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youvebeenlivingfictional · 4 years

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Don’t Treat My Love Like a Habit Part Two

Part One | Next Part | Masterlist

Pairing: Santiago Garcia x Reader Rating: Mature (this may change) Warnings: Cursing

Notes: Set before the movie. Not beta-read. Reina is Spanish for Queen. Also I am not a native Spanish speaker, so I am sorry for any mistakes! *We’ll let you know what we think as soon as we can. **Make it quick, Garcia, we need to move on this.-- Don't let her sway you too hard, huh? ***Sweet dreams

Summary: Pope needed this. You could see it on his face.

“You alive?” Pope’s voice crackled over your phone. You grunted in return, and he laughed, knowing it was as close as he was getting to a yes. “We got a call from Diego, he wants us to look over plans for a bust. Hernandez has been spotted.” Well that sure as fuck woke you up. You sat up in bed, scrubbing at your eyes. “Wha’ time is it?” You mumbled. “Almost noon. Meet me at the office in an hour. Diego’s gonna come by, give us the run-down.” You nodded. “Okay. Okay, an hour,” You agreed. “I’ll bring coffee,” Pope added. “You fucking better,” You said before hanging up. --

Pope needed this. You could see it on his face. After Isabella had disappeared, he’d been kicking himself. You’d eased up on berating him, even if you would still find yourself seething about it from time to time. The last month had been spent digging into leads that you knew would take you nowhere. But this bust that Diego was laying out... You were trying not to interject, keeping your face carefully schooled into a neutral set as he laid it out for the two of you. He’d sent you files, layouts, pictures of Hernandez that seemed off -- too perfect, almost. You were trying to keep an open mind, but you smelled a rat.

“*Le haremos saber lo que pensamos tan pronto como podamos,” You heard Pope promising Diego to let him know what you thought as he led the man out. “**Hazlo rápido, García, tenemos que seguir adelante con esto. No dejes que ella te influya demasiado, ¿eh?” You watched Diego’s back, eyes narrowing as he told Pope not let you ‘sway him too hard’. You saw Pope’s head turn back toward you a bit. He knew that you spoke and understood more Spanish than you’d let on to the team that he worked with frequently. Had they already talked this out without you? Had Pope already made some kind of commitment to the plan? You sure as hell hoped not. You pulled up the most recent picture of Hernandez that Diego’s team had gotten, scrutinizing it. There was something wrong about it; you could feel it in the pit of your stomach. You reached out, pulling the printed layout of Hernandez’ last known location, and the proposed sight for the bust toward you for another look. The last bit of information that Isabella had given Pope was that Hernandez had an operation that he was trying to set up in Mocoa, in the Putumayo region near the mouth of the Amazon. What the hell would bring him to Suseca? The town was a little over an hour from Bogota-- that was an eleven hour drive from Mocoa-- "So? What do you think?” You looked up to see Pope standing in front of you. He was trying not look too eager, and you felt your stomach drop. Pope needed this. You couldn’t give it to him. -- ”You’re killing me here, Reina.” The words were muffled. You glanced over at Pope to find his head in his hands. He took a deep breath before he lifted his head. “Just...Tell my why it’s such a bad idea,” He requested. “C’mere,” You said, waving him around to your desk. He pushed himself out of his seat, rounding to your desk. He frowned at the negative, pixelated image he was faced with on your computer. “What am I looking at?” He asked, eyes sweeping the screen. “I put the image of Hernandez through forensic photo software. Think of a jpeg as ... the erosion of a shoreline. Every time a wave washes up on a beach, it removes some sand, it’s a loss. In that same way, every time you save a jpeg file, it loses data and quality from the original image. The more you save an image--” You waved toward Pope. “The less quality there’ll be,” Pope finished nodding, “So?” “So,” You turned back to the screen, “this software identifies any modified areas on an image. You have to think of each pixel on a jpeg as a single grain of sand-- each pixel is independently compressed, okay? So if a picture hasn’t been touched up or changed at all, every single one of these pixels should have the same error potential. Do you see,” You raised a pen, pointing to the chunked fragments of pixelation around Hernandez’s frame, “All of this? And look--” You pulled up another screen to tourist site for Suseca, showing the background. “I don’t think this is authentic.” “Or maybe he’s just in the same place, that doesn’t mean--” Pope started, and you turned on him, disbelieving. “I don’t know if you’re not reading me or if you’re choosing not to, but there is something wrong with this. And it’s not just the photograph, alright, it’s the whole fucking thing! Diego’s plan is way too loose,” You turned back to the print-out for emphasis and Santiago stepped away from your desk, “It makes no sense that Hernandez would just surface this far north-- After three months of radio silence? It makes no sense.” “People slip up--” Pope began to rationalize. “He doesn’t. If he did, he wouldn’t be so close to Lorea.” You leaned back in your seat, watching as Santiago paced back and forth in front of your desks. You weighed your words carefully for a moment before you said, “Santi... I know you wanna get this guy. I wanna get him, too. But not like this. Something is wrong here.” Santiago turned to look at you, conflict twisting his features. For a split-second, panic surged through you - you were sure Santiago was going to tell you that you were off-base, that this bust was going down with him anyway. He took a deep breath, fist clenching as he muttered, “Fuck.” He grabbed his phone off of the desk and turned away, heading for the door. “Where are you going?” You asked, half-rising out of your chair. “To tell Diego that I’m not in and that his intel sucks,” Pope snapped before slamming the door behind himself. You lowered yourself back into your seat, raking a hand through your hair. You glanced back at the photo of Hernandez, frowning. -- ”You still in the office?” Was Pope’s way of greeting you this time. “Uh-huh,” You confirmed, tacking on, “What’s up?” “Diego circled back with me. The bust went down-- It was a set-up,” Pope relayed, “He’s fine, but two of his guys are hurt pretty bad.” “Shit,” You hissed quietly, resting your head on your hand. You’d been hoping that what Pope had imparted to Diego would’ve been enough to stop him from going through with the bust, but you’d been wrong. “...Where do we go from here?” You asked. “Well, you go home,” Pope said, “And we go back to figuring it out tomorrow.” You rolled your eyes a little bit. “I’m almost done,” You grumbled defensively. Pope chuckled. “You’re never ‘almost done’,” He teased. He paused. “Thank you,” he added quietly. You smiled. “I should be thanking you for trusting me,” You argued. “Hey, you know your shit. That’s why I hired you,” Pope retorted. You chuckled. “Alright, lemme finish up here and I’ll... Eventually make it home.” “Yeesh,” Pope mumbled. You could practically hear him rolling his eyes. “Night, Santi,” You murmured. “***Dulces sueños, Reina.”

#Don't Treat My Love Like a Habit #santiago pope garcia #Santiago Pope Garcia x Reader #Santiago Garcia/Reader #Santiago Garcia x Reader #Santiago Garcia x You #Santiago Pope Garcia x You #Santiago Garcia #Santiago Garcia/You

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milliondollarbaby87 · 4 years

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From Gotham’s White Knight to Two-Face

“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain”

This was something uttered by the new Gotham district attorney not long after he had begun to get involved with the true low life and scum of the city. Predicting his very own future something that he probably wouldn’t have even believed himself. Happy with his life and how everything just seemed to be falling into place for his professional and personal life. Although his turn to become the villain would not be well known and his death was used to highlight the good side and not the monster that he had become. Rachel’s death pushed him to a very dark place very quickly, going from the incredible hero making such a difference to then going about avenging her death with the traitors within the police force to the mob and more importantly to The Joker.

I have watched The Dark Knight many times now and on a recent cinema trip to eventually witness it in all the IMAX glory it got me thinking about Harvey Dent. Thinking about how we don’t really talk about him that much when discussing The Dark Knight. I mean we all know why because Heath Ledger’s Joker is utterly breathtaking and scene stealing. But that is not meant to take away anything from Aaron Eckhart and the marvellous performance he puts in as Harvey Dent and then later Two-Face. I would even go as far saying it is one of the most impressive turns from good to evil as a character within Nolan’s trilogy. While some characters are walking a fine line between the good side of them and the bad side of them. Dent completely goes from one extreme to the other in dramatic fashion.

Batman highlights to Jim Gordon that Dent was the very best of them and that was the reason why The Joker wanted to bring him down. The toughest target and to prove the point that everyone could be corrupted and changed if you managed to push them far enough. Obviously Dent had no idea that Bruce Wayne was Batman, so the link with Rachel was rather awkward for Wayne. Immediately Dent wanted to get to meet Batman and when the press conference is called he did not actually want the man behind the mask to step forward. Sacrificing himself in hope that Batman would indeed to the right thing in saving him.

A small joke made by Rachel about how terrified Harvey was of the trust fund brigade, but this was very interesting to see unfold when he could not cope with Bruce Wayne and his pals. The fundraiser that was thrown in his honour was something that he did not really want to do or attend. Which shows his character in different situations as he was quite happy going up against the mob and criminals of Gotham even having a gun pointed at him in court not effecting him as much as the rich socialites of the city.

The panic of trying to free himself from being tied up whilst also talking to his love Rachel was never going to end well. A very cruel technique used as they both left with people they trusted and woke up tied up, with a timer and being able to speak to each other. Having to try and reassure the other that everything was going to be ok. That was far from the truth as Batman and Gordon attempted to get the locations of the pair. Falling into oil drums and being stuck on the floor with the oil, mixed with fire was never going to be a good combination, especially as he also had to say goodbye to Rachel.

The build up to seeing him physically injured from the incident was rather impressive, as we see that his nickname given when he was working internal affairs was about to become very true. He really had become Two-Faced. But while visually we can see he has changed the important thing to really focus on is that as a person his spirit was well and truly broken. So much so that he would never be the same again, especially when it comes to the choices he makes when seeking revenge. I also feel it is possible that his new outlook on life links with how he looks, so with his features being destroyed by the oil people will expect him to be a monster.

We instantly see him become the villain when waking up with his face melted off basically, then seeing his coin on the bedside table knowing that Rachel was not saved. She had his double headed coin, something that she did not realise to begin with when he loved leaving things to chance. Now though the coin would also become a symbol of his new dark side, one side of the coin had been burnt. This was one of his trademarks of leaving things to chance, although in his lighter days he always said heads for what he wanted the outcome to be knowing that was the only option. Now it would become a sinister game and first used with none other than The Joker, something he certainly likes very much!

In that very sense The Joker had already won, he took Gotham’s real hero with a face and proud to represent and be changing the city, not needing a mask like Batman and destroyed everything about him. Taking away someone you love being the worst possible thing to happen. That is what he cannot deal with at all, after the encounter with The Joker and managing to escape the hospital before it was blown up he sets on his way to find the people responsible and involved in Rachel’s death. Picking them off one by one and letting the coin decide, as soon as he makes the first kill it is sure that he will never be the white knight again.

The turning on Jim Gordon and forcing him to lie to his family, holding his young son at gun point. That really is one very dark turn right? Especially when Batman seems to take forever to arrive. Anyway the final scene and moments with Dent really show that he had become the evil monster, the villain that he predicted right at the start of the film. Although Batman was not going to allow the world to know about Harvey Dent becoming the villain, he was symbol in a different way to the dark knight and everyone just needed to continue the good work he started.

The Dark Knight: The Rise and Fall of Harvey Dent From Gotham’s White Knight to Two-Face “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain”

#Aaron Eckhart #Batman #Bruce Wayne #Christian Bale #Christopher Nolan #Gary Oldman #Gotham City #Harvey Dent #Heath Ledger #Maggie Gyllenhaal #The Dark Knight #The Dark Knight Trilogy #The Joker #Trilogy #Two Face

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blueares · 4 years

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Alright, time to throw my hat into the ring of yet another controversial Smash topic.

So, Spirits are valid. Fine. I concede defeat. You guys were right. Even if a character is already in the game as a Spirit, they can make it in as a fighter. I’m not mad. I don’t mind. If anything, I AM happy we got Min Min, and I’m happy for all the people who are happy about her. What I wanna talk about today is the whole nature of the “Spirits can’t be fighters” mentality, because, while I can acknowledge that argument is officially dead, I still feel the need to try and justify it.

What irritates me the most is that whenever I saw/heard someone trying argue against that rule, they would (and still do) tend to straw-man it a bit. I’d hear stuff like “you think this character can’t get in just because they’re a PNG in the game already” or “you just wanna make up rules to kill the hope of my dream pick getting in.” No. That’s not the case, and that was never the case. I will acknowledge that there are SOME people out there who tended to bully others for their picks, but the real reason behind the no-spirits “rule” (now debunked) is much simpler.

To me, it always felt like the entire point of spirits was in the name; the character couldn’t make it in as a fighter, for one reason or another, so they’re here IN SPIRIT. Maybe it’s because Sakurai and his team didn’t feel that character would be fun to play, whether Nintendo decided they wouldn’t be a good fit for Smash, or maybe just because the release windows for games didn’t line up, there are a number of characters who couldn’t make it as proper fighters, but were at least given acknowledgment through Spirits. These JPEG files were added into the game to represented the characters who either missed their chance or didn’t make the cut, so to add them in after the fact felt like it went against the entire point of what Spirits were.

That’s not to say I was necessarily against it. Hell, there are a bunch of Spirit characters in the game I’d genuinely like to see put in; Shantae, Akira Howard, hell even someone like Chibi Robo would all make for great fighters. It’s not that I don’t WANT them added, but it felt like Spirits was the best they were going to get. Call it nihilistic if you want, but I, like many, interpreted those static images as a sign of “hey we remember and acknowledge this character, but they couldn’t make it in the roster.”

Added to that is the other fact that people tend to forget: the Fighter’s Passes are planned out well before they’re released. Who was going to make it in FP1 was already set in stone by Nintendo and Sakurai, if not when Ultimate came out, at least shorty thereafter. No amount of begging or hoping on social media would get Waluigi in if he wasn’t already decided for Fighter’s Pass 1, and if he had been, then why go to the trouble of bringing bim back as only a Spirit or Assist Trophy in the main game? Sakurai himself has stated he would have liked to include Rex from Xenoblade Chronicles 2, but the production and release schedules for that game in relation to Smash made it impossible to implement Rex in time.

Now, I can’t say with 100% certainty whether or not Fighter’s Pass 2 was planned or not, but based on the timing and circumstances, it at least seems like Nintendo and Sakurai agreed to do it after seeing the success of Fighter’s Pass 1. This DLC pack likely wasn’t intended to come out until at least part-way through the first Fighter’s Pass, which means that none of the characters we’re getting in this wave were planned from the get-go either. I firmly believe that if Min Min, and ARMS as a whole, were considered for the base roster or even for the first DLC, we would NOT have a Spirit of her already in the game. The same follows true for any other Spirits that we see made into fighters going forward. I still firmly believe that the point of Spirits was to represent characters that couldn’t or didn’t make it into Smash originally, but it’s clear that the second fighter’s pass has changed the game.

The next five characters are set in stone; this has been confirmed already. Whether or not this DLC wave will be used to backtrack and give more Spirits a second shot, time alone will tell, but I can say this absolute confidence: Spirits deconfirming fighters may no longer be a “rule” to consider, but that doesn’t mean the mentality was never valid. Fighter’s Pass 2 is a game-changing, and I’ll acknowledge that, going forward, pretty-much anyone could be valid at this point. Regardless, I stand by the fact that Spirits were not INTENDED to becoming fighters, and the success of Min Min (and any that follow after her) is only possible due to the success of the first Fighter’s Pass allowing for a second wave to come in and give these characters another shot.

#Super Smash Bros Ultimate #SSBU #Fighter's Pass #Anyway thanks for coming to my TED Talk

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roseamongroses · 5 years

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Antithesis: Dear Diary: why?

[Specific-Summary]: They should expect growing pains. For not everything to feel right or make sense. That doesn't mean it'll always hurt, nor does it mean they can't have fun along the way. It's senior year. Everything may be different. It won't be senior year for long. Everything will be okay.

[General Warnings]: Implied Emotional Abuse, Implied Physical Abuse, Bad Parents are Bad Parents, Mild Sexual Content/jokes,Mentioned Homophobia, Mentions of underage drinking (backround), Some Catcalling,Cursing , Self Hate,implied pregnancy talk/inability to become pregnant, adults arguing where the “kid” can hear it, adults drinking,

[Tags/mood:] highschool au, fluff and angst but its all good, chat fic, teen stress, its flordia no snow we die like men [Pairing:] Roceit (Roman Sanders/ Deceit Sanders), hinted future/possible logince/roloceit/loceit [Characters]Roman Sanders/Deceit (Dmitri) Sanders, Virgil Sanders, Logan Sanders, Patton Sanders, Remy (Sleep) Sanders, Nate Sanders, Dragon Witch (Diana) Remus “The Duke” Sanders (minor/brief)

(Ao3) (Previously)

(8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15)

(16) (17)

(Note: Please check the general warnings and character list before continuing since some changes have been made and I don’t want to throw you off later on)

Roman slung the scarf across his shoulders, “You think I should pack this?” he said, striking a pose, “You think it’s gonna be too hot for summer or?”

“You do look good in red...” Dmitri glanced up from his laptop, still typing, “And it’s better than your fifteen--separately bought-- white jeans.”

Roman flung a trench coat at his face. “Glass-fuckin houses babe, half your closet is black and boring--plus I like the white, ” he protested, “And don’t you think the red will be a bit too much with my hair?” he untucked his curls from underneath the scarf, smoothing the sides.

Dmitri laughed, “You’re the definition of a bit too much, Ro,” he said, “But if it means anything the reds been fading for a while now,”

“Wait really?” Roman picked up a hand mirror, angling it with a frown, “Dammit,” he said, “Virgil might still have some bleach left over, but I don’t want to kill my curl pattern like he did…”

“Then don’t redye it,” Dmitri shrugged, “You’ll look good regardless.”

Roman fluffed his hair, pouting in the mirror, “How good?”

Dmitri rolled his eyes, “Fishing early I see,” he said, pausing his typing to take a better look, “The red hair nice, but the brown will soften your features since there ’ll be less contrast.”

“I’dunno if I want to ‘soften my features though...It’d look cute, but...maybe if I cut my hair?” Roman tugged the scarf off, “.…people would take me more seriously.”

“Now why would you…” Dmitri paused, setting his laptop aside nodding, “Come over here, let me take a closer look.”

Roman eyed him warily.

“C’mon now, I’ve been dating you for what? A little over a year, Have a little faith,” Dmitri defended, “I’m not a snake tricking you into sinning,”

Roman crossed his arms, eyeing him up and down, “You’ve done it before--remember?”

“Oh that was fun and you know it, now c’ mere,” He offered a hand.

“It was,” Roman sighed, relenting and taking his hand. Dmitri tugged him to his knees, Roman making panicked noises as they bumped foreheads and he used Dmitri’s shoulders to steady himself, “Close enough?”

Dmitri tilted his head, “A bit closer.”

“Closer?” Roman’s lips barely brushed his.

“There we go--would you look at that,” Dmitri murmured, “A handsome prince if I’ve ever seen one…” Roman’s expression softened and Dmitri continued, “Whoever you’re trying to impress would be stupid not to take you seriously, especially with your anal work ethic--mmph,” Dmitri’s hands flew to Roman’s waist only slightly caught off guard as Roman closed the distance. The sloppy kiss eventually dissolved into Roman peppering Dmitri’s face between giggles.

“Either you’re rewarding me or you’re trying to distract...” Dmitri’s joke died off, eyes fluttering as Roman’s attention dipped lower, trailing his jaw, “Oh that’s...that’s nice…Your brother out?”

“Mhm,” Roman hummed contemplatively, before pulling back a bit, “ Yeah he is, but...I dunno I’m not really in the mood for that…Sorry..”

“You don’t need to apologize every time you know?” Dmitri leaned into Roman’s chest, feeling Roman’s hands nestle into his hair.

“It’s just so...weird.” He could hear the frown in Roman’s voice, “Is it weird? I’m going to be gone for a while too…Am I being a bad boyfriend?”

“You’re not weird, it's normal.”

“But--” Roman’s voice was quiet, “--- it’s not like you’re not attractive-- but--I dunno-- sometimes actually doing stuff like that is just...ugh I can’t even describe it.”

“The other guys might be horny bastards 24/7, but it’s perfectly normal for you Roman.” Dmitri said, “If you want to kiss we can kiss if you want to cuddle and talk we can do that too.”

“Talk’n’cuddle,” Roman mumbled and Dmitri smiled.

“So how are you feeling about the trip?”

“Oh, I’m absolutely horrified--” Roman easily spun into a rant,” I have to be holed up in that infested dung heap with that odorous rat with only my beautiful tia’s cooking as solace?” He sniffed appalled.

“Huh,” Dmitri snickered, “I’ve never heard that nickname for Virgil.”

“I’m not...talking about Virgil.”

---

R: XXX.notalink/rated:m/dontclickfortheloveofgod/dJDoJi90

Rem: WHAT THE FUCK ROMAN Rem: WHY WOULD YOU SEND THAT

L: Why the hell didn’t you read the link first

Rem: WHO THE FUCK READS Rem: GOD NEVER AGAIN

L: I highly doubt it's that bad

L:....I stand corrected

Rem: you clicked the link too didn’t you

L: In the name of science of course

Rem: ROMAN WHY DID YOU SEND THAT

R: ;)

Rem: EXPLAIN YOURSELF

R: ;) XXXX.notalink/rated:m/oopsididitagain/dskfJjfd9dsf3gds

L: That one is more weird than disgusting

Rem: WHY DO YOU KEEP CLICKING ON THEM

L: Why is Roman still sending them?

V: as much as i like smearing my brothers good name that isn’t roman

V: [Roman conked out on the couch, in a sweatshirt and shorts, drool pooling. Jpeg]

Rem: cute photo, 10/10 L: Agreed.

V: god both of you fuckin s t op i t s t o p s t o p

R: XXXX.notalink/rated:m/you filthylinkreaders/d3gds789jk

Rem: just bc you have issues with compliments doesn't mean roman does

L:Here we go again I guess...

V; roman doesnt have any fuckin boundaries

Rem: yes, yes he does Rem: they may be thin but he Does have them

V:sorry but he’s way too nice about it

Rem: weve more then established that me calling him cute is okay and i require the sustenance of doting on him okay? Like i get it ive pushed a bit too hard before but like im trying ok???

V: k k I i hit the breaks a bit too soon this 1 time but it’s ducking thin ass ice and I’m not above sending y’all to an icy tomb if you get gross. Roman may be a bastard but he’s still baby

L:Translation: He understands your reasoning and agrees he overreacted, but this won’t stop him from questioning our intents and calling out certain actions. Roman may be okay with joking around with stuff like that and being the center of attenuation, but he’s still self conscious and sensitive.

V:why must you add feelings and adult reasoning to everything

L: How dare you accuse me of having feelings

R: XXXX.notalink/rated:m/unicornhornsanddragontails/3nskjJ03 R: XXXX.notalink/rated:m/specA-Z/54Kjjf9n R: XXXX.notalink/rated:m/asliceofme/fljkl29mfJ

R: XXXX.notalink/rated:m/laughsinspanish/5Kjd8

Rem:ye feelings are gross so moving on

Rem: anyway who the fuck is this

V: the bastard

R: you can call me duke [video of Roman, Virgil, and Remus as toddlers, Virgil playing with blocks and listening to some music while in the background Remus follows Roman around.mp3] [image of Roman, Virgil, and Remus currently. jpeg]

V: the bastards name is remus

R: THE. DUKE.

V: FUCK. YOU.

Rem: why the shits have i never met them and why the FUCK does he look more like roman then you do virgil

V: i think it's bc rem doesnt cover up his freckles

V: but yeah my mom and tia had a falling out

R: more like my dad was an asshole

Rem: oh shit same

R: shitty dad squad hmu ;)

Pat: oh hey!!! Me too!!!!

V: yeah it was Not Fun and mom and mama refused to let us go back until tia got a divorce

R: XXXX.notalink/rated:m/deodarant/298jksf

R:XXXX.notalink/rated:m/sPicydeodarant/23kjfJ

L: Are you done yet? They’re getting repetitive at this point.

---

Sun beating on his forehead, Dmitri’s chest was light and airy. His hair was tied up in a high ponytail as he worked on repotting some of his nursery plants. Usually, he’d be listening to music, but his aunt had left early that morning for some appointment so he relished the silence.

Brushing the dirt from his hands, he winced at the fresh cuts lining his knuckles.

“You’re still out here?”

Dmitri almost jumped at Dr. Montag’s voice, “Sorry for the mess” he said, gripping the nursery pot tighter, “I-I’ll clean it up right away…”

Dr. Montag crouched, waving him off, “There’s no need. I’m running a few errands for your aunt,” his hands barely brushing the leaves of one, “This is a Yucca right?”

“Uh,” Dmitri blinked, “Yeah it is,”

He laughed, “Don’t look so surprised-- I know things,” he stood back up, “Like how to use google. It’s rather impressive that y’all manage to keep up with so many of these.”

“Barely,” Dmitri relaxed, refocusing, “We used to have a lot more, but without my dad...it got overwhelming,” he shook his head, “It’s the only thing we really….It keeps us busy..”

“This is more than busy--you put a lot of work into these, anyone should be proud,” He murmured, studying Dmitri again, “I’ll be gone in a few, just need to grab her purse. You need anything from the store?”

“Uh...No,” Dmitri frowned, “I don’t.”

---

LilRed: COLLEGE BOARD CAN SUCK MY ASS LilRed: THIS BITCH GOT A FIVE

BlueRanger: Which class?

LilRed: APUSH

BlueRanger: Nice, good job

LilRed:

PurpleRain: L you fuckin broke him

PurpleRain:like I legit just heard a fuckin thud I think he fell

BlueRanger: I just told him good job?

LilRed: i die from validation i die w/o validation

BlueRanger: Please don’t die

PurpleRain: thats a lame ass way to die

LilRed: @purplebitch i feel so loved

PurpleRain: mama didnt raise us for us to die so b o r i n g l y

LilRed: SO HOW DO YOU SUGGEST I DIE

PurpleRain: idk im feelin,,,,rain,,,,,lots of it,,, maybe you’re watching the sea,,,,

PurpleRain: okay I got it

PurpleRain: you’re wearing a white sundress, the ends tattered but well loved. The coast empty with nly the lapping of waves your company. You’re thinking, a lot. Not of anything particular, but thinking nonetheless. The ocean always makes you think, always makes you remember--bringing about a bittersweet tinge of remorse to your heart, but no tears ever fall.

PurpleRain:You make it a habbit to watch the sunrise each day, relishing in the sobering feelings it invokes Maybe you're a masochist at heart

LilRed:maybe it’s maybelline

PurpleRain:I AM HAVING A MOMENT PRINCEY

PurpleRain: one day, you hear footsteps approach, and assume it's your lover returned from war. The news of it's end just coming days prior and making your ventures to the coast sparked with an unfamilar hopefulness.

PurpleRain: instead when you turn around, you do not feel your heart soar. Instead it sinks. An icy panic spreading through you, a curl of dread closing your throat, it's grip tight. You need to move; to get away from them. But you cant. You cant.

PurpleRain: one shot is all it took.

PurpleRain: one.

BlueRanger:....Concern.

PurpleRain: dnd just started again im prepping ok

LilRed:fuckin nerd

LilRed: huh…. i should get a sundress tho

PurpleRain: i have a few bookmarked ill show you later

BlueRanger: Is That Really What Y’all Are Taking Away From This

---

“And so the shop explodes-no not explodes it's in flames and they have the audacity--the au,” Roman coughs readjusting the webcam, “They have the audacity to play ‘Somebody to love’ as he’s fuckin mourning,” he gestured angrily, “Like Neil might as well come into my house and stomp on my heart.”

Dmitri nodded along, amused at the combination of camera lag and Roman’s erratic movements, “Before or after you watch the next episode?” he asked.

“It’s gonna have to be after cause I already finished the season. I never recovered from that scene though, ” Roman shrugged, tapping his jaw thoughtfully, “Probably should’ve started working on my commission sheet,”

“The same sheet you said you were going to start last month?”

“Yes the same one,” Roman blew out an exasperated huff, flopping into his hands, “I don’t know why it’s so hard --I feel scummy for pricing ‘too high’ and like shit for pricing ‘too lo--,” A notification rang, and he glanced over the screen, eyebrow raised, “Huh, Lo’s callin’ to video chat, you mind if I add’em?”

“Nah, go ahead,” Dmitri said, starting to fold the pile of towels.

“Alrighty,” He answered the call, “What’s up ner-” his face lit up, “Princess!”

Giggles erupted from the screen and Dmitri glanced up curious. On the screen instead of Logan was a small girl animatedly talking to Roman. She had two front teeth missing, glitter coloring her cheeks and rainbow beads rattling each time her braids moved.

“Woah, Woah-Woah,” Roman snorted, “Slow down hon, where’s your brother? Does he know you’re using his computer?”

“He’s in the shower,” she said, batting her eyes, “And know is a very strong word, but I can assure you he’s...aware?”

“Mmm, I won’t tell if you don’t,” he said, “So what’s the fairest of the land need?”

She beamed, “You at my birthday party.” she said, more of a command than anything.

Roman made of show of mulling it over, unable to keep a straight face, “I think I can make it.”

Her fist punched the air, “Ya--”

“Nieve,” Logan’s voice called out sternly.

Her eyes shot wide and she scrambled out of frame. Seconds later, Logan reappeared in the frame without his glasses, towel tucked to his chest. He didn’t look particularly mad.

He squinted blearily at the screen, “Roman? “ his gaze slid over, “Dmitri? Shit sorry did she bug you?”

“Not at all,” Roman reassured, “It’s been a while since I came over anyway,”

Logan grabbed their glasses, adjusting the frames, “Yeah...I guess it has...Since you’re here did you get that email from the school?”

“Yeah, it’s bullshit, “ Roman said, rolling his eyes, “If the state cared they would have found the funds somewhere else, it’s all shady as fuck. ”

Logan nodded, saying goodnight before disconnecting.

As soon as his icon disappeared, Roman said, “Huh, that...reminded me,”

Dmitri started on the next pile of laundry, “Of what?” he said, brow pinched, concerned.

“I’ dunno something Remy brought up…” Roman said, playing with his hands, “It’s stupid really but---”

He yelped falling to the floor, Remus victoriously sliding into the rolling chair. He spun wildly, the web camera a laggy blur, with only loud obnoxious kissing noises heard amongst the screaming.

Eventually, Remus slowed down, and it was jarring how much he and Roman looked alike. It was more unnerving seeing such a sleazy look with Roman’s face.

“Oh Dmitri,” Remus mocked, even adopting the heavy accent Roman usually placed on his name, “Embrace me with those big, long artist hands of yours, god I’m going to melt--"

“Shut up--shut up! You Rat-- give it back-give it back--” Roman whined, clambering over the chair, elbowing him, “Give it back, fuckin- MOM,” At one point Roman managed to wrestle the laptop from Remus, kicking him out of the chair and sending him off with a finger-- which Remus promptly returned.

Dmitri’s silently wheezed as Roman turned around visibly frazzled, “God I forgot what I was say-Are you laughing at me?” he said, “Stop it--stop laughing it’s not--”

“It-” Dmitri’s covered his mouth, shoulders shaking “It kinda is,” He said between snorts, only laughing harder at the offended noises Roman made.

As his snickers died down, Roman crossed his arms, “You done yet?” he sniffed.

“Yeah…” he gasped, “Yea...h... I am…” he blinked a bit, a slow smile spreading across his face, “So... what’s this about my hands?”

Roman’s eyes shot wide, incoherent babbling coming from his mouth as his ears turned a bright cherry. He slowly shrank out of frame to promptly die.

---

@daflangstlairde

@ace-anx

@cataclysm-al

#Roman Sanders #Deceit Sanders #roceit #sanders sides #ts sides #ts logan #ts virgil #ts remus #ts remy #ts patton #sanders sides fanfiction #fanfiction #Antithesis

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yaminerua · 7 years

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for those who haven’t had the misfortune of being shown it, the video im talking about is a thing i did back in 2008 into 2009-ish. When I started it I was equal parts still into my previous obsession Tokyo MewMew as well as Naruto and briefly toyed with the idea of a crossover of sorts and mostly just having fun with the fact Taruto from TMM’s name was so similar to Naruto.

The video itself is just lots of repeated bits of Taruto singing, terrible MS Paint drawings, art of my OCs and my friends’ OCs and random pointless sequences that make no sense. I was just having fun putting whatever to the music and the whole thing is a mess. I didn’t have any art programs other than MS Paint and my only video program was windows movie maker so everything is extremely unquality.

what matters is i had fun I guess and it’s the only video I still have on hand from the good old first naruto phase all those years ago so there’s a lot of nostalgia packed into it. and sometimes i show it to friends who weren’t around to see me at peak naruto phase so they can get a taste of the kind of shit I did back then xD im sure it’s on this blog somewhere from being posted YEARS ago but if i remember right the playback’s timing was off when viewed on tumblr

anyways

classic quality fails in that old vid include, terrible MS Paint drawings done at varying sizes so the line quality is mostly just absolutely terrible

images scaled badly in Paint so they’re distorted to hell and back. but you can still relatively clearly see the ‘gallery player’ watermark on some bgs oh man..

every image was a jpeg because I didnt know what png did back then and the compression shows

getting lazy and tracing over scenes but just tweaking it to another character

overusing the ninja naruto font a lot

uncreative attempts to make new characters, or tweak characters from another series into ninjas.. (seriously one just looks like a brunette hinata and another’s like a pointy-eared green-haired sasuke. that one started out as kisshu from tmm but he’s named differently cos i ended up completely changing him into an unrelated OC eventually. likewise with the hinata look-alike, she ended up looking completely different in the end. just. not in the vid pfff)

no actual coherent linear progression through the vid. it’s just a bunch of things thrown together because lol

killing off ‘taruto’ half way through because by the time i got half way through making it i’d left my tokyo mew mew phase in the dust and my life was consumed by naruto obsession. i think he dies a total of 3 times through the rest of the vid.

after ‘killing’ him, the repeated shots where he sings the chorus are turned sepia..... lmfao???

my oc looks completely different in the middle of the video than in the latter half which was done much later when i returned to it. pfff aoki came back ‘darker’ and ‘edgier’ and also a really bad and blatant mashup of fav characters...

a gaara caramelldansen trace briefly happens

naruto spray painting the ‘taruto’ logo back into ‘naruto’

i bring in friends’ ocs towards the end and there’s a lot of random art off google used in the bg... god dammit past me why are you like this.

and other shit.. but you get the idea. also i couldnt animate for shit either.

also when i open it in VLC it still shows the old filename from when i worked on it in movie maker lmfao ‘tarutonarutoishcrud’ taruto/naruto-ish crud lmfao at least i knew i was making shit xD

basically the whole thing is terrible but... it still means a lot to me and i still get immensely amused when i look at it again

#talking shit about that old vid i mentioned xD #idk maybe some day i might redo bits of it but i think its awkward charm comes from looking so bad xD #personal shit #not really i guess but i'll just tag it that anyway

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jamesbyerj · 4 years

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In the Shadow of Red Mountain - TelShadow

In this Mod Author feature, we're catching up with [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/users/56842182]TelShadow [/url]who may well hold the record for most mods created for Morrowind. [b]Let's start as we always do, please tell us about yourself for those in the community who don't know you yet. [/b] There isn't much to tell really. I come from a very creative family, which I'm sure helps me when coming up with new mod ideas. I'm a writer and an artist but, to be honest, I haven't really done any writing or drawing for fun in many years. I have instead been dedicating most of my spare time to modding. I tend to do very little else! I've done a little bit of modding every day for the last 3 years. I also work as a tattoo artist, which is great for me as it's another avenue for creativity. When I'm not working or modding, of course, I like to play video games. [b]If you had to pick your top 3 favourite games of all time, which would you pick and why? [/b] Well, as you can probably guess, Morrowind has to be my number one - it was the first Elder Scrolls game I ever played. I remember picking it up about a year after it came out for the original Xbox. I fell in love with how alien the world was, the variety of things you could do and how rich the lore is. With all the factions, houses and guilds you could join it really is a great game to play over and over again, having a different adventure each time. For my second favourite, I'd have to say the games in the Halo franchise - hands down. It was a tough call between Halo and Morrowind for number one though. I really love the alien designs, the level structure and most importantly the story. Not unlike Morrowind, there's also rich lore to explore. I feel like I've covered 95% of the Morrowind lore, but with Halo, I've only scratched the surface. My third and final choice might be surprising to some. It's Fallout 3. You might have been expecting me to say Fable and it was close, but Fallout 3 wins out thanks to its incredible world design and how your choices drive real changes in the world around you. I remember getting killed by a mole-rat and having to reload, so I went to exact some revenge only to discover the mole-rat had been killed by the DeathClaw now standing beside it. Like Halo and Morrowind, I also really enjoy the lore of this game. I enjoyed unravelling the mysteries of the pre-war world and coming up with my own theories about what happened. As you can probably guess from my choices, I love anything with a large, alien world to explore and strong lore for me to immerse myself in. [center][img]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2295/images/26/26-1594391122-2038848737.jpeg[/img] [img]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2295/images/26/26-1594391126-162976364.jpeg[/img][/center] [b]Looking at your profile, it's pretty clear that Morrowind is the game you enjoy modding the most. What is it about the game that really draws you in?[/b] Morrowind is a part of me and has been a big part of my life since I first played it. I love the huge variety in your adventures based on your choices, your class and your play style. It's way more diverse than Oblivion or Skyrim. As I said before, I love how alien everything is. The Great Houses, the factions/guilds and the random encounters you come across really make the world feel lived in and that your choices have consequences. I would talk to all the characters and read every book to squeeze every little bit of lore out of the game. You can also do more silly things with the game. I remember stealing every single pillow from every corner of the world so I could build my own pillow fort. I always joined the Great House Telvanni because I thought the mushroom architecture was really cool and I wanted to become a Telvanni Archmagister. It was always the first thing I did. It actually explains the origin of my username "Tel Shadow". My character would always be a Telvanni assassin so I started to name my character that, but I wanted to shorten it. So "Telvanni" became "Tel" and "assassin" became "shadow" which made sense because I was always lurking in the shadows. So that's how Tel Shadow the Telvanni assassin was born. [b]You've created a staggering 246 Morrowind mods (at time of writing), where do you get your inspiration from when planning to make them? [/b] It's a mixed bag. Since I'm a creative person usually I can just sit down and make a mod. I usually already have an idea floating around in my head before I start, which is partly why I'm so fast at making mods. As the dungeon or mod grows I get flashes of inspiration and simply add in what I come up with. Maybe that's why some people say that I'm a Morrowind modding A.I.? In some cases, I do also tend to take inspiration from other games I've played. I've taken inspirations from Halo and the version of Morrowind found in The Elder Scrolls Online in a few of my mods, although I don't always mention where I got the idea in the mod description. [b]Morrowind turned 18 in May this year, so it's incredible to see that the fanbase for this classic is still going strong. What do you think makes it so successful? [/b] For most of us, Morrowind was a game that we have fond memories of from when we first played it on PC or Xbox. Players can recount epic tales of all the different experiences they had based on their way of playing the game. With so much to do, there's also huge scope for things to be added or changed by using mods. An equally common experience may also be players who have come from Skyrim or Oblivion because they want more Elder Scrolls. Sometimes these players don't get along with Morrowind, often due to the "dice roll" combat system where your damage output relies entirely on RNG rather than if you actually hit your enemy or not. I don't see this as a problem but I suppose because I started with Morrowind I got used to it. With Morrowind being so moddable and the Elder Scrolls lore being so vast, creating and using mods in the massive, alien world definitely helps in making it infinitely replayable. There are huge modding projects such as [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/42145]Tamriel Rebuilt[/url], [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/42081]Project Tamriel[/url] and [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/37795]Morrowind Rebirth[/url] that are still active today and can add tonnes of new content to explore. You can even use the Morrowind engine to make an entirely new game, as seen in [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/47768]Starwind[/url]. The [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/news/14258]Morrowind Modathons[/url] and [url=https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTiULQ_bcPRu_jMTZ86WO7A]Showcases[/url] by [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/users/19250]darkelfguy [/url]are also a massive factor as to why Morrowind continues to be so successful. I was watching his videos for years and they are part of what inspired me to start modding myself. Morrowind will never die because our ideas and experiences with the game live on, no matter what. [center][img]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2295/images/26/26-1594391130-1843652118.jpeg[/img] [img]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2295/images/26/26-1594391135-963779626.jpeg[/img][/center] [b]Have you played much of the newer Elder Scrolls titles (Oblivion and Skyrim) and how do you compare them with Morrowind? [/b] I have played both games on my Xbox 360 actually. I played Oblivion to get those sweet Xbox achievements and Skyrim for the awesome dragons. I think the majority of Morrowind players will agree that the gameplay formula has been "dumbed down" in each iteration following it. I heard this was partly because the main lore writer for Morrowind left Bethesda before these games were released, but I'm not sure how true that is. Oblivion was a very colourful game and was a medieval fantasy game that came out while Lord of the Rings was in the spotlight, so that definitely helped make it popular. Skyrim, by contrast, had a very dull/muted theme and felt a lot more Viking styled. To me, comparing these games to Morrowind is like day and night. In Skyrim, for example, there are only a small number of guilds you can join and interact with compared to the many options in Morrowind. It's like comparing a Viking-themed dragon killing RPG (Skyrim) to Dungeons & Dragons on steroids (Morrowind). [b]Back to modding, can you tell us about your workflow for creating mods?[/b] A lot of authors I've spoken to hold my workflow in high regard, probably part of the reason I get called "modding machine" and other nicknames. When I first picked up the [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/42196]Construction Set[/url] I spent two weeks learning everything I could about it. In that time I managed to figure out all the world design features and became a pro at using them. If you've ever watched YouTube speed painting videos, that's pretty close to the speed I work at when making mods. When planning out my mods I do things in layers. For example, if I'm making a landmass, I'll start by marking out the size and shape of the landscape, then add ground textures, then add objects like trees and rocks. After going over detailing it a few times I have the basic setup done and I move onto adding more complex things. I like to do things in order as it helps me track my progress. I find it also helps sometimes to keep notes or a checklist of problems I need to fix as I work through it. [b]What advice would you give a new modder who'd like to create a new dungeon or level in their favourite game? [/b] My advice might be a little controversial, most authors suggest starting small and working your way up to something big but I would say do the opposite. When you're making those first, smaller mods it's usually more about learning the tools than creating something you actually want to make. Starting with a bigger project allows you to work on different parts of your mod and learn the tools as you go, with the end result being much closer to your original idea. The size of the mod isn't important, it's more about your drive. If you're truly motivated to create something large, go for it! Push yourself and learn your limits, then find ways to exceed those limits. We can all achieve great things if you put our minds to it. [center][img]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2295/images/26/26-1594391468-486795442.jpeg[/img] [img]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2295/images/26/26-1594391471-1378499871.jpeg[/img][/center] [b]Out of all the mods you've created, which is your favourite?[/b] I love mostly all my Morrowind mods but I'm going to cop out a little bit here and say only three: [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/45951]Fablewind [/url]- which recreates all the Fable games into the Morrowind engine, [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/47201]Tel Felisa[/url] - a Telvanni town inspired around Felisa (one of the Telvanni members), and last but not least, [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/48227]Shadow of Colossus[/url] - one of my Halo inspired mods. [b]How about mods by other authors, are there any that really stand out to you?[/b] As sad as it sounds, I haven't really played Morrowind in a while other than to make mods for it. So I don't really play with many mods by other people for them to catch my attention. That's not to say I don't have some favourites though: [list] [*][url=https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/34046]Of Justice and Innocence[/url] by [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/users/19250]darkelfguy[/url]: He isn't just a great YouTuber, he also makes some really good quest mods. [*][url=https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/43181]Hold It[/url] by [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/users/1233897]Danae123[/url]: This is a really cool immersion mod. Danae is also really helpful when it comes to testing my own mods. [*][url=https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/40401]Drop the N'wah[/url] and [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/22905]A Female Dunmer Preset[/url] by [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/users/38638175?tab=user+files]BUULU[/url]: These are a couple of my favourites for Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE. I also enjoy watching his reviews of my mods [url=https://www.twitch.tv/buulu]on Twitch[/url]. [/list] [b]Is there anything else you'd like to say to the community?[/b] Keep making mods, no matter which game you're modding. We all have our moments, our ups and downs. It can be hard to keep working on a project but push yourself and see it through to the end as you never know what's on the other side. [quote]Legends aren't born, they're created.[/quote]- Tel Shadow [line] A big thank you to TelShadow for taking the time to talk to us! If there's an author or mod project you'd like to know more about, send your suggestions to [b][url=https://www.nexusmods.com/users/64597]BigBizkit[/url][/b] or [b][url=https://www.nexusmods.com/users/31179975]Pickysaurus[/url][/b]. Published first at In the Shadow of Red Mountain - TelShadow

#Video Games #PC Gaming

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talkagency · 5 years

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BASIC SEO TIPS FOR BEGINNERS

So you are just setting out with SEO and are not quite sure where you should start. Fear not! We’re here to get you on the right path to SEO success.

Once you have mastered these basic SEO tips, you can expect your ranking in the search engines to improve significantly.

We’ve got you covered with our top 10 beginners tips for basic SEO. So, if you’re ready to begin, let’s get started!

What Exactly is SEO & is it Important?

Before we get started with our top basic SEO tips, let’s first take a look at what SEO is. Search engine optimization helps you rank your website and content in the SERPs.

In its simplest form, it provides search engines such as Google and Bing with context about what your site and content offers.

In turn, this helps the search engines understand when and where to present your content when a user is searching for it.

Every single website that shows on the first page of Google has perfected their SEO techniques. They have mastered keywords, content and backlink gathering.

Ultimately, the higher your website ranks in the search engine results page, the more site visitors you can expect. And the more site visitors you have, the more likely you are to make sales and conversions.

Sounds awesome, right?!

Tip 1 – Keyword Research

This is the most important SEO step to take… aside from creating kick ass content! It is also the one that step that most beginners get confused with.

Keyword research lets you find high volume keywords to write into your content. The more keywords you use, the more likely you are to rank.

To begin with, you first need to find your seed keywords. These will be used in your title, URL, image alt, for around about 2% of your content text.

Once you have your seed keywords, also known as primary keywords, you then need to find semantically related keywords.

These are the keywords related to your content that users will most likely be searching for. (LSI Keywords)

As an example, if your seed keyword is flowers. Semantically related keywords would be how to grow, how to care for, what are the best types of, gardening tips, etc.

If you use WordPress, Yoast SEO will give you insights about how many keywords to use, etc.

Tip 2 – Internal Links

internal links are extremely useful for improving your websites CTR (click through rate).

They work by linking up to relevant pages and blog posts throughout your website. Much like a spider web, each link from one page to another helps build connections for search engines and your readers.

Think of them as being the perfect on page promotion tool that diverts readers to more content they will likely be interested in.

Of course, you want to make sure that your internal links are relevant to what your content is about.

As an example, if you have a beekeeping website, you could use internal links to any beekeeping products or services that you sell. Both are relevant to each other, thus more likely to encourage user click through.

And the longer a visitor spends on your website, the more likely it is to rank higher. The search engines noticed that your visitors weren’t bouncing, showing them that they are getting value out of your content.

Tip 3 – External Links

External links, also known as outbound links, are links on your content that point to an external website.

By linking to external websites, you help the search engines better understand what your content is about.

In fact, the more high-quality, related outbound links you have on your website, the more likely you are to increase your ranking.

This is because the search engines recognise your site as being high quality and trustworthy.

However, you can’t just go linking up to any old site. There is definitely something you want to be aware of.

Only ever link to blogs that are relevant to your website or content.

Limit your outbound links to a maximum of four per page.

Before linking, check the websites domain authority. Anything less than 50 is not worth linking to.

Never use a link farm.

Never buy links… these can literally kill that your website in a matter of weeks!

Message the website owner after you have created a link to let them know. If they ask you to remove it, you should.

Tip 4 – XML Sitemaps

XML sitemaps make everything easier for the search engines to crawl and index your content when you publish it.

A sitemap is basically a list of URLs that you currently have on your website. This let’s search engines such as Google know when they have missed a page or when changes have been made.

A sitemap is one of the basic SEO fundamentals that every website should have. By having one, you can ensure that your content is indexed and displayed in the search engine results page much faster than without one.

Talking about indexing. If you haven’t yet signed up with Google search console, you absolutely should. This free tool not only shows you analytics cover in your website. It also lets you submit URL to be indexed rather than waiting for crawling.

Tip 5 – Format Syntax

You might not know it, but using correct syntax is everything. Syntax is how you format and style your content. And it is an important part of SEO.

Not only does it make your content look more visually attractive. It also makes it easier for the search providers to understand your content.

But what exactly equates to good syntax?

Always use an H1 header

Use at least for H2 headers

Paragraphs should never exceed 90 words

Sentences should never exceed 20 words

Aim to use a maximum of three sentences per paragraph

Each subsection should be no more than 300 words

Use sentence case for titles and headings

Bold important text

And that’s pretty much it when it comes to syntax!

SEO Tip 6 – Optimise Images

You should always use images on all of your content. Images make content visually attractive and improve readability for the reader.

However, images can drastically slow down your website. And a slow website is often penalized by Google.

When possible, you should serve your images as a next-gen image using WEBP. If you use WordPress as your CMS (content management system) you can use the ShortPixel plugin to do this.

Avoid using PNG files as these are much larger than JPEG files. And JPG files are much larger than WEBP files.

Talking about images, you should also make sure that every image on your website has an image alt tag. This helps search engines understand what the image is about and shows it to those using image search.

Tip 7 – Use Robot.txt files

Robot.txt files, also known as robot tags the search engines which pages on your website their crawlers should index, and which they shouldn’t.

For example, if you have a page or blog post that you don’t want the search engines to index, you could use the ‘noindex’ tag.

Likewise, if you are linking to a website that you are not sure about, you can use the ‘nofollow’ tag. Perhaps it has a low domain authority or could be potentially spammy; whatever the reason, no follow prevents external sites from affecting your SEO efforts.

If you are using WordPress to build your website and publish content, you can use the plugin Meta Tag Manager to quickly and easily add and remove robot tags to your content.

Tip 8 – Optimise Your Meta Description

These little snippets of information are shown in the search engine results page. You will see them every time you do a Google search.

They provide both readers and search engine context to what the content is about.

Your meta description should be perfectly optimised to the correct character limit. This is currently averaging at around 140 characters. Anything over this will be cut off.

Try to use your main keywords in your meta description and answer the question instead of asking people to click to read more.

By answering the question in the meta description, you are already providing real value to the reader. In turn, they are much more likely to click through to your website.

Tip 9 – Write for Backlinks

If you seriously want to rank higher in the search results pages, you are going to need to get those all-important backlinks!

But unfortunately, finding backlinks is almost as hard as catching unicorns!

However, there are some easier ways to get backlinks that don’t involve black hat SEO techniques.

The best way is to produce content that provides real value! This means providing detailed and in-depth content with lots of data, statistics and shareable content.

You can also send out a message seeking guest writers to feature on your website. This method works really well as your guest writers are much more likely to link back to your website to show off their work to their followers.

Double bubble! You score that elusive backlink along with getting extra traffic.

Ultimately, if you want to get backlinks, you have to create content that people use to reference in their own content. Become an authority and watch as your DA starts to climb.

Tip 10 – Write Longer Content

When you take a look at the websites that perform best in the search engine results page, a common theme is clear.

Longer, more detailed content is a clear winner. That’s not to say that you need to start writing 5,000 word blog posts to rank, but every now and then, go longer than you normally would.

The average website on page 1 of Google has approximately 1,200 to 1,600 words. Why does longer content work better?

The answer is pretty simple.

The more words you use in your content, the easier it is to make use of more keywords. It is also much easier to write these naturally. The worst thing you can do is stuff short content with keywords. This can relegate you to the lost pages of Google… which you really want to avoid.

So when should you create blog posts over 1,600 words? If you are covering a particularly interesting topic that people are going to learn from, this is the time!

And one thing to remember when creating large posts is that you should aim to make them timeless. This is what is known as evergreen content and can drive traffic to your website over extended periods of time.

At the very least, you should be creating content of a minimum of 800 words. Anything less than this and you are going to find it difficult to get your content to rank.

Final Word

That’s about it for this beginners guide to basic SEO tips. Try to implement as many of these 10 tips as you can into your everyday content production.

The more you use them, the more familiar you will become with them. And once you have them mastered, you can move on to more advanced SEO tips for improved rankings.

If you are interested in learning more about website design, web development, SEO tips, PPC, and the different types of Google software, check out our blog.

We have an extensive archive filled with useful and up-to-date information covering everything a digital marketer and beginner web designer could need.

Article first published here: BASIC SEO TIPS FOR BEGINNERS

#seo #internet marketing

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fathersonholygore · 5 years

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Here at Father Son Holy Gore, we’re not waiting for a month or a week designated for the purpose: we’re celebrating great horror movies directed by women!

Horror’s often deemed— by ignorant dudes with angry balls— as a man’s genre. Not only that, horror made by men can, all too occasionally, devolve into misogynistic terror serving no purpose other than to be used as a male’s wet dream. It’s a genre propped up by women: they’ve been murdered as Final Girls, vilified as bad mothers and ‘whores’ and teasers who somehow turn men into murderous entities; they’re killed in gruesome, misogynistic ways by men who wield phallic weaponry with which to penetrate them; and the sad, tedious list of ways the genre’s disrespected women goes on eternally.

Horror’s far from being the domain of men. This list is just part of what helps prove that. The following is a compilation of (just some of) Father Gore’s favourite horror movies directed by women. Some are quite well known. Others are like treasures which horror fans have already discovered, and loved, that could do well with more exposure.

After you’re done reading, drop into the comments. Let everyone know YOUR favourite horrors directed by women. Make sure to share this with your guy friends, too. The ladies are already well aware of their gender’s contributions to the genre— it’s us men who’ve got to learn to widen our tastes.

Before the general public caught up on issues of representation, Jackie Kong was carving out her own unique little niche in the world of genre filmmaking. Her 1983 feature debut, The Being, managed to score both Jose Ferrer and Martin Landau to star in a movie about a toxic waste monster wreaking havoc in a small town. She did a couple other flicks, though it’s her 1987 cannibal horror comedy, Blood Diner, which has captured the hearts of B-movie fans everywhere.

Part of what’s so awesome about Kong’s two horrors is she never takes things too seriously, except for the spirit of horror itself. When so many dumb men think women can’t be weird and nasty, they need to look no further than Ms. Kong, whose foray into horror left its mark, one way or another.

Claire Denis is a master. Literally one of the greatest directors to have ever lived. Some of her work, though singular and definable as Denisian, is more typical to her calibre of filmmaker— what we’ve come to expect from the directors and writers considered auteurs.

One of her atypical movies is the 2001 horror, Trouble Every Day.

Denis uses cannibalism to explore the lengths to which people will go for love, how love consumes us, and what sort of monsters we can become in pursuit of it. Vincent Gallo, though a useless human being, does great work here as a newlywed husband with a dark secret. Alex Descas turns up— as he so often does in a Denis film— playing a semi-reclusive doctor in exile. It’s the spellbinding Béatrice Dalle who plays the doctor’s wife, a woman with her own terrifying secret, that makes Trouble Every Day so powerfully raw. One the 21st century’s great horrors.

There are so many vampire movies it’d be a pain in the ass to list even ALL the best, because, despite there being a vast number of bad ones out there the good far outweighs that number. Among the good are also masterpieces!

Kathryn Bigelow— before her stint of war flicks, from K-19: The Widowmaker to the fantastic The Hurt Locker and the much less fantastic, troubling, CIA-approved Zero Dark Thirty, and before her awesome run of genre fare (Blue Steel, Point Break, Strange Days)— gave us one of the best modern vampire movies.

Near Dark encompasses a lot of things: family, romance, contemporary Gothic, betrayal, difference. Bigelow’s vision of a vampire family roaming America in search of blood is as thrilling as it is macabre. Bill Paxton and Lance Henriksen are two immediately identifiable genre greats— Paxton’s performance is so much dark fun it’s criminal— but Jenny Wright, Jenette Goldstein, and Joshua John Miller each do their part to make this one hell of a memorable movie, too.

More here.

There aren’t enough mermaids in today’s fiction. Mostly, a lack of REAL mermaids. Many of the original mythologies about sirens didn’t depict these half-aquatic, half-human creatures as beautiful. They showed mermaids as hideous and frightening things, which is why they used their beautiful songs to lure their prey towards the shores, where they’d kill men by crashing their ships or worse.

The Lure works along the very lines of this dichotomy. Two mermaid sisters— Silver (Marta Mazurek) and Golden (Michalina Olszańska)— find living amongst regular people is tough. Silver becomes enamoured with the night club life and musicians. Golden can’t stop killing to feed her blood lust. Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s horror musical is a coming-of-age tale, inspired by her own life with a mother who ran a nightclub. Her use of mermaids, in the darkly comic, horrific style she uses, is a refreshing take on the mythology, and an interesting, loose interpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.

Not to be missed.

Jennifer Lynch followed her father David into the world of directing, after penning The Secret Diaries of Laura Palmer at 22 years old for him and his Twin Peaks co-creator, Mark Frost. That’s where similarities stop. Jennifer’s developed a unique style within the horror genre’s confines— she’s also done great work in television on American Horror Story and The Walking Dead.

Jennifer’s debut feature Boxing Helena wasn’t well received, though Father Gore’s a fan. 15 years later she returned with 2008’s horror-thriller Surveillance. The cast is phenomenal: Julia Ormond, Bill Pullman, Michael Ironside, French Stewart, plus Hugh Dillon and Cheri Oteri as a hilarious married couple. Ms. Lynch’s directing turns the movie into something wholly ‘other.’ She uses different film stocks processed in a variety of ways to portray the perspectives of the many disparate characters. The structure of the plot works in a non-linear style, keeping the viewer guessing until late in the game as to what’s actually happening. One of those twisted movies with a promising third act reveal.

Four years later, Lynch directed Chained, starring Vincent D’Onofrio and Eamon Farren. It’s a cruel and brutal tale of a serial killer who abducts a young boy after killing his mother, turning the child into his protege. Saying anything further would spoil it. Another movie with a solid twist, albeit most of the intrigue and intensity in the screenplay comes from the dynamic between the killer v. his reluctant apprentice. D’Onofrio has such power as an actor, and to see him once more become a vicious man— not TOO far off from the killer he played in The Cell— is an unsettling experience.

Mary Lambert’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel Pet Sematary will forever be my favourite version, no matter how many times they decide to re-envision the story onscreen. It isn’t perfect, but why does that matter, exactly?

The mood of Lambert’s 1989 movie is paramount to its success. She nails the New England Gothic feel without having to resort to a decidedly haunted house setting. She explores the rural spaces of Maine with grim fascination, no matter if the fabulous Fred Gwynne, playing old man Jud Crandall, lays on the faux-accent too thick. Lambert’s choices as a director, from the Gothic transformation of the house in the climactic scenes, to the moments with Zelda (played by a man, Andrew Hubatsek) have left generations of horror fans scarred. This woman knew what she was doing, and even if all the elements don’t work as well as they should, the atmosphere and mood of Pet Sematary make it an unforgettable ’80s classic.

More here.

Father Gore has a theory: Bret Easton Ellis is such a fucking asshole because Mary Harron took his, let’s face it, mediocre text American Psycho (which would’ve been leagues better if Tom Wolfe had never picked up a pen) and turned it into a horror movie masterpiece. Prove it wrong.

Harron’s American Psycho retains the good bits of Ellis while playing more with the interesting themes the author left in the backseat. Ellis overemphasised the 1980s heyday of American culture, to pretentious degree, whereas Harron uses it as part of a larger thematic mosaic which speaks to those ideas (materialism, capitalism, and all that’s wrapped up in them) while also focusing on misogyny as an offshoot of that same culture. Ellis tries to claim his novel does the same thing, though Father Gore disagrees.

Harron— along with co-writer Guinevere Turner— make things slightly less ambiguous than in the source material. What makes the movie so effective is there’s less of a smug, know-it-all sense to the style, like there is in everything Ellis writes, and more of a dark wink-wink, nudge-nudge quality that’d rather us all be in on the horrific joke than attempt to outsmart us.

Anything with Carol Kane is worth watching for Carol Kane, and the same could really be said for Lee Grant. The Mafu Cage features them both in an unnerving pair of roles, playing sisters who are JUST TOO CLOSE— like, incest close.

The addition of apes and the mansion’s Gothic drives this into creepy territory. A spectacle to behold. On top of that, director Karen Arthur spent time in a psychiatric hospital to research for the production, adding an air of unease. Like the best modern Gothic stories, The Mafu Cage poses questions about contemporary humanity v. primitive humanity, aided by the presence of the apes. Father Gore believes this is an underrated gem. Definitely a worthy title to be on a list of horror movies directed by women.

The New French Extremity‘s produced interesting work. One of those films is Marina de Van’s Dans Ma Peau (English title: In My Skin). De Van also stars as the protagonist, Esther, whose obsession with self-mutilation emerges after a small but nasty accident and threatens to destroy her life/body.

This is a tough piece of cinema. Not everyone will want to sit through it, especially those who’ve had their own history of self-mutilation. De Van separates the scope of her story from suicidal ideation— Esther’s not looking to kill herself. In a larger way, the movie IS about self-destruction, just not necessarily the depressive sort. The story and its plot explore how people can implode and cut themselves off from society. Although the visceral body horror is unavoidable, the psychological aspects are most important, as de Van tries to illustrate, in a highly literal fashion, how someone can figuratively take themselves apart, bit by bit.

Dark Touch is another movie from de Van, vastly different from the previous one. This has a different perspective on the ‘evil child’ sub-genre. It’s also jam-packed with atmosphere— the tone is dark, dark, dark. One of the first movies of its ilk that Father Gore found super interesting in a long while, at the time it came out in 2013. Always nice to see a woman directing a story about a young girl who’s experiencing the difficulties of growing up, with an extra cherry of disturbing horror on top.

Ignore the hype about Raw sending people rushing from the theatre to vomit. Not because there aren’t disturbing moments, and not because there aren’t ay scenes of corporeal nastiness that’ll make certain stomachs queasy, but because there’s so much more to Julia Ducournau’s fascinating movie than a few gross-outs.

The screenplay concerns a young woman coming into her own as she goes into a college to study as a veterinarian. There, she has a life changing experience involving her older sister. What comes out of this is a tale of transgressive love, which examines the thin veil between human and animal. Truly one of the better cannibalism movies in the horror genre. A unique story.

More here.

There are many ‘killer kid’ movies. The Godsend, though far from perfect, is a compelling entry in this sub-genre. There’s a lot of human drama at the core. Director Gabrielle Beaumont focuses on the people at the heart of the ‘killer kid’ dilemma, and the kid is not what’d you expect, either.

Instead of going for jump scares and elaborately explained moments of terror, Beaumont opts for atmosphere, tension, and, in the finale, subtlety. Not every horror fan is going to love this one. For those with patience they’ll find Beaumont’s feature debut well worth the time to track down.

Horror movies and grief go hand-in-hand. There’s no shortage of them, despite a recent article from Vice claiming Happy Death Day2U was the first (HIRE BETTER HORROR WRITERS WHO ACTUALLY KNOW THE GENRE— WE DO EXIST, Y’KNOW!). Jennifer Kent reworked her earlier short into a full-length feature tackling this exact subject with 2014’s The Babadook.

Sure, the kid’s a bit grating, but it’s all part of the plot. He and his mother are thrown into a terrifying existential situation in which their lives are haunted by a threatening entity from a children’s book. The mother, Amelia (Essie Davis), at first thinks the Babadook is just a manifestation of her son’s grief. She soon discovers different.

The whole thing is spooky. Kent’s striking imagery draws off the surreal, terrifying images of German Expressionism. But, again, like so many other quality horrors, The Babadook is above all about the power grief holds over individuals and families. Another that’ll go down as a classic.

Ravenous has, thankfully, been having a revival lately. Many are fans of this cult movie from 1999, directed by Antonia Bird. Her filmography, by the way, is fantastic (Priest and Face specifically are magic). Nevertheless, this movie doesn’t get the love it deserves, even as people discover its merits 20 years later.

Bird tells an interesting story, mixing the cannibalism sub-genre of horror with historical fiction and an overarching commentary on colonialism/manifest destiny. There are a bunch of solid performances. Robert Carlyle and Guy Pearce are utterly brilliant in their respective roles— their showdown in the subdued yet crazy finale is a sight to be seen with your own eyes, including a darkly comic ending to boot.

Truly one of the most unsung classics in the past couple decades. Again, thankfully people are finding this one, as fans keep spreading their love for this flick far and wide. Bless Ms. Bird for offering one of the best horrors of the ’90s, proving the decade is far from a bad one like certain gatekeepers will try to convince you.

If you couldn’t get enough of Rose Leslie as Ygritte on Game of Thrones, she gives a tour-de-force performance in Leigh Janiak’s Honeymoon, alongside Harry Treadaway as her confused and horrified husband.

Honeymoon is about a young married couple on their eponymous trip after the wedding. Janiak uses the movie to ask tough questions. Do we truly know the people we love, or can they still manage to hide things from us? Of course the story operates on the level of a metaphor about interpersonal relationships, specifically the deep, romantic, scary plunge of marriage. Janiak doesn’t only focus on other possible readings. She digs deep into the horror and science fiction here, creating a story of dread, both existential and physical, that’s hard to ignore. Leslie and Treadaway offer powerful performances, though it’s the former whose power truly helps the movie fly to disturbing heights.

Evolution is a perfect, twisted companion piece to Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s earlier 2004 movie Innocence. Each of them focus on gender in a uniquely unsettling way. Innocence is like a dark fairy tale for girls, whereas Evolution feels like a science fiction parable aimed at young boys. The former takes place in a lush, if not strange forest. The latter is set in a weird coastal town near the edge of a looming industrial city.

Hadzihalilovic rivals her husband Gaspar Noé in the way she aims at difficult, sometimes abstract concepts. She’s nowhere near as explicit or nasty as Noé— of whom Father Gore is a massive fan— instead going for subtlety, straying much deeper into metaphor as a method of delivery for her subject matter.

One thing’s certain: Evolution is a dreadful ride that’s visually gorgeous and thematically compelling as much as it is disturbing. A breath of fresh, awful air.

More here.

Go on, Karyn Kusama! Get it, lady!

Even if you don’t dig Kusama’s earlier movies, from the wrongfully maligned Jennifer‘s Body to Æon Flux and Girlfight, her work over the past few years has been incredibly interesting. Her latest, Destroyer, is an atypical dirty cop flick starring Nicole Kidman in a Charlize Theron level, Monster-like physical transformation. Before that, she gifted the horror world with a masterpiece of psychological fuckery.

The Invitation doesn’t just let us marvel at the handsomeness of Logan Marshall-Green and his luscious beard, neither is it only about Tammy Blanchard’s truly haunted performance, the movie goes full bore towards its themes, never allowing us a minute of relaxation between stints of unbearable suspense.

Don’t read anything else about it if you haven’t yet seen the movie. Go. Watch. Now.

More here.

Ana Lily Amirpour is a gift to us all. We must respect her accordingly. (She directed an episode of the new Twilight Zone recently and, despite naysayers, it’s a great episode in a wonderful new update to the classic series.)

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was a moody debut for Amirpour, giving us a new vision of vampirism that draws off her Iranian roots, as well as her American ones. The black-and-white cinematography is an exciting contrast of light and dark, fitting with vampire themes as a visual symbol unto itself. Sheila Vand as the Girl is mesmerising, and the director’s style is so affecting.

A few years after her debut, Amirpour directed The Bad Batch. While other critics weren’t as happy with this follow-up, Father Gore found it a wildly imaginative view of the current divided America, separating people along lines of gender, race, class, disability, and more. This dystopian vision of America— a desert wasteland filled that includes Jason Momoa’s glistening, musclebound cannibal, Keanu Reeves as an entrepreneurial criminal hosting a never ending EDM oasis, Jim Carrey playing a man who cannot speak and only communicates through pictures, and Suki Waterhouse depicting a woman looking to avenge her cannibalised limb— is a recipe for a one of a kind movie.

More on The Bad Batch here.

[List] Father Gore’s Favourite Horror Directed by Women Here at Father Son Holy Gore, we're not waiting for a month or a week designated for the purpose: we're celebrating great horror movies directed by women!

#Ana Lily Amirpour #Claire Denis #Directed by Women #Horror movies #Jackie Kong #Jennifer Lynch #Julia Ducournau #Kathryn Bigelow #Mermaids #New French Extremity #The Mafu Cage #Women in Horror

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iyarpage · 5 years

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15 Critical Website Fixes to Make Before Launching a Mobile App

Your target market has gone mobile. Mobile users spend up to 12% of their time browsing on their device, which works out to 87 hours a month or 1,044 hours a year spent on their phone; 90% of that time is spent using mobile apps.

Which is why having a mobile app can be so valuable for your business. No wonder everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon. Even 67% of small businesses now have a mobile app.

The problem is, many apps are just awful extensions of already bad websites. While you might feel the urge to dive straight into developing your own and racing it to the market, it’s a huge mistake. Mobile apps are a gateway to your site. So trying to implement them without some critical website optimization can directly impact the amount of time and money it takes to create the app.

Here are 15 website tweaks you should make before considering a mobile app.

Speed Optimization

Speed is critical to the user experience. Which means that if you want your website and your mobile app to provide a great user experience, the first thing you need to do is optimize your site speed.

Here are the tweaks you need to make, to do so:

1. Minify

Minification reduces the size of your website CSS, JavaScript, and HTML content. It works by removing any unnecessary website code, such as:

Unnecessary code in your JavaScript;

Unused spaces in your CSS;

Unnecessary line-breaks in your HTML.

If you use WordPress, there are plenty of plugins available that will take care of this process for you, including Fast Velocity Minify and Autoptimize.

2. Compress

Text compression can also boost speed, especially on text-heavy websites such as blogs. Most Content Delivery Networks support the sending of compressed files so you can set up default compression through a tool such as Gzip.

If you don’t host your own website, you can use Check GZIP Compression to see if compression is already set up. If it’s not, the easiest way to install it is through a plugin such as W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache or WP Rocket.

3. Maximize Caching

HTTP caching is when a browser stores copies of resources so that they can be re-accessed faster. Using an HTTP cache header, you can define when, how, and how long a response should be cached.

You can configure your server to attach the HTTP Cache-Control header and modify it for how long you want data cached. One way to do this is to add the header directly into your code.

Here is an example of a PHP header with a Cache-Control setting of max-age equal to 84,600 seconds (1 day):

header('Cache-Control: max-age=84600')

By setting a max-age expiration header, you will ensure repeat visitors are not slowed down accessing resources they downloaded before. Aim for caching as many resources for the longest period of time as securely possible. Then provide validation tokens for efficient revalidation of the resources that got updated.

4. Reduce JavaScript Load Time

JavaScript can cause delays, especially if you have large bundles of it. On an average mobile phone, processing these bundles can take 5–10x longer than on a desktop. You can combat this with code splitting.

Code splitting breaks your JavaScript bundles into pieces to deliver them faster and only as users need it. It can be applied at a route level or component level with tools such as React, Parcel, and Webpack.

5. Optimize Images

Visuals are important for user engagement, but the last thing you want is for them to slow down the user experience. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools on the market that will help you compress and optimize your images.

Here are a number of options to choose from:

One-off optimization tools:

ImageOptim

XNConvert

Automated optimization:

Imageflow

Imagemin

Thumbor

Hosting and optimization:

Akamai

Cloudinary

Fastly

6. Format Animated Content

The GIF format is popular for animations, but it was actually never intended as an animation platform. By switching to a more suitable video format, you can greatly reduce file size and speed up page times.

You can use the FFmpeg tool to convert animation GIFs into mp4 files. You can also use the Effective Type API tool to identify slow bandwidths, and automatically convert from delivering your animated images to much smaller JPEGs. While it does remove some of the user experience, it’s better than the site failing to load or operating unreasonably slowly.

7. Reduce Plugins

WordPress has over 54,000 plugins. While it is the largest platform on the market, even competing options still offer plugins in the thousands. There are plugins for practically anything you can dream up these days — ecommerce plugins like BigCommerce for WordPress, email marketing plugins like Mailchimp, and conversion rate optimization plugins like OptinMonster. Many of them add valuable functionality.

The problem is, too many plugins can slow down your site speed. First, make sure you don’t have anything installed that you’re not using. Next, uninstall any plugins for services that you can integrate with your website through other means. Google Analytics is a prime example. There is no reason to use a plugin for this integration when you can do it with an API key.

Finally, if you still have a lot of plugins look for some all-in-one solutions that can replace handfuls of niche ones. For instance, don’t use separate plugins for minification, compression, and caching when there is one solution for all three. However, perform your due diligence as some all-in-one plugins like Jetpack slow down your site more than any others.

How many plugins are too many? Here’s a general rule of thumb:

No more than five if you have shared or budget cloud hosting;

No more than 20 if you use cloud hosting, VPS hosting, or a dedicated server.

8. Use AMP

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) refers to an open-source web programming language that delivers static content instantly to mobile devices. It’s basically a lean, stripped down version of HTML built specifically for speeding up non-interactive web pages on mobile devices.

Because it’s a stripped down version, you do trade-off some functionality for this rapid speed. Here are two potential drawbacks to be aware of:

JavaScript is limited to an off-the-shelf AMP library;

Lazy load functionality is enabled (images load as you scroll down to them);

Lead generation may be impacted, as AMP often removes opt-in forms.

On the other hand, one of the biggest advantages (other than the improved speed) is that Google’s mobile-first indexing tends to promote AMP pages in search results. There are plenty of plugins to choose from for enabling AMP, including AMP, AMP for WP – Accelerated Mobile Pages, and AMP WP – Google AMP For WordPress.

9. Address Redirects and Broken Links

Redirects and broken links can kill your user experience as well as slow down your site speed.

Redirects

You’ll want to minimize redirects as much as possible, as they impact page speed and even the overall load time of your site. The delay tends to become even more noticeable when users are on mobile devices.

You can use a free tool such as Screaming Frog to check your website for any redirects. Once you’ve found some, remove any that aren’t needed and make changes to any that need to be updated.

If you have a secure site, you can also use HSTS to remove the SSL redirect.

Broken Links

Thankfully, there are also free tools you can use to find and fix broken links across your website. Two examples are:

Broken Link Checker

Xenu

Once you identify the broken links, you can either update them with the right URL or remove the linkage.

Both of these checks should be a routine part of your website management as redirects and broken links can crop up again over time.

10. Continually Test

We’ve covered nine significant methods for optimizing your page speed before introducing a mobile app. While this should significantly increase your site performance, you could still have more opportunities for improvement.

There are hundreds of tools for testing your website page speed and mobile readiness, but the best place to start is with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.

It will give you a current page speed score for both your desktop and mobile versions of your site and make specific suggestions on how you can improve.

The next step is to use Test My Site to further analyze mobile page speed and friendliness.

All you need to do is enter your website URL, and it will scan your site and evaluate. You can also get a free report containing optimization advice in exchange for submitting your email.

Site speed also provides huge SEO benefits. In addition to writing high-quality, long-form content and getting backlinks, site speed has a major impact on increasing website traffic.

In early 2019, I conducted a personal case study where I wrote as many guest posts as I could in 15 days. In that timeframe, I received 247 backlinks and a 372% increase in organic traffic.

However, this pales in comparison to the impact site speed has had on my mobile traffic. By boosting my mobile speed from 33 to 75+ over the same time period, I saw my mobile rankings increase 1,775% according to Google Analytics data.

UI Optimization

Speed may be at the top of the UX hierarchy, but it’s not the only factor. There are other components to consider, such as:

How easy it is to find what you’re looking for;

How well the site fits your mobile screen;

How simple it is to use;

How attractive it looks.

You can use the following site tweaks to streamline and maximize the user interface.

11. Simplify Your Structure

Your website needs to be intuitive and easy for users to navigate, especially when they’re trying to do so on the small screen of a mobile device.

Make sure your hierarchies are streamlined and that you have no more than one nested content level. Your ideal site structure should look like this:

Homepage

Categories (or sections)

Sub categories (only for larger sites)

Individual pages and posts

Focus on what your users are typically looking for and map out the common paths they will take. Then you can arrange categories in a hierarchy that will make the most sense to your audience.

You should also use knowledge base software to create a central resource or knowledge base for any users seeking answers to common questions.

This is about the simplest design tweak you can do that makes a lasting impact for both desktop and mobile usage.

12. Focus on Content Design

Designing your content around mobile can be a bit trickier, but it’s crucial for a successful mobile experience. A bad website design can kill your content on your app.

The bottom line is that you need your content to shine through with as few distractions as possible. To do this, you may need to remove elements such as tables, graphs, and other clunky elements that don’t translate well to the small screen.

You also need to strip down features such as headers, footers, menus, and sidebars so that they can be hidden or collapsed on smaller screens. Disable any hover-effects for your content as many mobile devices don’t have this functionality.

You don’t want to use too much text either. You can cut down on text by using tools such as Grammarly’s goals and audiences to help you create more concise copy that’s on point. Or, even better, focus on replacing text with more video content to maximize your mobile experience.

13. Reduce Banners and Sliders

Sliders have been popular for a while, but people typically add 5-6 high-quality images to a slider, which increases the overall load time of your website. Plus, studies show sliders annoy users and reduce visibility, especially on mobile.

Banners can result in similar problems, especially if they have any embedded text within the image. If you currently have any banners with text you should render the text with HTML & CSS instead of embedding it into the image. This will make it more flexible and easier to see on a smaller screen.

14. Optimize Forms and Touch Points

If your website has forms on it, pay attention to the field types, lengths, and labels. Everything should be clearly visible on any device. Enable functionality so that if a user taps on a field to enter information, the view zooms-in to the correct spot.

Check to see if you have field types that require a different keypad or touchscreen, such as a ZIP code, phone number, or electronic signature. If so, you should set the field to trigger the correct keyboard when tapped on, so users don’t have to switch manually.

Make sure all touch points and buttons will be visible and large enough to easily tap with a finger on a small screen. The standard recommendation is that they should be roughly 48 x 48 dp in size. Place text inside of the buttons rather than above or below it for easy identification.

15. Streamline Checkout

If you run an ecommerce website, this final tweak is for you.

About half of all ecommerce traffic comes from mobile devices, but when it comes to buying more people still do it on their desktops. This is likely because the entire flow of ordering, checking out, and paying is not properly optimized for mobile devices.

To identify where your process needs improvement, go through all of the steps across multiple devices and screen sizes and identify any pain points. The issue may be something we’ve already covered such as difficult form navigation or too small touch points.

However, even with these optimized, if you require a lot of data, it can still be painful to enter it all from a mobile device.

You can remedy this in one of the following ways:

Allow users to create profiles that will save and pre-populate their checkout information including shipping address and credit card number

Integrate with other payment gateways, such as PayPal that won’t require them to re-type their information.

Conclusion

Phone screens are getting larger, and tablets are getting more sophisticated, so it’s no wonder more of your audience is logging on and interacting through a mobile device.

A mobile app can be a great way to further engage with your users. But only if you optimize your website first to ensure a smooth user experience.

Featured image via Unsplash

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webbygraphic001 · 5 years

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15 Critical Website Fixes to Make Before Launching a Mobile App

Which is why having a mobile app can be so valuable for your business. No wonder everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon. Even 67% of small businesses now have a mobile app.

Here are 15 website tweaks you should make before considering a mobile app.

Speed Optimization

Speed is critical to the user experience. Which means that if you want your website and your mobile app to provide a great user experience, the first thing you need to do is optimize your site speed.

Here are the tweaks you need to make, to do so:

1. Minify

Minification reduces the size of your website CSS, JavaScript, and HTML content. It works by removing any unnecessary website code, such as:

Unnecessary code in your JavaScript;

Unused spaces in your CSS;

Unnecessary line-breaks in your HTML.

If you use WordPress, there are plenty of plugins available that will take care of this process for you, including Fast Velocity Minify and Autoptimize.

2. Compress

3. Maximize Caching

HTTP caching is when a browser stores copies of resources so that they can be re-accessed faster. Using an HTTP cache header, you can define when, how, and how long a response should be cached.

You can configure your server to attach the HTTP Cache-Control header and modify it for how long you want data cached. One way to do this is to add the header directly into your code.

Here is an example of a PHP header with a Cache-Control setting of max-age equal to 84,600 seconds (1 day):

header('Cache-Control: max-age=84600')

4. Reduce JavaScript Load Time

5. Optimize Images

Here are a number of options to choose from:

One-off optimization tools:

ImageOptim

XNConvert

Automated optimization:

Imageflow

Imagemin

Thumbor

Hosting and optimization:

Akamai

Cloudinary

Fastly

6. Format Animated Content

7. Reduce Plugins

How many plugins are too many? Here’s a general rule of thumb:

No more than five if you have shared or budget cloud hosting;

No more than 20 if you use cloud hosting, VPS hosting, or a dedicated server.

8. Use AMP

Because it’s a stripped down version, you do trade-off some functionality for this rapid speed. Here are two potential drawbacks to be aware of:

JavaScript is limited to an off-the-shelf AMP library;

Lazy load functionality is enabled (images load as you scroll down to them);

Lead generation may be impacted, as AMP often removes opt-in forms.

9. Address Redirects and Broken Links

Redirects and broken links can kill your user experience as well as slow down your site speed.

Redirects

You can use a free tool such as Screaming Frog to check your website for any redirects. Once you’ve found some, remove any that aren’t needed and make changes to any that need to be updated.

If you have a secure site, you can also use HSTS to remove the SSL redirect.

Broken Links

Thankfully, there are also free tools you can use to find and fix broken links across your website. Two examples are:

Broken Link Checker

Xenu

Once you identify the broken links, you can either update them with the right URL or remove the linkage.

Both of these checks should be a routine part of your website management as redirects and broken links can crop up again over time.

10. Continually Test

There are hundreds of tools for testing your website page speed and mobile readiness, but the best place to start is with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.

It will give you a current page speed score for both your desktop and mobile versions of your site and make specific suggestions on how you can improve.

The next step is to use Test My Site to further analyze mobile page speed and friendliness.

All you need to do is enter your website URL, and it will scan your site and evaluate. You can also get a free report containing optimization advice in exchange for submitting your email.

Site speed also provides huge SEO benefits. In addition to writing high-quality, long-form content and getting backlinks, site speed has a major impact on increasing website traffic.

In early 2019, I conducted a personal case study where I wrote as many guest posts as I could in 15 days. In that timeframe, I received 247 backlinks and a 372% increase in organic traffic.

UI Optimization

Speed may be at the top of the UX hierarchy, but it’s not the only factor. There are other components to consider, such as:

How easy it is to find what you’re looking for;

How well the site fits your mobile screen;

How simple it is to use;

How attractive it looks.

You can use the following site tweaks to streamline and maximize the user interface.

11. Simplify Your Structure

Your website needs to be intuitive and easy for users to navigate, especially when they’re trying to do so on the small screen of a mobile device.

Make sure your hierarchies are streamlined and that you have no more than one nested content level. Your ideal site structure should look like this:

Homepage

Categories (or sections)

Sub categories (only for larger sites)

Individual pages and posts

Focus on what your users are typically looking for and map out the common paths they will take. Then you can arrange categories in a hierarchy that will make the most sense to your audience.

You should also use knowledge base software to create a central resource or knowledge base for any users seeking answers to common questions.

This is about the simplest design tweak you can do that makes a lasting impact for both desktop and mobile usage.

12. Focus on Content Design

Designing your content around mobile can be a bit trickier, but it’s crucial for a successful mobile experience. A bad website design can kill your content on your app.

13. Reduce Banners and Sliders

14. Optimize Forms and Touch Points

15. Streamline Checkout

If you run an ecommerce website, this final tweak is for you.

However, even with these optimized, if you require a lot of data, it can still be painful to enter it all from a mobile device.

You can remedy this in one of the following ways:

Allow users to create profiles that will save and pre-populate their checkout information including shipping address and credit card number

Integrate with other payment gateways, such as PayPal that won’t require them to re-type their information.

Conclusion

Phone screens are getting larger, and tablets are getting more sophisticated, so it’s no wonder more of your audience is logging on and interacting through a mobile device.

A mobile app can be a great way to further engage with your users. But only if you optimize your website first to ensure a smooth user experience.

Featured image via Unsplash

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fakenewskilledpepe-blog · 7 years

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Death by Fake News

Pepe the Frog lays here, dead, and just a jpeg now. Actually he was always a jpeg, but one that was a universal symbol as chill, or sad with those big puffy eyes and an elongated smug or disappointed expression. Pepe was put down by his Frankenstein creator, Matt Furie early May, this year (2017). Furie felt he was forced to kill Pepe off as he was hopelessly losing his battle of hatred and white supremacy association.

Pepe was just a dude we all related to on the internet. He wasn’t out there to promote, change, influence or cause a reaction- there was no agenda apart from making people laugh.

The internet isn’t just a place for highly skilled computer tech geeks anymore, people are increasingly advancing their digital skills. This is evident throughout the process of reinventing and remixing the original neutral Pepe. People got inventive, and insensitive, and way over the top. The image began as a smiling frog with a catch phrase “feels good man”. Many renditions involved a Nazi Pepe, A White Supremist Pepe wearing the Klu Klux Klan outfit.

But it was Fake News that constantly enforced the idea that Pepe was in fact a representation of hate and a Donald Trump supporter. Hilary Clinton’s website put out an “Explainer” on why Pepe is represented as a symbol for hate : “Donald Trump, Pepe the frog, and white supremacists".

The alt-right adopted the character as a mascot after it was repurposed on far-right message boards. Images of the frog, variously portrayed wearing a Hitler mustache proliferated hateful messages aimed at Jewish and other users on Twitter.

News outlets constantly posing the question “Is Pepe Racist” or confidently stating to the public “For those of you who don’t know, Pepe as a White Nationalist Symbol” (CNN).

This train line of false information is driving and carrying the deceitful claim that Pepe is racist.

#savepepe #longlivepepe deathbyfakenews

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jamesbyerj · 5 years

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Project Spotlight: Project Genesis World Overhaul

Today we are talking to [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/users/67426046]Atlasroar[/url], [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/users/26431194]Swishos[/url], and [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/users/5589894]GregAmazingNinja[/url] from the [url=https://discord.gg/g7F6aHw]Project Genesis World Overhaul[/url] - a massive, all-encompassing overhaul mod for [url=https://www.gog.com/game/kenshi]Kenshi[/url] - a squad-based RPG based in a desolate, post-apocalyptic world that infamously does not care about you. [center][youtube]4SmFItVcv04[/youtube][url=https://steamcommunity.com/groups/projectgenesiswo/discussions/0/1634166237663341074/][/url][/center][url=https://steamcommunity.com/groups/projectgenesiswo/discussions/0/1634166237663341074/] [/url][b]BigBizkit: Could you guys give us a little bit of an introduction as to what your roles are on the project?[/b] Atlasroar: Of course! Hey all, I'm Atlas! I'm the community/server manager for the Genesis Modding Guild. I provide backend support for the server and finalize all posts made to ensure they are fun and easy to read :). I started off this journey just trying to make load orders work better for everyone. After doing a lot of research and realizing no one had any idea of what they were talking about when it comes to load orders, I decided it was time to sit down and finally try something I had 0 idea of what to do. After making a post that I was using LOOT as the basis for the idea, Greg found me on Reddit and invited me. After a month or so of pretty fast growth in Swishos' super-secret Discord, we decided to "move out". I made some recommendations on how to set things up, improve security and posts and Greg said: "You're hired". Swishos: Hey guys I'm Sam! Or as I'm better known, Swishos. After playing Kenshi for some time I quickly began looking for mods that added to the current world. Something I always noticed was how empty a lot of the areas are, some areas of the map clearly got more love than others. Oddly enough it was Ninja Greg's [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/kenshi/mods/236]Avalon Isles[/url] mod that inspired me to start modding myself. It was one of the few mods I had found that added new factions to the map but also utilized a previously empty part of the map. I had previous experience with JavaScript and HTML5 but knew nothing about Kenshi modding going in. But with how the “Forgotten Construction Set” is set up I was able to self teach myself in a week or so through trial and error ^^. GregAmazingNinja: Hi I'm Greg, I'm one of the leads for the Genesis team and I do most of the level data edits. I also have one of the most essential jobs which is maintaining the server that allows everyone to access the overhaul files so our team can all work on it simultaneously all across the globe. I also do the tedious job of merging all the mod files into the overhaul. [center][img]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/110/images/93729/93729-1570105323-925470521.jpeg[/img] [img]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/110/images/93729/93729-1570105323-1379555566.jpeg[/img][/center] [b]What would you say are the main features of Project Genesis World Overhaul and what was your inspiration?[/b] GregAmazingNinja: The overhaul's main features include the complete restructure of every location with an improved version of it (larger, more decorated towns), the addition of hundreds of new locations, factions, quests, and the ability to lay siege to cities. As for what inspired me personally, it's all my past gaming experiences that influenced our vision for the overhaul. I poured over 2000 plus hours into Skyrim during junior high school and I loved being able to go anywhere I wanted and finding something unique and receiving a quest to adventure further. I also poured countless hours into Mount and Blade Warband which had a lot of army management, politics, and fielding armies or sieging cities. With the implementation of the siege mechanics to Kenshi, I feel like we're just now scratching the surface as to what's possible with regards to how intricate and complex this game can become. [b]To those who are only now hearing about Project Genesis for the first time, how would you describe what it is?[/b] Swishos: The first thing I would say is that the “Project Genesis World Overhaul” and the “Project Genesis Modding Guild” are two very different things. The overhaul itself as you can imagine from the name is our planned project to fill out and expand upon the entire world of Kenshi, while keeping true to the game's lore. This includes new factions, cities, quests, dialogue and a lot more. All the new content we always try to link back to some of the vanilla lore so it feels like it was always meant to be part of the Kenshi world. Now for the Modding Guild itself, we wanted it to be a place where any and every modder could come to share their work, help others complete their work or get the help they require. One location where we could focus all of the modding talent Kenshi has to offer in one place. Since initial conception though we have already incorporated a Mount & Blade modding community and are looking at expanding to other games in the future. Another feature of our guild is that we are happy to support any of our members whenever possible, this can come in the form of promoting their mods on release or even supporting their Youtube/Twitch accounts through our Discord server ^^ In the future, we are also going to be looking at a shared community account for Nexus Mods, as we have noticed a serious lack of mods being released to the Nexus which means for members/players who don't play through Steam they miss out on a lot of mods. So looking forward we plan on using this community account to upload members mods to the Nexus (with permission of course) this way it's no extra work for them but everyone gains access to all the mods coming out of our guild. [b]Project Genesis will be touching on many aspects of the base game. One addition that stands out is city sieges - massive battles between rival factions. Could you explain how exactly sieges will work in your overhaul? [img]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/110/images/93729/93729-1570091672-446208846.jpeg[/img][/b] GregAmazingNinja: Before we delve into sieges we need to understand how the base game handles town overrides. So when a player kills/captures a leader of a faction, the player leaves the area and when they next return the city is taken over by a rival faction. We’ve completely done away with that and replaced it with a linear progression of these massive city battles that the player needs to take part in in order for the rival faction to take over. To get technical, it is an intricate tree of yes and no statements that determine how and when sieges occur. As we continue to add more sieges it will only get more complex in structuring the world states and dialogue for it. We actually have a [url=https://steamcommunity.com/groups/projectgenesiswo/discussions/0/1634166237663341074/]developer diary[/url] going into great detail as to how they work. [b]Is there a particular new feature or mechanic that you are most proud of?[/b] GregAmazingNinja: Well we're still technically in the alpha phase. But as of now, It’s the city sieges. That’s literally the crowning achievement of our overhaul, as no one’s done it before. When it comes to other games it might be a small achievement but in the Kenshi base game you take out a leader, leave the area and another faction "takes over". And we thought "Huh… that's it?". We took that idea and ran with it. If you want to take out any leader in a movie or video game you always gotta go through some enemies right? So that's what we did. We plan to expand this system to almost every town and faction. So just that alone is a huge achievement to the overhaul itself. [b]How did you form as a team and decide to put a massive project like this into action? [/b] Swishos: When I released my first popular mod The Hook Expansion back in April and it caught the eye of Greg. Soon after, I got a message from him asking about concerns of compatibility of our mods. We eventually came to the conclusion that by combining our mods together it would allow us to focus all our time on a single project and not have the issue of updating/patching multiple smaller mods. As this idea expanded we began to think why not look at other modders with similar mindsets to us? Originally using the Steam community we quickly found a lot of interest in the project which led us to creating the Project Genesis Steam group so we had somewhere to organise everything, plus a Google Drive for the team. It was at this stage Greg and I decided it would be possible for us to do a complete game overhaul with the support we were already getting. Not even a month after this and our project had grown beyond what we had ever imagined, the demands for a Discord could no longer be ignored. However, we wanted more than just a place to talk about our mod, with so many people interested not just in the project but modding, in general, it was decided to create a modding guild. A place where anyone could come to learn how to mod, help others where needed or receive the help you need to finish your own mod. Within two months of having the Discord server we were partnered with the Official Kenshi Discord and now have 700+ members and are still growing. ^^ [b]Your overhaul is a combination of many impressive Kenshi mods, but it is also far more than just the sum of its parts. What was the process of putting all the pieces together like? [/b] GregAmazingNinja: The addition of other mods was an afterthought at first. We began this project with the intent of creating an overhaul that adds hundreds of new locations and quests. What posed as an obstacle was the [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/kenshi/mods/211]Functioning market stalls[/url] mod. It would have taken a tremendous amount of time to create a patch for a mod like that, so I just reached out to the author of that mod and asked if he wanted his mod to be in our base overhaul. He said yes, and so did every other mod author we asked. We’ve merged a large amount of mods that we deemed “lore friendly” only in the sense that it didn’t break existing lore. Because of the massive list of merged mods, our overhaul now served a second purpose, and that was to shrink load orders. As for the process of merging mods, it’s incredibly tedious and can only be done by someone who has direct access to the main overhaul file. If the mod that I’m merging has assets like textures and meshes and tons of weapons and armor, it will take me hours to sort through everything and rewrite all the file directories. [img]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/110/images/93729/93729-1570107314-765094629.jpeg[/img] (Image by [url=https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0Xz5R4]5518 Studios[/url]) [b]To those who have yet to play it: can you explain what makes Kenshi as a game unique and especially appealing to modders?[/b] Atlasroar: Yes, yes I can. Chris (the creator of the game) did a wonderful job of creating this world that just doesn't care about you. As a squad-based open-world game this game just really doesn't care about you. Your starting faction name is "nameless". Yeah, you're not the hero, or the chosen one. You are literally no one. With that said, you can write any story you put into your head. You can be anyone. A mercenary, a slaver, an anti-slaver, a farmer, a miner, an explorer, you can build your own city and grow your faction. Even at "end game" the game still just doesn't care about you. You'll get sold into slavery and beaten, you'll have the wrong guy (or girl) talk to the wrong person and just like that. You're a filthy heathen and now you're a slave, or maybe you're starving and poor, get sent to jail, or maybe you're starving and poor and dying, someone might help you and give you food. Until you learn how the world works, the world will try to relentlessly kill you. When you finally do know how the world works, well that's when it really tries to kill you. When it comes to modding. The system is a mess and can be hard to work with until you really get into it and bare your knuckles. But, the people of the Kenshi community are what make this game thrive. If you play Kenshi you earn your support and your place. That's our gatekeeper. Is this game “Dark Souls” hard? No, but this game is so stupidly unforgiving, funny, and frustrating at times that it pretty much builds your character as a person. Yet, that is what makes modding here so rewarding. You'll have random people drop by and say "hey you forgot to set up this or this", you'll see modders sit down in one of the Discords and blow up chat for 10 hours straight as they work out how to make a custom building. It's the community as a whole that makes modding worth it for this game. [b]What tools did you guys use to create your mods?[/b] GregAmazingNinja: The greatest tool we have is the Forgotten Construction Set, it’s a program that comes with every copy of Kenshi and we have the developers of Kenshi to thank for that. The second most important tool we use is an SVN server. I understand that the technology for SVN servers is a bit antiquated and that everyone uses Github now, but for the purposes of our overhaul, it’s been pretty straightforward. I run a server with the main overhaul folder and everyone on the team is able to access it directly. From there, our team members create sub mods with the overhaul enabled, which in turn get sent to me so I can manually merge it into the overhaul. [b]How did you learn how to mod the game (or other games)? Do you have any tips for budding mod authors?[/b] GregAmazingNinja: For the longest time I’ve been obsessed with the idea of taking some of the ancient ruins you clear out as the player and turning it into a player home. Unfortunately, that wasn’t included in the base game; when I walked into a city with all these ruined buildings, I was a bit baffled as to why I couldn’t buy and repair some of them. From there I decided to try my hand at learning how to use the construction set included with the game. If there are any tips I could give new modders is to simply take what’s written in the base game already and rip it apart to understand how everything works. Dissecting and trial and error was the only way I learned. Anytime I got stuck, I’d look it up online, but for the most part, it’s experience and curiosity that’ll drive you to learn more about modding this game. Atlasroar: My modding experience started right here on the Nexus. I haven't published anything on any account but some pictures but man have I sunk some hours into the mods I've made. When it comes to Kenshi or any game really - realistically start small. Add a unique character or learn how to create a unique asset. Once you have stuff like that down you can very easily get help expanding into different categories. Just like with any community that has mods, you'll find many people out there who really want to pass on their own knowledge. It might be competitive out here in the modding world but at the end of the day no one wants to see anyone fail. Even if you're just making "stuff" bounce (LOOKING AT YOU BETHESDA COMMUNITY). As for tips, the biggest tip I can give to new modders for any community is this: www.nexusmods.com. You're welcome. To the user who is reading this, you already have 100% free access to the greatest modding community of all time. With guides upon guides upon guides of how to use almost any tool under the sun here for your specific game. But on a more serious note. Mod because you love the game you play. Mod because you want to change something. Mod because it's fun. You think Guardly, the author of [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/48593/]Really useful dragons[/url] mod was trying to become popular? No of course not. It was fun! Modding doesn't have to be about views. It has to be about passion and fun. If it isn't fun and you are struggling to keep going then it's time to take a break. The whole point of mods is to add what you find fun and then they add it to the game for others. [center][img]https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/110/images/93729/93729-1570108668-812650890.png[/img][/center] [b]How can people help you guys out or even join the project?[/b] Atlasroar: While realistically we aren't actively looking for anyone, this doesn't mean we can't use more people. If anyone wants to stop by and help us out, feel free to do so by using our [url=https://discord.gg/g7F6aHw]Discord link[/url]. While we do require you to have some knowledge of what you want to add to the game, it's pretty open-ended when it comes to joining the team. But even there at that point, what it really comes down to is we want to see that you have a passion to contribute to the team and the mod itself. We just recently took on someone who wanted to provide funnier dialogue and stories. They just want to provide the dialogue. They don't even want to actually put it into the game. This is a passion project, and with that said we just want to do this right. We want to really put time and effort into this to create something mindblowing for the Kenshi community to play with and hopefully set a precedent on how to mod Kenshi from here on out. We have many in our group who are constantly checking back in on older files just to make sure they are up to there own standards. As people learn and grow more in the team we have people who will resubmit mods and just say "this is a better version use this". It's stuff like that that makes the Genesis team really grow as a whole. Everyone here wants to help each other and support each other. That's what we're looking for when it comes to team members. [line] A big thank you to the team from Project Genesis World Overhaul for taking the time to respond to our questions. As always, if there are any mod authors or mod projects you'd like to hear about, don't hesitate to send a message to [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/users/31179975]Pickysaurus[/url] and [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/users/64597]BigBizkit[/url]. Published first at Project Spotlight: Project Genesis World Overhaul

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