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thisweekingundamwing · 3 years

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This Week in Gundam Wing 23-29 May 2021

I’m so on the ball with this lately... >_> Sorry. Here’s this week’s roundup! May 23rd - 29th!

Remember to give your content creators some love! Be sure to join in on the events at the bottom! And remember to send in any new works you see or make next week!

~Mod Hel

Fanfiction/Snippets/AU Ideas:

@bobo-is-tha-bomb

The Preventer Calendar https://archiveofourown.org/works/31561295

Gen, Reader, Heero Yuy, Duo Maxwell, Trowa Barton, Quatre Raberba Winner, Chang Wufei, Zechs Merquise, OC - Character

Mature, No Archive Warnings Apply, Humor, Partial Nudity, Reader-Insert, Nudity, A teeny hint of TrowaxReader, Rating because of some gratuitous nudity on Trowa's side

Twelve models, twelve shoots, twelve different locations in the Ardennes, and all of it in two fucking days. Because Preventer couldn’t spare you their agents any longer than that.

Why had you agreed to do this project again?

It's all for the arts.

boxofhatebrains

Helping Hand https://archiveofourown.org/works/31620146

M/M, Duo Maxwell/Heero Yuy

Explicit, No Archive Warnings Apply, Light Angst, Comfort/Angst, Minor Injuries, Implied/Referenced Blow Jobs, Not Gundam Wing: Frozen Teardrop Compliant, after series, Flirting, Not Beta Read, slight reference to Episode Zero, Swearing

Duo realizes that Heero comes around whenever he damn well feels like it. They’ve been in contact for the last seven years after the Mariemaia incident, but generally at Heero’s own whim. Duo stays in the same place, it’s Heero who gravitates.

This time is no different.

@duointherain

Silent Menace https://duointherain.tumblr.com/post/652120818915115009/fic-silent-menace-11

1x2x1

Warnings: Mute Duo. Drugged and injured Heero.

Une always had the dark side of the job. She’d let others give out goodness, but bad news she owned herself. Duo had come to the conclusion that she was trying to take responsibility, trying to be a decent person. He could vibe with that.

@lifeaftermeteor

Touched by the Stars (Ch. 7) https://archiveofourown.org/works/26314657/chapters/77885468

M/M, Chang Wufei/Duo Maxwell, Chang Wufei/Heero Yuy, Trowa Barton/Chang Wufei, Chang Wufei/Quatre Raberba Winner

Explicit, Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings, thar be porn, Dubious Consent, Aliens, Alien Abduction, Alternate Universe, mention of MPREG, everyone takes a turn with Wufei, alien anatomy and interesting dicks, Tentacles, Monster Boys, Slime, Double Cocks, Cum Inflation, Knotting, Oral, multiple dicks, Xeno, Spitroasting, Oviposition, Body Modification, Polyamory, Unbirthing, Triple Penetration, Cervical Penetration

University instructor Chang Wufei didn't even believe in aliens, much less intentionally attract their attention. But that doesn't mean much when they decided he'd be the ideal final mate for their group and scoop him off of the planet to take home to their queen. Enjoying him on the trip there, of course.

@noirangetrois

Of the Sea (Ch. 10) https://archiveofourown.org/works/12749670/chapters/78205124

M/M, Duo Maxwell/Heero Yuy

Mature, No Archive Warnings Apply, fairytale my way, Meroctopus!Dorothy, Slow Burn, Multi POV, POV Third Person Limited, merman au, MerMay, Fantasy Politics, mentions of abuse, Unnatural November

Heero Yuy will soon be reaching the age of majority, at which time he will ascend the throne of Wingaria. Before such time, he must needs choose a bride. But what if there are no good choices? What if someone else has captured his heart?

The Story of Wrong (Ch. 8) https://archiveofourown.org/works/13849020/chapters/77856332

M/M, Duo Maxwell/Heero Yuy

Explicit, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Duo POV, Angst, Drama, Tragedy, Spoilers, very dark, Heero and Duo don’t die, I promise, Yaoi, slowburn, Mental Instability, Mental Health Issues, Mental Breakdown, If those are in any way an issue for you then go ahead and skip this, Eventual Smut, VERY eventual, this is mostly canon-compliant but I’ve changed a couple things here and there

Duo recounts his experiences during the war in order to explain… well, why he was wrong.

simulacraryn

love me like (tomorrow we’re) stardust https://archiveofourown.org/works/31458119/chapters/77811359

M/F, Treize Khushrenada/Lady Une

Treize Khushrenada, Lady Une, Original Characters, Hot Dog (gundam wing)

Explicit, Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Angst, Near Death Experiences, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, unredeemable villain, Sex, Smut, consent is fucking sexy, Spoiler: He wore the Astro Suit at last!, Newtypes (Gundam Wing), no predators or prey here, intact brains

The World Nation would face off against the White Fang to bring about an end to all conflict between the Colonies and Earth. The plan had called for the bitter end of the last bastion of the old regime, Treize Khushrenada. However, as with every play on the stage of war, the actors have chosen to adlib. Effectively throwing the course of history off the rails, the director finds himself faced with a new road to choose.

@zaganthi

Jiu Jie https://archiveofourown.org/works/31413956

M/M, M/F, Duo Maxwell/Quatre Raberba Winner; Treize Khushrenada/Quatre Raberba Winner; Treize Khushrenada/Duo Maxwell; Duo Maxwell/Hilde Schbeiker

Explicit, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Relationship Negotiation; Polyamorous Character; Quatre Raberba’s Uchuu no Kokoro | Space Heart; Aged-Up Character(s); Newtypes (Gundam Wing); Past Relationship(s); Jealousy; Awkward Flirting; Bathing/Washing; Cuddling & Snuggling; Museums; talking about feelings; Psychic Bond; Dealing with exes; Ex Sex; Colonists exploring earth

Hilde waved goodbye as she left and Duo went to look for Treize and Quatre. What the hell was wrong with him. His body seemed to be saying yes but his mind was definitely not in that space at all. What the everlasting hell was going on. He wanted to see her again but why?

Treize passed him a picture of tree frogs, apparently feeling the confusion as Duo half jogged through the aquarium to catch back up. What the hell. Just what the hell.

It took him a while to get there, but the moment he got close, Quatre saw him, beamed a happy smile and the link opened up with a rush and he was surrounded again in emotional warmth. It was addictive and a relief, and there wasn’t, there wasn’t any recrimination from either of them. Just run off and see an old flame, it’s cool, we’ll be here when you get back vibes.

Lebensmüde https://archiveofourown.org/works/31413278

M/M, Duo Maxwell/Quatre Raberba Winner; Treize Khushrenada/Quatre Raberba Winner; Treize Khushrenada/Duo Maxwell

Explicit, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Aged-Up Character(s); Quatre Raberba’s Uchuu no Kokoro | Space Heart; Newtypes (Gundam Wing); Preventers (Gundam Wing); Cameos; Therapy; Aftermath of Torture; Aftermath of Violence; Rape Aftermath; Physical Disability; Gratuitous Smut; Psychic Bond; Psychic Abilities; Domestic; Injury Recovery

Treize remembered the discussion of gunpowder residue on his head; it was one of the things John had been livid about after everything, and unable to explain any more than Treize had at the time. Seeing it written down… was something else. Treize closed the book over his finger, gently tapping it on his thigh as he looked up at Quatre.

“The first hot chocolate of the season,” Quatre said sitting down next to him, comfort flowing over the link. “I really wanted something sweet.” He paused. “I can feel something is…oh.” He noticed the book in Treize’s hand.

“Adding to the list of things we need to probably talk about,” he said quietly, contemplating it as he reached with his other hand to take the cocoa. “Have you written everything up?”

Fanart/Crafts/Photo Manips:

@2pcbart

https://archiveofourown.org/works/31618103

Recollect - Trowa/WuFei, comic style

@alphaikaros

https://alphaikaros.tumblr.com/post/651358650733150208/little-angry-boi

WuFei Chang, fanart

@bettertasting

https://bettertasting.tumblr.com/post/652303436314017792/something-spicy-for-the-dash-im-really-digging

Heero/Duo, fanart, nsfw

@bobo-is-tha-bomb

https://bobo-is-tha-bomb.tumblr.com/post/652089738925359104/%F0%9D%98%9B%F0%9D%98%A9%F0%9D%98%AA%F0%9D%98%B4-%F0%9D%98%AA%F0%9D%98%B4-%F0%9D%98%97%F0%9D%98%B3%F0%9D%98%A6%F0%9D%98%B7%F0%9D%98%A6%F0%9D%98%AF%F0%9D%98%B5%F0%9D%98%A6%F0%9D%98%B3-%F0%9D%98%9E%F0%9D%98%AA%F0%9D%98%AF%F0%9D%98%A5-%F0%9D%98%A4%F0%9D%98%A2%F0%9D%98%AD%F0%9D%98%AD%F0%9D%98%AA%F0%9D%98%AF%F0%9D%98%A8-zechs-merquise

Tallgeese, gunpla

https://bobo-is-tha-bomb.tumblr.com/post/652448694036316160/sd-wing-gundam-ew

Wing, gunpla

@judaru

https://judaru.tumblr.com/post/651257960922857472/im-20-years-late-but-ive-been-reading-a-lot-of

Duo Maxwell, fanart

@keiko1183

https://keiko1183.tumblr.com/post/652327422940807168/completed-with-pencils-might-be-doing-the-acrylics

Trowa/Quatre, fanart

@not-so-dead-fandoms

https://not-so-dead-fandoms.tumblr.com/post/651085636504272896/mermay-01

Heero Yuy, fanart

https://not-so-dead-fandoms.tumblr.com/post/651494132071661568/mermay-02-duo-as-a-betta-fish-merlad

Duo Maxwell, fanart

https://not-so-dead-fandoms.tumblr.com/post/652283083819810816/mermay-03-of-course-i-made-trowa-a-clownfish

Trowa Barton, fanart

@pineappleglazedham

https://pineappleglazedham.tumblr.com/post/651759824584966144

Trieze/Une, fanart, fanfiction, playlist

Photosets/Gifsets/Screenshots/Manga Pages:

@clair-audients

https://clair-audients.tumblr.com/post/652114120696594432

Wing & Altron, gif

@disturbed02girl

https://disturbed02girl.tumblr.com/post/617456995130294273/thoughtful-quatre-thursday

Quatre, manga page

@meggie-stardust

https://meggie-stardust.tumblr.com/post/652350439669547008/same-energy

Epyon is an icon.

Fandom Discourse:

@bobo-is-tha-bomb

https://bobo-is-tha-bomb.tumblr.com/post/651423437954433024/a-homage-to-the-reader-insert

Reader Insert Homage

@cuteciboulette

https://cuteciboulette.tumblr.com/post/652076342033170432/shinigamis-coming-to-town-d-duo-just

Duo Maxwell, doujinshi

Quotes:

@incorrectgundamwingquotes

https://incorrectgundamwingquotes.tumblr.com/post/652102805897805825/in-the-groupchat-trowa-why-tf-do-we-have-20

Trowa & WuFei

https://incorrectgundamwingquotes.tumblr.com/post/652356366558806016/heero-yeah-but-as-far-as-plans-go-this-is-not-a

Heero & Quatre

https://incorrectgundamwingquotes.tumblr.com/post/651830976331251712/duo-gesturing-to-heero-dont-worry-weve-got-an

Duo, Heero, & WuFei

Calendar Events:

@gundamzine

Rhythm Generation 2021

Meet the Mods: https://gundamzine.tumblr.com/post/636708854145613824/come-on-over-a-meet-your-2021-zine-mod-team-head

Check out the blog for the Zine schedule!

@gundam-wing-pride

Gundam Wing Pride 2k21 https://gundam-wing-pride.tumblr.com/post/648237909672083456/incoming-transmission-faq

A Beautiful Rainbow of Prompts https://gundam-wing-pride.tumblr.com/post/649898271517573120/a-beautiful-rainbow-of-prompts

@gwartserver

Month of WuFei https://gwartserver.tumblr.com/post/649995521569767424/month-of-wufei

Shooting Stars (online convention) https://gwartserver.tumblr.com/post/650013463432888320/once-upon-a-time-lifeaftermeteor-and-myself

@gwcocktailfriday

Cocktail Fridays!

Post responses on Friday, during Happy Hour between 3 & 5 pm in your own timezone.

Here’s the prompt for Friday, !

In need of Summer/Fall(Autumn) prompts!

(I’ll um... fix these when I have time to find more prompts.)

@gwlemonyshenanigans

May 23rd’s Submissions https://gwlemonyshenanigans.tumblr.com/post/651999227800600576/may-23rd-submission

May 24th’s Submissions https://gwlemonyshenanigans.tumblr.com/post/652131130827571200/may-24th-submissions

May 25th’s Submissions https://gwlemonyshenanigans.tumblr.com/post/652252350922342400/may-25th-submissions

May 26th’s Submissions https://gwlemonyshenanigans.tumblr.com/post/652312096032342016/may-26th-submissions

May 27th’s Submissions https://gwlemonyshenanigans.tumblr.com/post/652433653693136896/may-27th-submissions

May 28th’s Submissions https://gwlemonyshenanigans.tumblr.com/post/652434486286548992/may-28th-submission

May 29th’s Submissions https://gwlemonyshenanigans.tumblr.com/post/652648408588353536/may-29th-submissions

Friday Spotlight! https://gwlemonyshenanigans.tumblr.com/post/652439213602684928/the-lastspotlight-friday

@oztober-rust

Welcome to Oztober Rust

We’re an up and coming Gundam Wing event with a slight twist! This page is still a work in progress, but you’re welcome to join us over on discord and get a feel for the event.

Have discord, will fan. https://oztober-rust.tumblr.com/post/647568110262566912/i-see-a-nice-and-steady-following-we-do-have-a

@seasons-of-gundamwing

Summer Event Voting https://seasons-of-gundamwing.tumblr.com/post/646220556727877633/seasons-of-gundamwing-okay-wingers-its-time-to

@thisweekingundamevents

Events Calendar https://thisweekingundamevents.tumblr.com/post/644080386309275648/events-calendar-update

If you are hosting an event currently, or are planning on one, hit us up with links and dates! We’ll add them to the Calendar and reblog your notices to get the word out!

#Gundam Wing #This Week in Gundam Wing #Weekly Roundup #23-29 May 2021 #(it's late again... but not as late as my last one)

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thoscheitrashdhawan · 5 years

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Cat and Mouse - Bucky Barnes x Reader

Words: 885

Summary: Your job is to kill Bucky Barnes, aka the Winter Soldier. You’ve met him before. You let him go. This time, you don’t plan on making the same mistake.

A/N: This is my entry to @buckygrantbarnes‘s writing challenge! (I only asked for a prompt like, an hour ago, but I was too excited not to write something straight away!) Also, I’m majorly shocked that this is only 885 words because it was 2 full A4 pages so I kind of thought it would be more... oh well. This doesn’t really have any actual relationship in it, so I feel like I should write a part 2, let me know if you think I should!

Movement in the corner of your eye caught you attention. You turned around, gun confidently held in front of you, as you came face to face with your enemy.

You’d gotten this close to him before - if you hadn’t then you wouldn’t be any good at job - but he’d always somehow managed to escape. Or, at least, that’s what your superiors thought. It wasn’t so much that he escaped, and more that you let him go. He was just so much fun to chase, and, if you were being honest, you kind of liked the guy. He wasn’t like all the emotionless killers you’d gotten so used to fighting. You’d been shown his photo, but that was all you’d had to work with. So, when you’d managed to track him down, it was quite impressive. You’d chased him halfway around the world, and he knew that you were coming after him. He’d always managed to stay one step ahead, until the last time you saw him. The two of you had been in the same building, and you were sure that you could take him down, for good this time. But, alas, he had other ideas.

After a conversation that was way too long for your liking, you knew that he wasn’t the person you’d been sent here to kill. Maybe he had been, a few years ago, but since then, he’d broken free. A normal life was all he wanted. So, you’d let him walk away.

And you never thought about him again. Until a few days ago.

His face had been all over the news - apparently he’d killed people, and he was being referred to by his old alias… The Winter Soldier. So, you’d decided to track him down, and complete your job. You were seething; you were angry at him for lying about leaving that life behind, but more angry at yourself for actually believing him.

And that brings you back to the present day, where you were standing in his house, pointing a gun at him while he calmly sat at a table, shuffling a deck of cards. His own gun was just in front of him, resting within reach on the table, but he didn’t reach for it.

“You here to finish me off, sweetheart?” He asked, not looking up at you.

“Yes.”

“Aren’t you going to find out the truth, first?”

“I already know the truth.” As you spoke, he glanced up at you and raised an eyebrow.

“Is that so? Enlighten me.”

“You played me. You convinced me that you’d left the Winter Soldier behind, but it was just a lie so that I wouldn’t kill you.”

“That’s not true.” He said softly, and you could see the pain in his eyes as he sighed and placed the cards on the table. You tensed, thinking he would grab the gun, but he didn’t.

“Then why is your face all over the news? Why did you kill all those people?”

“I didn’t. I’m being framed. The people I used to work for set all of this up, so that people like you would come looking for me, and deliver me straight into their hands.”

“How can I trust you? It’s your word against the word of my organisation; against the world!” He stood up and took a step towards you, so that the gun was pressed right against his chest.

“If you really believe that I’m the bad guy, then go ahead. Shoot me. But know that you’re killing an innocent man.”

You shook your head, conflicted. You wanted to believe him, you really did. But everyone thought he was a murderer, and you knew that even if he wasn’t anymore, he used to be.

Looking him in the eyes, you could see his sincerity, and you truly wanted to believe that he was telling you the truth.

“I still don’t know if I can trust you. Prove to me that you’re telling the truth.”

Bucky sighed, before moving his metal hand to the barrel of your gun, hitting it, while at the same time his other hand hit your wrist from the other direction. It happened so fast that you didn’t have any time to react, and your gun spun to the floor. Then, his hand hit your chest, pushing you back against the wall while he picked your gun up, took a few steps closer to you, and pressed the barrel of the gun against the side of your head. You looked up at him, daring him to shoot you.

The two of you stayed like that for a moment, glaring defiantly at one another, before he leaned closer, and you could feel his breath against your ear.

“Now you know you can trust me. Because I could shoot you right now, and if I was still the Soldier, then I would’ve done it without a second thought.” He took a step back as he looked at you, and spun the gun between his fingers so the handle was pointed towards you. Cautiously, you took it back.

“Okay.” You nodded, before clearing your throat and moving away from the wall.

“What are you going to do now?” He asked, curious, as you tucked your gun away.

“I’m going to help you clear your name.”

#buckygrantbarnes writing challenge #bucky barnes #bucky barnes x reader #james barnes #james buchanan barnes #james barnes x reader #shield #avengers #marvel #fan fiction #bucky fan fic #bucky x reader #bucky barnes x oc #bucky barnes x genderneutral reader #gender neutral reader #my fic

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contes-de-rheio · 5 years

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More about Fascism and Nazism

(Or how to make my followers run away... maybe)

@a-game-of-slapdashery posted a comment on this post about worldbuilding politics. And though, I could have answered in a reblog, I chose to create this new post instead, mostly because the original post is fuckingly long already...

« Um… how do people think Nazis weren’t fascist? (Unless their country or schools are brainwashing them with historical revisionism.)

Like you describe nationalism then describe fascism as basically that but inherently violent in nature and feeling justified with that violence, and crushing those who oppose it.

Literally Nazi Germany… who started a worldwide war and then abducted and mass murdered innocent people in the most cruel, torturous ways possible. In cold blood. For this hilariously big-headed and self-obsessed idea they came up with that they’re somehow the perfect people and nation, so it’s all good to do that. But there’s still people don’t think they classify as Fascist?! In whom’s world?!

I know it’s not you who’s saying that, you’re just pointing out it’s a thing, but damn. »

This forced me to go back to my notes and sources, and made me realize a few things: 1) I should really cross reference my sources more, 2) writing an essay with clarity is a must, and 3) maybe I made a mistake... So, here I am, writing again about fascism and Nazism.

First of all, yes, fascism and Nazism have a lot in common. Their original models (from Italy and Germany) emerged, grew and fell along each others.They were authoritarian, military oriented dictatorships. They embraced nationalism and conservative values (order, authority, hierarchy, obedience...), had racist ideologies (with eugenics, social Darwinism, race biology) as well as imperialist ones, rejected the ideology of Enlightenment (including Human Rights philosophy), created a past myth, and strongly stood against communism.

But they also had some differences:

their origin: Fascism was, in Italy, born from right as well as left movements, and from some avant-garde movements, with a strong nationalist and warmongering base. Nazism, on the other hand had absolutely no leftist components, Hitler had found some of his inspiration with social-christian populism and racist pangermanism (both stand on the right of the politic spectrum).

their interpretation of nationalism: for Fascism, the State is at the very center of everything. They even had the following motto: “All in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”. For Nazism, it was about the people, and specifically about the Aryan race. The State was a mere tool, though a strong one.

antisemitism: though Fascist Italy collaborated in the Holocaust during its alliance with Nazi Germany, its message was not originally turned against Jews, in fact incidents against them were marginal. On the other hand, Nazism cannot be separated from antisemitism. Nazism aim was the planned systematic elimination of the Jews. Its death camps also make it distinct from other totalitarian regimes who used them (such as Bolshevik Russia). In most other totalitarian States, the camps are used for forced labor and death is a consequence of the harsh conditions. But in the nazi camps, some of the structures (i.e. the gas chambers) were created with the intent to kill from the start.

Because of these differences, Specialists prefer to put Nazism in its own category, and occasionally as an under political current of fascism or totalitarianism, or even populism. Another thing to note, Nazism is seen as a unique phenomenon with no undercurrents, which is why it is always written with a capital in English, while fascism is considered plural (there are many different fascist movements, each with their own subtleties), and thus the word can be written with a lowercase. To add to your perspective, sometimes Francoist Spain is also given its own category in political studies.

Note this was a summary of the two recto-verso A4 pages of my new notes on the subject. I spared you the distinction made between fascist movements and fascist governments, though it exists (because it’s nice to want power, but, once you get it, you might want to keep it, and thus you might have to change your original message or make concessions).

I hope it helped to clarify things, and again I acknowledge the wording in my op was wrong and confusing... sorry about that :)

#worldbuilding #politics #writing tips #conworld #fantasy writer #science-fiction #tip politics #cdr writes #my writing tips

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theweekendbriefs · 4 years

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Weekend Briefs - 17 July 2020

Hey Everyone!

I can imagine the relief and happiness when a lot of my colleagues type “ Weekend is Here” followed by emoticons of dancing men and women on our WhatsApp conversations. I experience the same joy when I write a new edition of the Weekend Briefs, and the weekend only begins when the publish button is clicked.

Anyways, the week as usual has been filled with unexpected surprises and the bare mention of paper sizes below A4 can tip off my colleagues. Amidst all the chaos & confusion , novelty filled playlists, light yet touching words of encouragement, the afternoon rains , and good food has helped me muddle through the weekend. Without much adieu, lets move onto our reading lists for the weekend...

Image courtesy : Johan Papin

King without a Kingdom in a new republic

I have been reading a near personal and heroic narrative of V P Menon , the sidekick to the great Sardar Vallabhai Patel, who was a tough negotiator and got all the princely states to agree to accede to India. However, many of these princely kingdoms were annexed by the British and plundered to be mere sources of income for the British Raj and the departure of the British could have signaled a reign of autonomous rule for these kingdoms but those plans were foiled by the Patel-Menon duo resulting in an India we see today. Interestingly, one such kingdom was the Kingdom of Oudh in Lucknow, which was annexed by the British but had much regal splendor and fame in the United Provinces back in the day. Now, imagine a royal descendant turns up at gates of the Government of India and announces all the royalties and titles taken away from them to be restored to them. NYT’s Ellen Barry captures an interesting tale of an eccentric family of desposed royals who lived in near isolation and obscurity in Delhi’s Malcha Mahal. The family still believed they were royals in every sense of the term and how equally tragic their life was. Read this extremely engaging and informative piece about a family and a king without a kingdom. To be honest, this was one of the finest pieces I have read in recent times. You can read this here.

Image courtesy : NYT

WE CONQUERED THE MECCA OF CRICKET!

For the Indian cricket fan, nostalgia of a bygone era involves some fine moments in the history of the game. Sharjah 1999, Eden Gardens 2001, Lords 2003, Multan 2004 and many more. Here was a new team with a nice mix of young and experienced, under the agile captaincy of Sourav Ganguly, shrugging off the blemishes of a match fixing and corruption scandal and playing directly to the hearts and minds of a billion people. All of the above mentioned moments are uniquely special but if there is an image to show India had truly arrived at the cricket scene, it is the image of a defiant Ganguly swirling his jersey on the balcony of the Lord’s Cricket stadium. 18 years have passed since that memorable evening at Lords, and Indian cricket has changed way beyond recognition. Indian Express takes a walk down the memory lane with Mohammed Kaif, who was the unsung hero of the run chase. You can read his interview and listen to him recollect those fond memories here.

P.S If you wish to revisit the Lord’s victory ( what ECB even calls as ‘One of the Greatest ODI Matches ever’ ) you can watch it here.

Image Courtesy : India Today

In a world for/of men, the woman stands out !

The world is now opening up to the revelation, how the world is designed by and for to be used by men. Look around at every single utility ever designed. The dimensions of a cell phone are designed so it fits into the palm of a man, desks are made believing the end user is always a man. In several silent ways, these daily inequities play out against women even though proven research says women do much more unpaid work than men and have to muddle through to a career while rearing children, making a home and many other chores. This week NYT’s Program launches a unique column titled, “ In Her Words ; 7 Days, 7 Issues “ highlighting the many inequities women face in 7 beautifully illustrated and concisely written articles. What struck the most with me was the following few lines from the first issue written by Emma Goldberg.

“Researchers at Boston University and Microsoft found that a software program trained on text from Google News was also more likely to link women with domestic activities. When asked to complete the statement “Man is to computer programmer as woman is to X,” the program responded: “homemaker.”

You can read the entire series here.

Enough of the readings... Tell us something to watch

Taking a cue from the above, imagine if a movie spoke to you about gender abuse, fused it with a few supernatural occurring and set in the pre-independece era India. Bulbbul ( Streaming currently on Netflix ) does this concoction of themes quite poignantly. Directed by Anvita Dutt Guptan, produced by Anushka Sharma, Bulbbul boasts of an ensemble cast of Tripti Dimri, Rahul Bose, Paoli Dam who give riveting performance to make this an engaging watch. With just over 95 minutes and soaked in a visual palette of crimson, Bulbbul is a quick and promising watch. Several scenes are beautifully composed and the soundscape of the movie captures the elegant yet scary forests where the movie is set in. Watch it for the brilliant performances of Rahul Bose and Tripti Damri.

Source : Netflix India

WFH WFH WFH by Apple

Ever since the Weekend Briefs began, there is a healthy obsession over the most trendy word of the year WFH ( Work from Home ). Apple captures the drama and many nuances of the Underdogs working from home and how WFH is transforming our lives in this era. This 6-minute mini, is enjoyable, effable and an elaborate Apple product placement video. Good marketing and the increasing human connection to its products has always been a forte of the chaps at Cupertino. You can watch this short here.

Image Courtesy : YouTube

Tell us something to listen to...

History of India podcast by Kit Patrick is a light, educational podcast chronicling the many historicities of India from 6th century BCE. This extremely grounded podcast by Kit focuses on why Indian history plays a pivotal role in understanding how the history of the world. You can catch Kit’s podcast on major podcast streams and read the exclusive review by first post here.

Meanwhile, we have been listening to this incredible playlist called Groove on Apple Music. Filled with deep, techno tracks , this is a finely curated playlist from Apple Dance Music can help you get into the ‘groove’ when doing mindless tasks such as figuring out on scaling a powerpoint to newer ratios or V-looking up an excel spreadsheet. You can catch the playlist here.

_____

Well that’s all from the Weekend Briefs for this weekend. I am off to begin my weekend, by cooking dinner!

If you would like to feature/suggest for the upcoming editions for Weekend Briefs, please ping us on our Instagram page.

We would like to thank Umesh S for his podcast recommendations this week.

Hope you all have the best weekend of fun and frolic.

Happy Weekend!

Signing off,

The Weekend Briefs.

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sjnm3217 · 5 years

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⊹╰(⌣ʟ⌣)╯⊹ Reflections: Final Project

It is said that the author of this post has achieved Nirvana after working on the final project. It is currently 3.30am in the morning, after wrapping up perhaps the final group call of this project. Kind of happy, but also kind of sad that it’s all over.

First of all, I would like to say that I am immensely proud of my group and of the final work. Perhaps one of my most efficient and hard working project groups this semester!! Out of the 4 of us, we delegated the workload according to our strengths and preferences - Stacey, Zhuo Ting and I was in charge of conceptualising the magazine and doing the layouts, while we put our strongest artist Sharmaine solely in charge of illustrations. For the final lap, Stacey and Zhuo Ting continued to work on refining the layouts while I did the design document together with Sharmaine. Thus I’m afraid that some of the reflections I wrote in the group document echoes mine, but here they are anyways.

Lets dive deeper into the reflections:

Being more conscious and critical about design elements

The 4 iterations of the Venue spread that I was in charge of. Tumblr, stop resizing my images omg...

The flowchart was first conceptualised on an A4 page, with no lines or shapes enclosing the words. This however made the information look messy, with constraints on how close we can place elements together whilst maintaining breathing space and enough space to tell the separate elements apart. The second iteration was done with lines enclosing the various options, which made the overall flowchart look much neater. It draws upon the Gestalt concept of similarity - closed lines for questions, and open lines for decisions and to guide direction.

After the first consultation, and through internal deliberation, I changed the A4 layout to a spread to allow for more liberal arrangement of content. Again, bearing in mind the hierarchy of information, I used height as the main signifier to distinguish the hierarchy of steps the reader should take. I made several mishaps at first unknowingly, such as this:

The reader was probably like, oh so which way should I go

Putting the “Don’t Lie” on the same level as the “Are you expecting a large crowd” shows that it can be a possible option, when “Don’t Lie” was actually a consequence of the previous budget conscious question.

I had to take extra care to rearrange the elements bearing in mind the mental frame and approach the reader would take.

Even then, due to the greater negative space around the options that I had, since I wasn’t using an A4 portrait layout now, the flowchart looked bland and flat against a larger spread. I had to think about how best to make the flowchart “pop” - perhaps lines wasn’t the most effective? I listed my options and decided to try shapes or solid colours out instead. Which leads to this design

It was just a minor change, but I thought switching around the colours for the “Yes” and “No” icons were better, as I usually associate warmer colours with more positive feelings and vice versa.

Sometimes, you really have to hunker down and think if the element or principle used is the best one available to present the information. Shapes? Lines? Or shapes with lines? Which leads me to my second learning points...

How to best present and communicate a huge amount of information

I remember that when we first started out, we struggled to deal with the huge amount of information we had with the planning page. We had many different ideas like representing total costs as a pie chart (of a ring) but we scrapped that because the page might look too cluttered.

For the tips page, we eventually narrowed the information down to 3 key tips. Although receipts and invoices were the final choice, we also went bounced many different ideas around, for instance using

Sugar Hearts and wedding invitations (what we presented for the first critique).

But beyond being aesthetically pleasing, its important to ask ourselves if the medium really fit the message. As we were talking about financial tips, it would make more intuitive sense to use receipts, cheques, and invoices, borrowing existing semiotics shared between us and the reader to convey information more directly.

Pushing beyond design rules (and comfort zones)

At first, I stuck to a very safe rendition of the contents page.

But safe is boring - it didn’t even covey the dynamism and unfettered nature of the topic. Besides, there’s literally no hierarchy in contents page at all, just pure listing.

From a reflective process of design, I slowly got feedback from tutors and peers and made edits to the contents page as I went along. It made me think more about anchoring, hierarchy matters and colour combinations. Here are some of the other iterations - I was trying to play around with pushing design rules here, hence the “popping” out of numbers from the usual grids and margins.

And the final contents page!!

For me, I’ve also never used inDesign before this class, so it was really - I’m running out of vocabulary at 3am - an eye-opening experience.

Learning to let go.

And most importantly, sometimes you really need to just take a leap of faith. And tell yourself that it’s good enough, and time to set the work free ⊹╰(⌣ʟ⌣)╯⊹ We spent the night before submission poring through the magazine spread over and over again, to adjust the most minute of phrases and alignments. At the end we decided that it was enough, and ok, we really need to learn how to just let go. Because sometimes, when it comes to the real world - besides churning out a piece of quality work, it’s also about learning how to do things fast.

P.S. I can’t imagine the work and consideration that would go into doing a design meant for print, with all the different paper types and print types and print checks one has to go through. Man...

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a-louisephotography-blog · 7 years

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Lets get on with it then...

So this year is gonna be a step up from last year, we have a lot more work but also a lot more freedom with what we shoot. At first the work load was quite daunting but after planning and making a time table to go off its seeming more and more do-able by the day. I am as equally exited as I am nervous.

We have three different modules going on, PEP210, PEP220 and PEP260

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Module Description PEP210 Genre:

In this module I will be exploring genre through shooting a 12 part portfolio. Building on my skills from level 1 with digital cameras, speedlites and ranger kits. I will be expected to take each brief and develop it, making it my own.

In this module I will be introduced to a diverse range of press and editorial photography genre. Developing a portfolio of work that encourages professionalism and introduces me to the conventions of each genre and its relevant context. With support from a range of tutors, the tutorials system and my own research I will be encouraged to cover a wide range of subject matter outside my initial interest areas. This broadening of experience will help inform my decisions in PEP240 your first negotiated portfolio.

Students will apply photographic technique and skill to achieve genre-specific outcomes. Applied skills will include:

• a range of photographic techniques and formats • post production • use of flash • editing and image selection

The Brief

12 Part Portfolio 80%

For the first semester you will be exploring various types of image that will inform your understanding of genres in Press & Editorial Photography. You should research and develop each part of the portfolio simultaneously; some can be shot immediately some you will have to wait for a specific event. On an average week you could be shooting as many as six parts of the portfolio or as few as one. You will bring all work in progress to each tutorial for guidance from tutors and peers. Towards the end of the module, you should start collecting your work into your best examples of each image type or genre in preparation for deadline. You should have multiples of each of the 12 parts to choose from during the picture editing workshops.

1: News/Event picture.

Single image to illustrate a hard news or soft news story, or an image from an event. To be supported with an extended caption of up to 150 words.

2: Mini Feature

3-7 images picture story that would appear in a magazine of your choosing.

3: Observed Portrait

Portrait obtained through watching, observing. Available light only.

4: Lit portrait - Interior

A formal portrait, where you control everything and light the subject with reflectors and/or a flash head.

5: Lit Portrait - Environmental

A formal portrait taken outside in daylight using more than one flash head to balance and control everything in the image

6: Sports picture.

An action image from a sporting event (not a practice). Any sport, any action.

7: Group photograph.

A picture of a minimum of 5 people arranged and positioned by the photographer to best effect. You must use an artificial light source, either as fill or as main.

8: Music photograph.

Archetypal 'First 3 songs no flash' type music picture from a gig.

9: Food:

A photograph showing any food or food process as still life, well presented and lit.

10: Product

A photograph showing any product/s, or still life, well presented and lit. I.e could be technology, flowers or shoes etc.

11: Creative standalone.

Your chance to photograph anything in the entire universe beautifully and creatively, with the potential for the image to stand alone in a publication. Creative and technical abilities at the forefront here.

12: Fashion photograph.

An image from the world of fashion, anything from studio, to location, to catwalk to backstage.

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Law, Ethics and Human Rights

In this module you will be covering applicable areas of media law, journalism ethics and the influence of human rights law on the world of Press and Editorial Photography. You will be given a thorough grounding in your rights as a photographer as well as exploring your ethical responsibilities as a professional photojournalist. This will be a forum for debate and will use current events to spark lively discussion and bring this subject to life.

The Brief

2000 Word Critical Essay (60%)

Group Seminar Presentation (40%)

The Essay:

Conditions: A4 formal layout, bound, 2000 words (tolerance 10%), illustrated, fully referenced, with bibliography of referenced material and further reading on the following topic:

Select, research and explore an assignment or body of work by an eminent photographer of your own choice whose project has been subject to moral/ethical and/or legal and intellectual issues around the production of this particular body of work. Your task is to look at the challenges and problems that might have been experienced in the planning, pre production, generation or publication/exhibition of the work. Moral, ethical and legal considerations should be at the heart of this essay rather than aesthetic considerations around the work you have selected.

The Presentation:

In your assigned groups and working to the topic number corresponding to your group, work together to research and produce a 60min seminar presentation to your peers about one of the following nine topics, which represent key areas in law, ethics and human rights. How you structure your presentation is up to you, but you must incorporate case studies and images and be prepared for group discussion and a formal delivery. This is your opportunity to share your knowledge with your peers so remember that this presentation must be engaging and in-depth enough to sustain interest over an hour. Some of you may be on placement during the presentation portion of this module, but you are expected to fully participate with your group and contribute to the final presentation.1. Copyright & Rights to Use2. Defamation3. Street photography and incidental inclusion4. Image Manipulation5. Photography and obscenity6. Child Photography7. Privacy and Surveillance 8. How Audience Response has brought change to a photographer or publication9. How Social Media Impact has changed photographers approach to moral and legal issuesConditions:You can use all forms of presentation and communication software available on the computer in the seminar room.You should balance the workload and delivery between all members of the group.Your presentation needs to be no less than 50 minutes long and no longer than 60 minutes.

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Pep260 Multimedia

Pep260 Audio Visual Multimedia Brief 1 The title of the brief is:

PEOPLE AND PASSION.

You are to find, research and produce a 3-5 minute piece around the title of the brief.

Your piece must contain both of the following:

Documentary quality audio.

Industry standard photography.

And which can also include:

Moving image (video).

Text.

Images sourced from elsewhere, ie archives, but remember ©.

Music…see © warning above.

Anything else which strengthens the piece (ie animation)

You may collaborate with others to produce this piece, but the collaboration must be from outside the course.

I have left the brief wide open apart from the module title. The title is there to help you with the quality of the work, because if you tap into someone’s passion, you will almost always find a story, and the story will be stronger as a result. All content must be shot and collated for this specific task.

You must treat your audio with as much respect and effort as the images, and vice versa. If you are to include video, I expect the same level of effort and quality in the capture. I am making no other technical or aesthetic restrictions, but please see the assessment criteria below.

I would suggest you find two voices around the same story, possibly from different viewpoints, possibly the same. Any more than two voices gives potential for confusion in the final piece. That is not a hard and fast rule however, just a suggestion from experience.

You are free to use any software you care to on this, whether that be iMovie, FCP, Premiere, Audition etc.

The final piece needs to be in a movie format such as mp4, mpeg, quicktime etc, You must post your final work to your own account on Vimeo. Setting up your own account is free, simple, and allows you to embed your work wherever you wish. Remember that the environment in which your work sits can add significantly to the content/narrative. Consider building a page to host the work, i.e. on medium.com.

Minimum submission guidelines: 1280 (wide) x 720 pixels (tall)

Remember…this is all about the story. Stay tight to the title. I don’t expect your production skills to yet rival those of a professional, but I expect you to try. You can however all impress me with your choice of story, and how you construct it.

DELIVER A SENSE OF PERSON AND A SENSE OF PLACE.

Pep260 Audio Visual Multimedia Brief 2 Project title: Hidden Cornwall.

You need to produce a self contained 3-5 minute multimedia piece.

Your content must include video, shot by you.

Your own content must be all shot digitally.

Your video content must be shot and delivered in Full HD(1920x1080pixels) Use any tools available to do so…ie you could shoot in 4k raw if you wanted, but you would have to render back down to HD. I recommend against doing so however. No upsizing of video content, ie do not shoot in 720 then render up to HD.

If you include still photography content, render this down to HD for output.

You are free to use any software you care to on this, whether that be iMovie, FCP, Premiere, Audition etc.

The final piece needs to be in a movie format such as mp4, mpeg, quicktime etc, You must post your final work to your own account on Vimeo.

Theme: Hidden Cornwall.

Any story/subject is possible, within the broad theme above.

Avoid clichés, stereotypes, tropes. This is important. Hence the word hidden.

This is an exercise in finding and thinking about content as much as delivering it. Read everything local, from brochures to newspapers, books to flyposters. Pick up flyers, read notice boards, try to imagine what you find into the production of your multimedia, for example, you may have a great story, but the subject may not lend itself to audio, or conversely, your story may sound great but not image well.

Consider your own interests and future hopes. You may wish to make this a commercial exercise, an artistic one, a journalistic one. Whatever you decide, remember the theme.

Show the audience a Cornish story rarely seen. Maybe it’s food, maybe it’s politics, poverty, wildlife, graveyards, coves, the elderly, volunteers, farming, education, industry, religion, horticulture, obsession, desire, craft, design, charity, fostering, pollution, innovation, research, energy, distillation, beauty, architecture, landscape or employment. Violence, addiction, love and support. Think hidden, undiscovered, unique, new to the viewer. Find the dispossessed, the voiceless. Mine literature, film, archives, people, Tell me unheard tales of the sea, the land, the people, history. And, always, listen. This is a brief, and far from exhaustive list.

You must deliver strong audio, strong imagery and strong content. Remember that when contemplating your idea.

Think small, intimate, achievable. If you want to tell a big story (such as the economy, employment, poverty etc) consider telling it through the voice of just one or two people.

All content from this project will be collectively online under the url www.hiddencornwall.uk, therefore your work will be seen publicly and also be seen amongst that of your peers. This should help focus your mindset and approach. It will also grow year on year to provide an archive of hidden Cornwall content.

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5hfanfiction · 7 years

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mean girls pt.4

IV.

Camila is never late. You can’t get far in life without planning ahead and therefore she always makes a point of arriving at least five minutes early to wherever she needs to be. It’s not her fault that Sofi had decided to throw a temper tantrum this morning and, by the time Camila had managed to calm her down, they only had ten minutes to get to school. She always needs to drop Sofi off first, which is why she’s now running through the hallways, trying to make it to AP Government on time.

She somehow manages to walk inside the classroom as the second bell is ringing, so there are no consequences for her tardiness and she just gives the teacher a quick apology before taking her seat on the row by the window. Pulling out her notebook and her pencil case, she places her phone between her legs to let the girls know she’s alive and is surprised to see she has more texts than she’d expected. Both Normani and Dinah have blown up her Whatsapp notifications.

China Jane [8:16] are u here yet??

Mani [8:21] Where are you?

Mani [8:22] Did something happen?

China Jane [8:24] ok bish we headin inside c u after 1st period

Mani [8:25] Is everything okay? You should be at school by now

China Jane [8:26] where tf r u walz

China Jane [8:26] GURL U NEVER GONNA BELIEVE THIS SHIT

China Jane [8:27] YOU GOTTA SEE THIS

China Jane [8:28] get yo ass to the lockers rn!!!!!

Mani [8:29] Shit. Did you see it?

China Jane [8:29] DA FUQ U AT

Camila stares at the screen in disbelief. Of course the girls couldn’t have been kind enough to drop a photo or a snap of whatever they wanted her to see and now she’ll have to wait until class is over to catch up on the latest gossip.

With an annoyed sigh, she grabs a pen and starts copying the notes on the board.

Camila doesn’t notice anything out of the ordinary as she leaves AP Government, sending a quick message to the Clique’s group chat so they’ll meet at her locker. She’s vaguely aware that there are people watching her and pointing and muttering under their breaths, but there are always people doing that and she’s learned not to care about it.

After all, it’s much better to be the one people talk about than to have nothing better to do but talk about someone else.

She saunters up to her locker and opens it to pull out her Psychology textbook. A folded paper falls to her feet and she lowers down to pick it up, keeping it between her index and middle finger as she finishes what she has to do. It isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last, that someone leaves random messages through the slit of her locker. She shuts the door and leans against the wall of lockers, hoping the girls won’t take too long.

Camila isn’t quite prepared for what she sees as she unfolds the paper and her chin drops before she can regain control of her muscles and facial expressions. What she has in her hands is a very poor excuse for a student president campaign poster, limited to a printed out color photograph on A4 photocopy paper with a slogan underneath in what looks like a bland Arial font. She would be appalled at the unprofessionalism of it all if it weren’t for the shocking content.

It’s a photograph of Lauren fucking Jauregui. And sure, the photograph is flattering, but Camila couldn’t care less if Lauren had plastered her face all over school or decided to hand out nudes at the cafeteria. No, what really gets to her is the slogan:

No cliques: for a fair high school experience

Camila sees red in that moment. She’s gritting her teeth so hard, middle-school Camila would be worried those two years wearing braces had been for naught.

She knew Lauren would come for her, but there is a difference between coming for her and attacking her friends. This is personal.

“There you are!”

She snaps her eyes up to face Dinah walking towards her with Normani in tow.

“I see the hottest news has found its way to you,” Normani says, wincing. She places a hand on Camila’s shoulder and softly allows it to travel down to her wrist. Camila feels some of the tension inside her fade at the gesture and tries to give Normani a smile. She fails.

“That bitch,” she breathes out instead. “I’ll fucking kill her.”

“I’m kind of impressed, actually,” Dinah says, prying Camila’s fingers open to grab the poster and check it out. “Girl legit pulled this outta her ass from one day to the other.”

Camila glares at her, not wanting to hear anything even remotely positive about Lauren. “Did you even read the stupid slogan, Dinah? This is not just about me, she’s coming after us!”

“Yeah?” Dinah shrugs. “I’m 100% Team Mila but I can’t say it isn’t exciting to have someone challenging us.”

Normani snickers at that and Camila struggles with her instinct to stomp her foot like a spoiled toddler.

“You have to admit this school isn’t exactly home of the brave material,” Normani prods, hand moving to entwine their fingers. “I don’t think this is a big deal, it’ll be just like in freshman year when Richard Baker tried to run against you for class president. It was more of a formality to pretend there was some sort of race going on when, lol no.”

Camila squeezes Normani’s hand, grateful for her words and for how her presence helps relax her.

“I’m still going to kill her,” Camila announces after a long moment of silence, lips quirking up in a dangerous smirk.

“I can’t wait for that.” Dinah grins triumphantly, putting her hand up for Camila to high-five.

“And I’ll be right there to step over the bitch’s dead body.” Normani’s eyes are glinting, bright with mischief.

On second thought, Camila says to herself, this could turn out to be a lot of fun.

Camila spends most of her Psychology class obsessing over the poster. She can feel the weight of it inside her blazer’s pocket, even though it’s just a piece of paper folded in four.

This is an affront she can’t let slide, and while she wants to confront Lauren about the whole thing, she doesn’t want to come across as angry and hysterical. Lauren doesn’t deserve the satisfaction of feeling like she has affected her in any way.

She tears out a page of her notebook and starts listing possible scenarios so she can both calm herself down and come up with a viable action plan. She scribbles several brilliant lines of monologue and memorizes them right away, feeling quite pleased with herself. She doesn’t know how Lauren will react but she trusts her quick wit to present her with some decent retorts. As long as she keeps her cool, everything should be okay. The idea is to make Lauren lose her cool.

Now she only needs to think of the perfect setting to enact her little speech. A confrontation in the hallways is out of question because she doesn’t need any more attention placed on the two of them together. There’s already plenty of that to go around. Checking her schedule, she realizes she has AP Lit next and smirks.

That’s something she can work with.

Camila enters room A012 three minutes before the bell rings and is satisfied to see Lauren is already there. Unfortunately, so is her table partner, which forces Camila into a less smooth approach.

Standing next to him, she offers a saccharine smile. “Scram.”

The boy looks up at her, eyes open wide, and hurries away, finding another seat. It’s a good thing Mr. Keating doesn’t care about fixed placements - never a time when that hadn’t been convenient.

Camila beams at Lauren and sits next to her without asking for permission, ignoring the incredulous stare Lauren is throwing her way. She removes the poster from her pocket and unfolds it, placing it on the middle of the table. “It has come to my attention that this is a thing that is happening.”

Lauren just raises one eyebrow, not bothering to reply.

“I’m actually glad you’ve decided to run against me” Camila continues, counting a victory point when confusion flashes across Lauren’s features. “It does get a bit tiresome to have the world bow at your feet without question.”

“Oh please,” Lauren huffs, with an eye-roll.

“But, Jauregui, if you’re going to run against me, at least give me the pleasure of a challenge?” Camila tilts her head to the side, smiling lazily and enjoying the turmoil behind Lauren’s eyes. “Here.” She points at the poster, her finger falling between the photograph and the slogan. She thinks it’s very kind of her. She could’ve easily just tapped one of Lauren’s eyes with her fingernail, which is closer to what she would like to do to the girl. “Photocopy paper, seriously? How cheap.”

“I would like to see you bringing a campaign to life overnight, Cabello,” Lauren counters, swatting Camila’s hand away from the poster. “In the last twenty-four hours, I’ve signed up for student body president, studied the students’ council regulations and policies of the past three years, wrote down a draft of the plan for my presidency and created a campaign from scratch. All by myself.”

“Photocopy paper makes the photographs look pixelated and scrunched up, so unpleasant,” Camila carries on, disregarding her in spite of the somewhat impressive list of achievements. “And Arial for the slogan’s font? What is this? The first group project for middle school?”

Lauren is seething at this point and Camila’s chest swells with pride. She’s doing this. She’s the one aggravating Lauren and she’s loving the hell out of it. “I’ll give you kudos for the slogan though. That was… brave. It will get you attention, for sure, which will last you for today and maybe until the end of the week. But it isn’t memorable.

"I mean, if you’re this bad at posters alone, how do you expect to hold up against me when it’s time to present your campaign video in homeroom? Or for the debate before the election?”

Mr. Keating arrives in that moment and Lauren fixes her with a glare that would probably be considered intimidating if Camila were someone else. “Are you done with the lecture? Can you go now?”

“No,” Camila answers, surprising them both. “You smell nice. I think I’ll stay here for today.” She grins, delighted by Lauren’s startled expression and her obvious loss for words as she shifts her attention back to the lesson.

Camila didn’t think it would be possible, but if she enjoyed messing with Lauren’s head over her subpar poster, she’s now overcome with glee, arguing against every single interpretation Lauren has for the poems they’re studying today.

Mr. Keating notices it but doesn’t stop them. The man has strange ways and he seems to value intelligent discussion over appeasing the belligerent tension in the room. Camila appreciates it.

She’s on a winning streak anyway.

When Camila finally makes it home that evening, after spending two hours in the library finishing her History essay, she falls face first on her bed with a groan. Her phone beeps from somewhere in her bag and she shoves her hand inside to try and find it without having to change position. She succeeds after a very frustrating minute and looks at the screen to see Normani had texted her.

Mani [6:33pm] I have a feeling this presidential race is gonna be more interesting than we thought

Camila blinks and then frowns, unsure of what Normani is trying to convey.

Mila [6:34pm] what do you mean?

Normani sends her a link to a tweet and Camila opens it, a feeling of dread coursing through her veins.

Her first reaction is relief because she was expecting much worse, but then she clicks on the twitter account, realizes it’s been created earlier that day, sees a tweet with a picture of her campaign poster side by side with Lauren’s and a few other incendiary tweets, and she lets out an undignified wailing sound.

Great. This is just what she needed in her life.

* * *

Camila doesn’t think too much about Lauren for the next two days. Or rather, she doesn’t allow herself to, forcing her mind to drift somewhere else as soon as the obnoxious girl pops up in her thoughts. She smiles inwardly when she notices that most posters have been replaced with classier versions of the original, taking her suggestions into account. The slogan is still the same but Camila doesn’t believe that will stick for long.

For all her effort to remain collected about the events of the past week, Camila’s also aware that, for the first time in her high school experience, a person that she’d condemned to ostracism had bounced back from it like it had been nothing.

Social media had played a big part in that, what with the stupid @sipthegreentea twitter that keeps people obsessing over the campaign and that rat Zayn Malik interviewing Lauren for the school blog. She thought no one followed that thing, but apparently a six-minute video of Lauren being charming and eloquent, and making sense in a few of her points, had been enough to gather it some attention. Lauren Jauregui had gone from persona non grata, from the absolute bottom of the social hierarchy to somewhere… slightly above that.

Camila would be lying if she said that didn’t unnerve her a little bit.

In all fairness, most of the school is still avoiding Lauren like she has the plague and she knows some of the popular kids have fun throwing insults at her every now and then - which, kind of makes her uncomfortable but she has done nothing to prevent. However, Lauren’s become a champion of sorts for the underdogs and the wallflowers, the kids too weak to make a name for themselves, and so she isn’t alone by any means, as had been Camila’s original intention. And if Lauren isn’t alone, if she’s defied the school’s natural order and survived, Lauren is dangerous.

That’s why Camila is keeping track of what’s going on with Lauren by ensuring some underdogs remain loyal to her. She may be willing to act as if Lauren is beneath her and nothing she does phases her, because that both irritates Lauren and allows her to be perceived as the still reigning president, influential and untouchable. But smart people keep their friends close, and their enemies closer. Being two steps ahead is not enough of a waypoint as far as Camila is concerned.

And thus, she weaves a web of nerds and drama kids and almost pretty girls, people she’s always been nice to and who’ve always liked her. One should never underestimate people’s willingness to betray their own in exchange for the approval of the powerful majority.

It’s Friday and Camila’s lost in thought in one of the bathrooms of the second floor when she’s approached by a girl with long, copper-colored hair.

“C-Camila?” she stutters.

Camila fights the urge to roll her eyes because in these times of political need, she can’t afford to act however she wants. “Hi,” she says, turning to give her attention to the girl with a smile on her face. Camila knows she’s the current sophomore class president until election day but can’t remember her name even though she should. This girl is one of those who would sell her soul for popularity. “Can I help you, hum - what’s your name again?”

“Katie,” the girl replies, not at all offended that Camila didn’t know that. She checks the stalls before she speaks again. “I thought you should know that Lauren is planning a campaign event.”

“Oh, is she?”

“Yeah. I don’t know when it will happen but there’s been talk of getting a catering service so they can give away cupcakes while handing out flyers and buttons.”

Camila narrows her eyes, studying the girl. “Catering service?”

“Some kid’s mom owns a bakery and he said he could get a few batches of cupcakes for free. To help with the campaign, I mean.” Katie keeps shifting on her feet, nervous energy coming off of her in waves.

“What kid?”

“Jacob Sartorius.”

“Jacob Sartorius?” Camila shakes her head. “Who even is that?”

“He’s a freshman,” Katie says, shrugging. “Skinny, wears those thick-framed type of glasses, hair makes up half of his height?”

Camila snickers. “Do you know this boy?”

“Yeah, like, we say hi in the halls and stuff?”

“Good.” Camila places both her hands on the girl’s shoulders and stares deep into her eyes. “Tell him to meet me behind the gym at 4:30.”

Katie nods, and Camila finds it a mix of cute and sickening that she looks like she’s been given a life-changing mission.

“Will do, Camila!” she says, bobbing her head up and down until Camila releases her shoulders and signals for her to leave with a thanks. “Bye!”

“You’re late,” Camila drawls when she spots a lanky boy with his hair two inches up in the air walking towards her. She repositions herself so only her shoulder is leaning against the wall as she faces this Jacob creature.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, blushing. “I thought this was a prank.”

Camila smirks. “I can see why you would think that but no, this isn’t a prank.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“Not if you help me.”

“I don’t see how I can help you, I’m sorry.” To his credit, Jacob looks genuinely rueful. The poor thing has no idea what he’s doing, talking to Camila Cabello in secret.

“I hear your mom owns a bakery, is that true?”

“Yes.” He moves closer and stands next to her, hands behind his back as he also leans against the wall. “You need a catering service too?”

“Too?”

“Well yeah, Lauren Jauregui–” Camila cringes as Jacob mispronounces the surname but he doesn’t notice, “–is doing some campaign event next week and she asked if I could get her some free cupcakes so I figured you were after the same thing?”

“If I ever need cupcakes from your bakery, I’ll make sure to pay your mom for her excellent service,” Camila informs him, smiling sweetly. “In fact, do you have a card or is there a website I can visit?”

“Place is called Baked Bites,” Jacob says, returning her smile. “You can look it up on Facebook or Instagram.”

“I will,” she assures him. She’ll order a box of goods to take home to her family, at least, and make sure that reaches Jacob’s ears. Favors are paid with other favors. “Now there is something I would like you to do for me, if you’re up for that?”

“Sure. What do you need?”

“Those free cupcakes that Jauregui is getting for her campaign…” She pauses on purpose, gauging his reaction. “What would have to happen for them to be… less than perfect cupcakes?”

“What are you getting at?” He squints his eyes, suspicious. “This is my mom’s business we’re talking about. I don’t want to cause her trouble.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t, don’t worry!” Camila cuts, eyes wide with innocence. “Ally Hernandez loves baking, I’m sure she’ll do her own batch for the event. We’ll blame it on her.”

Jacob laughs at that, his hair shaking with his movements. “Alright. I guess I could be persuaded then. What’s in it for me?”

Camila’s lips curl up smugly. “Name your price, Jacob. I’ll make it happen.”

————————–

A/N: slytherin!camila: rise

thank you so much to everyone who’s been voting and commenting, it truly makes our hearts sing <3

#UPDATE #series #AU #camren #angst drama #humour #submission #mean girls

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blastron01 · 7 years

Text

Ascendance of a Bookworm – 043

Lutz's Education Plan

While I idly laze about in my bed, my fever returns, just like Lutz predicted. This fever, brought on by exhaustion, is mild, so all that happens is that my whole body feels heavy. Since this isn't the all-consuming fever of the devouring, I should be able to cure it with plenty of quiet bed rest.

That, at least, has been what I've been thinking over the past three days. Although I'm getting increasingly irritated about my unbroken fever, I get scolded whenever I try to leave my bed on my own, so even though I'm sluggish from oversleeping I can't do anything but stay in bed.

...Aaaaaargh, so bored.

Today is pig-slaughtering day. Unlike last year, I've managed to gain enough of my family's confidence that they're letting me stay here and watch the house by myself, so the headed out for that early in the morning. They made a sandwich for my lunch and filled everyone's cups with water and left them in the bedroom for me so that I would neither get too hungry nor get too thirsty without any way to deal with it.

In this dead-silent bedroom, I technically could move around if I wanted to, but I know that all that would do for me is make my fever linger even longer, so I don't have any choice but to stay quietly in bed. However, with nobody to even talk to, there's no helping it: I am so, so bored.

If only I had a book...

I have a tremendous quantity of failed prototype paper with me, but I still haven't used it. All it's been doing since I've brought it home has been sitting in the box at the foot of my bed, neatly stacked to one side, gathering dust. Ever since we successfully finished our prototype, I've simultaneously been really busy and really fired up about wanting to make my first book.

Above all, though, since these are failed prototypes, both the material quality and sizes are all over the place. While I do have some paper that's almost successful, I also have pieces that are such total failures that are badly ripped or crumbling to pieces. There's paper that's so thin that it's nearly see-through, to the point where I'm almost scared to touch it, and paper that we reinforced so much that it looks brittle enough to break.

Out of the pieces that were almost perfect, the ones that got twisted when we tried to paste them up to dry out are still probably the easiest to use. If I were more skilled with my knife, I might be able to use the sheets that dried successfully but we couldn't remove without ripping big holes in them, but cutting out only the pieces of the page that are actually usable proved to be surprisingly difficult. I really want a tiny, slender blade with a very sharp cutting edge, like a hobby knife. That would be much easier to cut with.

I think that if I wanted to make a book with this paper it would take a considerable amount of time. This winter I'll have a lot of extremely productive free time, it seems.

...Ah! Now that I think about it, even if I don't have a book, I have the board that Mister Benno gave me.

I remember that, before my fever flared up, Benno told me that I should look this over when I returned home. I think that I'll probably be fine if I read it while lying in bed.

I get up unsteadily, open the box that I keep my clothes in, and retrieve the approximately A4-sized board from my tote bag. Flopping back down on the bed, I start to read.

"This is... the outline of a training course for new employees."

It contains a listing of the minimum amount of knowledge that it's been decided that newly-entering apprentices should be taught. To break the contents down into broad categories, apprentices will need to know:

How to look after their appearance and give proper greetings.

How to write all of the fundamental letters and numbers.

How to use a calculator.

How to perform monetary exchanges to a certain degree.

The list of commodities in which the shop trades.

The names of the merchants that associate with the shop.

"Hmmm, the things the two of us can study ourselves are... writing, math, and monetary exchanges, I think. Everything below that is probably going to be taught to all of the new employees during training, so I think we can put it off for now..."

As I monologue, mumbling, I start making study plans for the winter.

First off, I wonder how many of the fundamental letters and numbers Lutz remembers? I taught them to him a while ago, but they're the kind of things that you tend to forget if you don't use. I'll need to verify what he's forgotten, then teach those to him again. Instead of practice sentences, I wonder how well it would work if I had him write out order forms, formal introductions, and so on? They're full of vocabulary words that he'll need for work, so I don't think there's much harm there.

To be perfectly honest, I actually don't know how to write many words that aren't strictly work-related. Here, there's no dictionary, and the words that have been taught to me were either drilled into me by Otto so that I could help him with the budget or are merchant-related ones taught to me by Benno or Mark. I think I've got a solid grasp on my work-related vocabulary. However, I don't know how to write any common nouns or verbs.

"As for using calculators, I know how to add and subtract, but I've never asked Mark about how to do multiplication or division on them so I don't know that yet, hmmm..."

I can work out all sorts of calculations by hand on my slate, but it's essential for me to learn how to be able to use a calculator, too. In order to avoid standing out too much from the other apprentices, I should be able to do things the same way that everyone else does.

"I really want to teach Lutz first- through third-grade arithmetic, but I don't have either textbooks or workbooks, so teaching him is going to be really tough. Since I have to prioritize, I think the counting system and doing large monetary conversions is probably the biggest priority, and then getting him to do addition and subtraction, at least in the ones digit. Then, we can move on to the general concepts of multiplication and division... wait, can we actually do this over the winter?"

Drilling in how to work with numbers takes three years, so of course doing all of it over the course of a single winter is impossible.

As I let out a heavy sigh, I notice that my fever is wriggling around inside me, a pressure building up like it's about to burst open. I press my fingertips into my temples, gritting my teeth.

I don't actually scream "don't come out," though.

Imagining tightly screwing on a lid, I shut it back away, then breathe a sigh of relief. It hadn't been for very long, but fighting against the devouring has actually made me hungry. I reach over and pick up the sandwich my family had left for me. I take a big bite then, while I chew noisily, start thinking about personal appearance and greetings.

"Now this is the biggest problem: looking after our appearance and giving proper greetings. Neither of us really know to what extent a merchant needs to prepare their appearance, or what kind of greetings and phrases are unique to merchants, if any..."

I have some idea of what the work clothes, which we will have to buy, are like, having seen the various employees at both Benno's shop and the Merchant's Guild. I have no idea how much any of that would actually cost, so I'll need to verify that with Benno later.

As for the greetings, those are on the list of things I want someone to teach me. I already know that people here don't ever greet each other by bowing, but I don't know what the correct way to greet someone in the merchant world actually is. All I've seen is people smiling at others who they've just met while lying through their teeth. Although, I have a hunch that neither Benno nor the guild leader had been doing any sort of typical greeting.

At some point, while I was staring at the board I got from Benno and thinking hard, I gradually drifted off to sleep again. When I wake up, I see my family's already returned home, and are busy bringing their various pork products into the storage room.

"Welcome back," I say. "Oh, hello, Maine! Did we wake you? How are you feeling?" "...Better, I think."

Now that I'm awake, I actually feel very refreshed, so I think my fever's gone down. Tomorrow, I'll still be staying at home so we can wait and see, but the day after tomorrow I think I'll be able to move around again.

The next day, Lutz, with a basket strapped to his back, stops by to pay me a visit on his way to the forest. Although my fever's gone down, today's another day in which I shouldn't be leaving my bed, so I'm extremely happy to have someone to talk to, even if it's only for a little bit.

"Hey, Maine! I heard you're feeling better? Tory told me a little while ago, when she met me downstairs." "Yeah, since last night. I'm staying home all day today to make sure, but tomorrow I think I'll be able to go out." "Oh, okay! It's been a long time since you've been sick for so long, I was worried."

It seems that both Lutz and my family have been very worried, since I haven't had a fever that's lasted this long in quite some time.

"You missed helping prepare the pork this year, too." "Ahhh, it just can't be helped, this time of year."

I've slowly become more-or-less used to going to the butcher's and seeing chickens get sliced up, but there's no way I can go along with the rest of the family thinking that I'm going to enjoy this once-per-year experience. I still can't even make myself want to participate. I actually caught myself thinking that I was so lucky that it came and went while I was still stuck in bed with a fever.

"Yesterday," I say, "I looked over the board that Mister Benno left us and put together an education plan for us. Tomorrow, I'd like to go to Mister Benno's shop, return this board, and ask him if I could buy a calculator, maybe..." "...Oh, that's right, what's on that board, anyway?"

Lutz claps his hands together, apparently having only just remembered that the board even existed, and leans forward curiously. He looks like he's ready to listen to every word.

"It's related to the education apprentices get. Lutz, how much of your letters and numbers do you think you remember?" "All the ones you taught me...?" he says, tilting his head doubtfully at me like the answer was obvious.

Startled, I open my eyes wide. I didn't expect in the slightest that he'd completely remember everything.

"What? Really?! You don't usually use them, but you haven't forgotten any?!" "...Well, you know, it's so rare for someone to be able to teach me things, so once I finally learned how to write, I didn't want to forget, so I kept writing on the ground or the wall with my finger, and then after I bought my slate I've been practicing on that ever since." "Lutz, that's amazing!"

Lutz is an even harder worker than I thought. Wait, no; I've still been thinking that it's only natural that people get educated, and that it's easy to get any information you want whenever you want it. I wonder if this is too naive? I've never actually thought about not wanting to learn knowledge that I'd finally received. After all, if I ever forgot it, I could just get a book and read about it again. If I just remembered what kind of books I can find things in, then I could easily obtain, on demand, any information that I wanted. I've never had a need to memorize the entire contents of it before.

"Nah, I'm not amazing at all. You're the amazing one, being able to read really large numbers like you can." "Then, I can teach you how to read big numbers too! Pick up that slate."

I teach him about the ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, and ever-larger digits. The town marketplace uses three-digit numbers, so he can read those easily, but it seems he doesn't understand numbers larger than that. Holding the slate in place, I run through the digits until Lutz starts counting along with me. After reading them aloud many times, I write up a series of suitably large numbers on the slate.

"Alright, question one. How do you read 78,946,215?" "Ummm, one, ten, hundred, thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand, million, ten million, so..."

Lutz tackles each problem earnestly and, in no time at all, starts to be able to read numbers up to the ten millions. I wonder what's higher, his memory or his concentration skills? Lutz's specs are way higher than I thought they'd be. We'll be able to put a ton of effort into studying this winter.

If he's this smart... there's not actually a single thing I can actually beat him in, is there?

As I start feeling a little sorry for myself, Tory comes back up from downstairs, bringing a bucket of water from the well with her. When she sees Lutz, she shouts in surprise.

"What the... Lutz?! Weren't you supposed to go to the forest? Everyone else left already, you know?!" "Yikes! Sorry, Maine. I gotta go! Thanks for teaching me!"

Panicking, Lutz shoots to his feet, then dashes out the door. At that speed, he should be able to catch up to everyone else well before they even reach the gate.

The next day, my family grants me permission to leave the house, so Lutz and I head out to Benno's shop in the afternoon, when he has the free time to meet with us. However, when we arrive, the entrance is closed, and a single guard stands quietly outside.

"Huh?" I say. "I guess it's still lunchtime..." "Want to go back to the central square and sit down for a bit? Standing around the whole time would be really hard, right?" "Yeah, you're right. Finding someplace to sit down sounds like a really good idea right now."

As the two of us discuss how we're going to kill the time, the guard beckons to us, as if he's completely recognized our faces.

"I'll go ask the master if it's okay to let you two in. Would please you wait here for a moment?" "Yes, sir, and thank you!"

The guard disappears into the shop, then immediately returns, opening the door wide to let us in. Inside, the shop is gloomy with the windows and doors shut. He leads us briskly back to the office in the back and opens the door. Inside, the sunlight streams brightly in through the window, and a brilliant fire burns within the hearth.

"Maine, are you feeling better now?"

Benno, who seems to have been in the middle of some work, sets aside his pen and ink and stands to greet us.

"Yes, sir. I've come to return this board to you. I also have some questions I'd like to ask, is that okay?" "Sure, go ahead. I've got some things I'd like to talk with you about too, but you two go first."

Benno gestures to the table we usually sit at, and prompts me to begin.

"Thank you very much for lending me this," I say. "Thanks to it, I was able to form some ideas about a plan for studying during the winter." "Oh?" "Ummm, as I was reading it, a few questions occurred to me. I understand that taking care of our appearance and giving proper greetings is necessary, but to what degree do we need to take care of our appearance? Also, if merchants have any specific greetings or phrases, unfortunately neither of us actually know them."

"Ahh," he says, studying us carefully.

"To start with, although you two are commoners living near the south gate, you aren't grungy at all, so all you need to worry about is your work clothes. You can get the minimum for about ten small silver coins, so if you start saving now, then by the summer you could probably afford it." "Ten small silver coins...," mumbles Lutz, dumbfounded. "I'm so glad I copied Maine and saved some away..."

To Lutz, whose mother spins thread and makes all of the clothes for her family, the concept of spending ten small silver coins on clothing and shoes comes as an enormous shock. I'm shocked as well, but clothing here is not something you get off the shelf. It's all made to order, so I thought that the price was going to be something around those lines. It's definitely very expensive, but it's still something that we could buy if we work very hard come springtime to earn money making paper.

"Next is your manner of speech. Maine, you're okay, but Lutz, you need work. You need to learn how to speak politely, otherwise I can't put you out in front of customers the way you talk now."

Lutz, having been singled out, is at a loss for words. Picking up how to speak politely is really difficult if nobody around him does it either. I try to think about who the best person for him to imitate would be, out of all the people we know.

"You could use Mister Mark as a reference for speaking politely." "...Urrrgh, it makes me really kinda... itchy, though."

I can sympathize with the unstable sort of feeling of being suddenly told to change one's manner of speech to something that's entirely unlike yourself. However, if he's unable to do so, he won't be able to stand out in the front of the shop. This is doubly true in Benno's shop, which is rapidly growing its base of noble clientele. If we want to climb to the top, we absolutely need to learn how to manage our appearance, our speech, and our manners.

"That's okay," I reassure him. "You can do it if you try! You know how Benno usually talks one way, then in front of customers he's suddenly speaking very politely? It would be great if you could do the same thing when you're dealing with customers, too."

Even though I've never actually seen Benno switch to a more polite manner of speech, even when talking to the guild leader, I'm certain that if he thought he had to, he could do it in a heartbeat. Otherwise, he'd be a terrible fit for a merchant.

"There's no real need for you to talk super politely to me or your family, you know? Also, when I'm talking with the guild leader or Mister Benno, I use different words than I do when I'm talking to you, right? Does that make you itchy. too?" "Now that you say that... nah, I guess not. You talk normally to me, so I guess I never really noticed."

If you can smoothly switch between modes, it's not something you ever notice. Even if you start out being uncomfortable with it, as you keep using polite speech, you rapidly become used to it.

"So, for the words you're going to be using just at work, why don't you try practicing how Mister Mark speaks? Start with things like addressing people as 'sir' and 'ma'am' and using 'please' and 'thank you' more often... I believe that would best, wouldn't you agree?"

As I switch to more polite phrasing for the last sentence, Lutz nods in comprehension.

"Yeah, sounds good, sir!" "Argh, no! I'm a girl, say 'ma'am'!" "Snrk! Gaahahahaha!"

Benno, having watched our exchange, erupts in a belly-bursting laugh, slapping the table uproariously, wiping tears from his eyes and clutching his sides.

"Ahaha... well, I have no idea how far you two can get over the winter, but keep at it, kids."

He shows no sign of calming down, so I peer at him in mild disapproval, though it doesn't seem to do much. I clench my fist tightly, resolving that we're going to make so much progress this winter that he'll be shocked. This jogs my memory, and I remember the favor I wanted to ask of him.

"Ah, that's right! Mister Benno?" "What's up?" "I'd like a calculator so that I can work on learning how to use it. If I can't practice, I won't be able to really master it."

Mark is capable of using his calculator very quickly, flicking beads around with his fingers while simultaneously thinking of the next steps. I probably won't be able to get quite as good as him, but for things like abacuses, practice is very important.

"A calculator, hmm... If a secondhand one from my shop is alright with you, I can sell it for six large copper coins. How does that sound? Can the two of you share one?" "Yes sir, thank you very much."

Lutz and I tap our guild cards together with Benno's, agreeing to pay him three coins each. He then gives us our new calculator.

"We'll be able to study math with this, Lutz." "Yeah," he replies. "Did you have anything else you wanted to ask?" says Benno.

Something immediately flashes to mind.

"Ah, I'll need to order a new contract sheet-sized paper frame before springtime, if that's not too much trouble..." "Just fill out an order form. Mark already knows what you're looking for, he can go handle it." "Huh? But..."

When we'd been going around to various places to place our orders, Mark had told us that if we weren't there ourselves to describe what we wanted, there's no telling what kind of trouble we might get ourselves into. I don't think leaving it all to him is the best idea.

"I've got something else I need you to do for me. Hey, just write it down, okay?"

Urged onwards, I draw my ordering set out of my tote bag. By now, I'm down to a single board that I can use for ordering.

"Mister Benno, it seems that I'm running out of boards for order forms..." "Yeah, you've done a lot of ordering, haven't you. I'll get you some more." "Whoa! I've almost run out of ink, too!"

Not only have I written a lot of orders, but when we were working on our prototypes, it was necessary for me to use even more ink in order to test how easy it was to write on the paper. I've used quite a lot of it by now.

When I say that, Benno's face tightens sharply. "...I want to charge you for this, but... well, whatever. I'll call this part of my initial investment."

I'm a little shocked by this. Otto had said that ink was very expensive and thus not a child's plaything. However, I'd never heard how much it actually cost.

Timidly, I ask, "If you'll pardon the digression, might I ask how much a bottle of ink would cost?" "About four small silver coins each." "Eek?!"

Lutz and I couldn't afford it even if we scraped together everything we've saved so far!

"Use it carefully," he warns me. "Y... yes, sir. Of course!"

I'd been thinking that I wanted some ink of my own to use for my book-making project, but I think I'll have to give up on trying to buy it. Using my leftover soot pencils is probably my best bet.

My pen scratches at the surface of the board as I write out my order. I'm very used to this by now. The tip of the pen quickly dulls, but Lutz immediately sharpens it again for me. I ask Benno to get an average-sized contract for me, use my tape measure to determine its size, and finish writing out the rest of the order.

Benno looks over my completed form, then nods slightly.

"No mistakes or spelling errors at all. I'll get this over to Mark. ...Maine, if you don't get that paper frame and can't make any paper, I'll be in just as much trouble as you. Don't worry about it, I'll make sure it's done right." "Thank you very much, sir."

I'm relieved to hear Benno say that he'll take responsibility for making sure it'll be made correctly. Breathing out slowly, I tidy up my ordering set.

"...Is that all you wanted to talk about, you two?" "Yes, sir," I say, nodding emphatically.

Benno sits up straight, his expression going serious. Guessing that this is going to be a discussion about some sort of transaction, Lutz and I straighten up as well.

"Well then, I've got something I'd like to ask as well. Maine, it's about the hair-washing liquid you taught me how to make." "What is it?"

I'd explained how to make it quite a ways back, when we were still in the middle of prototyping our paper, on one of the days where we were borrowing the key for the warehouse. I should have already told him everything. Since I've already relinquished all of my rights to it thanks to the contract magic, I have no idea whatsoever about what he could possibly have to ask after all this time. As I study him curiously, my head tilted to the side, his expression grows increasingly troubled as he opens his mouth to speak.

"You told me that melil oil is best oil to use, so I've been gathering it until now, but..." "Huh? Shouldn't melil be almost out of season? Have you not made anything yet?"

Lutz and I exchange glances. Melil should be about out of season. The two of us had gathered a lot of it already and made it all into simple shampoo. I would have thought that Benno, who is constantly seeking profit, would have started production a long time ago and would have sold a large quantity of it since then.

"Well, I'd acquired a large crop of them, and had a workshop start making it, but the other day they came to me and said that it wasn't coming out right, even if they made it exactly the way you said. Can you think of any reason that might be?"

I frown as I think about what he said. Fundamentally, the entire procedure boils down to just smashing, then pressing, then mixing in scents. I can't think of any place in the process that could actually go wrong. I tilt my head to the side in confusion, as does Lutz, who has helped me make shampoo countless times.

"...Even if they're saying it's not turning out right, if you're making simple shampoo, then... it's not a very difficult process, is it?" "I know, right?"

I have a ton of ideas on how to make it better, if I only had the ingredients, but in its current simple form, I can't think of a reason why it would ever fail. It always turned out the same no matter if it was me, Tory, or Lutz who was making it.

"I really didn't want to bring you out, but if we don't manage to complete this, then this will turn into something the contract magic would have to deal with. Sorry, but could you come with me to the workshop?" "Yes, sir!" I reply.

If I recall correctly, the penalties for violating a magical contract are very severe. In the worst case, they could even mean death. As soon as I cutely chirp out my immediate response, though, Lutz grabs hold of my arm.

"Maine, I think you should probably stop for today. Your fever's only barely just gone back down, and you're not all the way back to normal, right?"

Lutz is correct, but in this season there's not going to be a whole lot of time where I'm actually at peak health. This is definitely a season where my fever could flare up at any point, if I'm even just a little bit unprepared. If just not having a fever doesn't count as being healthy, then I'd never be able to leave my house for anything.

"But I don't know how long it'll take me to get totally healthy again, and if we let this go for too long then the snow is going to start falling, so we should go now, while my fever's down, right?" "Well, you're not wrong, but..."

Benno pats Lutz's worried head reassuringly. "Don't worry too much, Lutz. I'll carry her, so we won't be making her walk. Not like I can stand walking that slowly, anyway." "...Well, in that case, I guess it's okay, huh?"

With that, Benno picks me up once again, and we head out.

He asked me about what could have caused the failure, but I've never actually seen this fail before.

I wonder if he really understood me?

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#honzuki #honzuki no gekokujou

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tears-of-araxes-blog · 7 years

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Burlington Times News Friday, March 7th 2003. Page A4: Opinion.

History holds lessons for opponents of war against Iraq

By Shepard S. Averitt IV

[The following is an opinion piece by an apparent member of an infamous CIA sponsored spy program, which included the notorious “Operation Chaos” which monitored Americans, most of whom had or were still protesting the U.S. war involvement in Vietnam, or had organized in any way against the war. It was an extention of McCarthyist government programs that targeted “Socialists” in a variety of unconstitutional ways. The findings of the spy program Mr. Averitt here apparently participated actually did not find that anti-war protester were run by foreign governments bent on destroying democracy, the information gathered rather infamously did not find what this Mr.Averitt here claims -- but President Lyndon Johnson rejected these (illegally obtained) findings anyway, and continued to violate American civil rights with his illegal domestic spy programs. So have fun, cause this Op Ed is sure an entertaining shit storm of lies and propaganda, and by a criminal no less.]

I was saddened as I read the main article on Thursday’s front page about student "war protesters" cutting classes to "protest the war."

What caused me to be sad was the reality that we never learn from history and how easily our young are manipulated in the hands of people with a hidden agenda. These are not anti-war protests, but anti-democracy protests, and one should never be fooled into thinking any differently.

From 1967-1972.1 served in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer. During those years, I watched college students be unknowingly led around by the forces in this country that would like to see our democracy destroyed and replaced with a socialistic form of government. This is what the real, behind-the-scenes organizers of these marches want. They use the fear of war by young people who think that they may be called into service to help spread socialism and the destruction of democracy around the world How do I know this? Part of my job from 1970-1972 was to infiltrate anti-war organizations and to identify the backers.

Also, just as they did in the 60s and 70s, the socialist movement in this country is using the media to propagandize the U.S. population. They do this by playing on the media’s greed to use any story, regardless of how destructive that story is to our society and to the morale of the men and women in the military, to sell papers or to capture the TV ratings on any given evening.

What we fail to remember from history is the end result of all this. Vietnam today is an oppressed, socialistic society whose people still remain in abject poverty all because politicians wanting to be re-elected lost their will to be winners for democracy. [But.....America did go to war, the protesters didn’t get what they wanted??] One has to wonder what 30 years of democracy and trade relations with this nation would have accomplished in South Vietnam instead.

We also fail to remember one of the largest holocausts known to mankind, the slaughter of millions of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge. They were able to accomplish this atrocity against humanity because the anti democracy movement in the U.S. caused politicians to fear their ability to get re-elected if they supported winning in Vietnam and in Cambodia, which is exactly what it would have taken to win that war. [So the complete and humiliating loss of the war and abandonment of the Vietnamese people because the U.S. had drained all of its sources in a war it lost was because politicians decided not to win, ok that makes sense]

How do I know this? My job in 1969-1970 was to gather intelligence on North Vietnamese troop movements on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I watched the NVA move divisions of troops and equipment up the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and all the while students were in the streets in the U.S. protesting any bombing in Cambodia. They had no idea they were being used to help the NVA move their troops unharmed back to North Vietnam so they could regroup. Had we bombed the Ho Chi Minh Trail during 1969, it would have ended the war in Vietnam and we could have moved upon the communist forces that were murdering millions in Cambodia.

Isn’t it interesting that on Fox News Thursday morning it was reported that Saddam Hussein in a speech yesterday was drawing parallels in today’s situation between the U.S. and his regime and the U.S. and Vietnam. Even he can see the similarity. Today the anti-democratic forces are using students, the media, and the socialists in the U.N. to help Saddam buy time until he is fully prepared to cause the largest amount of damage possible to the U.S. forces and our allies. Why can we never learn from history? Saddam is right. It will be Vietnam all over again, but only if we "let it be.”

Shepard S. Averitt IV is a resident of Gibsonville. In addition to being awarded the Bronze Star and Army Commendation Medal for his military service, he received the Vietnamese Medal of Honor from the Vietnamese Armed Forces.

[This whole piece of writing makes my skin crawl. But I will point out that the author himself makes an important point, by agreeing with Saddam Hussein himself by making a parallel between the Vietnam war and the Invasion of Iraq. They started similar, and they are ending similar, though of course he wouldn’t know that yet back then.

So yes, Saddam did make that parallel, but not for the reason the author makes it . Saddam saw parallels not because he considered himself an insidious commie or force bent on spreading anti-democracy across the world, who was deathly concerned that his genocide program and program for world domination would be shut down by America, but because like America was preparing to do with Iraq, America invaded Vietnam, a country that posed no physical threat the United States, and as a result, hundreds of thousands of Americans and Vietnamese people died as a result of this invasion, and in the end the war was lost, because it was poorly planned from the beginning and all throughout, would be (and was) massively over-funded and poorly budgeted, “the enemy” was an abstract entity (Commies for Vietnam, Terrorists for Iraq), and so could never actually be defeated, and actual anti-American war combatants, the ones that weren’t abstract, were extremely underestimated in their abilities and support, and finally, much the wars were popularized by lies and propaganda that much of America went along with anyway because they bought that they were under imminent existential threat from an abstract enemy force that was apparently centralized in the proposed war zone, whether they were “Communists” or “Terrorists.”

And just like how even though the Khmer Rouge actually were guilty of ethnic cleansing in the Cambodia, and that is not something anyone who opposed the Vietnam was thought was super swell and something they supported, the United States’ interests in Vietnam were not to protect these people -- so was Saddam Hussein guilty of ethnic cleansing, and anti-war protesters of an invasion of Iraq did not support this in the least bit, but understood that the U.S.’ interest in Iraq was not, and never had been, to “save” the Iraqi people, or even protect Americans. Because for both of these wars against existential threats too abstract to ever actually be defeated, it didn’t matter if they were defeated, because the US waged these wars primarily in order secure or further America’s imperialist stronghold on foreign wealth. So that’s fun.]

#iraq war #2003 invasion of iraq #vietnam war #operation chaos #cia spying #antiwar

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largentkzpreslerfh87insuran-blog · 5 years

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insurance cost audi a4

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The Advanced Guide to Keyword Clustering

Posted by tomcasano

If your goal is to grow your organic traffic, you have to think about SEO in terms of “product/market fit.”

Keyword research is the “market” (what users are actually searching for) and content is the “product” (what users are consuming). The “fit” is optimization.

To grow your organic traffic, you need your content to mirror the reality of what users are actually searching for. Your content planning and creation, keyword mapping, and optimization should all align with the market. This is one of the best ways to grow your organic traffic.

Why bother with keyword grouping?

One web page can rank for multiple keywords. So why aren’t we hyper-focused on planning and optimizing content that targets dozens of similar and related keywords?

Why target only one keyword with one piece of content when you can target 20?

The impact of keyword clustering to acquire more organic traffic is not only underrated, it is largely ignored. In this guide, I'll share with you our proprietary process we’ve pioneered for keyword grouping so you can not only do it yourself, but you can maximize the number of keywords your amazing content can rank for.

Here’s a real-world example of a handful of the top keywords that this piece of content is ranking for. The full list is over 1,000 keywords.

Why should you care?

It’d be foolish to focus on only one keyword, as you’d lose out on 90%+ of the opportunity.

Here's one of my favorite examples of all of the keywords that one piece of content could potentially target:

Let’s dive in!

Part 1: Keyword collection

Before we start grouping keywords into clusters, we first need our dataset of keywords from which to group from.

In essence, our job in this initial phase is to find every possible keyword. In the process of doing so, we'll also be inadvertently getting many irrelevant keywords (thank you, Keyword Planner). However, it's better to have many relevant and long-tail keywords (and the ability to filter out the irrelevant ones) than to only have a limited pool of keywords to target.

For any client project, I typically say that we'll collect anywhere from 1,000 to 6,000 keywords. But truth be told, we've sometimes found 10,000+ keywords, and sometimes (in the instance of a local, niche client), we've found less than 1,000.

I recommend collecting keywords from about 8–12 different sources. These sources are:

Your competitors

Third-party data tools (Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush, AnswerThePublic, etc.)

Your existing data in Google Search Console/Google Analytics

Brainstorming your own ideas and checking against them

Mashing up keyword combinations

Autocomplete suggestions and “Searches related to” from Google

There's no shortage of sources for keyword collection, and more keyword research tools exist now than ever did before. Our goal here is to be so extensive that we never have to go back and “find more keywords” in the future — unless, of course, there's a new topic we are targeting.

The prequel to this guide will expand upon keyword collection in depth. For now, let’s assume that you’ve spent a few hours collecting a long list of keywords, you have removed the duplicates, and you have semi-reliable search volume data.

Part 2: Term analysis

Now that you have an unmanageable list of 1,000+ keywords, let’s turn it into something useful.

We begin with term analysis. What the heck does that mean?

We break each keyword apart into its component terms that comprise the keyword, so we can see which terms are the most frequently occurring.

For example, the keyword: “best natural protein powder” is comprised of 4 terms: “best,” “natural,” “protein,” and “powder.” Once we break apart all of the keywords into their component parts, we can more readily analyze and understand which terms (as subcomponents of the keywords) are recurring the most in our keyword dataset.

Here’s a sampling of 3 keywords:

best natural protein powder

most powerful natural anti inflammatory

how to make natural deodorant

Take a closer look, and you’ll notice that the term “natural” occurs in all three of these keywords. If this term is occurring very frequently throughout our long list of keywords, it’ll be highly important when we start grouping our keywords.

You will need a word frequency counter to give you this insight. The ultimate free tool for this is Write Words’ Word Frequency Counter. It’s magical.

Paste in your list of keywords, click submit, and you'll get something like this:

Copy and paste your list of recurring terms into a spreadsheet. You can obviously remove prepositions and terms like “is,” “for,” and “to.”

You don’t always get the most value by just looking at individual terms. Sometimes a two-word or three-word phrase gives you insights you wouldn’t have otherwise. In this example, you see the terms “milk” and “almond” appearing, but it turns out that this is actually part of the phrase “almond milk.”

To gather these insights, use the Phrase Frequency Counter from WriteWords and repeat the process for phrases that have two, three, four, five, and six terms in them. Paste all of this data into your spreadsheet too.

A two-word phrase that occurs more frequently than a one-word phrase is an indicator of its significance. To account for this, I use the COUNTA function in Google Sheets to show me the number of terms in a phrase:

=COUNTA(SPLIT(B2," "))

Now we can look at our keyword data with a second dimension: not only the number of times a term or phrase occurs, but also how many words are in that phrase.

Finally, to give more weighting to phrases that recur less frequently but have more terms in them, I put an exponent on the number of terms with a basic formula:

=(C4^2)*A4

In other words, take the number of terms and raise it to a power, and then multiply that by the frequency of its occurrence. All this does is give more weighting to the fact that a two-word phrase that occurs less frequently is still more important than a one-word phrase that might occur more frequently.

As I never know just the right power to raise it to, I test several and keep re-sorting the sheet to try to find the most important terms and phrases in the sheet.

When you look at this now, you can already see patterns start to emerge and you're already beginning to understand your searchers better.

In this example dataset, we are going from a list of 10k+ keywords to an analysis of terms and phrases to understand what people are really asking. For example, “what is the best” and “where can i buy” are phrases we can absolutely understand searchers using.

I mark off the important terms or phrases. I try to keep this number to under 50 and to a maximum of around 75; otherwise, grouping will get hairy in Part 5.

Part 3: Hot words

What are hot words?

Hot words are the terms or phrases from that last section that we have deemed to be the most important. We've explained hot words in greater depth here.

Why are hot words important?

We explain:

This exercise provides us with a handful of the most relevant and important terms and phrases for traffic and relevancy, which can then be used to create the best content strategies — content that will rank highly and, in turn, help us reap traffic rewards for your site.

When developing your hot words list, we identify the highest frequency and most relevant terms from a large range of keywords used by several of your highest-performing competitors to generate their traffic, and these become “hot words.”

When working with a client (or doing this for yourself), there are generally 3 questions we want answered for each hot word:

Which of these terms are the most important for your business? (0–10)

Which of these terms are negative keywords (we want to ignore or avoid)?

Any other feedback about qualified or high-intent keywords?

We narrow down the list, removing any negative keywords or keywords that are not really important for the website.

Once we have our final list of hot words, we organize them into broad topic groups like this:

The different colors have no meaning, but just help to keep it visually organized for when we group them.

One important thing to note is that word stems play an important part here.

For example, consider that all of these words below have the same underlying relevance and meaning:

blog

blogs

blogger

bloggers

blogging

Therefore, when we're grouping keywords, to consider “blog” and “blogging” and “bloggers” as part of the same cluster, we'll need to use the word stem of “blog” for all of them. Word stems are our best friend when grouping. Synonyms can be organized in a similar way, which are basically two different ways of saying the same thing (and the same user intent) such as “build” and “create” or “search” and “look for.”

Part 4: Preparation for keyword grouping

Now we're going to get ourselves set up for our Herculean task of clustering.

To start, copy your list of hot words and transpose them horizontally across a row.

List your keywords in the first column.

Now, the real magic begins.

After much research and noodling around, I discovered the function in Google Sheets that tells us whether a stem or term is in a keyword or not. It uses RegEx:

=IF(RegExMatch(A5,"health"),"YES","NO")

This simply tells us whether this word stem or word is in that keyword or not. You have to individually set the term for each column to get your “YES” or “NO” answer. I then drag this formula down to all of the rows to get all of the YES/NO answers. Google Sheets often takes a minute or so to process all of this data.

Next, we have to “hard code” these formulas so we can remove the NOs and be left with only a YES if that terms exists in that keyword.

Copy all of the data and “Paste values only.”

Now, use “Find and replace” to remove all of the NOs.

What you're left with is nothing short of a work of art. You now have the most powerful way to group your keywords. Let the grouping begin!

Part 5: Keyword grouping

At this point, you're now set up for keyword clustering success.

This part is half art, half science. No wait, I take that back. To do this part right, you need:

A deep understanding of who you're targeting, why they're important to the business, user intent, and relevance

Good judgment to make tradeoffs when breaking keywords apart into groups

Good intuition

This is one of the hardest parts for me to train anyone to do. It comes with experience.

At the top of the sheet, I use the COUNTA function to show me how many times this word step has been found in our keyword set:

=COUNTA(C3:C10000)

This is important because as a general rule, it's best to start with the most niche topics that have the least overlap with other topics. If you start too broadly, your keywords will overlap with other keyword groups and you'll have a hard time segmenting them into meaningful groups. Start with the most narrow and specific groups first.

To begin, you want to sort the sheet by word stem.

The word stems that occur only a handful of times won’t have a large amount of overlap. So I start by sorting the sheet by that column, and copying and pasting those keywords into their own new tab.

Now you have your first keyword group!

Here's a first group example: the “matcha” group. This can be its own project in its own right: for instance, if a website was all about matcha tea and there were other tangentially related keywords.

As we continue breaking apart one keyword group and then another, by the end we're left with many different keyword groups. If the groups you've arrived at are too broad, you can subdivide them even more into narrower keyword subgroups for more focused content pieces. You can follow the same process for this broad keyword group, and make it a microcosm of the same process of dividing the keywords into smaller groups based on word stems.

We can create an overview of the groups to see the volume and topical opportunities from a high level.

We want to not only consider search volume, but ideally also intent, competitiveness, and so forth.

Voilà!

You've successfully taken a list of thousands of keywords and grouped them into relevant keyword groups.

Wait, why did we do all of this hard work again?

Now you can finally attain that “product/market fit” we talked about. It’s magical.

You can take each keyword group and create a piece of optimized content around it, targeting dozens of keywords, exponentially raising your potential to acquire more organic traffic. Boo yah!

All done. Now what?

Now the real fun begins. You can start planning out new content that you never knew you needed to create. Alternatively, you can map your keyword groups (and subgroups) to existing pages on your website and add in keywords and optimizations to the header tags, body text, and so forth for all those long-tail keywords you had ignored.

Keyword grouping is underrated, overlooked, and ignored at large. It creates a massive new opportunity to optimize for terms where none existed. Sometimes it's just adding one phrase or a few sentences targeting a long-tail keyword here and there that will bring in that incremental search traffic for your site. Do this dozens of times and you will keep getting incremental increases in your organic traffic.

What do you think?

Leave a comment below and let me know your take on keyword clustering.

Need a hand? Just give me a shout, I’m happy to help.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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isearchgoood · 6 years

Text

The Advanced Guide to Keyword Clustering

Posted by tomcasano

If your goal is to grow your organic traffic, you have to think about SEO in terms of “product/market fit.”

Keyword research is the “market” (what users are actually searching for) and content is the “product” (what users are consuming). The “fit” is optimization.

Why bother with keyword grouping?

One web page can rank for multiple keywords. So why aren’t we hyper-focused on planning and optimizing content that targets dozens of similar and related keywords?

Why target only one keyword with one piece of content when you can target 20?

Here’s a real-world example of a handful of the top keywords that this piece of content is ranking for. The full list is over 1,000 keywords.

Why should you care?

It’d be foolish to focus on only one keyword, as you’d lose out on 90%+ of the opportunity.

Here's one of my favorite examples of all of the keywords that one piece of content could potentially target:

Let’s dive in!

Part 1: Keyword collection

Before we start grouping keywords into clusters, we first need our dataset of keywords from which to group from.

I recommend collecting keywords from about 8–12 different sources. These sources are:

Your competitors

Third-party data tools (Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush, AnswerThePublic, etc.)

Your existing data in Google Search Console/Google Analytics

Brainstorming your own ideas and checking against them

Mashing up keyword combinations

Autocomplete suggestions and “Searches related to” from Google

Part 2: Term analysis

Now that you have an unmanageable list of 1,000+ keywords, let’s turn it into something useful.

We begin with term analysis. What the heck does that mean?

We break each keyword apart into its component terms that comprise the keyword, so we can see which terms are the most frequently occurring.

Here’s a sampling of 3 keywords:

best natural protein powder

most powerful natural anti inflammatory

how to make natural deodorant

You will need a word frequency counter to give you this insight. The ultimate free tool for this is Write Words’ Word Frequency Counter. It’s magical.

Paste in your list of keywords, click submit, and you'll get something like this:

Copy and paste your list of recurring terms into a spreadsheet. You can obviously remove prepositions and terms like “is,” “for,” and “to.”

=COUNTA(SPLIT(B2," "))

Now we can look at our keyword data with a second dimension: not only the number of times a term or phrase occurs, but also how many words are in that phrase.

Finally, to give more weighting to phrases that recur less frequently but have more terms in them, I put an exponent on the number of terms with a basic formula:

=(C4^2)*A4

As I never know just the right power to raise it to, I test several and keep re-sorting the sheet to try to find the most important terms and phrases in the sheet.

When you look at this now, you can already see patterns start to emerge and you're already beginning to understand your searchers better.

I mark off the important terms or phrases. I try to keep this number to under 50 and to a maximum of around 75; otherwise, grouping will get hairy in Part 5.

Part 3: Hot words

What are hot words?

Hot words are the terms or phrases from that last section that we have deemed to be the most important. We've explained hot words in greater depth here.

Why are hot words important?

We explain:

When working with a client (or doing this for yourself), there are generally 3 questions we want answered for each hot word:

Which of these terms are the most important for your business? (0–10)

Which of these terms are negative keywords (we want to ignore or avoid)?

Any other feedback about qualified or high-intent keywords?

We narrow down the list, removing any negative keywords or keywords that are not really important for the website.

Once we have our final list of hot words, we organize them into broad topic groups like this:

The different colors have no meaning, but just help to keep it visually organized for when we group them.

One important thing to note is that word stems play an important part here.

For example, consider that all of these words below have the same underlying relevance and meaning:

blog

blogs

blogger

bloggers

blogging

Part 4: Preparation for keyword grouping

Now we're going to get ourselves set up for our Herculean task of clustering.

To start, copy your list of hot words and transpose them horizontally across a row.

List your keywords in the first column.

Now, the real magic begins.

After much research and noodling around, I discovered the function in Google Sheets that tells us whether a stem or term is in a keyword or not. It uses RegEx:

=IF(RegExMatch(A5,"health"),"YES","NO")

Next, we have to “hard code” these formulas so we can remove the NOs and be left with only a YES if that terms exists in that keyword.

Copy all of the data and “Paste values only.”

Now, use “Find and replace” to remove all of the NOs.

What you're left with is nothing short of a work of art. You now have the most powerful way to group your keywords. Let the grouping begin!

Part 5: Keyword grouping

At this point, you're now set up for keyword clustering success.

This part is half art, half science. No wait, I take that back. To do this part right, you need:

A deep understanding of who you're targeting, why they're important to the business, user intent, and relevance

Good judgment to make tradeoffs when breaking keywords apart into groups

Good intuition

This is one of the hardest parts for me to train anyone to do. It comes with experience.

At the top of the sheet, I use the COUNTA function to show me how many times this word step has been found in our keyword set:

=COUNTA(C3:C10000)

To begin, you want to sort the sheet by word stem.

Now you have your first keyword group!

We can create an overview of the groups to see the volume and topical opportunities from a high level.

We want to not only consider search volume, but ideally also intent, competitiveness, and so forth.

Voilà!

You've successfully taken a list of thousands of keywords and grouped them into relevant keyword groups.

Wait, why did we do all of this hard work again?

Now you can finally attain that “product/market fit” we talked about. It’s magical.

You can take each keyword group and create a piece of optimized content around it, targeting dozens of keywords, exponentially raising your potential to acquire more organic traffic. Boo yah!

All done. Now what?

What do you think?

Leave a comment below and let me know your take on keyword clustering.

Need a hand? Just give me a shout, I’m happy to help.

via Blogger https://ift.tt/2RWLwk3 #blogger #bloggingtips #bloggerlife #bloggersgetsocial #ontheblog #writersofinstagram #writingprompt #instapoetry #writerscommunity #writersofig #writersblock #writerlife #writtenword #instawriters #spilledink #wordgasm #creativewriting #poetsofinstagram #blackoutpoetry #poetsofig

0 notes

tracisimpson · 6 years

Text

The Advanced Guide to Keyword Clustering

Posted by tomcasano

If your goal is to grow your organic traffic, you have to think about SEO in terms of “product/market fit.”

Keyword research is the “market” (what users are actually searching for) and content is the “product” (what users are consuming). The “fit” is optimization.

Why bother with keyword grouping?

One web page can rank for multiple keywords. So why aren’t we hyper-focused on planning and optimizing content that targets dozens of similar and related keywords?

Why target only one keyword with one piece of content when you can target 20?

Here’s a real-world example of a handful of the top keywords that this piece of content is ranking for. The full list is over 1,000 keywords.

Why should you care?

It’d be foolish to focus on only one keyword, as you’d lose out on 90%+ of the opportunity.

Here's one of my favorite examples of all of the keywords that one piece of content could potentially target:

Let’s dive in!

Part 1: Keyword collection

Before we start grouping keywords into clusters, we first need our dataset of keywords from which to group from.

I recommend collecting keywords from about 8–12 different sources. These sources are:

Your competitors

Third-party data tools (Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush, AnswerThePublic, etc.)

Your existing data in Google Search Console/Google Analytics

Brainstorming your own ideas and checking against them

Mashing up keyword combinations

Autocomplete suggestions and “Searches related to” from Google

Part 2: Term analysis

Now that you have an unmanageable list of 1,000+ keywords, let’s turn it into something useful.

We begin with term analysis. What the heck does that mean?

We break each keyword apart into its component terms that comprise the keyword, so we can see which terms are the most frequently occurring.

Here’s a sampling of 3 keywords:

best natural protein powder

most powerful natural anti inflammatory

how to make natural deodorant

You will need a word frequency counter to give you this insight. The ultimate free tool for this is Write Words’ Word Frequency Counter. It’s magical.

Paste in your list of keywords, click submit, and you'll get something like this:

Copy and paste your list of recurring terms into a spreadsheet. You can obviously remove prepositions and terms like “is,” “for,” and “to.”

=COUNTA(SPLIT(B2," "))

Now we can look at our keyword data with a second dimension: not only the number of times a term or phrase occurs, but also how many words are in that phrase.

Finally, to give more weighting to phrases that recur less frequently but have more terms in them, I put an exponent on the number of terms with a basic formula:

=(C4^2)*A4

As I never know just the right power to raise it to, I test several and keep re-sorting the sheet to try to find the most important terms and phrases in the sheet.

When you look at this now, you can already see patterns start to emerge and you're already beginning to understand your searchers better.

I mark off the important terms or phrases. I try to keep this number to under 50 and to a maximum of around 75; otherwise, grouping will get hairy in Part 5.

Part 3: Hot words

What are hot words?

Hot words are the terms or phrases from that last section that we have deemed to be the most important. We've explained hot words in greater depth here.

Why are hot words important?

We explain:

When working with a client (or doing this for yourself), there are generally 3 questions we want answered for each hot word:

Which of these terms are the most important for your business? (0–10)

Which of these terms are negative keywords (we want to ignore or avoid)?

Any other feedback about qualified or high-intent keywords?

We narrow down the list, removing any negative keywords or keywords that are not really important for the website.

Once we have our final list of hot words, we organize them into broad topic groups like this:

The different colors have no meaning, but just help to keep it visually organized for when we group them.

One important thing to note is that word stems play an important part here.

For example, consider that all of these words below have the same underlying relevance and meaning:

blog

blogs

blogger

bloggers

blogging

Part 4: Preparation for keyword grouping

Now we're going to get ourselves set up for our Herculean task of clustering.

To start, copy your list of hot words and transpose them horizontally across a row.

List your keywords in the first column.

Now, the real magic begins.

After much research and noodling around, I discovered the function in Google Sheets that tells us whether a stem or term is in a keyword or not. It uses RegEx:

=IF(RegExMatch(A5,"health"),"YES","NO")

Next, we have to “hard code” these formulas so we can remove the NOs and be left with only a YES if that terms exists in that keyword.

Copy all of the data and “Paste values only.”

Now, use “Find and replace” to remove all of the NOs.

What you're left with is nothing short of a work of art. You now have the most powerful way to group your keywords. Let the grouping begin!

Part 5: Keyword grouping

At this point, you're now set up for keyword clustering success.

This part is half art, half science. No wait, I take that back. To do this part right, you need:

A deep understanding of who you're targeting, why they're important to the business, user intent, and relevance

Good judgment to make tradeoffs when breaking keywords apart into groups

Good intuition

This is one of the hardest parts for me to train anyone to do. It comes with experience.

At the top of the sheet, I use the COUNTA function to show me how many times this word step has been found in our keyword set:

=COUNTA(C3:C10000)

To begin, you want to sort the sheet by word stem.

Now you have your first keyword group!

We can create an overview of the groups to see the volume and topical opportunities from a high level.

We want to not only consider search volume, but ideally also intent, competitiveness, and so forth.

Voilà!

You've successfully taken a list of thousands of keywords and grouped them into relevant keyword groups.

Wait, why did we do all of this hard work again?

Now you can finally attain that “product/market fit” we talked about. It’s magical.

You can take each keyword group and create a piece of optimized content around it, targeting dozens of keywords, exponentially raising your potential to acquire more organic traffic. Boo yah!

All done. Now what?

What do you think?

Leave a comment below and let me know your take on keyword clustering.

Need a hand? Just give me a shout, I’m happy to help.

#The Moz Blog Blogger

0 notes

nereomata · 6 years

Text

The Advanced Guide to Keyword Clustering

Posted by tomcasano

If your goal is to grow your organic traffic, you have to think about SEO in terms of “product/market fit.”

Keyword research is the “market” (what users are actually searching for) and content is the “product” (what users are consuming). The “fit” is optimization.

Why bother with keyword grouping?

One web page can rank for multiple keywords. So why aren’t we hyper-focused on planning and optimizing content that targets dozens of similar and related keywords?

Why target only one keyword with one piece of content when you can target 20?

Here’s a real-world example of a handful of the top keywords that this piece of content is ranking for. The full list is over 1,000 keywords.

Why should you care?

It’d be foolish to focus on only one keyword, as you’d lose out on 90%+ of the opportunity.

Here's one of my favorite examples of all of the keywords that one piece of content could potentially target:

Let’s dive in!

Part 1: Keyword collection

Before we start grouping keywords into clusters, we first need our dataset of keywords from which to group from.

I recommend collecting keywords from about 8–12 different sources. These sources are:

Your competitors

Third-party data tools (Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush, AnswerThePublic, etc.)

Your existing data in Google Search Console/Google Analytics

Brainstorming your own ideas and checking against them

Mashing up keyword combinations

Autocomplete suggestions and “Searches related to” from Google

Part 2: Term analysis

Now that you have an unmanageable list of 1,000+ keywords, let’s turn it into something useful.

We begin with term analysis. What the heck does that mean?

We break each keyword apart into its component terms that comprise the keyword, so we can see which terms are the most frequently occurring.

Here’s a sampling of 3 keywords:

best natural protein powder

most powerful natural anti inflammatory

how to make natural deodorant

You will need a word frequency counter to give you this insight. The ultimate free tool for this is Write Words’ Word Frequency Counter. It’s magical.

Paste in your list of keywords, click submit, and you'll get something like this:

Copy and paste your list of recurring terms into a spreadsheet. You can obviously remove prepositions and terms like “is,” “for,” and “to.”

=COUNTA(SPLIT(B2," "))

Now we can look at our keyword data with a second dimension: not only the number of times a term or phrase occurs, but also how many words are in that phrase.

Finally, to give more weighting to phrases that recur less frequently but have more terms in them, I put an exponent on the number of terms with a basic formula:

=(C4^2)*A4

As I never know just the right power to raise it to, I test several and keep re-sorting the sheet to try to find the most important terms and phrases in the sheet.

When you look at this now, you can already see patterns start to emerge and you're already beginning to understand your searchers better.

I mark off the important terms or phrases. I try to keep this number to under 50 and to a maximum of around 75; otherwise, grouping will get hairy in Part 5.

Part 3: Hot words

What are hot words?

Hot words are the terms or phrases from that last section that we have deemed to be the most important. We've explained hot words in greater depth here.

Why are hot words important?

We explain:

When working with a client (or doing this for yourself), there are generally 3 questions we want answered for each hot word:

Which of these terms are the most important for your business? (0–10)

Which of these terms are negative keywords (we want to ignore or avoid)?

Any other feedback about qualified or high-intent keywords?

We narrow down the list, removing any negative keywords or keywords that are not really important for the website.

Once we have our final list of hot words, we organize them into broad topic groups like this:

The different colors have no meaning, but just help to keep it visually organized for when we group them.

One important thing to note is that word stems play an important part here.

For example, consider that all of these words below have the same underlying relevance and meaning:

blog

blogs

blogger

bloggers

blogging

Part 4: Preparation for keyword grouping

Now we're going to get ourselves set up for our Herculean task of clustering.

To start, copy your list of hot words and transpose them horizontally across a row.

List your keywords in the first column.

Now, the real magic begins.

After much research and noodling around, I discovered the function in Google Sheets that tells us whether a stem or term is in a keyword or not. It uses RegEx:

=IF(RegExMatch(A5,"health"),"YES","NO")

Next, we have to “hard code” these formulas so we can remove the NOs and be left with only a YES if that terms exists in that keyword.

Copy all of the data and “Paste values only.”

Now, use “Find and replace” to remove all of the NOs.

What you're left with is nothing short of a work of art. You now have the most powerful way to group your keywords. Let the grouping begin!

Part 5: Keyword grouping

At this point, you're now set up for keyword clustering success.

This part is half art, half science. No wait, I take that back. To do this part right, you need:

A deep understanding of who you're targeting, why they're important to the business, user intent, and relevance

Good judgment to make tradeoffs when breaking keywords apart into groups

Good intuition

This is one of the hardest parts for me to train anyone to do. It comes with experience.

At the top of the sheet, I use the COUNTA function to show me how many times this word step has been found in our keyword set:

=COUNTA(C3:C10000)

To begin, you want to sort the sheet by word stem.

Now you have your first keyword group!

We can create an overview of the groups to see the volume and topical opportunities from a high level.

We want to not only consider search volume, but ideally also intent, competitiveness, and so forth.

Voilà!

You've successfully taken a list of thousands of keywords and grouped them into relevant keyword groups.

Wait, why did we do all of this hard work again?

Now you can finally attain that “product/market fit” we talked about. It’s magical.

You can take each keyword group and create a piece of optimized content around it, targeting dozens of keywords, exponentially raising your potential to acquire more organic traffic. Boo yah!

All done. Now what?

What do you think?

Leave a comment below and let me know your take on keyword clustering.

Need a hand? Just give me a shout, I’m happy to help.

from Moz Blog https://moz.com/blog/the-advanced-guide-to-keyword-clustering via IFTTT from IM Local SEO Blog http://imlocalseo.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-advanced-guide-to-keyword-clustering.html via IFTTT from Blogger http://nereomata.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-advanced-guide-to-keyword-clustering.html via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Blogger

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