you followed the absolute bullshit treatment of POC at Bon Apetit? And the silence of the white staff is so damn disappointing.

I can’t believe y’all really making me talk about this but it’s too absurd not to at this point. I haven’t watched BA in months and I really don’t have any reason to defend any of these people, especially Rapo because y’all know I always despised him so I don’t need to state that I’m glad he’s fucking gone because I couldn’t stand his face but...........the silence of white staff??? Literally HUH? That whole thing took what...like 6 hours from start to finish yesterday? It couldn’t have been more than 6-8 hours between the time the picture surfaced and Rapo resigned. In that time EVERYONE from the BATK spoke up and pretty firmly for that matter. Not one “white” person was silent about it or about their support for the staffers that spoke up.

Also, I’m not going to get into it with titles and job responsibilities because I don’t care to get into that but the amount of posts that I’ve seen floating around since yesterday that claim Claire makes 20k/video is absolutely stupid. The notion that $400/video to shoot a 6-8 minute cooking video that probably took 3-4 hours to produce from start to finish is bad pay is also just idiotic. Here’s the thing, it’s a well known fact that there is no money in digital media. None. For a while in the last decade people thought there would be but every company that expanded their digital video presence has since shrunk it because digital is not the money pile some apparently think it is. Look at places like Vice or Vox for example. All downsized in the last year and other publications scrapped their video content completely. It’s also no secret that magazines/journalism subscriptions have slumped immensely in the last few years. Sure, you could get rich off making youtube videos but it’s SO VERY DIFFERENT when you’re a single person sitting in front of a camera at your house with little to no costs being sunk into making your videos while having sponsors than being a whole ass corporation in the publishing business.

Let’s look at some numbers:

I think a pretty realistic number is to say that an episode of Gourmet Makes brings in about 20,000 in ad revenue. That’s a fair estimate. Could be more, could be less depending on the views but let’s stick with 20k because that’s a number I’ve heard thrown around more than once. You know what’s behind those 20k? Huge operational and production costs. How many people work behind the camera on those GM videos? Every time the camera reveals crew there’s at least 7-10 people. That crew is all getting paid. Claire is getting paid. Ingredients need to be bought. Equipment has an intrinsic cost. Do you think office space at the World Trade Center is cheap? The actual cost of making those videos from pre-production to post is probably close to the 20k they bring in. Especially when you’re considering the fact that GM episodes last longer than the few hours it takes to shoot every other BATK video. That’s a day rate for the crew every extra day. That’s thousands of dollars in costs every single time Claire fails and has to come back.

Let’s look at some more numbers. SAG (Screen Actors Guild) is the actor’s union. The actor’s union sets minimum day rates and scales for what talent should be paid. YouTube videos fall under “New Media” in the SAG contracts. Do you know what the day rate is for a union actor to work 12 hour days on a new media project that has a budget under 250k?

$125 dollars. For what is usually 12 hours of work. That’s what UNION actors are getting paid per day for New Media projects. $400 per video to shoot for a handful of hours is a pretty fucking fair rate. That’s the ballpark for the 12 hour day rate for many other department head positions on set and again...those people are expected to work 12 hours, often doing a fair amount of manual labor.

You also have to take into consideration that Brad and Claire literally carry that entire channel on their backs. Do they get paid more? Sure. But they also get the most views. Bar none. If the BATK was a fictional tv show they would be the lead actors. Leads and supporting/guest stars don’t get paid the same. Not even close. ESPECIALLY not when a Claire video is going to get 4 million views in a week and one of the other person’s videos is going to get 900k views in three weeks. That’s a massive difference in revenue being created. Their compensation is matching the money they make the company. Y’all seem to forget that at the end of the day all of this is a BUSINESS. You also forget it every time a “diverse” show gets cancelled too. Something can have all the diversity in the world but if people aren’t watching it or if it’s not making the company money they’re not paying for it. Period.

Look, I’m not saying BA doesn’t have a diversity problem because it clearly does, but what I am saying that it’s disingenuous to think that someone getting paid $400 per video for something that takes less than a half a day of work to produce is somehow exploitative. It’s not the crime y’all seem to think it is lol. Matter of fact, she said it was per video but let’s pretend it wasn’t. Let’s say she was getting $400/day and had to shoot more than one video that day. That’s still the equivalent of making $33/hr if you’re working 12 hour days. More if the days are shorter. In what planet is $33/hr not fair pay to make a recipe video??? Like...math guys. It’s your friend. Want more stats? A junior Editor at Vice in Los Angeles makes 30k a year. Quick googling tells me that Conde Nast in general pays their employees in similar positions about that much as well. Google tells me that the average Assistant/Associate Editor in the US makes 45k. She said she was making 50k a year. That’s seems to be above the standard. Y’all are grabbing pitchforks without using your brains first. Logic and Google are your friends. Use both of those before y’all open your mouths and start throwing around words that end in “-ism” and “-bic”.

#there really doesn't seem to be any 'checks' to give to either of these people #not based on these numbers #if they get a raise then amazing #but they weren't getting fucking robbed or anything #if y'all dont know numbers for what shit costs in the production world then....just...shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh #ba #my rants #Anonymous #KG Answers #csaffitz #bleone

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incarnateirony · 6 years

Text

Ratings for Dummies

An explanation kit to those having to deal with people who spew mindless garbage about higher or lower viewers on a given week.

I'm going to begin this with a challenge: if you've been copy-pasted this as a default retort for doing the above, I dare you to read all of it. If you're 100% confident in your opinion, and educated on your reasoning beyond a random corner of the internet number set pulled out of your butt and recited ad nauseum, you should be able to postulate a reply instead of "UR STUPID." - Anything else, you either have to internalize a debate about how often you've made yourself look like a complete jackoff to the fandom and TPTB, or just knowing and willfully spread disinformation. You are encouraged to cross-search ratings talk when I start busting out techie terms - because contrary to how the fandom likes to fling ratings around, there is in fact a science to this.

Let's start with

What are raw viewers worth?

Jack shit.

I mean if one ep had 80,000 more people watching it-

It still doesn't mean jack shit.

That doesn't make sense.

Okay so here's where we get into some real-world talk.

If you think for a second, for a moment's glance, that the entirety of any TV show's following are like us, in the deep end of the fandom, humping press releases and tracking character appearances, tuning in for any time someone breathes a character's name, you have an incredibly distorted version of reality to begin with.

But you said some characters have base loyalty...

Character loyalty does have impact, to some measure. For example, between seasons 11-12-13 Castiel maintained a 72,000-74,000 character exclusive draw per episodes that featured him (which IS a base allure of roughly 0.028 to 0.035 depending on the viewership night). And no, that doesn't mean only 70K~ people are fans of his. That means there's 70K~ people that are humping promos with dedication enough to know and tune in only for his presence. Now, you don't have to be a math wizard to know that this is about 4% of routine audience being dedicated explicitly and only to Castiel (1.7-8 million base viewership / 74k = 23~; 100/23 - you get the point.)

So yes. Character loyalty impacts numbers. We can't really give J2 exclusive numbers, because, well, J2 are in every episode - ergo we can't really determine their independent draw, especially minding that for example Castiel is himself expected in half episodes, other recurring characters in quarters of episodes and so on ad infinitum, and we have very little measure of how well the show will handle with only them.

Oh, wait, we do. It was season 7. Keep that in mind. We'll get back to this point.

But this is where that ends. Because a lot of the viewers are just that: interested in the full dynamic of a show. Many are what you'd call casual viewers, but many casual viewers are also dedicated in their own standards. Swathes of people who have watched the show since the dawn of time have never poked into social media. They never looked into show or fandom politics. They simply tune in and enjoy the complete picture.

This is what your real core demographic is. I've seen fans talk about "We're the core dem-" STFU. Really. Get over yourselves. At the peak that movement had 400 heads to it and since then most have utterly quit the show or idled out. There's roughly 200 active at this point. So I want you to realize what a piss in the bucket that is. We can get into the absolutely failed Tombstone boycott as a perfect example later on. But for now, we need to get to how ratings /actually/ work.

Well then, is it demos that matter?

To some extent, yes, but that's a microcosm in a much more complex macrocosm, and to get to that, first you need to understand the values of the "True" and "Plus" systems, what they are, and why they exist. To do this, you need to understand

The death of network television

When Supernatural first started in 2005, we had an entirely different entertainment landscape. Cell phones were bricks without internet (as even reflected in early show), most people were on dialup and if lucky, lowgrade DSL we'd laugh at modernly; there was no streaming, DVR was a pricy alternate feature on top of already pricy cable less than half of american homes had. Rabbit ears were still a very real thing until 2009 when the Digital Television Relay transition took effect. 2005-2009 was a transition point into cable being considered common and, even after this period, a large portion of the population still didn't have it and it was basically mandated at a certain point and stations everywhere had to flip across. This may be shocking to anyone under the age of 30, but /not everybody had cable when SPN started./ In fact, only a minority did.

Why is this important? Because the death of network television is important before I even get to explaining the "Plus" system and why it /exists./

Cable and Sat TV's been around for a while. Back in the old days, people got these giant assed antennas installed on top of their house that looked like you were trying to catch alien transmissions. But this was by no means a standard. Even still, even long before SPN was a thing, Nielsen and other interested parties took interest in tracking the decline of television, but it /really/ started ramping up around 2009 because of the transition.

But if you didn't have cable? If you weren't a lucky sod or early converter? You had six, maybe eight local stations. WB/CW (2006) was one of them. You generally got Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, WB, CW... and maybe one other rando and a few locals. Welcome to television. So, lo and behold, when people turned on their TV, they only had... 6, 8 choices? Goooo figure. These stations - ALL of them - had MUCH HIGHER RATINGS.

Notice the “today” is a chart that ended in 2011. Now have fun wading through the rest.

Does anyone remember Kripke talking about being in the Bubble and being unsure the show was going to make it until Misha Collins tanked in? This isn't about stanning Misha (I am not nor have I ever been a Misha stan, I am a TPTB stan and ALL related individuals) - this is about explaining just where Kripke's head was at. That's because as the show progressed, it started losing value. We're gonna get to ratings later, but know that CW was not going to syndicate until it reached 88 episodes, and by late season 3... it didn't look like they were going to get there. At a glance, looking at numbers and demos both, it looked like the show... marginally recovered, tada, happy day. But there is a picture far, far deeper than this.

Okay so that’s just news but...

Do you see these charts? These are just... several I whipped up off a quick google search regarding network television. Notice the one showing network shares drops off dead at 2012; and if any of you, whatsoever, realize anything it's that in these last five years, we've had a truly digital boom. Everyone has a cell phone with internet. Everyone has cable, DVR, high speed internet. In the US, at least. It's a very, very, VERY small population that doesn't anymore. As a result And just in case for some reason you're unaware of that, here have a CHART and another CHART. And take notice that Amazon, Hulu, and other major streaming services do NOT report ratings. They make the studio money, yes, and they're very happy and aware of that, but you'll never see it reflect in viewers or demos. But despite this, at least until the 2012 cutoff, seems like CW’s share stayed pretty level, didn’t it? But... where is it going?

Oh, IDK.

Now if for any reason you think this has zero impact or ramifications in ratings across the board on major networks, let's try this: Simpsons. Totally different genres, viewership types, right? Here's a bundle of charts. I even overlapped them within the year brackets for the visually impaired.

You can try it with the time period for anything. Check out WWE. Check out anything out in the US this long. Overlay. Start feeling embarassed.

QED: Ratings literally everywhere have gone down. And that's what the "Plus" factor in ratings is for.

Okay you keep talking about "Plus" so WTF IS PLUS

Plus isn't exactly what the industry calls it, but it's become a widely acknowledged tag for the general public. "Plus" is a factor that people-that-aren't-dumb-and-work-in-TV are fully aware of and, I promise, with all of those charts in mind, completely expect. It's a lot simpler to just call it Plus.

A18-49+ (or "Plus" for short) is a stab at a "fair" measurement of historical TV ratings in a world where Live + Same Day broadcast ratings and renewal standards are constantly on the decline. To create a fair measurement for entertainment programming, a 30 year ratings buff came up with the rating for the average moment of primetime entertainment programming on the big four broadcasters in each season starting with 2001-02, as "league average."

A18-49+ takes a show's average rating for a season, divides it by the "league average" for that season, and multiplies by 100. That means a show with a 100 A18-49+ did exactly the "league average" for entertainment programming. The bigger, the better.

You can read more from the creator here: http://www.spottedratings.com/p/a18-49-index.html

Keep in mind this individual has no affiliation with SPN or the CW, doesn't give two flying FUCKS about your fandom drama or ships, and has been studying ratings since before most of the squawkers here popped out of their mother. The others, you may have been in school at the time. That said, before you start screaming any of the trivializing "bias" horse shit you can feel free to go argue with that sysop and look like a righteous jackass to them too, or you can deal with the fact that someone, somewhere, is far, far more aware of what they're talking about than you are.

Now that we have that handled,

So... demos don't mean anything?

No, they do. They're an important microcosm in a very vast macrocosm that's eternally expanding. Demos show us our "percent share" of people watching actual television on any given day and time. Even on shitty days where SPN is panning a flat 0.50, that means one in two hundred people with their TVs on in america are watching, basically. It's a little more complicated than that, but this is gonna be long enough.

However, demos can be impacted by just... high TV viewing nights. Let's say a TV show has a highly dedicated cult fandom and then, I dunno, the Olympics click on. Even if that show retains every base line fan, unless it has something like a ratings draw character that rakes in more than their average viewers, the demo is going to faceplant even if they happen to get MORE viewers. Why? Because 5 bazillion new people just tuned into the Olympics that usually wouldn't even watch TV and now our percentiles are fucked up.

To some extent, those of us that are versed in the mechanics of the TV world can kind of speculate what's going to slag viewership on a given night.

Holidays, olympics, etc. If you air a TV episode on Christmas when a million people around the US all decide to tune into the fucking hallmark channel to watch a fake fireplace with fake puppies running around, suddenly everything goes to hell. And so on. There's other more detailed nuances than this, of course, but these are the ones that make sense without pages of extra exposition.

That said, a demo can flux up and down even on the exact same number of viewers. Sometimes, a demo can be below an episode even though it had more viewers. Demo matters more than raw viewers because it shows the general retention better than raw heavy traffic does, since there can just be a lazy damn day in America by some fluke and boom, heavy general click-on. Viewership, in the end, means about as much as a fart in the wind. Demos give us localized views within the structure of a few seasonal periods. Demos of surrounding years can be relatively contiguous, but while hundreds of station options expand, streaming becomes more prevalent and more, the core networks, as seen on the above charts, seem to be dying demographically.

I promise it's not that the Simpsons or WWE have become 1/3 as entertaining as before, and neither has SPN. The simple fact of it is: people have diversified options in what, and how to view.

So back to base: The Plus factor is a simple algorithm to determine that. Networks take it into account too, that's why they're still making money, and still airing things that, in theory, have 1/2 or 1/3 the ratings they had a handful of years ago. Because in reality: that's simply not true. And anyone that continues to recite this shows they have no idea what they're talking about. Then there's "True," which is ratings adjusted for timeslot and station, as CW has its own formula if you look up "Plus,"

Okay fine but SPN started at a 2.5 demo in season 1 and has a 0.6 demo now and you can't even-

Okay first of all, hold the phone, S1-3 stan, because we've got some enlightenment here.

Literally any new show in that era (due to the limited options thing) got a wealth of attention. Did you know that by midseason demo had already dropped to 1.7 and share had dropped from 6 to 4? It only broke 2.0 one other time that season, dropping as low as 1.3 in the penultimate episode, with the finale marking in at 1.6. Supernatural lost an entire viewership percentile over the course of only its first season, and the average was a 1.9. (Source: http://www.spottedratings.com/2011/12/spotvault-supernatural-cw-2005-06.html )

Season 2 fared no better, starting at 1.7 and never returning to it, declining to 1.2 by the finale with a 29% loss on year to year. However, later on, I'm going to break out the "Plus" metric and show why... this was actually okay. For now, it looks rough on S1-3 stans, but hang in there! Plus will shine for you on this. Just wait until we do raw demo breakdown. Just hang onto the average being 1.38. (Source: http://www.spottedratings.com/2011/12/spotvault-supernatural-cw-2006-07.html )

Supernatural returned in season 3 at 1.2, where it left off, bouncing between and staying... just about stable there. Even on season average (1.2) (Source: http://www.spottedratings.com/2011/12/spotvault-supernatural-cw-2007-08.html )

As I recently went through the skull busting agony of finding "the first episode of March" for all seasons to show a thematic trend, I'm going to give you "first episode of March" (not withstanding S3 which was off until end of April) with Plus values as pulled from this same site. All the way through the end of "Kripke's vision." S1: 3/30/06 37 S2: 3/15/07 37 (+0%) S3: 4/24/08* 30 (-19%) S4: 3/12/09 33 (+10%) S5: 3/25/10 39 (+19%) Literally, arbitrary date/episode number you can go back and cross reference for air times. Go ahead, prove I'm wrong. And if you want, and are willing to give a few days for me to pull up the independent Plus values on all of these seasons (or do so yourself) - go and check. Try to /not/ be so transparent as to lurch for the initial surge wave of S1 that we've already covered the horrific slashing of. This is clearly where we equalized.

So what's up with S2 having the same "Plus" value as S1, when S2 had a drop? Well, check the seasons, the S1 March ep and S2 ep basically got the same viewership on that specific episode, and no major changes happened. Tada! Cool. So what happened in S3? We flatlined.

What was the bottom of S2's barrel on ratings became our average point. Simple enough. Be it demos, audience, or "Plus," S3 kinda waffled - while still in the grey area of syndication that Kripke was worrying about (88 episodes.) So moving into S4, you see the +10 value. Things were /starting/ to update but not wildly at this point. Season started at 1.7, which we hadn't seen in a while, then danced around and landed at an average of 1.3; still a higher demo than S3, but I mean, not staggeringly so.

But here's where those plusses get fun.

As above, in 2009, digital conversion became mandated. You could either buy an expensive converter box to keep watching regular TV, have NO TV, or go to cable. By then, portions of friends had gotten basic cable, most people cracked and went to table, but not all yet. Some still scrabbled for rabbit ears. Even still, on all above graphs and charts, you'll notice the decline setting forward. S5 hit with a starter demo of 1.4, balancing routinely to 1.22, lending it between S 4 and S 2 - so what gives on it being ranked ABOVE both of them? (+19% over S4, +29% over S3, +10% over S1-2) - BECAUSE EVERYBODY HAD CABLE OR NO TV.

That's right, diversity was almost thrust upon the general audience, but at that point, cable was still a fairly small universe compared to now. Streaming still wasn't a thing. Lo and behold, even though S5's season average was on par between 3 and 5, the value was ranked above - as the true death of broadcast television began... and miraculously, SPN pretty much kept its viewerbase while other stations started dropping like flies in 2009.

---

Still reading? Probably not the people this needs to reach, but it'll educate those that do truly WANT to know.

Ah... season 6. I have so many things to say about season 6-7. First of all I do feel like Sera Gamble was kind of thrown under a bus; S3 had the writer's strike, S4 Manners was pulling out due to DYING, then S5 Kripke and head author Carver both bounced like DEUCES and left Gamble scrambling with a tied off storyline and a now-syndicated show demanding more.

Despite S4-5 pulling out and bearing through the decline of network TV, season 6, in pure demos, didn't do that well. Started at 1.3, ended at 0.8, and on top of that got boned over onto Fridays too. TLDR season average was 0.99. There's a lot of factors in this drop - from some original audience being appeased by Swan Song, the schedule change, and other people just not liking the new production and direction, but the thing is? It still held. It was S7 that fell through the goddamn floor. S1: 3/30/06 37 S2: 3/15/07 37 (+0%) S3: 4/24/08* 30 (-19%) S4: 3/12/09 33 (+10%) S5: 3/25/10 39 (+19%) S6: 3/04/11 39 (+0%) [Moved to Friday] S7: 3/16/12 30 (-24%) So before anybody starts crying about Born Again Identity being the lowest rated as DA PROOF that Cas wasn't wanted back, you need to look at that. LOOK AT IT. That was the episode before he came back, with no warning nor ad at that point indicating he would. S7 fell to an average of 0.73, or in demo talk, about a 26.5% demo loss. Plus rounds off 2.5 of that as standard network losses over that period. But the fact of it, by every demographic, at this point, the last two seasons had lost us HALF of the season 4-5 stable demographic that resisted the digital conversion period.

There's a reason Gamble doesn't work there anymore.

So let's talk more about demos, and how they're often flagrantly abused in the name of hate.

Let's look at season 8. Season 8's recovery may have seemed meager. It rode low on the aftermath of S7 and started at only 0.8, but routinely stabilized at 1.0, including the back end of the season, leaving us a 0.92. Here's the Plus value share, S6: 3/04/11 39 (+0%) [Moved to Friday] S7: 3/16/12 30 (-24%) S8: 3/20/13 47 (+58%) S9: 3/04/14 48 (+2%)

You notice anything here? Mainly that they projected a 50% annual incline of data usage back then? You know, people who worked in it? Or how about the one that showed the projections were spot on when the chart was made afterward? How about a report on how many TV networks branched on cable around then? Or defaulting back to those cripplingly flatlining charts? Broadcast TV is dead, Jim. But somehow, despite only recovering to just-under the ratings of S6 (roughly 28%~ recovery demo-wise), it counted as a +58% increase. Again, it's not me, it's them. [points at the 30 year ratings experts] Network TV declined, but SPN bounced back.

As you can see, S9 held the sharing line, but that's also because SPN had updated.

Updated how? Oh, let's see... Supernatural had been loaded for binge watch on Netflix. DVR and SD started popularizing and becoming mainstream. S9 stabilized us back at a 1.0 raw demographic despite these tumultuous changes in television. Back to Plus, S8: 3/20/13 47 (+58%) S9: 3/04/14 48 (+2%) S10: 3/18/15 36 (-33%) S11: 3/23/16 44 (+22%) So here's where it looks like it gets dicey. Season 10 started at a 1.1 share, which we really hadn't seen since... well, Kripke era. It hovered around the 1.0 line until midseason. I also have my feelings about the back-end of S10's handling, and by the sounds of interviews and panels, so did the cast and crew, but someone pitched a direction, we meandered, ratings drifted. 0.1>0.9>0.8>0.7>0.6. Even the finale didn't bank better than 0.7, and our average dropped at 0.8. Fun fact though, that -33% on the first episode of March? One of the lowest rated episodes on the season, notwithstanding the horrible choice of killing off Charlie. But by then, viewership had floundered. Even still, at our LOWEST episodes on the season, we're holding the network share ABOVE the S9 gains... as once again digital around us booms.

Don't believe me? Check. You can forward and backtrack everything I'm saying on these seasons. (Source: http://www.spottedratings.com/2014/10/spotvault-supernatural-cw-2014-15.html )

Curiously after midseason, on the bottom chart, you can literally SEE the perpetual decline on every metric. You can LITERALLY look at it as it started dropping viewers to competition.

Ultimately, S11 led in about where you'd expect, a small tick above S10's ending, because... premieres. Duh. 0.9. TLDR ratings at a glance teeter tottered around 0.71 on demographic. Our demo went down 0.1 ... but our Plus went up 22%? And better, our Plus went up 22% on one of the LOWEST RATED episodes OF season 11? And the better part of the extended charts (http://www.spottedratings.com/2015/10/spotvault-supernatural-cw-2015-16.html) are green instead of red?!?! What black magic is this?

The black magic is called being in the year 2016. How many of your US friends didn't have highspeed internet? How accessible was CW app which wasn't connecting in yet? How many people buy from Amazon, Hulu, or other streaming sources that don't report ratings but just feed in direct profits?

DING DING DING, EUREKA. Maybe this has clicked on a light in a few skulls. We'll touch briefly on S12-13.

Look, I'm not a S12 fan. I fucking hated S12. But I have the brains enough to know that this 0.6 it has? The population doesn't. There's a reason TPTB is holding on and it's not ThE DeStIEL aGENdaaaaa. It's not SaMEraSUre. So let's talk. S12. Led in at 0.8 from S11, hit .6 pretty immediately spare for like 12x12 and a few other flukes, rode the perfect 0.6 average line. But where is our Plus? S11: 3/23/16 44 (+22%) S12: 3/02/17 49 (+11%)

That's right. Despite our average going down 0.1 at a glance to people who don't understand how The Internet works, our Plus values increased 11%. Because guess what? IT WAS 2017 AND EVERYTHING IS FREAKING DIGITAL. So how about we do the time warp to the current, and realize we're in 2018, and not back in 2005-land where cell phones were mythic ideas that you were excited if you could play 2-tone space invaders on.

Those were first eps of March, right? Enjoy the first week of March, this year (13x14) (http://www.spottedratings.com/2018/03/spotted-ratings-thursday-3118.html#more)

See the buttons for Raw and Plus?

First of all let me disclaimer this. At the point I'm writing this piece, true-true finals haven't been tallied in and the main page for it hasn't been made in archive yet with true finals. These are prelims. I'm writing this before TVSF or any of the big websites people like to bounce to as casuals thinking they're ITK about ratings go to look at, release anything. Both this page and TVSF say 0.6 at this point. I can promise the final is going to be (or be close to, such as within a 0.01~) 0.56; Why? Because this same site also releases unrounded prelims, and both this page, TVSF, and almost any page does a round-up. Unrounded prelims were 0.558. We got 0.56.(Adjustments can and do happen but, at the point of this post, we’re not getting railed by a lot of pre-emptions and prelims have generally been within 0.01; the specific accuracy of fast track national unrounded prelims can vary such as with a large pre-empt.)

But do yourself a favor. Check the Plus. Season 13: 3/1/2018 - episode 13x14 - 56. A 14% increase in network share at current and, even if this drops a few points with a 0.56 adjustment, no doubt at least a 10% increase. So let's do some math: S1: 3/30/06 37 S2: 3/15/07 37 (+0%) S3: 4/24/08* 30 (-19%) S4: 3/12/09 33 (+10%) S5: 3/25/10 39 (+19%) S6: 3/04/11 39 (+0%) [Moved to Friday] S7: 3/16/12 30 (-24%) S8: 3/20/13 47 (+58%) S9: 3/04/14 48 (+2%) S10: 3/18/15 36 (-33%) (earlier episodes would give us nearer to -20% but we're being nice to antis.) S11: 3/23/16 44 (+22%) S12: 3/02/17 49 (+11%) S13: 3/01/18 56 (+14%) You... you do realize that in terms of broadcast television, this means that S13 is performing, functionally, 51% better than S1-2 did at origin and as much as 86% better than season 3?

You... you do realize that, right?

So while someone sits here, screaming, "WHY HAVEN'T TPTB LISTENED TO US?" maybe stop and realize that it is because you are WRONG to the point of being utterly incoherent to anyone that knows how this works. The seasons railed for are the lowest performance, the attempt to go back TOWARDS those demands in early S7 threw the show BACK into that early trashcan, and all steps made by the eras that a certain very small, noisy sect of haters screech about have in fact redeemed the show, first in regaining MASSIVELY exodused demo, then stabilizing it across other mediums and still climbing compared to all competition.

Now I will rub SOME salt in the wound. Tombstone. You know that one that all the haters rioted, hashtagged a #mysupernatural boycott during to prove they weren't watching, ended up having a GIANT ratings jack?

Yeah. Its Plus value was 69. Or, summarily, sizably above two times the network value of early seasons. And had a 20% increase over Year to Year in the same slot. And a 40% increase on "true year to year" from even S12.(http://www.spottedratings.com/2017/11/spotted-ratings-thursday-111617.html) Don't believe me? Ask the dishes. Click plus.

The simple fact of it is: the people that scream the show is "dying" are wrong in every field imaginable. The show is, and will continue to be, one of CW's forever strong horses as long as J2 WANT. But the fact of it is - they don't want it as much anymore.

Not because of "Jared mistreatment" by the crew; but because this is now 13 years in which the world around them has changed - quite literally - right down to the evolution of cellphones as we've spoken - while they've started families. And maybe, just maybe, some of them are tired of their friends and family being harangued in the name of tinhatting or hating certain characters. And maybe, just maybe, they're heading on 40 and want to try other things in life. And maybe, just maybe, we should respect that instead of turning it into other reasons to shriek at people and just prove the point. Cuz the entire ratings screaming? That's gone. It's done.

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Now this is already a titanic post. I'm not going to cover my own ratings projections mechanics in the same thing. I've talked it in bits and pieces over social media, but really mapping out the entire image of it, and its reliance on a mix of outter-world issues, episodical formats, calendar scheduling, hiatuses, and of course fan favorites and ratings characters yes - that's it's own thing. So to those who have been worried - CW will literally continue it, "as long as ratings hold out." One thing that hasn't occured to the shriekers is that this has been the verse since the dawn of time. Even with demos seeming to fraction on themselves until you run this kind of analysis. Why is that? Because ratings have been holding out. They always have. CW will never have another horse in the race like Supernatural. Flash is close - it tries, but it's not as age and time worn and we have no proof, beyond it surviving another decade, that it will hold out like SPN has. If it does, Good On It. But CW really only has two considerations: J2(and to some extent M)'s desires, and any well-beyond-SPN fiscal issues (such as the TW/ATT fiasco that could bone a lot of their projects). That's it. SPN is fine. SPN is fantastic. SPN is more than 50% better off than when it started.

Again, at some point I'll break down the mechanics I use to generate my demo projections at another point. Those that pay attention know I'm eerily accurate; and these things go beyond simply "who is in the episode," though that be part of it - there's so many complicated things that I'd have to explain piece by piece. So, some day, I'll get to that. Until then, you see I know what I'm talking about and see that I'm right week in-and-out, so...

TLDR to people yelling about ratings to bash people: Shut the fuck up about ratings until you understand it. Or quietly squii over when something looks good. But don't sit here trying to use it to bludgeon other wings down or worse, harass TPTB or try to agenda push on them when one specific bracket of ratings seem to look good to your cause, because odds are, you look like a giant freaking asshat.

TLDR2 for people who love the show in its current state: S13 is doing 51% better than S1-2 and Tombstone did 2times+ better respectively and you should be really happy about that. (Edit: Brainfried, it was a late post I was finishing. S13 is doing 86% better than S3, Tombstone did 2x better than all of them. Crossed my wires at 2 AM.)

This has been a public service announcement AND The More You Know.

(Edit: For those still finding this fresh, an addendum post has been created:

https://intelligentshipper.tumblr.com/post/171566934275/ratings-for-dummies-vol-2 )

#Supernatural #ratings #death of primetime TV #mine

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webmarket01 · 4 years

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5 Quick Tips To Get The Weight loss Results You Want With Peloton | Stronger U

New Post has been published on https://weightlosshtiw.com/5-quick-tips-to-get-the-weight-loss-results-you-want-with-peloton-stronger-u/

5 Quick Tips To Get The Weight loss Results You Want With Peloton | Stronger U

My first introduction to Peloton was when a few people started joining our program and mentioning that’s how they heard about us. I didn’t have a clue what it was. I would see “Peloton group” come through on the ‘how you heard of us’ section on our signup form and I assumed it was an at-home add on to regular cycling.

Then I did a little searching. Wow. This thing is major and there is a huge community of people buying these bikes to lose fat in addition to getting more fit and healthy. If you aren’t familiar with Peloton, picture an in-home spin class with a well-built bike, awesome instructors, a tight community, and some of the best technology in the fitness business. You can see why this company is valued at over a billion dollars. It checks all the boxes…except one and it’s to no fault of their own. Giving people the results they want.

I already mentioned it’s not the Peloton’s fault per se, but something is responsible. So, what is it? Well, it’s the same old problem every exerciser faces and literally the reason Stronger U started. To be the sidekick to great workouts and give people the results they deserve. In this case, fat loss.

If you’re working out hard and you’re not seeing the results it’s most likely food-related. The elephant in the room that accounts for the other 95% of the day you don’t spend working out. That’s what we’re going to address here and leave you with some practical tips so you can get the most out of your workouts from this point on.

You’re not burning as many calories as you think.

Calorie outputs are estimations based on power, your weight, time, and a few other factors. Calories burned estimates aren’t a perfect science, and while that science might be improving, the estimates of how many calories you burn while exercising can still be wildly off base. It’s best to think of the calories burned number on your Peloton, Apple Watch, or any other piece of tech as a generalization.

Beyond those numbers being a general estimate, it’s important that we recognize that exercise in itself isn’t a weight-loss tool. It’s a health tool. Can working out consistently help with weight loss? Definitely. But the help it provides typically comes from helping us stay motivated to eat well, sleep regularly, and be more mindful of how we treat our bodies. The more quickly you can start exercising for the health and wellness benefits instead of the calorie benefits, the better off you’ll be. And chances are you’ll enjoy your workouts even more because of it.

“I have had a peloton since 2014… I even tried to workout 6-7 days a week with NO weight loss. I kept thinking I’m killing it and I ate pretty healthy too. Until I met stronger U I never had any weight loss. I assumed I was doing enough. Bottom line is there was more fat (avocados and olive oil) and calories in the food that I ate then I wanted to admit.” – Amanda Lamer

You’re still eating poorly even if you think you aren’t.

You start riding your Peloton 3x a week and you make that a habit. You’re feeling great because you’re moving your body more often and you’re building an exercise habit you can be proud of. You decide to make some changes in how you’re eating to help yourself along.

So you start eating more “whole foods”. You load up on avocados, buy only organic foods, grass-fed beef, and butter. A few weeks go by and you’re still not down any weight. What gives? Simply put, you might have tried to improve the quality of what you’re eating, but in doing so you might have also increased the quantity of how much you’re eating without even knowing it.

Our eating habits are the most important factor when it comes to weight loss. Specifically, how much we eat. Most of us understand that we have to eat less in order to lose weight. But what most of us don’t understand is how difficult it is to eat less or how small the margin for error of weight loss actually is.

Actual weight loss requires a consistent calorie deficit, repeated over a period of time. How long of a period of time that is depends on how intense your calorie deficit is. Creating that calorie deficit requires us to honestly and accurately stay on top of how much we’re eating on a daily basis — something that even the most educated people in the world of food struggle with.

Eating plenty of fruits, vegetables, and exercising is a good recipe for improving your health. But weight loss in itself still comes down to creating a calorie deficit, and unfortunately, it’s more than possible to overeat foods that we view as healthy or okay. Especially foods higher in fat like avocados. Yes, there is more to this food thing than calories but in the case of fat loss, they are king.

You use food as a reward for working out.

Someone goes on a ride, they’re told that ride burned 400 calories, and now they have an additional 400 calories they can eat that day. Because that’s how calorie burning and exercising work, right?

Not quite. It’s easy to think of food as a reward. For many of us, we’ve been taught since we were children that’s exactly what food is: a reward. And that thought follows us into adulthood. The way we approach food after a hard workout is a perfect example of that.

But that’s not how the world of weight loss works. Like we’ve established, creating a calorie deficit usually involves a very small margin of error. For plenty of people, that might only be 100-200 calories. Which means even if you have a great workout, you’re only a heaping serving of peanut butter away from eliminating your calorie deficit for the day, which might undo any weight loss you were going to see that week. It’s also common to under-report the amount you did eat, which means you’re not only negating the deficit, you’re going the wrong way.

“I definitely ate the calories the bike told me I was burning!” – Carrie Costello

The workouts make you hungrier.

The double-edged sword of working out is the fact that working out, by its very nature, is bound to make you hungrier. Think about it: you’re pushing your body, you’re sweating, and you’re doing that for around an hour or more. Even if that doesn’t burn as many calories as we think, it does have a psychological impact.

As we’ve already seen, the whole hunger/exercise relationship is incredibly complicated, and it feels impossible to separate the two. But one of the things that we have to accept is that working out will inevitably make you hungrier at some point during the day. Maybe it’s because you’re implicitly viewing food as a reward and not even conscious of it, so you desire more food. Or maybe it’s because you’ve been convinced that you need to eat more food in order to recover, so you have this natural desire to eat more on days you exercise.

No matter the reason, if you’re not actively paying attention to how much you’re eating on a daily basis, working out regularly can accidentally lead you to overeating. All without you being aware of what is actually going on.

“I was over eating and hoping to offset that with burned calories. Based on the bikes numbers and guessing (incorrectly) how much I was eating I assumed I was in a “good enough” deficit (I wasn’t). Often, I thought that since I was working out I had more wiggle room so that didn’t help either.” – Katherine Crites

You worked out hard and moved less the rest of the day.

Have you ever heard of the constrained model of energy expenditure? If not, you should. In short, it says that when you work out hard, your body will naturally throttle down your activity in order to help you rest and prevent from expending too much energy.

This is an evolutionary adaptation that goes back to the time when our ancestors roamed the plains. And while we now roam grocery stores instead of wide-open plains, our brains and the things that drive our behavior haven’t changed much. That’s especially true when we think about our relationship with exercise and general movement.

It’s a well-established idea that NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis) plays a pivotal role in weight loss. NEAT can be thought of as all the movement you rack up during your day to day life that isn’t exercise. Your daily steps, the fidgeting you do while you’re waiting on a meeting to start, and the work you do to prep your food? All NEAT.

But here’s where things get tricky: when you work out really hard, the constrained model of energy expenditure says that you will then start moving less over the rest of the day, bringing your NEAT down from where it previously was. Not all bad, right? Not so fast.

NEAT accounts for around 30% of your daily energy expenditure. Calories burned during exercise pale in comparison to that number due to the fact that exercise tends to happen for drastically shorter periods of time. After all, if your workout takes you an hour, there are still 23 hours in the day that your body can be moving around and burning calories. It’s virtually impossible for most people to make up that difference through exercise alone, and I can confidently say that it probably wouldn’t be fun to try and do so.

In closing, keep riding your Peloton, it’s awesome. Anything that helps you move your body on a consistent basis in a way that you enjoy is an exercise habit that is sure to stick around. And it should be no shock to any of you that we here at Stronger U are big fans of a company that creates a supportive and loving community. Just don’t treat riding your Peloton as the only thing you need to do in order to lose weight. If that’s the goal, you will have to pay attention to how much you eat, and that will pay the biggest dividends for you in the long-run.

This content was originally published here.

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adelindschade · 6 years

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So since in my previous post I touched on some of the bullshit my dad put us through, I’m going to reiterate some of our last ‘transactions’ before that bridge was burned - one of the many pivotal awakenings I needed to throw those rose colored glasses away. By then I had taken them off and started seeing shit differently but this moment was probably one of the few that prompted me to stop giving a fuck and call it quits for good.

By this point, dad and I are in a rough patch. I gave him an ultimatum about a year from now - right before thanksgiving - to stay off mom, she wasn’t in a position to be losing income for child support when custody was 50/50, etch. - and he’d rather lay into me about not knowing my place (despite me being a 22 YO independent adult) and gaslighting me about not knowing the full situation (bullshit). So we’re not on speaking terms.

I’ll let you know now - family or not, if you piss me, I’m done. I quit. There ain’t no tantrums. There aren’t conversations. After that last text and you ain’t wit the program, I’m duecing out. Peace sign, have good life, motherfucker, I’m out. Adios. Fuck off forever. I had my last straw and I stopped talking altogether. It was mutual. No one was lifting a finger to initiate any sort of discussion after that debacle. .

I ain’t the person who sends holiday or birthday texts. Nah. When I’m done, it’s cold turkey. I cut it off in an instant and I don’t look back. None of this “I’m always here” bullshit or “call me if you have a change of heart”. Nah, fam. Not even with my ex-bestie. She was all about that life after our blow out but I said what I said, I meant it, and I’m not turning back on my words just to re-engage an awkward & inevitably change friendship. That bridge was incinerated and same goes for my Dad.

Also - blocking - I’m all about that life. None of that ‘weak’ shit excuse. I don’t want to be hearing from you. I don’t want to be seeing shit from or about you. I don’t want you creeping on my shit either so your nosy ass can talk about something to your friends. Nah. We’s dead to each other. I blocked a hella ton of people because they nosy AF and messy and I’m not going to enable that shit. My profile is private, too, so they can’t hire their friends to peep for them either. Communication is low so mutual friends or family can’t be talking shit if I don’t have anything to say about the matter. I stay in my fucking lane, you bet your ass you ought to do the same. I ain’t gonna make it easy for you to weave in between the lines so don’t even bother.

I also learned that if people are a) bitching but b) not blocking - that door is still open for more bullshit. That girlfriend of yours talking shit about her on-and-off ex for a billion reasons but still refusing to block his ass? You bet they’re going to be back together by the end of the week. It’s inevitable. They ain’t ready to cut that cord.

My dad was one of those people. His (last I heard, ex) GF was a piece of work. So many stories were born from that messy relationship but he wasn’t dumb AF and continued to justify or make excuses as to why he wanted to work on it. At the end of the day, he made it known he valued her over his own kids, and that was that. He bankrupted himself to support her even though she already had income coming in three different ways and he used that excuse to make all these expectations that were never realized.

This is semi-important. All of this ties together.

When I cut contact, I cut all of it. No birthday text, no happy father’s day text, none of that. I was a making a point and it struck a nerve. He went through mom to tell me I needed to bounce TF off his phone plan (as if I wasn’t paying my portion?? which I learned was MORE than what I actually owed!!). Hmm. Ironic. I was asking him for months to cut me off his plan because he was the account owner and he had to give the approval but all he did was give BS excuses to wait or that I wasn’t financially ready to take on another burden (What?? I was meticulous about my budget and planned ahead for it! I realize now it was because I was paying for part of not just my plan but his, too - hmm). So suddenly now, I’m an ungrateful mooch and need to bounce ASAP.

Luckily I anticipated this but unfortunately had to wait for his go ahead. Because no matter how times I attempted to do it, they still needed certain information only he could give, and it was infuriating that I couldn’t do shit unless he went ahead from HIS account to release the line.

Now, let me input this: I love my phone. It’s old (4+ years) but it works, it functions, and it still in pretty condition because I forked out a shit ton of money for a grade A case that lived up to its reputation (otterbox FTW). So, the only thing I was (or should have been) paying for was just the plan and my ass was grandfathered in so I wasn’t paying for shit for unlimited. However, I was paying twice that amount until this moment. My upgrade was never used because I didn’t need one - it was only for an emergency just in case some shit happened to my phone. I didn’t ever want a new one because the one I had (and still do) does everything I need it to. (Shout out to Samsung!)

Dad, however, was the exact opposite. Constantly upgraded because he HAD to have the new iPhone after it’s release (same applies to my brother which he always catered to) and stealing everyone’s upgrades while still forking out money for the phone he just ditched.

So after days in finagling for the fucking information I needed to just finish the job, he finally makes me the account manager to just take care of it. First it was, oh I haven’t paid the bill yet so I still owe x amount before they make any account change (abet lowkey suggesting I take care of the $400+ invoice - TF I will! Hell no! I’m not the one to be tried today - fuck that noise!) Then it was - oh, well, uh, I couldn’t cover the total so wait until next week so I have the entire bill take care of...

Here’s what went down:

This man never, ever paid the bill in full. He had late fee after late free applied because he was cutting corners.

On top of that, he was constantly adding new devices - like a new set of Dre Beat wireless headphones - hmm - while apparently not having enough to cover the bill. That’s some piss poor management right there.

Here’s the bonus:

I finally ask the rep to take me off. Wait, there’s a new charge. What? On my line? Repeat that, please??

This man used MY line, MY UPGRADE, while the account still under his name to buy a brand new $1100 iPhone - in payment plans no less! So either someone pays the difference (which is pretty much the whole thing) before I can ever transfer my line to an independent one or - at this point - my mind stopped listening because I was fuming.

Wanna guess where, or rather who, that phone went to? Take a guess - it’s pretty easy - if you thought, hmm, Dad, so did I - but no, it went to his pretty little neurotic piece of a GF. *I learned this later on from my brother who was lamenting about how she got the phone and not him (after his took a nasty fall & cracked the screen).

Folks, I don’t remember how TF I did without forking over money but I did - I got my ass off the plan within a week of the original message, kept my beloved phone (which he can pry from my cold, dead hands) and my number with a manageable plan.

Now, let me tell you, I did not block my dad. My number is still the same as always because it’s damn near connected to everything in my name. I couldn’t bother with a number change because too much inconvenience. I sent him an e-mail saying the deed was done (literally 5 words or less) and he never replied back - that was that.

Fast forward about.... rounded, a couple months. Karma is beautifully served and she kicks his ass to the curb after mooching off what she could without having to do the same. (He’s still a dick and probably did some shit to deserve the restraining order). He crawls back to my mom looking for pity. She reminds him said-ex-GF is not worth it and primarily one of the reasons why he’s estranged with his eldest (me!).

He has the audacity to say the following - oh, I was going to ask her eventually if she wanted to get coffee. (Haha! Hell no! As if I’d be anywhere in the same zip code as this man! I ain’t gonna be trapped listening to his woe-is-me bullshit. Fuck that!)

Mom shakes her head - she knows me well enough. That ain’t gonna fly. She’s not going to respond to that.

He probably scratched his head - what should I do? (*Uh, dumbass, I literally wrote you an e-mail with plain-as-day instructions. First step, apologize, second step, acknowledge your wrong doings, third step, make an vocal and actual effort to fix x amount of issues which I’ve bulleted! Look at your Goddamn archives!)

Mom literally says - show an effort.

He replies - okay... is her number the same??

Bruh. Bruuhh.

At this point, it’s just comedy. I can’t make this shit up.

I’ve never blocked this man. I never changed my number. If he asked, idk, my brother?? He’d confirm - yeah, it’s still the same.

Now under this context, which my mother forewarned me about, he sends me a BS text - oh, thinking about you, hoping you’re doing well, text me, love ya.

What bullshit. Mind you, had his (ex) GF not kicked him to the curb, he’d still be at her side, and I’d still be in exile - so no - not happening. You made your bed, lie in it. See - I look at the bigger picture - it helps with retrospect.

Mark to present: Mom is now on the train which she’s almost always finds her way back on - forgive and forget! He’s your father? Yadda-yadda - you know the naive shit that gets her into trouble because she forgives wayyy too easily the shit no one should put up with. (*I’m all about the resent-and-remember and boii has it served me good).

Mom - has your father texted you yet? He told me he tried again. (As per use, telling one thing, doing another - actions ain’t lining up, pops. Typical).

My inbox: void of any such message(s).

Me - Nope! (proceeds to monologue about his douchebaggery and my intolerance for such antics and how forgiveness is absolutely out of the question.)

Mother - who is very passive - immediately weans off the topic. She’s the soft spoken but persistent type. (I’m the opposite. I’m the ‘cuss your ass out’ + end of fucking discussion type).

I see things for how they are and I’m ain’t about that bullshit. I know how things operate and I’m not playing the fool this time.

#this is a long post #oh my

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communityglobalbuzrush-blog · 4 years

Text

Make Money On Instagram

You’ve perhaps heard accounts of Make Money On Instagrammers that happen to be cashing in at the photos they snap and publish on daily basis. You might've even checked out your own personal sizeable following and thought, “Maybe I will execute this too”.

Similar tobloggers and YouTubers, and someone who’s amassed a crowd to the information they deliver, Make Money On Instagrammers have get through to and impact found out-2 things many companies suffer from.

Together, both these items provide chance for Make Money On Instagram designers to explore various streams of capabilities profits, no matter if they would like to make an business or even bring in extra cash and free stuff.

The amount of supporters do you need to make cash on Make Money On Instagram?

If by now you're wondering how many followers you need to make it happen, the short answer is “not as many as you think”.

The prolonged answer is dependent on conditions that cover anything from:

•What specific niche market you’re in and just how quite simply it is possible to instantly tie it to a new supplement type (food, beauty and fashion and fitness are well-known niche categories, dependant upon leading Make Money On Instagram hashtags)

•How active your enthusiasts are (100K counterfeit readers won’t amount to significantly).

•Which sales routes you investigate.

Naturally, the harder interested readers one has, so much the better. Assess our the best way to get visitors on Make Money On Make Money On Instagram.

Even while top notch Make Money On Instagrammers make many for every publish relating to the digital photo-discussing system, even people who have a reduced-but-interested pursuing of 1000 have the potential to get started on creating wealth.

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How to earn money on Make Money On Instagram in 2019

Depending upon your distinct label of Make Money On Instagram posts, your target audience, including your amount of commitments, you can create money on Make Money On Instagram in the subsequent methods:

•Engaging in sponsored articles for makers that need to get while in front of your target audience.

•Getting to be a joint venture partner and coming up with a fee marketing other brands’ products and services.

•Creating and selling a physical or digital product. Alternatively, offering a paid service.

•Marketing permits for the photographs or online videos.

The beauty here is that chasing one revenue stream doesn’t necessarily rule out another.

So let’s start with the most common approach to Make Money On Instagram monetization: partnering with manufacturers for being an influencer.

Assist types on subsidized content material

The words “influencer” will get chucked approximately a good deal at the moment.

An influencer is basically anyone who’s constructed their selves an internet based history by doing and sharing magnificent details web-based. Thus to their audiences, influencers are tastemakers, trendsetters and dependable industry experts whoever thoughts about specified subjects are well known.

Several brands just can't play competitively with that and they also other half with influencers instead for subsidized blogposts that guide get the word out with regards to their services.

But it is besides the type and get through to with your Make Money On Instagram credit account that models want. It’s your audience’s engagement and trust with the posts.

It usually is very hard to stability your income as the influencer together with your stability as a creator, when you’re not relying on your Make Money On Instagram cash flow to be profitable, you generally possess the relief to end up being selective concerning labels you work with, nearly as types will be picky concerning the Make Money On Instagrammers they consult with.Brandnames of all kinds are employing influencer selling to get their services available on the market (by Fohr Greeting card).

Methods to figure out exactly what to demand being an influencer

Typically these influencer deals involve the creation of content-an Make Money On Instagram post, video or Story-and will sometimes include permission for the brand to use this content on their own site or in an ad.

The majority of specials are negotiable and will come with only one put up as well as full promotion in exchange for a payment, a free of charge supplement, a service, a gift, the promise of publicity, or some mixture off these.

Take into account when negotiating that you’re not simply supplying material but admittance to your audience, a actually major access on by far the most famous societal programs throughout, and utilization protection under the law way too.

In any questionnaire of 5,000 influencers, around 42% said they incurred $200 to $400 for every put up-just to give you a perception of what some labels are likely to give, and how to bargain based on the charge cards you’re controlling.

Eventually, it's essential as an influencer to also know the listeners.

What is the make-up of your clients and what on earth is your engagement speed (overall engagement broken down by the volume of visitors)? You can dig up numbers to back this up in your Make Money On Instagram Analytics report, if you've switched to a business account. This will aid be well prepared in regard to the time to negotiate.

Would like to learn the best ways to flourish and monetize your Make Money On Instagram accounts? Make Money On Instagram promoting and advertising knowledgeable, Gretta van Riel, demonstrates how in Grow Your Company with Make Money On Instagram, a cost-free tutorials inside Shopify Academy.

Getting manufacturers to do business with

If you're big enough, chances are brands will find you. But you could consider makes to employ that happens to be for the similar amount in relation to values and personality, which means your readers will not think that you’re “selling out”.

You can also list yourself on one of the many influencer marketplaces out there to increase your chances of being discovered, even though you can reach out to them directly to try to work out a deal:

•Fohr Card: Attach your Make Money On Instagram, weblog, You tube station, as well as other public websites to create an influencer “card” that reveals your numerous information and entire reach for makes looking around to get a union. You likewise gain access to a long list of brandnames as well as needs, allowing you to make the effort to contact out likewise.

•Grapevine: If you have 5000 or more followers, you can list yourself in the Grape Vine marketplace for the opportunity to work with like-minded brands.

•Group Tap: Do smaller content material construction jobs to generate perks. If you've got a smaller audience, this is great. Offered in the U.S only.

•indaHash: Companies put up marketing campaigns that one could be involved in. Submit a photo together with the given hashtags on Make Money On Instagram and grab paid out. You will want 700 involved fans to become qualified.

The rules vary when it comes to sponsored content, but to be on the safe side and respect your audience’s trust, consider adding a #sponsored hashtag to indicate sponsored posts. About 69% of influencers in one report said that being transparent about sponsorships didn't affect how consumers perceive their recommendation if you need reassurance.

You can locate degrees of subsidized content articles as well as how Make Money On Instagrammers blend makes inside their history or caption by looking up #sponsored on Make Money On Instagram, of this nature a from How He Inquired about, your account that explains to you marriage ceremony offer stories and partners with a jewlery business enterprise:

Make Money On Instagram additionally has a "Compensated Alliance with" label that conspicuously determines sponsored content, which some makes can need you to use to make known your association with each other.

Turned out to be an affiliate marketer

Unlike an influencer, an affiliate is more invested in doing income for those companion branding-besides delivering awareness-in return for a commission rate.

This is definitely usually completed with a trackable website link or specific coupon rule to be sure mouse clicks literally translate into income. Since Make Money On Instagram doesn’t yet allow links anywhere outside of your bio, you can only focus on one product at a time if you choose to rely on affiliate links, making promo codes a better option for Make Money On Instagram since you can actually incorporate them into your posts.

Notice: Make Money On Instagram has offers to roll out url links for Make Money On Instagram Accounts, which will certainly unlock new opportunity available for you for being an influencer.

Give some thought to reaching out to among the numerous on-line vendors that include affiliate marketing programs that you may be involved in. Or you can also look at famous marketplaces like:

•ClickBank: An online affiliate console with a tier-located commission rate that's accessible to almost everyone.

•RewardStyle: An invitation-only fashion and lifestyle influencer group that offers 20Percent commission fees.

•Amazon's Affiliate Program: A favorite option that compensates out a 10% payment.

If you have a plan going into it and expand your online presence to include a website and other marketing channels, though it sounds like a numbers game, affiliate marketing is also an art, and you’ll have a better chance at success.

Hint: If they're going in your Make Money On Instagram bio, Affiliate links can be ugly and long, so I recommend a URL shortener like bit.ly, especially.

Open your own online website

At this point it could sound like the only way to have an Make Money On Instagram to make money would be to provide out and assist other companies.

But inventors of all kinds are additionally in a wonderful spot to "sell out" in relation to their individual solutions: specificgoods and services, or a digital equipment that could be an extension from the product, building a firm with an listeners at its heart.

You need to invest some time upfront, but in today’s world it’s almost natural for creators to make the leap into entrepreneurship.By selling your own stuff, you don't need to worry about integrating messages from other brands into your posting strategy. Much better, you will get your individual make available on the market for the solutions and products you distribute.

Lovers can teach their support and love the work by buying from yourself-any purchase they could feel good about.

There are a few solutions to perform this:

•You can use a printing-on-require service to ship and print your very own tshirts and pillows, coffees cups, structure craft, plus much more.

•You may sell off expertise that include taking photographs or talking to, making use of your bio to guide engaged website visitors to a get in touch email or perhaps a connect to your professional site.

•You possibly can promote online products and solutions along the lines of training courses, digital books, or design and style themes.

•You can use your Make Money On Instagram account to launch a business selling your own original products. Alternatively, even a book.

You can also make purchases through Make Money On Instagram possible on your website using one of the available Make Money On Instagram gallery apps if you plan on selling several items in your own Shopify store.

Carry it one step more with our hunting on Make Money On Instagram integration that allows product or service product and tags stickers making the knowledge from Make Money On Instagram posts and Stories to your own possess systems alot more smooth and substance. To work with it, you'll should also switch to an Make Money On Instagram online business bank account, have a Facebook or twitter website, as well as an okayed Facebook retail outlet (all of these you can actually create for no additional end up costing).

Offer for sale your snap shots on the internet or on items

Make Money On Instagram is a photo-sharing app at its core, even though someone might get famous on Twitter by telling 140-character jokes. And snapshots are valuable assets that may belicensed and printed, and traded in various ways.

You can list your photos in marketplaces like 500px or Twenty20 where brands and publishers might license them if photography is what got you into the Make Money On Instagram game in the first place.

However, you can also sell your photos as prints and on other physical products using a similar methods described in the last section. Providers like Printful and Teelaunch allow you place your shots on cards, cell phone cases, cushions, plus more !, maintaining completing orders placed and client support so all you should be concerned with is generating gross sales.

Take the story of Daniel Arnold who went from “eating toast 3 meals a day”, according to an interview on Forbes, to making $15K in a single day by offering to sell prints of his popular-but-controversial photos. All you need to do is take the initiative and offer your audience the opportunity to buy your photography from you if you've already got the demand.

Complete the work for any 'Gram (and try to get paid for)

What started off as being a pursuit-getting men and women giggle, engaging in absurd photoshoots using your dog or discussing photos of diet-can snowball into the chance to change Make Money On Instagram in to a source of income fuelled by the engaged pursuing.

There's a realm of options you can get like a creator which has a big web based customers made of individuals that can't benefit but halt as soon as they browse prior your article on their give food to. It's this amazing look that you may have that opens the door. You simply need to go walking by using it.

Get more info visit BuzRush

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buzrushglobalcommunity-blog · 4 years

Text

Make Money On Instagram

You’ve almost certainly experienced accounts of Make Money On Instagram which are cashing in over the shots they snap and promote regularly. You might've even looked at your own personal significant thought and following, “Maybe I will accomplish that too”.

As withbloggers and YouTubers, and any one who’s amassed an audience to the subject matter they yield, Make Money On Instagrammers have get through to and control discovered-2 things a lot of companies have trouble with.

Collectively, these two elements supply the chance for Make Money On Instagram makers to learn a wide range of streams of future profit, irrespective of whether they want to generate an kingdom or only receive a little bit more profit and free things.

Exactly how many supporters should you earn a living on Make Money On Instagram?

If by now you're wondering how many followers you need to make it happen, the short answer is “not as many as you think”.

The particularly long reply to varies according to conditions that include:

•What specialized niche you’re in and in what ways simply you possibly can specifically tie up it to the system group (beauty, fashion and food and exercise are sought after niche categories, in accordance with prime Make Money On Instagram hashtags)

•How involved your fans are (100K fraudulent visitors will not amount to very much).

•Which income routes you look at.

In a natural way, the greater amount of active enthusiasts you might have, the more likely. Check our the best way to get readers on Make Money On Make Money On Instagram.

While the best Make Money On Instagrammers make hundreds for every put up over the picture-revealing system, even those that have a reduced-but-involved subsequent of 1000 have the possibility to start out earning money.

Free of charge Webinar: Ways to Get bigger and Generate income from Your Make Money On Make Money On Instagram Consideration

A 100 % free workshop with sector-tested Make Money On Instagram marketing tips. How to grow your Make Money On Instagram listeners and generate income from it with the web store.

Arrange your seat now

How to earn money on Make Money On Instagram in 2019

Dependant on your line of Make Money On Instagram articles, your customers, whilst your degree of determination, you can create funds on Make Money On Instagram in the subsequent ways:

•Carrying out sponsored content articles for famous brands that would like to get facing your readers.

•Starting to be an online affiliate and generating a profit promoting other brands’ systems.

•Creating and selling a physical or digital product. Alternatively, offering a paid service.

•Offering permits for your photographs or video tutorials.

Chasing one revenue stream doesn’t necessarily rule out another. That's the beauty here.

So let’s start with the most common approach to Make Money On Instagram monetization: partnering with companies for an influencer.

Make use of manufacturers on sponsored topics

The phrase “influencer” receives cast about significantly these days.

An influencer is simply someone who’s designed ourselves an internet history by doing and sharing great factors via the internet. In their viewers, influencers are tastemakers, trendsetters and responsible experts whose feedback about some topics are respectable.

Lots of manufacturers just can't tackle that and they also loved one with influencers as a replacement for sponsored blogposts that guide get the word out with regards to their products.

But it is not just for the scale and arrive at to your Make Money On Instagram consideration that types want. It’s your audience’s trust and engagement with all your material.

It is difficult to stability your revenues as an influencer whilst your strength as the inventor, however if you’re not depending on your Make Money On Instagram income source to stay profitable, you normally possess the liberation to get selective within the manufacturers you work with, as brand names are going to be discerning for the Make Money On Instagrammers they work with.Makes of all kinds are using influencer promoting and advertising to have their supplements you can get (by way of Fohr Unit card).

Methods to select what you should request as an influencer

These influencer deals involve the creation of content-an Make Money On Instagram post, video or Story-and will sometimes include permission for the brand to use this content on their own site or in an ad, typically.

These types of savings are flexible which enable it to contain a specific content or perhaps over-all advertising campaign to acquire a rate, a no cost solution, a service, a great gift, the commitment of visibility, or some blend of these.

Take into account when discussing that you are not simply promoting material but use of your readers, a possibly sizeable access on essentially the most common public platforms about, and intake protection under the law too.

During a customer survey of 5,000 influencers, close to 42Per cent expressed they billed $200 to $400 every publish-just to present you a solid idea of what some models are able to pay for, and the way work out depending upon the charge cards you’re clutching.

Ultimately, it's important as an influencer to also know your special audience.

Do you know the make-up from your visitors and what is actually your engagement premium (full proposal categorised through your amount of visitors)? You can dig up numbers to back this up in your Make Money On Instagram Analytics report, if you've switched to a business account. This can help you be ready as it pertains time for it to make a deal.

Want to find out how to build and generate income from your Make Money On Instagram accounts? Make Money On Instagram promotional consultant, Gretta vehicle Riel, helps guide you in Expand Your Business enterprise with Make Money On Instagram, a free program on the inside Shopify Academy.

Finding famous brands to work alongside

If you're big enough, chances are brands will find you. But you might also consider types to utilize that can be over a similar degree with regard to personality and values, which means your clients won’t sense you are you’re “selling out”.

You can also list yourself on one of the many influencer marketplaces out there to increase your chances of being discovered, even though you can reach out to them directly to try to work out a deal:

•Fohr Charge card: Hook up your Make Money On Instagram, web site, Vimeo channel, along with other personal platforms to produce an influencer “card” that displays your completely different profiles and absolute take brands looking around to get a union. You likewise get access to an index of models as well as requires, to help you make the effort to attract out much too.

•Grapevine: You can list yourself in the Grape Vine marketplace for the opportunity to work with like-minded brands if you have 5000 or more followers.

•Masses Faucet: Do small written content generation activities to bring in perks. If you've got a smaller audience, this is great. Sold in the You.S only.

•indaHash: Brands create marketing you can participate in. Content a photograph while using the described hashtags on Make Money On Instagram and become paid back. You want 700 involved followers for being eligible.

You could find illustrations of subsidized blogposts and also just how Make Money On Instagrammers blend labels to their experience or caption by shopping up #subsidized on Make Money On Instagram, something like this a single from How He Requested, a merchant account that gives wedding event proposition stories and partners by having a jewlery industry:

Make Money On Instagram has the benefit of a "Given Collaboration with" label that noticeably determines sponsored content, which some types may perhaps ask you to use to disclose your union with their company.

Be an affiliate

In contrast to an influencer, an online affiliate is much more bought generating profits for your mate trademark-besides making interest-in exchange for a commission rate.

This is often through with a trackable connection or special promotion policy to assure mouse clicks literally translate into revenues. If you choose to rely on affiliate links, making promo codes a better option for Make Money On Instagram since you can actually incorporate them into your posts, since Make Money On Instagram doesn’t yet allow links anywhere outside of your bio, you can only focus on one product at a time.

Take note: Make Money On Instagram has intentions to roll out back links for Make Money On Instagram Testimonies, that will open up new chances available for you as the influencer.

Give consideration to contacting among several other over the internet suppliers offering affiliate marketing programs that one can participate in. Or also investigate common marketplaces like:

•ClickBank: An affiliate system using a tier-founded fee that's ready to accept absolutely everyone.

•RewardStyle: An invitation-only fashion and lifestyle influencer system which provides 20% commission fees.

•Amazon's Affiliate Program: A well known preference that can pay out a 10% profit.

Though it sounds like a numbers game, affiliate marketing is also an art, and you’ll have a better chance at success if you have a plan going into it and expand your online presence to include a website and other marketing channels.

Recommendation: Affiliate links can be long and ugly, so I recommend a URL shortener like bit.ly, especially if they're going in your Make Money On Instagram bio.

Open up your very own new web store

Right now it may could be seen as the only method with an Make Money On Instagram to generate money is usually to promote out and work closely with other makes.

But builders of all kinds can also be inside of a fantastic standing to "offer out" in relation to their own individual merchandise: physicalgoods and services, or electronic digital products that may be an extension of their total manufacturer, setting up a company with the audience at its focus.

You need to invest some time upfront, but in today’s world it’s almost natural for creators to make the leap into entrepreneurship.By selling your own stuff, you don't need to worry about integrating messages from other brands into your posting strategy. Even better, you could get the company on the market at the solutions and products you promote.

Addicts can show their support and love your projects by purchasing from yourself-any purchase he or she can feel better about.

There are still alternatives to accomplish this:

•You can use a produce-on-demand from customers company to ship and print your very own new tpillows and shirts, espresso mugs, structure art work, and more.

•You are able to supply products and services that include pictures or consultation, with your bio to immediate intrigued individuals to a contact message or a url to your skilled web-site.

•You possibly can sell off electronic digital systems for example tutorials, digital books, or style and design templates.

•You can use your Make Money On Instagram account to launch a business selling your own original products. Alternatively, even a book.

If you plan on selling several items in your own Shopify store, you can also make purchases through Make Money On Instagram possible on your website using one of the available Make Money On Instagram gallery apps.

Use it one step farther with these purchasing on Make Money On Instagram incorporation to enable products tags and product decals which makes the ability from Make Money On Instagram Stories and posts to the personal products and services considerably more seamless and liquid. To make use of it, you'll should also move to an Make Money On Instagram company credit account, have got a Facebook article, with an permitted Twitter retailer (which all you will established for no other cost).

Market your images via the internet or on things

Make Money On Instagram is a photo-sharing app at its core, even though someone might get famous on Twitter by telling 140-character jokes. And snapshots are investments that islicensed and printed, and distributed in a number of alternatives.

You can list your photos in marketplaces like 500px or Twenty20 where brands and publishers might license them if photography is what got you into the Make Money On Instagram game in the first place.

However, you can also sell your photos as prints and on other physical products using a similar methods described in the last section. Companies like Printful and Teelaunch can let you place your snapshots on cards, device examples, pillows, and others, caring for completing instructions and consumer support so all you really need to be concerned with is making sales and profits.

Undertake it towards the 'Gram (and have payed off)

What begun to provide a leisure activity-doing people today have a good laugh, performing ridiculous photoshoots with all your family dog or sharing snap shots of foods-can snowball into a chance to change Make Money On Instagram right into a revenue stream fuelled from your involved using.

There's a realm of options you can get as being a creator along with a large over the internet listeners made of people that can't help out but discontinue as soon as they scroll former your article into their nourish. It's this wonderful draw that you may have that paves the way. You just need to step by it.

Get more info visit BuzRush

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republicstandard · 6 years

Text

Dear Liberals: It’s not "Rednecks" who are Inbred

The Inspector General (IG)’s latest report, capturing exchanges from as many as five FBI agents under investigation, exposed the intense hatred and contempt that the Deep State has not just for President Trump, but for the average American who voted for him. A sample exchange:

Agent One: “I find anyone who enjoys [this job] an absolute f---ing idiot. If you don’t think so, ask them one more question. Who are you voting for? I guarantee you it will be Donald Drumpf.” Agent Five: “I forgot about Drumpf…that’s so sad and pathetic if they want to vote for him. Someone who can’t answer a question. Someone who can’t be professional for even a second.” Agent Five: “I’m trying to think of a ‘would I rather’ instead of spending time with those people.” Agent One: “stick your tongue in a fan??” Agent Five: “I would rather have brunch with Trump and a bunch of his supporters like the ones from Ohio that are retarded.” (sic)

That last comment from Agent Five is the smug refrain of coastal cosmopolitans that America’s rednecks are incestuous retards, but the reality is quite different. You see, it’s not the working class whites -who actually make the country go- with average IQs literally at or below clinical mental retardation. The much-maligned “hicks” of West Virginia have an average IQ of almost 99. There are two population groups —one of them quite prominent in the media and entertainment industries committed to perpetuating such a portrayal of America’s working class— who have serious genetic issues related to inbreeding.

For point of reference, here is a list of the countries with average IQs at or below 70, which has been considered to be a marker of "definite feeble-mindedness" or "mild mental retardation": Sudan, Sierra Leone, the Congo, Zimbabwe, Senegal, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Jamaica, the Central African Republic, Tanzania, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Botswana, Rwanda, Togo, Burundi, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Malawi, Niger, Angola, Burkina Faso, Chad, Haiti, Djibouti, Somalia, Swaziland, Dominica, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho, Liberia, St. Kitts and Nevis, Sao Tome and Principe, the Gambia, Cameroon, Gabon, Mozambique, St. Lucia, East Timor, Ghana, and Equatorial Guinea. Nigeria would also qualify if you removed the Igbo. Does anything stick out to you?

Regarding inbreeding, globally about half of all Muslim marriages are consanguineous (blood related), usually between first cousins or an uncle and niece, while the rate is about 1% in Europe (largely attributable to the “migrants”) and 0.2% in the US. Carlisle du Rozel reports:

According to Bengali ex-Muslim essayist Abul Kaseem, the product of rampant phenomena of inbreeding in Islam is due to several things, but two stick out in particular: 1) interpretations of the Qu’ran which permits a Muslim man to marry and have intercourse with his daughter born out of wedlock (usually 8 or 9 years old), and 2) the popular and widely accepted practice of cousin-marriage initiated by the Prophet Muhammed himself, who infamously had relations with his cousins outside of marriage (Tirmidhi 5.3214).

The consequences can be severe. Medical data shows that while British Pakistanis are 3 percent of all births, they account for over 30 percent of children in the UK born with genetic illnesses, costing the NHS at least about 600 million pounds per annum. A 2005 BBC survey found that 55% of Britain’s Pakistani population was married to a first cousin; in Pakistan itself, 70% of all marriages are consanguineous. British scientist Steve Jones explains:

It is common in the Islamic world to marry your brother’s daughter, which is actually closer than marrying your cousin. We should be concerned about that as there can be a lot of hidden genetic damage. Children are much more likely to get two copies of a damaged gene.

Consanguineous marriages result in an average IQ deficit of about 15 points. The risk for having an IQ lower than 70 increases by 400% among the offspring of first cousin marriages. It also increases aggression, lowers impulse control, and dramatically elevates the risk of a whole host of medical disorders. The Danish “migrant” community offers another illuminating case study. From the newspaper Jydskevestkysten:

Immigrant children are clearly overrepresented in Copenhagen’s schools for retarded children and children with physical handicaps. … 51 percent of the children in the three schools in Copenhagen for children with physical and mental handicaps have an immigrant background and in one of the schools the amount is 70 percent. … These amounts are significantly higher than the share of immigrant children in the municipality, which is 33 percent. The many handicapped children provide clear evidence that there are many intermarried parents in the immigrant families.

From B.T.:

Disabled immigrant children costs Danish municipalities millions. In Copenhagen County alone, the number of disabled children has increased 100 percent in 10 years…[Social worker] Meredith Lefelt has contacted 330 families with disabled children in Copenhagen. She estimates that one third of their clients have a foreign cultural background.

The Rockwool Foundation Research Unit found that:

Those who speak Arabic with their parents have an extreme tendency to lack reading abilities - 64 percent are illiterate. ... No matter if it concerns reading abilities, mathematics or science, the pattern is the same: The bilingual (largely Muslim) immigrants’ skills are exceedingly poor compared to their Danish classmates.

From Kristeligt Dagblad:

In Sct. Hans Hospital, which has the biggest ward for clinically insane criminals in Denmark, more than 40 percent of the patients have an immigrant background.

In Denmark, the number of inbred Muslims ranges from Pakistanis at 40% to Turks at 15%. The rate of inbreeding in Turkey itself is about 25-30%. For Islam, this is pretty low. While in India the Muslim rate of cousin marriage is 22%, the rate spikes to 40% in Jammu and Kashmir. Between 20-28% of Morocco’s marriages are of the cousin variety. 35-50% of sub-Saharan African marriages are estimated to be between blood relations, with Nigeria’s rate highly variable depending on the tribe: Hausas (percentage unknown) and Yorubas (51.2%) practice it; Igbos ban it. 34% of all marriages in Algieria are consanguine, with Tunisia at 39% and Syria at 40%. About 40% of the population marries a cousin in Egypt, according to a 2016 report in The Economist. “Rates are thought to be even higher in tribal countries such as Iraq and the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Kuwait,” says the Economist.

Statistical research on Muslim-majority countries shows that up to 42% of all marriages in Lebanon are consanguine (blood related), as are 45% in Yemen, 46% in Bahrain, 47% in Mauritania, 48% in Libya, 54% in Qatar, 54% in the United Arabic Emirates, 56% in Oman, 60% in Iraq, 63% in Sudan, 64% in Jordan, 64% in Kuwait, 66% in Palestine, 68% in Saudi Arabia, and 80% in Nubia. Arabs have one of the world’s highest rates of genetic disorders, with 66% of the abnormalities linked to cousin marriage. A Saudi study discovered that “90% of couples detected as carriers did not follow the advice they were given and went ahead with their marriages.” Executive Director of the Prince Salman Center for Disability Research, geneticist Dr. Stephen R. Schroeder, stated:

Saudi Arabia is a living genetics laboratory. Here you can look at 10 families to study genetic disorders, where you would need 10,000 families to study disorders in the United States.

In Afghanistan, where 46% of the marriages are consanguineous, Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels discusses some of the consequences:

A study from Kabul, Afghanistan, based on autopsies of the remains of suicide bombers, shows that close to 90 percent were suffering from severe illnesses or deficiencies such as blindness, cancer, missing limbs or leprosy. Many Muslim societies, including that of Afghanistan, have a low social acceptance of handicaps and mental illness. Being physically handicapped or mentally retarded often leads to exclusion. Becoming a martyr may be the only chance of achieving social recognition and honor. Some cases of Down’s syndrome may be another unpleasant effect of inbreeding and al-Qaeda has been known to use people afflicted with it. People with low intelligence may also be more easily convinced that Islam, with its promise of 72 virgins to Muslims who die fighting for their religion, is true.

The numbers for consanguinity in some Muslim nations such as Indonesia, Niger, Djibouti, Somalia, and Bangladesh are woefully incomplete, though we do know that 17.6% of marriages in the Teknaf region of Bangladesh are consanguineous. 37.5% of Iran’s marriages are consanguineous, as are 69% of Burkina Faso’s Fulani and 27% of Mali’s (admittedly a small sample at just 600 persons). We do not know the percentage of Azerbaijani marriages of this kind, but there is a tradition of inter-marriage, and a prevalence of certain diseases and disorders common to this practice. 30-35% of birth defects in Tajikistan are attributable to kin marriage. Dr. Bill Warner writes:

Think about this, Islam says it is destined to rule the world, and if it does inbreeding will be everywhere and humanity will actually devolve. And this can’t be changed, because the Sharia is Allah’s law. But why are we silent about Sharia, suffering? Why can’t we educate about this harm? How can we go about trying to show that this is wrong? Oh wait a minute, we can’t do this because this would be offensive to Muslims. So we won’t be including incest in part of the explanation about the beauty of Islam in our schools. Can we find a Muslim who will say that inbreeding is wrong, will he abjure this because science agrees it is wrong? Can we run a social program to educate immigrants who come here about genetic damage? Well, as good as that sounds, because it would reduce suffering, that would be Islamophobic. How evil does something have to get before we can talk about it? I want to prevent a crime against the next generation. Am I a bigot to talk, and are you afraid to talk? This is a serious problem and it needs to be addressed.

As Winston Churchill said, “The influence of [Islam] paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.” It also retards —literally— the development of not just the next generation, but generations henceforth. The data bears this out. In addition to actually being incestuous, the Muslim world is intellectually incestuous, contributing precious little to the advancement of human knowledge and understanding outside of its own religious texts. The UN Arab Human Development Reports (AHDR) records that roughly the same number of books are translated within the country of Spain annually as have been translated into Arabic in the last 1,200 years. Eugene Rogan notes:

The Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one fifth of the number that Greece translates. The cumulative total of translated books since the Caliph Maa’moun’s time (813-833 AD) is about 100,000, almost the average that Spain translates in one year.

From the Nature International Journal of Science:

In 2003, the world average for production of articles per million inhabitants was 137, whereas none of the 47 OIC countries for which there were data achieved production above 107 per million inhabitants. The OIC average was just 13.

On the other side of the consanguineous coin, all Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the same group of 330-350 people who lived in the Middle Ages, a hybrid population of Levantine males and European females who ultimately turned inward and bred with each other in closed communities for centuries. This intense inbreeding has paradoxically had the opposite effect of cognitive impairment that’s afflicted the Middle East and Africa. The Jews are wildly overrepresented in terms of their intellectual contributions. From JINFO.org:

At least 201 Jews and people of half- or three-quarters-Jewish ancestry have been awarded the Nobel Prize, accounting for 23% of all individual recipients worldwide between 1901 and 2017, and constituting 37% of all US recipients during the same period. In the scientific research fields of Chemistry, Economics, Physics, and Physiology/Medicine, the corresponding world and US percentages are 26% and 39%, respectively. Among women laureates in the four research fields, the Jewish percentages (world and US) are 33% and 50%, respectively.

This is not to say, however, that the inbreeding amongst the Ashkenazim hasn’t been without consequence. Jews are twenty times more likely than the average person to suffer from schizophrenia, and they are predisposed to higher rates of breast and ovarian cancer. There are a number of gene mutations found exclusively amongst their population that are attributable to the prevalence of other diseases, primarily Tay-Sachs.

The evidence is clear: the cousin diddling isn’t so much a West Virginia thing as it is an after-madrassa and shtetl thing.

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My friend was at fault as she rear end another vehicle causing minor damage to the vehicle in front of her. She is now being sued by the insurance comp of the other driver in the civil court for driving in a negligent manner. Wouldnt this be covered under her insurance company? Why is she paying for the insurance in the first place?

Auto insurance settlement offer too low?

We were in an accident in September, my 4 y/o son and i went to see a chiropractor and i also seen a physical therapist a few times, (i actually still have pain from time to time in ...show more""

Is there a good site to compare the insurance rates of different cars?

I'm looking at cars for my son (who just turned 16) and would like to see which cars are best in terms of insurance rates without going through the process of getting a quote for each car.

Temporary car insurance problem...Help!?

My car has to go away for repair and I don;t know how long its going to take, so I want to get insured on my parents car. Because I am still 20, I cant get temporary car insurance and the insurance policy on my parents car won't insure me as an additional driver because of my age and because the car is fairly new. Any ideas on how I can be insured on this car would be welcome, as I still need to get to and from work! Thanks.""

What effect does not being at fault in an automobile collision have on your insurance premium?

Doesn't the cost go up any way?

California Insurance with Arizona license?

If i change my California drivers license to an Arizona one, do i have to tell my insurance company? If i do will this affect my policy in any way? thanks!""

I need car insurance!!!!?

Is there any cheap car insurance providers that are really cheap for a teenager???

Who's responsible for rental car insurance after an accident?

Last month my car was run into in a parking lot while I was shopping. No question who was at fault. We exchanged information and I contacted their insurance company. Their insurance agreed to pay for all repairs and the rental. However, they did wouldn't pay for the insurance on the rental, claiming it is my responsibility. I only have liability, so the additional insurance cost $8.99 per day, in the end I had to pay $360. I'm wondering if now I can take this to the people who hit me, since if they had not hit me, I wouldn't be out $360. Could I demand them to pay it, maybe even take it to small claims?""

How much does the average person pay yearly for car insurance?

I'm considering buying a 2007 Nissan Sentra or Toyota Corolla. It may be new or certified pre owned.

What would the annual insurance cost range look like for a Benz C63 AMG?

Would the cost be greater just because of the model? Say I upgraded a C300 so it reached the base price of a C63 - would this increase the cost of insurance? Or is it based solely on the model? So if I upgraded the C63 so the value bumped up 20k, would my insurance become more expensive? I am new to all this, and want to get an idea of these things for the future. Thanks.""

Getting added on to my parents auto insurance?

ok well i just got my license and want to get added onto my parents insurance and a want to know an estimate on how much it would cost for me to do that. Im a 17 year old male and my parents have AIG. So please help me

How much does disability insurance cost?

my 28 year old non smoking healthy wife who works at a computer for 30 hours a day was quoted $130 per month for $3000 per month of disability insurance. is that reasonable?

What's a good car with low insurance and good gas mileage?

Am looking to spend around 5 grade. Looking for a classy looking car. Preferably 4 door. No need for a sports car look. I guess I like the subcompact look? Compact look. Needs to be fuel efficent. Safe. Low running costs. Reliable. Anyone have any ideas on brands and models? Any advice? Also what am I meant to look out for when buying a used car? This will be my first car.

""Insurance, and other sources of help?""

My last cancer screening came up positive, which means I have to fight the beast again. I currently don't have health insurance, but have been actively looking for insurance the last few years. Since I have a pre-existing conditions most premiums are way out of my price range, and the one's that are do not cover any of my treatments. Does anyone know of an affordable health insurance provider? Also does anyone know where I can get help with my medical expenses? I'm doing this on my own, so any kind of help would be appreciated. Thank you.""

What is homeowners insurance declaration page?

im getting a loan but im not sure what a home owner's insurance is

Insurance for Braces?

Does anyone have insurance for braces that they have used and can tell me about it? I really need braces but my regular insurance won't pay. :( Any help is appreciated! :)

My friend and I got tickets for rolling right thru a stop sign. Will insurance go up even if we dont get a pt?

So, a line of cars got tickets for 'rolling right through a stop sign'. We are considering just paying the fine and taking traffic school, so then we wont get a pt on our licenses. But will the ticket still count toward raising insurance rates if we dont get the point? What do we do if we take the traffic school thing online? Do we need to take the certificate anywhere when we pass? We live in California.""

Which car insurance should I get--First Timer?

My first car--and I haven't a clue about what car insurance to get. At the website they ask questions and I'm not sure what they mean... This is what I want: I want my car to be covered in an accident, I want some money if I get hurt. If I get sued/it's my fault, I don't want to pay a lot out of pocket. Is that so much to ask? Thanks for your help!""

""In GA, if the moving violation is no longer on my DMV record, can insurance companies penalize me anyway?""

A bit over two years ago, I got a ticket for a turn I made that wasn't sharp enough. In GA, moving violations leave your record after 24 months, so it should be gone by now. Can my insurance company continue to penalize me for it, though? Do they have to lower my rates now that it's off my record? If I go to a new insurance company, will my current one pass along the information somehow even though the DMV doesn't have it on file?""

Are there any well known and reliable insurance companies in Florida that provide homeowner's insurance?

Seems that every insurance company is leaving Florida.

How can a non insured pregnant lady get a health insurance in california that covers maternity and delivery ?

California Health Insurance for a pregnant lady

How does AAA insurance work?

I want to start driving I'm a fifteen female. I want to drive my moms four wheel drive Subaru. We have AAA insurance and I live in the state of California. I'm just not sure what the insurance policy would be... Or whatever. So basically, what would our insurance be? I'm pretty sure this makes little to no sense and I apologies sincerely but to be quite frank I don't understand insurance whatsoever. So if you could explain to me that would be amazing. Thank You for your time""

affordable insurance columbus ohio

Car insurance coverage question...?????

I have state farm. there's an expectation of a severe storm with softball size hail heading our metroplex. I'm in the middle of switching car insurance. The coverage will expire april 10, 2008. Will state farm covers me if I have hail damage on the same day it's expired?""

Free Insurance Quotes Online?

Hi, I just bought a car and I need to get insurance asap so I can drive. A friend told me you can get free insurance quotes from websites online. Is it true?""

What auto insurance company will give me a good price after lapsing insurance?

I had geico and my insurance lapsed. Everyone wants so much money now since i lapsed previously. Ive tried all the major companies. Does anyvody know of a cheap insurance that i can look into? Right now everyone wants around 7-800$ for 4 cars liability. Rediculous.

Pregnant And Can't Get On State Health Insurance!! What Should I Do!?

I'm so pissed off!! I have tons of medical bills stacking up and I am on no health insurance! Because I live with my parents and am under age 21 (I'm 20 and will be til May), and I already have one son. Thankfully he's covered. But I have all these bills that are stacking up and won't be able to be paid off because by the time I get on anything it'll be past the 3 month time limit for back pay!! I live in MN and the problem with getting my parents income is my mom and dad both have new jobs, but my dad was laid off his old job so how the hell am I supposed to get his stop work form filled out by a company that no longer exists!?! I can't get on anything unless I have their income!! Even tho' I'm 4 months pregnant!! This is so f***'d up!!""

Car Insurance in California?

Anyone know a good low cost auto insurance company in California? Someone w/ a suspended licsence that is now released?

Question about state health insurance in georgia?

Im moving from Massachusetts to Georgia in march. My work doesn't offer insurance so we are on commonwealth care. Its state insurance. Im trying to find out if there is state insurance in ga as well iv got children and need insurance for them. Im not sure if the job im taking will offer some but in the mean time I need something. Can someone tell me if they have state health insurance or some type of low cost for low income? Thanks.

CAR INSURANCE FOR A 16 YEAR OLD?

would it be more expensive for car insurance for a brand new car or a used car.

How much will insurance cost per year for a scooter/moped?

I am 17 and would like to know roughly how much insurance would be for a basic 125cc moped/scooter

How much would insurance on a Mercedes C230 cost?

2008

Affordable health insurance?

What are some affordable Health Insurance Options in NYC for Latin American father and his child to be? My friend doesn't have health insurance and is planning on putting his new baby (born around Oct.) on his policy with him. He's Latin American and has his permanent residence card, but is not yet a citizen. Anyone know of any affordable plans for him to look into in the Manhattan area?""

US Maternity Health Insurance?

Hi, I am looking forward to give birth in America so I need to know what kind of Maternity International Health Insurance I need since I am not an US citizen. I need a 1 to 6 months insurance. Can you provide some Companies' names or more info please? Or an approximated price? Thanks.""

I'm moving out of state - do I have to change auto insurance companies?

Explanation - I went through a local auto insurance company called ABC Insurance (not the real name, btw). They got me the lowest rate through XYZ Insurance, out of a different state. I'm moving out of state in a few weeks. Do I have to worry about finding a new insurance company if the one I pay my bill to is out of state anyway? After the move, I will actually be physically closer to that company... but still out of state. I never deal with ABC anyway. It's like they are just the go-between that found me that company.""

Why is car insurance so expensive in the UK!?

So i'm not driving yet, only applied for a provisional, i'm age 21, But I thought why not try and figure out how much my insurance will be once i've passed and buy a car at roughly 1000, so I filled in all the details as accurate as possible on the compare websites and the cheapest yearly insurance price was 2500! How the hell am I suppose to afford this, am I doing something wrong haha :L""

Anybody got a guess for what it could cost to get insurance on a 95 mustang in ny?

Just tryin to see if anyone has a idea of the cost

What affordable health insurance would you recommend for my uninsured 21 year old daughter?

She works full time but her employer charges an outrageous amount of money for health insurance. I know there are many many young people who don't have health insurance, mostly because of the cost of high insurance premiums. But my daughter really needs it cause she has some health issues that will stay with her for a lifetime.""

I don't know what to do with my auto insurance coverage... can someone help me??

I got a new auto insurance last November and it expires end of May. I paid $320 for 6 months. The rate was higher due to a moving violation. Well, the violation is off my record now.... and when I got a quote today with another insurance company, it was $150 for 6 months. So would it be cheaper for me to cancel my current coverage ($50 early cancellation applies) and get the new coverage? Or just keep the current coverage and apply again in June?""

Best Health Insurance For Self Employed?

I really need help finding a good health insurance option. I started my own company in 2009 and have kept it active and grew it slowly ever since. I was, until recently, employed at a large bank where I had good health and dental benefits. I recently left the job to take my business full time and scale it up. I am doing that full time now and it's been about a month since I left my job. I elected to keep my dental insurance through COBRA, because it will only cost me about $23/month. However, to keep my health insurance through COBRA would cost me almost $500/month and I felt that was too much. I have read all the paperwork and believe that I can still elect COBRA for my health insurance for about another month. They give you 60 days from your last day. However, I believe there has to be a better/more affordable option. I am 26 years old and healthy, but God forbid anything ever happened, I want to be covered. Also, if my girlfriend ever got pregnant and I had a child, I would want to be able to sleep at night knowing that I have the health insurance for this. What are my options here? Are there good companies out there that are more affordable than the $450+/month I would have to pay if I kept the United Healthcare plan that I had at my previous job? All advice is appreciated. Thanks!""

""Insurance quesion, help!?

Cash value life insurance is more expensive than term insurance because a. it is usually sold to older people who have higher mortality. b. higher rates of interest are earned on term policy investments. c. whole life is subject to adverse selection. d. the whole life contracts include both a protection element and a savings or investment element. e. none of the above. Is this one C? Past efforts to address the growing imbalance between tax-paying workers and social security beneficiaries have included a. increasing the social security (FICA) tax rate. b. increasing the maximum income subject to the social security tax. c. increasing the normal retirement age. d. taxing part of social security benefits. e. all of the above. This one E? The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) contains provisions that a. allow continuation of group health insurance by employees and certain dependents upon the occurrence of designated events. b. apply to all employers offering group health insurance to employees. c. require an employer to pay the cost of continuing former employees' health insurance for up to 36 months. d. allows terminated employees to continue their group health insurance for up to 36 months. e. all of the above. This one E?

Where do insurance proceeds go on a 1041 estate tax return?

Lady died in a tornado. House was destroyed and personal belongings. She got 200K in insurance proceeds, which will be distributed to her 2 kids equally. Where does this $ go on the 1041 estate tax return? Secondly

Car insurance help needed ASAP thanks.?

Ok. My father has his own jeep insured in his own name.He has owned the jeep since 2005 and he still has it this day.He has a 9 year no claims bonus on it.He is insured with FBD insurance.His insurance is commercial. Now I have my own car which was only bought recently but I put my car in my fathers name.Now the reason been is because im trying to get my insurance cheaper.Now I dont want any comments saying that its insurance fraud because every one is broke now and trying to get things cheaper just like myself here.Now what I was thinking if I were to go with a differant car insurance company than his and if he were to go as main driver and me as named could he say that he uses the jeep for commercial use and the car for private use? If that works can he put his 9 year no claims bonus on my car which is in his name so ill just say he owns it for now one.So can he put his 9 year no claims bonus on my car aswel as his own jeep aswel.Because if that worked I would get mine really cheap?So if that would work,I know that if i were in an accident his no claims bonus would be gone but my father trusts me to be a carefull driver. I only want proper answers to my question and thanks very much for the help and it will be much appreciated for it.I live in Ireland aswel ok....Thanks very much.""

Any affordable health insurance for children in TX?

How much would these cars cost to run per month?

renault clio 1.2... citron Saxo.... corsa (old) including tax , m.o.t and insurance and watever you have to pay for :) x""

Do i need to get car insurance or licsence plate?

So me nd my fiance live in phoenix az and we're planning to move back to bakersfield ca! Were driving a uhaul back and pulling our car, and our car doesn't have no car insurance or plates, do I need to get those things even tho were pulling our car? Its not that iam to lazy to get those things, it will jus save us money!""

What to do about insurance?

Is there any way to find insurance that covers a pregnancy? (after you have been pregnant) Even if it is a pre-existing condition, is there an extra amount of money we can pay? I have been using my college's insurance plan for the past 2 years. It is now summer and I no longer have insurance. Unfortunatey my due date is before the fall semester starts so I can't renew it until after the baby is delivered. We thought I would be able to just get onto my husbands plan but they wont cover the insurance AT ALL because he signed some waver years ago (before we were married) saying if he were to get married the insurance doesn't have to cover his wife. (It didn't bother him at the time since he didn't know he would be getting married... he has had the same insurance for nearly 5 years now and he forgot all about it) What should we do? I don't mind finding an insurnace that makes me pay a high premium so they would cover my pregnancy. I just don't know how insurance works!""

Insurance question: Uninsured car in accident?

My son (17) had permission to drive his uncle's car to the store when he was staying at his house. My son is in an accident and the car is totaled. I now find out his uncle does not have insurance on the car. Am I responsible for replacing the car? Does his uncle have any liability at all? I have full coverage on my cars. Will my insurance kick in at any point?

affordable insurance columbus ohio

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mobile-home-insurance-quotes-sc-harry-escobar/"

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beyonddevices · 7 years

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Digesting Snap's S-1

Snap Inc (maker of Snapchat) finally made its long-awaited S-1 filing public on Thursday evening. I’ve been dying to get my hands on this filing for months, and spent some time diving into it last night and digesting some of the numbers and other information in it. Here’s a quick summary of what I’ve found and some of my conclusions about Snap’s prospects going forward. Below, I’ve embedded a slide deck which shares many of the individual charts in this post and several more – it’s part of the Jackdaw Research Quarterly Decks Service, which offers similar decks on the most important consumer tech companies each quarter to subscribers.

Snapchat IPO Filing Chart Deck from Jan Dawson

Massive revenue growth

The first thing to note is that Snap is growing extremely fast from a revenue perspective. It showed its first ad in late 2014, and had its first meaningful revenue in 2015 (totaling $59 million), and then passed $400 million in revenue in 2016. The quarterly revenue picture is shown in the chart below.

That’s a very fast ramp, enabled by the fact that Snap held back on monetizing its base for several years following its founding in 2011. Facebook, by contrast, started to monetize the year it launched, and generated $382,000 in revenue in 2004. Its revenue ramp was slower ($9 million in 2005, $48 million in 2006, $153 million in 2007, $272 million in 2008, and $777 million in 2009), but it didn’t hit Snap’s current user scale until 2009. When Facebook turned on revenue generation, it had under 1 million MAUs, whereas when Snap showed its first ad it had 71 million daily active users.

ARPU growth a major enabler

The major driver of this ramp in revenues is rapid growth in average revenue per user (ARPU), as shown in the next chart:

Global ARPU has risen from 5 cents in Q1 2015 to $1.05 in Q4 2016, but the main driver has been revenue from North America, where ARPU was already $2.15 last quarter. The ARPU ramp in other regions has been much slower, with Europe generating just 28 cents per user per quarter in Q4, and the rest of world region just 15 cents. The one dollar ARPU isn’t far off Facebook’s global ARPU in Q1 2012, the last quarter it reported before its IPO, which was $1.21 globally. But its US & Canada ARPU was already up to $2.90 and its European ARPU at $1.40.

Still a very US-centric financial picture

The reality is that Snap’s business is still very US-centric when it comes to generating revenue. North America had 43% of its users, but generated 88% of its revenues in Q4 2016 (over 98% of that coming from the US). That could be seen as an opportunity for Snap to broaden its horizons and put more effort into monetizing Snapchat in other regions, driving up ARPU, but this may also be a sign that Snap simply hasn’t gained the same traction in other regions yet. It increased its sales and marketing headcount by 340% in 2016, so there’s a good chance it’s hiring in these other markets to drive higher ad sales there.

Profits are another story entirely

While Snap’s revenue picture is fairly clear, the bottom line is a lot less healthy – Snap is losing money by the truckload. This may be one of the first companies I’ve seen file for an IPO whose cost of revenue alone outweighs its revenue in the most recent financial year.

Most margins are literally off the charts

It literally makes no sense to include here one of my customary charts showing various margins over time, because both of the biggest ones – operating and net margins – have been at -100% or multiples of it throughout Snap’s reported history (the only time I’ve seen anything like it is when looking at Alphabet’s Other Bets segment). Gross margin is the only one which is anywhere near positive, and was positive in the second half of 2016:

Snap’s cost of revenue is made up of two larger buckets and some smaller ones – hosting costs are by far the largest, and those scale fairly directly with user growth. Snap doesn’t break these hosting costs out in detail, but they grew by $192 million in 2016, and total cost of revenue in 2016 was $452 million, so my guess is that hosting costs were around $300-350 million in 2016. Snap signed a deal in January with Google to extend its use of Google’s cloud infrastructure, which has a minimum revenue commitment of $400m for each of the next five years, so it’s a good bet Snap is expecting to spend at least that much in 2017.

The second largest, albeit much smaller, contributor to cost of revenues is Snap’s revenue share with its publisher partners. When Snap sells ads (which it did for 91% of its ad revenue in 2016), it gives publishers a cut, and this revenue share amounted to $58m in 2016, up from just under $10m in 2015. When partners sell the ads, they give Snap a cut, and it records only this net amount as revenue, so there’s no reported cost of revenue associated with that smaller chunk. The only other notable contributors to cost of revenue are content creation, where expenses rose $13m in 2016, and inventory for Spectacles, which only hit the books in late 2016.

I usually like to include a chart on cost components as a percentage of revenue, but in Snap’s case it makes more sense to show them as a multiple of revenues, as for most of the company’s history that’s what they’ve been. The two charts below show first a zoomed out view over the whole of the reported period and then a slightly shorter-term view excluding total costs and expenses, to make it easier to see what’s happening in detail with some of these expense lines.

Because Snap is so early in its monetization effort, some of its cost components were multiple times its revenues even in late 2015, and its cost of revenue was still almost twice its revenue in Q1 2016. But as the charts above show, there’s been some real progress here, and R&D, Sales & Marketing, and General & Administrative costs are all under half of revenues now and falling. Snap still has a long way to go, though, before it can be profitable: cost of revenue needs to come down considerably as a percentage of revenue, and that means ramping up ARPU to better cover those massive hosting costs. The rest of the costs will continue to come down as a percentage of revenue as Snap scales, so profitability should improve steadily on that front assuming Snap can get back to strong growth (more on this below).

It’s worth remembering that, when Facebook IPO’d in May 2012, it had been net profitable for three years. Meanwhile, Snap’s prospectus says matter of factly, “We have incurred operating losses in the past, expect to incur operating losses in the future, and may never achieve or maintain profitability.” Though that profitability should come in time with scale and rising ARPU, it’s not a certainty. Twitter is another company which had its IPO at a time when it wasn’t profitable but it seemed a continuation of past rapid growth would carry it over the line soon, and yet it still isn’t in the black now (and in fairness, Twitter had a similar though slightly less bleak warning about its own profit prospects in its S-1).

User growth is a mixed bag

Snapchat reports only daily active users, and not monthly active users. That’s actually very sensible, and I always take it as a knock on Twitter that it refuses to give DAU figures – for an app that’s supposed to be a regular daily habit, monthly user numbers are a bit meaningless.

Linear annual growth

Daily active users have grown strongly over Snapchat’s history, as shown in the chart below, which shows the longer-term end of year picture, including some estimates based on milestones Snap provides in the S-1.

The annual picture is incredible – I don’t know when I’ve seen such a straight line for user growth from a base of almost zero (it was roughly a million at the end of 2012, and only a few thousand at the end of Snap’s first year, 2011). The chart below compares this growth to Facebook’s growth over a similar period. It’s worth noting that the Facebook number here is MAUs, whereas Snap’s is DAUs, but the comparison is striking:

I’ve aligned the timescales so that the years when the companies had 1 million users by their respective measures (2012 for Snapchat, and 2004 for Facebook) line up. As you can see, the start and end points are not far off from each other – 1m in the first year, and 161 versus 145 million in the fifth year, but the trajectory in-between is very different. Facebook saw the classic s-curve adoption, while Snap’s has been almost linear.

A much less straight line for quarterly growth

Things get a loss less linear when you look at quarterly growth numbers, as shown below.

There’s something of the s-curve in the first two thirds or so of the chart above, where growth appears to accelerate through late 2015 and early 2016, but it tapers off significantly in late 2016. What happened there depends on who you believe, as there are two possible explanations:

Snap’s own explanation is that a number of product improvements in late 2015 and early 2016 accelerated growth and brought forward some of the growth it would have seen later anyway, while in late 2016 it launched a version of its Android app which had some bugs and caused slower growth

Third party data suggests that Snapchat began to slow down after Instagram launched its Stories feature, a clone of Snapchat’s own, which drove faster growth at Instagram and sucked usage and growth from Snapchat.

In fairness, Snap does acknowledge strong competition in the second half of 2016, but not Instagram specifically. Which explanation you believe is critically important for your view of Snap’s future prospects: if user growth really did slow down because of the competitive threat from Instagram, that isn’t going away, and in fact will only strengthen as Facebook brings Stories to the News Feed. If Snap can’t defend itself against such competitive threats, and if those threats cause an ongoing stagnation in user growth, it becomes a lot less appealing as an investment. On the other hand, if the issues really were a temporary combination of lumpy growth across the year and some Android glitches, that’s a much less gloomy statement about Snap’s future.

Differences by region

Where things get interesting is when you look at the regional breakdown of DAUs which Snap provides in the S-1 – the first of the charts below shows actual DAUs, while the second shows sequential growth in DAUs, both by region.

As you can see, there was an acceleration in late 2015 and early 2016 as Snap says, but there was also a slowdown in late 2016, though to very different extents in the regions. In North America and Europe, sequential growth in Q3 and Q4 was similar to its growth in the early part of the chart, but in the Rest of World region it dropped down to zero in Q4. Now, these figures are inherently lumpy – though they’re stated in whole millions of DAUs, the underlying numbers could be moving more subtly than these zigzag lines suggest, but there does seem to have been a meaningful slowing in Q3 and Q4, and that is worrying.

Terrible timing for the IPO

We won’t really know whether Snap’s explanation or the external explanation (or some combination of the two) is correct until we see another quarter or two of data from Snap on its user base. If it returns to strong growth in Q1 and Q2 of this year, investors can breathe a sigh of relief, but if it doesn’t, then the worries will continue, If I were a potential investor, I’d be very wary of making big commitments to Snap in a March IPO, before any of those figures are known.

The broader worry with Snap’s data here is that it really only provides DAU numbers as a measure of engagement. That’s better than MAUs, as I said above, but it still doesn’t tell you how engaged users are. This recent article in Bloomberg talks about the ways in which Snapchat fosters “streaks” by users, which drive them to open the app at least once a day, but which don’t necessarily drive meaningful engagement. The only deeper engagement stats Snap does provide relate to time spent and the number of times the app is opened – time spent across its base is 25-30 minutes on average, while the app is opened 18 times on average, with younger users skewing higher and older users skewing lower. But as Snap provides no longitudinal reporting on these data points, we have no idea how they’re trending over time and what that might tell us about real engagement.

For both investors and advertisers, knowing what engagement really looks like is critical, but that data is missing here. Snap badly needs user growth along with rising ARPU if it’s to make progress towards profitability, and at this point the user growth side of the equation is uncertain, though ARPU looks to be on a healthier trajectory. Put another way, the timing of this IPO couldn’t be worse – rather than coming at a time of strong, consistent growth, it comes at the first time in Snap’s history when it’s showing signs of significant weakness.

Digesting Snap’s S-1 was originally published on Beyond Devices

#$SNAP #Snapchat #IPO

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