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This Week At Bungie 11/19/2020

Source: https://www.bungie.net/en/News/Article/49853
This week at Bungie, the Crow has found a new nest.
Hello, and welcome to the second TWAB of Beyond Light. We’ve got a bit to cover today, so we won’t spend too much time on introductions. Season of the Hunt kicked off proper on Tuesday. If you haven’t jumped in just yet, we have some wonderful web lore to get you prepared. I wasn’t mentally prepared for part 2...

IMMOLANT PT. 1 // IMMOLANT. PT 2

TWO DRINK MINIMUM

Wrathborn Hunts have begun. We still have the Deep Stone Crypt Raid, The Dawning, Trials of Osiris, Iron Banner, and more to look forward to over the course of the Season.
First stop: The raid.

On Your Marks. Get Set. Raid.

Season of the Hunt isn’t the only thing making its grand entrance this week. At 10 AM PST on Saturday, November 21, the Deep Stone Crypt will become available.
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We’ve talked through Contest Mode, shown off some fancy rewards, but we wanted to get in a final reminder before the show begins.
World First Verification Timeline
Once the raid has been conquered, we will announce that the activity has been completed from @Bungie on Twitter. After this, our teams will start diving into the data to verify that the first completion was clean. Our hope is to be able to announce the winners shortly after World first, but we want to ensure our validation efforts are sound. Ultimately, our goal is to have a post congratulating the winning team on Monday, November 23.
Contest Mode Reminder and a Quick Stasis Update
Full details on Contest Mode can be found in the This Week at Bungie – 10/15/2020 article.
Quick bullets that all should be aware of:
  • Contest Mode will cap all players at 20 Power below each encounter for 24 hours.
  • Artifact Power will be disabled during Contest Mode.
  • Your team’s Power Cap goal is 1230 for all the encounters.
  • Being above 1230 will not provide any additional advantage in the final fight.
Earlier this week, an issue was discovered where Stasis was doing large (and we mean insanely huge) amounts of damage to bosses. The team worked at lightning pace to develop a fix for Destiny 2 Hotfix 3.0.0.3, thus preventing impact to the upcoming raid! We have a few more notes on general Stasis balancing later in the TWAB, so keep reading if you want to know more! This may not be a piece of Contest Mode, but we wanted to make sure to call this out for those who may have seen an interesting video or two over the last few days.
There Will Be Loot
Now, it wouldn’t be a race if there wasn’t something on the line. While many of you may have seen these rewards on our Instagram or even a preview on the Bungie Store website, we wanted to make sure to show these off in a TWAB before the raid released!
World First Raid Title (don’t call it a belt)
The first Fireteam of 6 to complete the Deep Stone Crypt raid will be declared World First by Bungie from @Bungie on Twitter after verification from our analytics team. Official rules can be found here.
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Day 1 Raid Emblem
Complete the Raid within 24 hours with Contest Mode active (by 10 AM PST on Nov 22) to unlock this unique emblem.
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Jacket Quest: Parka Edition
Complete the raid by 9AM PST on December 1 to unlock the Bungie Rewards Deep Stone Crypt Raid Jacket for purchase.
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Additionally, there are two deadlines that players should be aware of:
  • Deadline to Claim Reward Code: December 31, 2020 9 AM PST
  • Deadline to Purchase: December 31, 2020 11:59 PM PST
For additional details, please refer to your Bungie Rewards page, or the Bungie Store pre-order page.
Now, only a few questions remain...
  • Have you gotten your Power high enough?
  • Do you have your raid team assembled?
  • Are you prepared for battle?
  • …and for those of you who may not be racing, who will you be watching?
See you Saturday. It’s going to be a blast.

Securing the Entrance

Our Security team has been working on a variety of projects to sharpen our tools for cheat detection. In the coming weeks we’ll begin rolling out a new security measure for newly created accounts on PC. Our hope is that this deters some players from breaking the Code of Conduct.
For a quick explanation of what’s coming, our friends from the Security team will be taking the stage to walk you through the process of SMS verification.
What is SMS verification?
Bungie is implementing a quick account validation step for free-to-play players who want to access our high-stakes PvP modes in Destiny 2 on PC. Free-to-play accounts (PC only) will need to link and verify a cell phone number to their accounts via Bungie.net before being able to access those activities.
What activities are high-stakes?
Trials of Osiris, Iron Banner, and Competitive PvP playlists are examples. As this feature rolls out, we will be looking to how it can grow, and potentially expanding it to alternate activities in the future.
Why are we doing this?
Unscrupulous players can negatively impact everyone’s gameplay experience and undermine the hard-earned achievements of others. Bungie takes the threat of cheating seriously. We will continue implementing systems to help verify that accounts engaging in Destiny 2 activities are honoring our Code of Conduct and Terms of Service.
What do you need to do?
If you are a free-to-play Destiny 2 PC player you will receive a notice in-game the first time you try to access a protected activity. This will provide you with a “Verify Now” link to follow to Bungie.net and process your SMS linking. When you enter your cell phone number and request a verification code you will receive a quick text message with “Bungie Code: ######”. Once you enter that code on the Bungie.net page to complete your verification process you can sign back into the game to get immediate access to the activity you want to play.
Once this feature is live, free-to-play PC players will see an image in-game which will walk them through the signup process.
For announcements regarding this security rollout, please follow @BungieHelp on Twitter. We will also release some help articles over the next week to give full details on the upcoming feature!
As a reminder, if you encounter any players that you suspect of cheating or breaking our terms of service, please use the in-game report tool and submit a report using our contact form on Bungie.net.

Game2Give 2020 Fundraising Campaign – Light Keepers

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Over the years, this community has proven time and time again that gaming does good. You've acted as Guardians of the world, providing aid to people in need, no matter the challenge. We’re excited to announce our next initiative, partnering with Game2Give, starting on December 1! Without further ado, we’ll pass the mic over to the Bungie Foundation to run us through this wonderful event.
Bungie Foundation: Gear up for our second annual Game2Give charity event in support of the Bungie Foundation and Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, benefitting sick kids across the country. We invite the Bungie Community to join us in celebration of what we can accomplish together through games and giving.
Starting today, we invite all of our Bungie Community members to sign up to host your own Destiny 2 fundraising stream between December 1 and December 13. We have some incredible prizes for you all at various fundraising milestones.
On Giving Tuesday, December 1 at 10 AM PST, we’ll be kicking off a 24-hour streaming marathon with some of your favorite influencers from a variety of channels including Twitch and Facebook Gaming. We’ll have featured live streams taking place throughout the entire 2-week campaign, so be sure to follow us @BungieLove to receive the latest information!
We are excited to share the sweet prizes we have to thank our donors for their amazing contributions to help kids. Check them out:
Donation Incentives
  • A $25 donation will earn you the 2019 Mist Blossoms Emblem and Gilded Shell Exotic Ghost.
    • If you missed them last year, this is your chance to get your hands on them!
  • A $50 donation will earn you the above items, plus the new Light Keepers Emblem.
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  • A $100 donation will earn you the three items above and will enter you to win an item from the Bungie Prize Pool. Prizes include GameStop/EB Games gift cards (U.S. and Canada only), Destiny 2: Beyond Light Digital Deluxe Editions, and Destiny 2: Beyond Light Physical Deluxe Editions.
Best of all, 100% of donations go directly to the charities. All in-game digital incentives will be automatically redeemed via donors’ Bungie.net ID and will appear in the Destiny 2 Collections tab on or after Tuesday, December 1.
This year, we have also partnered with the online fundraising platform Omaze. Gamers from around the world can enter for their chance to win $20,000 to create the ultimate gaming rig and support this fundraising initiative! More details will come leading up to our campaign’s launch.
As we head into the holiday season, we want to extend our heartfelt gratitude for each and every one of you, who continue to bring smiles, joy, and hope for Little Lights everywhere. We hope you see yourself reflected in this mantra and hold it dear.
We are Light Keepers
Those who dare to ignite hope in the face of uncertainty
By our united, global passion we protect those in need
Making a lasting difference for the Little Lights around the world
We are Light Keepers
Love,
The Bungie Foundation
We’re also planning a few other goodies for you to unlock throughout the event when reaching certain donation milestones. Stay tuned for the full Game2Give 2020 article planned for December 1!

Tuning the Darkness

It’s not often that an entirely new subclass makes its entrance into the ecosystem of Destiny 2. The team has been hard at work over the last year building abilities and Supers powered by the Darkness. Enemies around the solar system are shaking in fear of your Stasis powers, including your fellow Guardians in the Crucible.
Depending on when this article goes live, a hotfix may or may not be in the wild. We have some notes from the development team on what’s changing in Destiny 2 Hotfix 3.0.0.3.
Development Team: We have seen a lot of feedback on Stasis since Beyond Light launched last week. We’ve heard it’s a ton of fun to use, but certain aspects of this new subclass can be frustrating to go up against (looking at you, Shadebinder Warlocks). We have a few minor tweaks planned to go out in Hotfix 3.0.0.3 this week. Our goal here is to do some early tuning to rein Shadebinders back in while still maintaining their overall efficacy and power fantasy.
Stasis Changes:
  • Stasis Breakout Damage reduced (110->90hp).
    • Adjusted the curve that reduces breakout damage using resilience.
    • Increased the damage reduction effect resilience has so that higher tiers of Resilience are more valuable.
    • Caps out at 90 Resilience.
  • Penumbral Blast (Stasis Warlock Melee) projectile speed reduced by 20%.
  • Penumbral Blast (Stasis Warlock Melee) range reduced (was 28m now 16m).
  • Winter Wrath (Stasis Warlock Super) duration reduced (30s -> 24s).
  • Winters Wrath Light Attack (Stasis Warlock Super) cost reduced (5% per burst -> 4.5% per burst).
  • Cold Snap seeker speed reduced by 23%.
Against Guardians:
  • Cold Snap freeze duration lowered (4.75s -> 1.35s).
  • Ice Flare Bolts freeze duration lowered (4.75s -> 1.35s).
  • Penumbral Blast (Stasis Warlock Melee) freeze duration lowered (4.75s -> 1.35s).
  • Winters Wrath Heavy attack (Stasis Warlock Super) no longer affects players who are not encased.
With all that said, we believe strongly in the “cosmic ice” wizard fantasy in PvE so we’re trying to target changes where we can towards the PvP experience specifically. With Stasis we’ve tried to push the sandbox in new directions and that increases the likelihood we introduce something spicier than normal.
When it comes to crafting new abilities, we believe the risk of shipping something a little hot is better than playing it safe and shipping something that doesn’t get you excited. As always, we’re going to be using data, playtesting, and feedback to help refine our direction and we’re going to keep responding. This will not be the last change to Stasis this Season. As we get closer to future changes, we’ll make another appearance in the TWAB for a patch note preview.
Thanks for playing, and we’ll see you out there in the wild.

Let’s Talk Loot

Since Beyond Light launched, we’ve been working through a whirlwind of feedback. What feels good, what needs work, and most importantly, how are you feeling? Today, we’ll be talking through a bit of player feedback concerning loot, and some short term plans the development team is working on.
Development Team: As Beyond Light has launched we've been tracking your feedback around loot, particularly weapons, and wanted to take a moment to let you know how we are processing it. Today we're going to talk mostly about the short-term, with more information to follow in the future around the long-term as we work through those problems.
Infusion caps are intended to help keep Destiny 2 evolving and ensure that every release the new rewards are exciting and relevant to the meta. However, we agree with your feedback that there’s currently not enough variety in the world loot weapons available to players this season.
To that end we are adding back in a selection of weapons that will help alleviate this issue. We will also be watching to see how the landscape changes with the addition of weapons from Season 12 and this week’s Raid launch. We also agree that getting near-cap weapons from random world drops is frustrating. Thus, we are removing those from the pool, and are weighting drops more heavily towards newer weapons.
Here’s a list of adjustments to the world loot legendary weapons pool you’ll see with our November 24 hotfix:
  • Remove all legendary weapons that hit their infusion cap at the end of this season
  • Add all of the Seventh Seraph weapons from Season 10
  • Add all of the Season 11 seasonal and planetary reprisal weapons
  • Weight drop chances so the newer an item is, the more likely it is to drop.
While we are not yet ready to dive into the long-term strategy yet, we are listening to feedback and watching how the player build landscape evolves over these first few weeks of Beyond Light, and incorporating that feedback as we plan out future Seasons.
Feedback never stops, and we’re always excited to hear how you’re feeling about Destiny 2. Keep it coming.

Bashing Some Bugs

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This last week has been a whirlwind. New content, new bugs, and new investigations. Destiny Player Support has a full report of what’s we’ve found, and what we’re still on the hunt for.
This is their report.
HOTFIX 3.0.0.3
Today, November 19, maintenance for Hotfix 3.0.0.3 will begin. Below is a timeline of events:
  • November 19, 8 AM PST (1600 UTC): Destiny 2 maintenance for Hotfix 3.0.0.3 begins.
  • November 19, 8:45 AM PST (1645 UTC): Players will be removed from activities and won't be able to log back into Destiny 2 until 9 AM PST when Hotfix 3.0.0.3 will be available.
  • November 19, 9 AM PST (1700 UTC): Destiny 2 Hotfix 3.0.0.3 has begun rolling out across all platforms and regions. Players will now be able to log back into Destiny 2. Ongoing maintenance is expected to conclude at 10 AM PST.
  • November 19 10 AM PST (1800 UTC): Destiny 2 Maintenance is expected to conclude.
HUNT OR BE HUNTED
This week, Season of the Hunt activities and story content unlocked for Season Pass owners. In order to access the Season intro mission, players should make sure to have completed the initial Forsaken and Shadowkeep story missions, which are free to all players.
Players should also make sure to have space in their quest inventory prior to interacting with Spider or the Crow in order to acquire Seasonal quests.
For more information on Season of the Hunt, please follow this link to our Season of the Hunt Guide.
ARTIFACT PICKUP
We are currently investigating an issue causing players who acquired the Seasonal Artifact before completing the full New Light Tower introduction to be blocked from progressing in the Season of the Hunt story and missions.
New Light players should be sure to complete the full Tower introduction prior to picking up the Seasonal Artifact from Zavala’s office.
We are continuing to monitor for reports of veteran players encountering this issue. If you believe you've been impacted by this issue and are not a New Light player, please report to the #Help forum.
DESTINY ADD-ONS
Players who encounter issues with their Season Pass, expansions, or Beyond Light Character Boost are encouraged to view our Purchased Destiny Add-Ons Help article for information and troubleshooting steps they can take. Click here for more information.
PC MIGRATION AND BATTLE.NET LOGIN ENDING SOON
Beginning on December 1, 2020, at 9 AM PST, logging in using Blizzard Battle.net accounts will no longer be possible on Bungie.net or the Destiny Companion app, nor will users be able to migrate their Battle.net account to Steam.
Users who only have a Battle.net account linked to their Bungie profile are strongly encouraged to either link another platform to their profile, or to perform PC migration to Steam (unless you already have a Destiny 2 Steam account). Click here for more information.
KNOWN ISSUES
While we continue investigating various known issues, here is a list of the latest issues that were reported to us in our #Help Forum:
  • We’ve identified an issue where the Vanguard strike Playlist difficulty was unintentionally set to 1100 Power.
    • We are developing a fix to reduce the Recommended Power of Vanguard strikes Playlist to 1050.
  • The Exo Stranger’s weekly challenge is mistranslated in languages other than English – players need to defeat combatants with or affected by Stasis off of Europa.
  • Sparrows on Europa are not properly despawning.
  • Meleeing as a Titan while using the Stasis subclass can result in a visual of multiple rapid punches.
  • The lift tubes in the Warden of Nothing strike can close before all fireteam members are successfully through.
  • The lift tubes in the Warden of Nothing strike fully drain Super energy.
  • The Warsat Heroic Public Event in the Mothyards of the Cosmodrome doesn’t count completions for objectives.
  • Yellow subtitles will appear as white even when the yellow option is selected.
  • The Braytech RWP Mk. II no longer appears as owned in Collections for some players.
  • High value target reward chests do not grant the proper amount of Glimmer.
  • The holograms on the Stella Incognita bond and Bond of Last Departure ornament bounce aggressively.
  • The eyes on the Phenotype Plasticity Mask no longer glow red.
  • Adored cannot be reacquired from Collections.
  • In-game PlayStation friends lists are missing large amounts of online friends.
  • Player heads may not render when inspecting players in the Tower.
  • Later Crucible rounds may display an inaccurate round timer.
  • Vest of the Great Hunt clips through the Moonfang-X7 Cloak.
  • The Titan Shiver Strike and Glacial Quake melee have inconsistent hit registration.
  • Reaching Power Level 1200 may result in a “New Adventure” popup even though Adventures are no longer available.
  • An incorrect amount of Orbs of Power may drop than what is displayed to have dropped when defeating enemies with a Masterworked weapon.
  • In Survival, players may not enter into overtime when both teams have an equal amount of lives remaining.
  • PlayStation Remote Play controls may no longer function for some players.
  • Mida Mini-Tool and Drang cannot accept ornaments for their Baroque versions.
  • Fallen Empire and Stasis Fragment quests can be purchased even with a full quest inventory.
  • Participant kill audio plays in the Crucible even when not involved in a player kill.
  • An increase in ARUGULA errors for players completing the Beyond Light campaign.
  • In the Insight Terminus strike, Kargen will continuously perform ground slams and not allow players to progress past the conflux space.
  • Combat Drill bounties say they require Clash kills, but actually requires kills in Elimination.
  • Players may be directed to reacquire the Seasonal Artifact from Zavala’s office when they already have it in their inventories.
  • The Garden of Salvation and Crown of Sorrow Warlock armor sets are not visible in Collections.
  • The Unsecured/Outcry ship has the rocket engine effects floating behind the ship model.
For a full list of emergent issues in Destiny 2, players can review our Known Issues article. Players who observe other issues should report them to our #Help forum.

Always Watching

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We’ve been spending a lot of time over the last week and a half watching players reacting to live events, expansion launches, and more. There have been a few moments where we were watching players taking advantage of some interesting bugs, too. Don’t worry, we aren’t keeping a naughty or nice list. You’re all still winners in our hearts.
Well, sort of. The actual winners for MOTW put out some fun videos that creep me the hell out. Festival of the Lost may be over, but there are still echoes of darkness reverberating through our Creations page.
Movie of the Week: Truth
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Movie of the Week: The Curse of Bad JuJu
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Movie of the Week: Risen (Warning – Strobing Lights/Imagery)
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If you’d like a chance at our new MOTW emblem, make sure to submit your content to the Creations page on Bungie.net. Tag it with #MOTW, and please credit everyone who contributed to the video in its description.

An Artistic Touch

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I will always have great appreciation for those with a green thumb, but even moreso for those with a green thumb for art. These skills are earned through hours, days, weeks, months, and years of practice… but I will always be amazed at the pieces we see shared throughout our community. This week, we have an amazing take on Beyond Light, and more.
Featured Art: Go Beyond the Light
GO BEYOND THE LIGHT! Hope you like my Beyond Light poster! ❄️👾🖌#Destiny2 #BeyondLight #destinythegame #DestinyArt #xbox #XboxSeriesX #SeriesX #PlayStation #ps5 #Halo #Commission pic.twitter.com/vz7powNNPp
— jack 🎨 (@jackdrawss) November 14, 2020
Featured Art: Immolant Pt. 2
🔥☀️ IMMOLANT PT.2 ☀️ 🔥
//In that last moment she seemed
as wholly luminescent as the Sun,
and I wished to be so brave.//#Destiny2 #destinythegame #DestinyArt pic.twitter.com/cvnrsPUXKL
— StellarStateLogic ❄️🧊🥶 { Comm.: Full 3/3 } (@PedanticAuspice) November 17, 2020
Featured Art: Europan Fireteam
ローンチおめ！(再掲) pic.twitter.com/I31Q2e3ARk
— 𝙏𝘼𝙈𝘼𝙈𝙄❄️ (@tmaaaaa3) November 11, 2020
If you have any Destiny inspired art, make sure to tag it with #DestinyArt on Twitter, Instagram, or whatever image hosting site you use! Each week, we pick a few and grant unique emblems to their creators.
I’ll admit, this TWAB has been somewhat difficult to write. Don’t get me wrong, what’s said above is incredibly important! Charity initiatives to help those in need, the upcoming raid race, new security measures, and Stasis tuning are great things to see. It’s always a fun time collaborating with the various teams of Bungie to get you a weekly dose of information.
That said, I’m just itching to get back into the game. It’s about time for me to go hunting. See you next week.
...wait, I'll more than likely see you on Saturday for a raid race. Either way, I hope you are in good health, and wish you a good weekend.
Cheers,
-dmg04
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SEO is easy. The EXACT process we use to scale our clients' SEO from 0 to 200k monthly traffic and beyond

Hey guys!
There's a TON of content out there on SEO - guides, articles, courses, videos, scams, people yelling about it on online forums, etc etc..
Most of it, however, is super impractical. If you want to start doing SEO TODAY and start getting results ASAP, you'll need to do a TON of digging to figure out what's important and what's not.
So we wanted to make everyone's lives super easy and distill our EXACT process of working w/ clients into a stupid-simple, step-by-step practical guide. And so we did. Here we are.
P.S: startups, and seo loved the guide, so I thought you guys might like it too.

A bit of backstory:

If you guys haven't seen any of my previous posts, me and my co-founder own an SEO/digital marketing agency, and we've worked w/ a ton of clients helping them go from 0 to 200k+ monthly organic traffic. We've also helped some quite big companies grow their organic traffic (from 1M to over 1.8M monthly organic), using the exact same process.
So without further ado, grab your popcorn, and be prepared to stick to the screen for a while, cause this is going to be a long post. Here's everything I am going to cover:

Step #1 - Technical Optimization and On-Page SEO

Step #1 to any SEO initiative is getting your technical SEO right.
Now, some of this is going to be a bit technical, so you might just forward this part to your tech team and just skip ahead to "Step #2 - Keyword Research."
If you DON'T have a tech team and want a super easy tl;dr, do this:
If you’re a bit more tech-savvy, though, read on!

Technical SEO Basics

Sitemap.xml file. A good sitemap shows Google how to easily navigate your website (and how to find all your content!). If your site runs on WordPress, all you have to do is install YoastSEO or Rankmath SEO, and they’ll create a sitemap for you. Otherwise, you can use an online XML Sitemap generation tool.
Proper website architecture. The crawl depth of any page should be lower than 4 (i.e: any given page should be reached with no more than 3 clicks from the homepage). To fix this, you should improve your interlinking (check Step #6 of this guide to learn more).
Serve images in next-gen format. Next-gen image formats (JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP) can be compressed a lot better than JPG or PNG images. Using WordPress? Just use Smush and it’ll do ALL the work for you. Otherwise, you can manually compress all images and re-upload them.
Remove duplicate content. Google hates duplicate content and will penalize you for it. If you have any duplicate pages, just merge them (by doing a 301 redirect) or delete one or the other.
Update your ‘robots.txt’ file. Hide the pages you don’t want Google to index (e.g: non-public, or unimportant pages). If you’re a SaaS, this would be most of your in-app pages. ]
Optimize all your pages by best practice. There’s a bunch of general best practices that Google wants you to follow for your web pages (maintain keyword density, have an adequate # of outbound links, etc.). Install YoastSEO or RankMath and use them to optimize all of your web pages.
If you DON’T have any pages that you don’t want to be displayed on Google, you DON’T need robots.txt.

Advanced Technical SEO

Now, this is where this gets a bit more web-devvy. Other than just optimizing your website for SEO, you should also focus on optimizing your website speed.
Here’s how to do that:
Both for Mobile and PC, your website should load in under 2-3 seconds. While load speed isn’t a DIRECT ranking factor, it does have a very serious impact on your rankings.
After all, if your website doesn’t load for 5 seconds, a bunch of your visitors might drop off.
So, to measure your website speed performance, you can use Pagespeed Insights. Some of the most common issues we have seen clients facing when it comes to website speed and loading time, are the following:
Want to make your life easier AND fix up all these issues and more? Use WP Rocket. The tool basically does all your optimization for you (if you’re using WordPress, of course).
Lastly, if you want to validate the website speed optimization changes you've made, or if you simply want to test how your current site is performing, you can use Google Page Speed Insights*.*
In May 2020, Google rolled out its Core Web Vitals update, which in layman terms means starting next May (2021), the three most important website load speed metrics you will need to worry for ranking will be:
  1. LCP - Largest Contentful Paint -> under 2.5s
  2. FID - First Input Delay -> under 100ms
  3. CLS - Cumulative Layout Shift -> under 0.1

Step #2 - Keyword Research

Once your website is 100% optimized, it’s time to define your SEO strategy.
The best way to get started with this is by doing keyword research.
First off, you want to create a keyword research sheet. This is going to be your main hub for all your content operations.
You can use the sheet to:
  1. Prioritize content
  2. Keep track of the publishing process
  3. Get a top-down view of your web pages
And here’s what it covers:
Now that you have your sheet (and understand how it works), let’s talk about the “how” of keyword research.

How to do Keyword Research (Step-by-Step Guide)

There are a ton of different ways to do that (check the “further readings” at the end of this section for a detailed rundown).
Our favorite method, however, is as follows…
Start off by listing out your top 5 SEO competitors.
The key here is SEO competitors - competing companies that have a strong SEO presence in the same niche.
Not sure who’s a good SEO competitor? Google the top keywords that describe your product and find your top-ranking competitors.
Run them through SEMrush (or your favorite SEO tool), and you’ll see how well, exactly, they’re doing with their SEO.
Once you have a list of 5 competitors, run each of them through “Organic Research” on SEMrush, and you'll get a complete list of all the keywords they rank on.
Now, go through these keywords one by one and extract all the relevant ones and add them to your sheet.
Once you go through the top SEO competitors, your keyword research should be around 80%+ done.
Now to put some finishing touches on your keyword research, run your top keywords through UberSuggest and let it do its magic. It's going to give you a bunch of keywords associated with the keywords you input.
Go through all the results it's going to give you, extract anything that’s relevant, and your keyword research should be 90% done.
At this point, you can call it a day and move on to the next step. Chances are, over time, you’ll uncover new keywords to add to your sheet and get you to that sweet 100%.

Step #3 - Create SEO Landing Pages

Remember how we collected a bunch of landing page keywords in step #2? Now it’s time to build the right page for each of them! This step is a lot more straightforward than you’d think. First off, you create a custom landing page based on the keyword. Depending on your niche, this can be done in 2 ways:
  1. Create a general template landing page. Pretty much copy-paste your landing page, alter the sub-headings, paraphrase it a bit, and add relevant images to the use-case. You’d go with this option if the keywords you’re targeting are very similar to your main use-case (e.g. “project management software” “project management system”).
  2. Create a unique landing page for each use-case. You should do this if each use-case is unique. For example, if your software doubles as project management software and workflow management software. In this case, you’ll need two completely new landing pages for each keyword.
Once you have a bunch of these pages ready, you should optimize them for their respective keywords.
You can do this by running the page content through an SEO tool. If you’re using WordPress, you can do this through RankMath or Yoast SEO.
Both tools will give you exact instructions on how to optimize your page for the keyword.
If you’re not using WordPress, you can use SurferSEO. Just copy-paste your web page content, and it’s going to give you instructions on how to optimize it.
Once your new landing pages are live, you need to pick where you want to place them on your website. We usually recommend adding these pages to your website’s navigation menu (header) or footer.
Finally, once you have all these new landing pages up, you might be thinking “Now what? How, and when, are these pages going to rank?”
Generally, landing pages are a tad harder to rank than content. See, with content, quality plays a huge part. Write better, longer, and more informative content than your competition, and you’re going to eventually outrank them even if they have more links.
With landing pages, things aren’t as cut and dry. More often than not, you can’t just “create a better landing page.”
What determines rankings for landing page keywords are backlinks. If your competitors have 400 links on their landing pages, while yours has 40, chances are, you’re not going to outrank them.

Step #4 - Create SEO Blog Content

Now, let’s talk about the other side of the coin: content keywords, and how to create content that ranks.
As we mentioned before, these keywords aren’t direct-intent (the Googler isn’t SPECIFICALLY looking for your product), but they can still convert pretty well. For example, if you’re a digital marketing agency, you could rank on keywords like…
After all, anyone looking to learn about lead gen techniques might also be willing to pay you to do it for them.
On top of this, blog post keywords are way easier to rank for than your landing pages - you can beat competition simply by creating significantly better content without turning it into a backlink war.In order to create good SEO content, you need to do 2 things right:
  1. Create a comprehensive content outline
  2. Get the writing part right
Here’s how each of these work...

How to Create a Content Outline for SEO

A content outline is a document that has all the info on what type of information the article should contain Usually, this includes:
Outlines are useful if you’re working with a writing team that isn’t 100% familiar with SEO, allowing them to write content that ranks without any SEO know-how.
At the same time, even if you’re the one doing the writing, an outline can help you get a top-down idea of what you should cover in the article.
So, how do you create an outline? Here’s a simplified step-by-step process…
  1. Determine the target word count. Rule of thumb: aim for 1.5x - 2x whatever your competitor wrote. You can disregard this if your competition was super comprehensive with their content, and just go for the same length instead.
  2. Create a similar header structure as your competition. Indicate for the writer which headers should be h2, which ones h3.
  3. For each header, mention what it’s about. Pro tip - you can borrow ideas from the top 5 ranking articles.
  4. For each header, explain what, exactly, should the writer mention (in simple words).
  5. Finally, do some first-hand research on Reddit and Quora. What are the questions your target audience has around your topic? What else could you add to the article that would be super valuable for your customers?

How to Write Well

There’s a lot more to good content than giving an outline to a writer. Sure, they can hit all the right points, but if the writing itself is mediocre, no one’s going to stick around to read your article.
Here are some essential tips you should keep in mind for writing content (or managing a team of writers):
  1. Write for your audience. Are you a B2B enterprise SaaS? Your blog posts should be more formal and professional. B2C, super-consumer product? Talk in a more casual, relaxed fashion. Sprinkle your content with pop culture references for bonus points!
  2. Avoid fluff. Every single sentence should have some sort of value (conveying information, cracking a joke, etc.). Avoid beating around the bush, and be as straightforward as possible.
  3. Keep your audience’s knowledge in mind. For example, if your audience is a bunch of rocket scientists, you don’t have to explain to them how 1+1=2.
  4. Create a writer guideline (or just steal ours! -> edit: sorry had to remove link due to posting guidelines)
  5. Use Grammarly and Hemingway. The first is like your personal pocket editor, and the latter helps make your content easier to read.
  6. Hire the right writers. Chances are, you’re too busy to write your own content. We usually recommend using ProBlogger or Cult of Copy Job Board (Facebook Group) to source top writing talent.

Step #5 - Start Link-Building Operations

Links are essential if you want your content or web pages to rank.
If you’re in a competitive niche, links are going to be the final deciding factor on what ranks and what doesn’t.
In the VPN niche, for example, everyone has good content. That’s just the baseline. The real competition is in the backlinks.
To better illustrate this example, if you Google “best VPN,” you’ll see that all top-ranking content pieces are almost the same thing. They’re all:
So, the determining factor is links. If you check all the top-ranking articles with the Moz Toolbar Extension, you’ll see that on average, each page has a minimum of 300 links (and some over 100,000!).
Meaning, to compete, you’ll really need to double-down on your link-building effort.
In fact, in the most competitive SEO niches, it’s not uncommon to spend $20,000 per month on link-building efforts alone.
​
Pro Tip
Got scared by the high $$$ some companies spend on link-building? Well, worry not!
Only the most ever-green niches are so competitive. Think, VPN, make money online, health and fitness, dating, CBD, gambling, etc. So you know, the usual culprits.
For most other niches, you can even rank with minimal links, as long as you have top-tier SEO content.
Now, let’s ask the million-dollar question: “how do you do link-building?”

4 Evergreen Link Building Strategies for Any Website

There are a TON of different link building strategies on the web. Broken link building, scholarship link building, stealing competitor links, and so on and so on and so on.
We’re not going to list every single link building strategy out there (mainly because Backlinko already did that in their link building guide).
What we are going to do, though, is list out some of our favorite strategies, and link you to resources where you can learn more:
  1. Broken link building. You find dead pages with a lot of backlinks, reach out to websites that linked to them, and pitch them something like “hey, you linked to this article, but it’s dead. We thought you’d want to fix that. You can use our recent article if you think it’s cool enough.”
  2. Guest posting. Probably the most popular link building strategy. Find blogs that accept guest posts, and send them a pitch! They usually let you include 1-2 do-follow links back to your website.
  3. “Linkable asset” link building. A linkable asset is a resource that is so AWESOME that you just can’t help but link to. Think, infographics, online calculators, first-hand studies or research, stuff like that. The tl;dr here is, you create an awesome resource, and promote the hell out of it on the web.
  4. Skyscraper technique. The skyscraper technique is a term coined by Backlinko. The gist of it is, you find link-worthy content on the web, create something even better, and reach out to the right people.
Most of these strategies work, and you can find a ton of resources on the web if you want to learn more.
However, if you’re looking for something a bit different, oh boy we have a treat for you! We’re going to teach you a link-building strategy that got us around:
...And so much more, all through a single blog post.

Link-Building Case Study: SaaS Marketing

“So, what’s this ancient link-building tactic?”
I hear you asking. It must be something super secretive and esoteric, right?
Secrets learned straight from the link-building monks at an ancient SEO temple…
“Right?”
Well, not quite.
The tactic isn’t something too unusual - it’s pretty famous on the web. This tactic comes in 2 steps:
  1. Figure out where your target audience hangs out (create a list of the channels)
  2. Research the type of content your audience loves
  3. Create EPIC content based on that research (give TONS of value)
  4. Promote the HELL out of it in the channels from step 1
Nothing too new, right?
Well, you’d be surprised how many people don’t use it.
Now, before you start throwing stones at us for overhyping something so simple, let’s dive into the case study:
How we PR’d the hell out of our guide to SaaS marketing (can't add a link, but it's on our blog and it's 14k words long), and got 10k+ traffic as a result.
A few months back when we launched our blog, we were deciding on what our initial content should be about.
Since we specialize in helping SaaS companies acquire new users, we decided to create a mega-authority guide to SaaS marketing (AND try to get it to rank for its respective keyword).
We went through the top-ranking content pieces, and saw that none of them was anything too impressive.
Most of them were about general startup marketing strategies - how to validate your MVP, find a product-market fit, etc.
Pretty “meh,” if you ask us. We believe that the #1 thing founders are looking for when Googling “saas marketing” are practical channels and tactics you can use to acquire new users.
So, it all started off with an idea: create a listicle of the top SaaS marketing tactics out there:
  1. How to create good content to drive users
  2. Promote your content
  3. Rank on Google
  4. Create viral infographics
  5. Create a micro-site
...and we ended up overdoing it, covering 41+ different tactics and case studies and hitting around 14k+ words.
On one hand, oops! On the other hand, we had some pretty epic content on our hands. We even added the Smart Content Filter to make the article much easier to navigate.
Once the article was up, we ran it through some of our clients, friends, and acquaintances, and received some really good feedback.
So, now we knew it was worth promoting the hell out of it.
We came up with a huge list of all online channels that would appreciate this article:
  1. entrepreneur and startups (hi guys!). The first ended up loving the post, netting us ~600 upboats and a platinum medal. The latter also ended up loving the post, but the mods decided to be assholes and remove it for being “self-promotional.” So, despite the community loving the content, it got axed by the mods. Sad. (Fun fact - this one time we tried to submit another content piece on startups with no company names, no links back to our website, or anything that can be deemed promotional. One of the mods removed it for mentioning a link to Ahrefs. Go figure!)
  2. Hacker News. Tons of founders hang out on HN, so we thought they’d appreciate anything SaaS-related. This netted us around ~200+ upvotes and some awesome feedback (thanks HN!)
  3. Submit on Growth Hackers, Indie Hackers, and all other online marketing communities. We got a bunch of love on Indie Hackers, the rest were quite inactive.
  4. Reach out to all personal connects + clients and ask for a share
  5. Run Facebook/Twitter ads. This didn’t particularly work out too well for us, so we dropped it after 1-2 weeks.
  6. Run a Quuu promotion. If you haven’t heard of Quuu, it’s a platform that matches people who want their content to be shared, with people who want their social media profiles running on 100% auto-pilot. We also got “meh” results here - tons of shares, next to no likes or link clicks.
  7. Promoted in SaaS and marketing Facebook groups. This had awesome results both in terms of traffic, as well as making new friends, AND getting new leads.
  8. Promoted in entrepreneur Slack channels. This worked OK - didn’t net us traffic, but got us some new friends.
  9. Emailed anyone we mentioned in the article and asked for a share. Since we mentioned too many high profile peeps and not enough non-celebs, this didn’t work out too well
  10. Emailed influencers that we thought would like the article / give it a share. They didn’t. We were heart-broken.
And accordingly, created a checklist + distribution sheet with all the websites or emails of people we wanted to ping.
Overall, this netted us around 12,000 page views in total, 15+ leads, 6,000 traffic in just 2 promotion days.
As for SEO results, we got a bunch of links. (I would have added screenshots to all of these results, but don't think this subreddit allows it).
A lot of these are no-follow from Reddit, HackerNews, and other submission websites, but a lot of them are also pretty authentic.
The cool part about this link-building tactic is that people link to you without even asking. You create awesome content that helps people, and you get rewarded with links, shares, and traffic!
And as for the cherry on top, only 2 months after publishing the article, it’s ranking on position #28. We’re expecting it to get to page 1 within the new few months and top 3 within the year.

Step #6 - Interlink Your Pages

One of Google's ranking factors is how long your visitors stick around on your website.
So, you need to encourage users reading ONE article, to read, well, the rest of them (or at least browse around your website). This is done through interlinking.
The idea is that each of your web pages should be linked to and from every other relevant page on your site.
Say, an article on "how to make a resume" could link to (and be linked from) "how to include contact info on a resume," "how to write a cover letter," "what's the difference between a CV and a resume," and so on.
Proper interlinking alone can have a significant impact on your website rankings. NinjaOutreach, for example, managed to improve their organic traffic by 40% through better interlinking alone.
So, how do you do interlinking “right?”
First off, make it a requirement for your writers to link to the rest of your content. Add a clause to your writer guidelines that each article should have 10+ links to your other content pieces.
More often than not, they’ll manage to get 60-70% of interlinking opportunities. To get this to 100%, we usually do bi-annual interlinking runs. Here’s how that works.
Pick an article you want to interlink. Let’s say, for example, an article on 'business process management'.
The goal here is to find as many existing articles on your blog, where ‘business process management’ is mentioned so that we can add a link to the article.
Firstly, Google the keyword ‘business process management’ by doing a Google search on your domain. You can use the following query:
site:yourwebsite.com "keyword"
In our case, that’s:
site:example.com “business process management”
You’ll get a complete list of articles that mention the keyword “business process management.
Now, all you have to do is go through each of these, and make sure that the keyword is hyperlinked to the respective article!
You should also do this for all the synonyms of the keyword for this article. For example, “BPM” is an acronym for business process management, so you’d want to link this article there too.

Step #7 - Track & Improve Your Headline CTRs

Article CTRs play a huge role in determining what ranks or not.
Let’s say your article ranks #4 with a CTR of 15%. Google benchmarks this CTR with the average CTR for the position.
If the average CTR for position #4 is 12%, Google will assume that your article, with a CTR of 15% is of high quality, and will reward you with better rankings.
On the other hand, if the average CTR is 18%, Google will assume that your article isn’t as valuable as other ranking content pieces, and will lower your ranking.
So, it’s important to keep track of your Click Through Rates for all your articles, and when you see something that’s underperforming, you can test different headlines to see if they’ll improve CTR.
Now, you’re probably wondering, how do you figure out what’s the average CTR?
Unfortunately, each search result is different, and there's no one size fits all formula for average CTR.
Over the past few years, Google has been implementing a bunch of different types of search results - featured snippet, QAs, and a lot of other types of search results.
So, depending on how many of these clutter and the search results for your given keyword, you’ll get different average CTRs by position.
Rule of thumb, you can follow these values:
Keep in mind these change a lot depending on your industry, PPC competitiveness, 0-click searches, etc...
Use a scraping tool like Screaming Frog to extract the following data from all your web pages:
Delete all the pages that aren’t meant to rank on Google. Then, head over to Google Search Console and extract the following data for all the web pages:
Add all of this data to a spreadsheet.
Now, check what your competition is doing and use that to come up with new headline ideas. Then, put them in the Title Ideas cell for the respective keyword.
For each keyword, come up with 4-5 different headlines, and implement the (seemingly) best title for each article.
Once you implement the change, insert the date on the Date Implemented column. This will help you keep track of progress.
Then, wait for around 3 - 4 weeks to see what kind of impact this change is going to have on your rankings and CTR.
If the results are not satisfactory, record the results in the respective cells, and implement another test for the following month. Make sure to update the Date Implemented column once again.

Step #8 - Keep Track of Rankings & Make Improvements On-The-Go

You’re never really “done” with SEO - you should always keep track of your rankings and see if there’s any room for improvement.
If you wait for an adequate time-frame after publishing a post (6 months to a year) and you’re still seeing next to no results, then it might be time to investigate.
Here’s what this usually looks like for us:
...And that's it.
Hope you guys had a good read and learned a thing or two :) HMU if you have any questions.
If you want to read the full version in a more reader-friendly format, you can check out our SEO process blog post here.
submitted by malchik23 to Entrepreneur [link] [comments]

I study forbidden and 'cursed' media (Part 1): Money for Nothing

Whenever anyone thinks of forbidden or ‘haunted’ media, they usually mean something like a video game that kills you, a tv commercial that creeps them out, or a movie whose production is met with misfortune at every turn. While those things certainly do exist, they overshadow bits of cursed media that I feel are more deserving of modern attention, since they act as both curiosities, and dangers. While we do have some that could be quantified as ‘supernatural’, a lot of it is fairly mundane-- like what I’m covering today.
Money for Nothing was a stunt-based game show that was intended to air in 1999; however, in the middle of filming the fourth of five episodes, the host (Who I’ll just call [Host]; I won’t name her, but she was a fairly prominent actress at the time) walked off the set, threatening to terminate her contract with the network if they ever tried to get her to appear on another program like it.
Officially, all tapes of the show were destroyed by order of the studio; however, in the course of my study, I have seen part of the first episode, the majority of the second, a series of stills from the third, and the final shots of the fourth episode that caused [Host] to walk off the set.
Up until November of last year, the fifth and final episode was thought to be completely lost.
The objective of Money for Nothing was simple, and summed up in its tag line: “Do you have what it takes… to do NOTHING?”. From what I’ve been able to research, it was based off of the principle of the ‘Quiet Game’, the ever-iconic pastime of harried mothers on road trips everywhere: how long can you go without doing anything? Adding to this was an element of chicken-- the first one to do something loses.
The set of Money for Nothing is a bizarre hybrid of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? with its moody lighting, darkness, and amphitheatre-like setup, and Double Dare, featuring several areas of modular (possibly retractable) flooring which could be used to set up the various equipment used in the stunts. From what I’ve been able to determine, the floor was fairly large-- over 600 square feet, with a very high ceiling in the studio. With some creative set design it could be used for conceivably anything.
As you may be able to guess from what I’ve said so far, Money for Nothing was a very strange show. Challenges consisted of trying to stay as still as possible while everything went wrong around you-- For instance, the surviving footage of episode 1 featured the segment ‘Stopping Cart’, where the contestants sat in the basket of standard supermarket shopping carts and rolled down a ramp that gradually got steeper, until it ended in a large pile of padded material. One of the contestants bailed from their cart less than halfway down the slope, losing the challenge. In documents related to the show, challenges like these were termed “Chicken Challenges”.
Other than Chicken Challenges, we had what was meant to be the main draw of the show: what these documents called the “Skin Crawling Challenges”. Here, contestants were expected to sit perfectly still and make as little noise as possible while various unpleasant things happened to them. Episode 2 featured three different Skin Crawling Challenges: the first one, “Hammock Panic'', featured a contestant laying in a hammock within a small wind tunnel, attempting to not fall out of it while moving as little as possible. Secondly, there was ‘Oh, Honey!’, where [Host] would drizzle honey on the contestant while buzzing sounds played, mimicking a swarm of bees; this seemed at least somewhat pleasant, due to the fact that the honey was clearly very warm if it could be drizzled so easily. Lastly, during the championship round, was the game ‘Arach your Brain’, where a contestant had their head placed in a box full of wolf spiders, which are harmless to humans-- terrifying, but harmless.
The three stills I have of Episode 3 are almost entirely unenlightening; when I got the first one, I swore the set was on fire, due to the sheer amount of smoke or gas in the frame. Upon further inspection, I saw three contestants sitting in lawn chairs, casually reading through magazines, while [Host] stood by in a prop gas mask. The second still almost looks like it’s from the set of The Wicker Man, with two contestants hanging upside-down from wooden scaffolding, clearly trying not to laugh from the headrush.
The last still from Episode 3 was likely not intended for broadcast; it shows one of the producers (who shall go unnamed) getting into an argument with a man who appears to be a crew member; both of them are covered in some form of white foamy fluid. An occupied stretcher is seen in the background. Since I first saw this photograph back in 2017, I wondered what was happening with it.
In November of last year, I started to get answers. A friend of mine got me into contact with one of the producers of Money for Nothing, and while he’s technically under an NDA, he’s breaking it for the sole reason that “You’re a bunch of nutjobs and nobody would believe you anyway”. Harsh, but fair.
The producer, who I’ll call [Riley], talked to me over a Zoom call from L.A. After I introduced myself, I asked him about the picture with the stretcher. He shrugs. “The challenge called for the contestant to hold a lit candle on their head. But they sneezed, and… look, they made it out alive.”
“So the white stuff is fire retardant? From an extinguisher?”
“Exactly.”
“There’s a lot for it for someone setting themselves on fire.”
“I never said they set themselves on fire.”
With that question filed away, I presented him what I had of Episode 4-- he asked how I got it, which was a fair question, considering the fact that the Network itself had lost the recording some time in 2001 or 2002.
There were three cameras that captured the last moments of [Host]’s tenure on Money for Nothing, and in summer of last year, I had tapes from two of them; the person who had the last tape was well known among our community of researchers, but refused to part with it for any amount of money. He was a massive fan of [Host], ran a fangroup for her on UseNet all the way back in the day, named his cat after her most well-known character-- and he has a restraining order from her framed on the wall in his ‘office’.
Now, I have to admit something. In the field of research I carry out, there tend to be more B&E’s than Ph. D’s. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and find something on eBay or at an estate sale or in a library, where you can essentially scoop it up and research it at will; this wasn’t one of those cases. I wanted to see what was on that tape, so…
My original plan was to break into the house and copy the tape with some equipment I had-- something a friend of mine frankensteined out of a tape player and one of my old laptops. It’s meant to convert tapes to a digital format quickly enough that you can be in and out in five minutes, ten tops. It’s portable, if not particularly light, and you don’t really leave any evidence.
So, when he left for work, I waited ten minutes, then went through the back door. From there, I made my way to his office on the second floor-- in addition to the restraining order (which he had posted on Facebook as a point of pride) he had posters, action figures, photos [Host] did from Playboy, and a signed photograph of him and [Host], where she is clearly screaming on the inside. He wasn’t cliche enough of a stalker to have a carefully curated shrine; it was all on a series of bookshelves. And on one of them, sandwiched between several volumes of TV shows [Host] had been in, was a single black plastic tape case, with the words ‘$.F.N. 1999 Last Apperance[sic]” written on it.
Only one problem: the case it was in was too small to be a VHS tape. I realized that I was dealing with a Betamax tape. I had a VHS-to-Digital setup, and Betamax-to-Digital conversion required an entire room’s worth of specialized equipment-- equipment that I had access to through the research group, granted, but I was going to have to physically take the tape out of the house.
That was the first snag I ran into. The second was physical; I felt it catch on something as I tried to pull the case off the shelf, and heard something go click. There was a cable tied to the Betamax case, into some mechanism behind the bookshelf that I didn’t see, but I knew that if I pulled the case off the shelf completely, something bad would happen, and I didn’t see if there was a way to deactivate it; judging by the fact that I hadn’t seen a Betamax player anywhere in the house, he probably didn’t actually watch it. He’d set this up specifically to get someone who was after this tape.
So, keeping the case perfectly still on the shelf, I took out my box cutter and began the arduous process of dissecting the case. This case was made of a solid, if cheap, plastic, and it was more likely to shatter and leave plastic shards than it was to just cut; I couldn’t risk that. I’d given the owner a fake name and was wearing gloves, so if he didn’t know the tape was gone for at least a week, I could make myself scarce. But if he found a shard of the black plastic I was trying to saw my way through… well, the good news is that we have a couple of lawyers in the community.
After ten minutes, I managed to get through the seam linking the front cover of the tape and the spine. I dug my fingers into the sharp plastic, and began peeling it off-- and was immediately met by a strange sight. The tape was in there, all right, but immediately in front of it was a plastic bag filled with some sort of liquid. There was a bare wire inside of the liquid, a battery on the inside of the front cover, and I could smell alcohol-- a booby trap to destroy the tape? Why go through all that trouble? And why keep a Betamax tape if you didn’t even have a Betamax player?
My heart stopped as I heard a car pull up outside; he wasn’t supposed to be back from work for another six hours. The tripwire must have been some kind of alarm system, maybe set up to send a text to him if it was tripped. I pulled aside the makeshift firebomb, prayed I wouldn’t set anything off, and grabbed the tape, intact. A door downstairs slammed open, and I heard him enter the house, heading straight for the room I was in.
I knocked the bookshelf down so it landed in front of the door, and dashed across the office to a window. It was on the second floor, but outside of it was a bare trellis that had to have come with the house, as the rest of the garden was equally dead. It made for a good ladder.
I was about halfway down when I heard the door burst open, despite the bookshelf in front of it. I thought for sure that he was going to come to the window and start either throwing things down at me or shooting at me, but instead I heard him fall to the floor and start crying, saying that something was ‘ruined’ and that he could ‘never fix it’.
I didn’t stay for long after that. I ran out of his backyard and to my car parked three blocks away. Didn’t see any police presence until I was at a diner about two miles away from his house, on IRC with my friend who has the Betamax-to-Digital setup.
-------
“Hell of a story,” [Riley] admitted once I got done telling it. “Been over twenty years since I saw this. Let’s see if it’s as fucked as I remember.”
Episode 4 is… uncomfortable to sit through. Thanks to the tape I procured, what we have of Episode 4 consists of fifteen minutes of footage-- three of [Host], talking with the crew to the incident, seven with her actually presenting the stunt, and five minutes of the aftermath.
The stunt that caused [Host] to walk off the show was called ‘Raindrops on Noses’. It was the only stunt on the show that used restraints; I’ve yet to find any documentation pertaining as to why, but the contestants were strapped into a set of reclining chairs. Above their heads, a prop in the shape of a large raincloud would drip water onto their faces, drop by drop. The chairs had buttons on them that would release the restraints and light up a sign indicating they forfeited.
The first three minutes of the tape consist of [Host] having a conversation with one of the producers; it’s indistinct, and the words ‘disgruntled employee’, ‘fired’, and ‘call security’ can be made out.. [Host] looks exasperated, like she clearly doesn’t want to be here; she’s rubbing her hands together when she clearly just wants to wipe all of her makeup onto her shirt and start screaming. It’s something you see a lot of when you study media like this; when they think the cameras aren’t rolling, people become giant balls of stress. Part of me thinks that they were trying to record a blooper reel, considering that she drops her American accent at one point and says something along the lines of ‘buncha horseshite’.
Then, the lights come back up. There are cheers from the audience as the host escorts the two contestants-- who I’ll call [Carter] and [Etta]-- to the chairs. She explains the challenge to them, and the mechanics of it, demonstrating the button they need to push to be released from the restraints. Then, when she’s sure the contestants are in the positions, she says “Are you ready to Earn… MONEY FOR NOTHING?”. The audience cheers, and the challenge starts.
There’s a lot of droning, moody music here. Upon five different viewings, I think that it’s just to cover up the snoring of the audience.
“The show was bullshit,” [Riley] admits, lighting up a cigarette. “Nobody wanted to watch people just sit around and do nothing. The shopping cart ride was an example of a good stunt-- people were expected to just sit around and not bail out, kind of a weird expression of machismo. But this rain challenge? We were having people sit and watch contestants get wet for three to six minutes.” He rubs his face. “One of the production assistants, he came to us with an idea-- make the droplets fall randomly. He read somewhere that it can drive people mad.”
“...isn’t that basically Chinese Water torture?”
“I didn’t know that until later but… yeah.”
Since this episode was never aired, all the sound here is diegetic and unedited; the video was cobbled together by my friend from three different tapes. While the motion of these cameras tries to convey some kind of grand event, it’s clear that this should not have been on television in the first place; the first time I saw this, I was nearly falling asleep.
The challenge should have ended quickly-- [Carter] starts tapping at his release button while the [Host] is in the middle of commentating and cheering them on. His restraints don’t open-- bear in mind that this is the same chair [Host] had pressed the release on two minutes earlier to demonstrate its mechanism. The alarm to show that he’s forfeited doesn’t even light up. He keeps pressing it, and [Host] doesn’t seem to notice.
[Etta] takes a bit longer to crack; at the five-minute mark, she presses her button, and it works. As [Host] gets up to thank her for playing and congratulate [Carter], she notices something is wrong with him. The camera closest to him zooms in on his hand. It's been trying to press the button for the last three minutes; the plastic on the button is broken, and there are several cuts on his hand from him desperately trying to press at the shards that remain. He’s clearly sobbing and writhing in his restraints, saying ‘Please, please, oh god please, let me out please, let me out, let me out’. There appears to be smoke coming from his forehead, and I hear a sizzling sound, before the camera cuts.
The only camera to remain un-cut is the one positioned where [Host] would be sitting. [Etta] is pulled out of her chair and taken off-stage. The audience looked on, confused, some wondering if they should call 9-1-1. The audio feed is overtaken by [Carter]’s sobbing as he begs to be let out of the chair. A member of the crew yells to get the water shut off, and eventually resorts to breaking the apparatus dispensing it.
[Carter] is cut free of his restraints and layed on the ground. He is crying. [Host], showing some modicum of tact, goes directly in front of the camera, where she has an argument with her producer, again dropping her accent. Despite the hushed voices, the audio is fairly clear; a transcript is below, with “H” for [Host]t and “P” for the producer.
H: Are you fucking insane?
P: Look, this show is fucking boring. It was a bad idea to begin with, but something like this could get us into syndication. We just needed to bring a little more excitement--
H: Excitement? If people want excitement, they can watch me poke through someone’s guts on Sunday night. What-- what just happened here is fucking torture! I won’t have it! The gas was bad enough, but this?!
P: Look, it was a mistake. We’ll scrap this episode, give them both compensation. They signed waivers--
H: Fuck you. I’m calling my agent. Anyone who wants me to stay here can kiss my--
At this point, a member of the crew enters the shot and shuts off the camera.
“What’s this about the gas?”
[Riley] shakes his head. “The guy in the chair was part of a stunt earlier in the program where he sat in a room full of smoke. It wasn’t even smoke, it was a stupid fog machine. He had some residue on him, but… I’ve never seen it react like that with water.”
“And… it was water in there?”
“...maybe. The cloud prop-- literally just a showerhead-- vanished before we could get the police to look at it.”
It’s here that I started asking about Episode 5.
“So, after [Host] walked off the set… we still had a contract with the network to fulfill. They asked for five episodes, and if their Queen of the Small Screen wanted off the show, they weren't going to say ‘no’.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “So, I make a few phone calls. My dad worked on [Sitcom] in the 80’s, you ever heard of it?”
“Yeah.” [Sitcom] isn’t the actual title, obviously, but ‘cursed sitcoms’ are a specialty of one of my friends. I might ask her if she has any ideas for a post like this.
“We managed to get [Actress]. She played the mom on the show, but was almost entirely forgotten by ‘99. She got to relaunch her career, we got a new host. Win-Win.” He chews his lip. “It… it’ll be easier to show you what happened than tell you.”
My eyes go wide. “You have footage?”
“Kinda. It’s only one angle of the set, and a wide one at that. But… it captures most of the action." He sighed. “Your email is XXXXX@gmail?”
“Yeah.”
Ten minutes later, I’m watching the clip. It’s six minutes long, and most of the dialog is indistinct. And… look, in the course of my research, I’ve seen stuff that makes ‘National Anthem’ from Black Mirror look like Peppa Pig. And I need to say that this… this was rough.
The last recorded challenge of Money for Nothing begins with the contestant being placed into a clear, plexiglass box. He stands completely still as [Actress] walks around him; I can make out the words ‘little furry friends’ and ‘maybe you’ll come out the big cheese!’. Then, she looks out at the audience, and says “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the [inaudible]ack!”
The floor around the man opens up, and a swarm of what I assume are brown rats comes flowing out, gathering around his feet. Credit where it’s due, he stands completely still-- for a while, anyway. Once they start clawing at his clothing, he gets shaky, and by the time one climbs onto his chest, he collapses-- fainted, by the look of his body language.
I hear a tone over the audio; the Zoom call has been continuing this whole time, and [Riley] must see my confusion. “Get to the rats?”
I pause the playback. “Yeah. What’s that sound?”
“It was meant to be a rodent deterrent. Something to make them go back below the stage once the stunt was done. It was never tested. Just…” He looks like he’s turning green. “Keep watching.”
I unpause the video. The tone plays, but the rats remain in the box, crawling over the body of the fallen man. [Actress] is looking at the producers in confusion, and gets up to approach the box. She recoils as the tone sounds again, and I see it-- the rats are swarming over where the man fell. I know where this is going.
There’s panic in the audience. Staff is starting to have them evacuate. [Actress] tries opening up the box, but is stopped by someone on the set-- they get into a fight, with her gesticulating at the swarm of rats. The bottom of the box begins to fill with a visible layer of red liquid. Someone come over with a fire extinguisher to try to break open the glass; [Actress] tries to stop them, but it’s too late.
The box doesn’t shatter as much as it tips; apparently it was never well-secured to begin with. Rats and blood flow out from beneath the box as it falls over, and everyone who hasn’t already evacuated the set does so. The rats abandon a bloody mass that I’m thankful I don’t get to see clearly-- there doesn’t seem to be much skin left, and barely any muscle. All there is are bloody bones covered in the barest fibers of flesh.
“Fucking god.” I swallow.
“It gets worse,” Riley assures me. “Keep watching.”
So, I do. Two minutes after everyone leaves. a figure emerges from the audience section, dropping down opposite the camera. They’re hard to make out, even though the entire set is lit from below; they don’t seem to have any distinct features, barring what seems to be a white T-Shirt with what looks like a broad “V” on it.
Then, the lights go out entirely, leaving the set in darkness.
“What the hell?”
“Rat chewed through a cable. Keep watching.”
I do. I hear footsteps approach the camera. The emergency lights show a shadowy form come up to the camera; his body obscures the lens. He picks up the apparatus and wheels it over what I assume is the center of the room, aiming the lens downwards. This whole time, I’m expecting his face to pop into frame, but instead I hear footsteps walking away.
I check the timestamp; there are maybe ten minutes left in the recording. I only have to wait for five of them, though. I hear voices and see the beams of flashlights briefly illuminate the… the…
When they’re scavenging a corpse, animals normally go for the softest parts of the body first-- the eyes, the lips, the ears. So no, I can’t explain why the head of the contestant that the rats had eaten was untouched. I can’t explain why his eyes seemed to open in response to the flashlights. And I hope to god that his mouth wasn’t actually opening to call for help when I shut off the recording.
I close the window and begin saving the file to a thumb drive. “What the fuck was that?”
“That’s what the LAPD has been trying to figure out for over twenty years.” [Riley] lights another cigarette. “We’re fairly confident someone sabotaged the production, between the incident with the Raindrops stunt, and this one, which… god, I think they called it ‘Rat Pack’.” He shakes his head. “Production was scrapped, tapes were burned, and any props that weren’t essential to the investigation were mothballed or destroyed. That footage you saw is supposed to exist only in evidence lockup, and nowhere else.”
“How’d you get it?”
“It’s Hollywood. Do the math.”
The video finishes saving. I delete the email off of my computer. “Were there any other acts of sabotage at the studio around this time?”
“Surge of crank calls made to [Crime Show] right after this happened. Beyond that, nothing.”
“What about at other studios?”
“Wouldn’t know.” He blows on the cigarette. “Would you?”
I frown. “I’ll have to look into it. Now, how much do I owe y--”
He shakes his head. “Kid. I’m loaded. I could pay for my grandkids’ dog’s retirement. I just… needed to get this off my chest.” He’s pensive for a moment. “There is one thing.”
“What?”
“You do this all the time, basically? Look up creepy media, TV shows and that?”
“I mean, I have a job, but yeah...”
“If you ever find anything related to a show or movie that involves an actress named ‘Zelda Plunick’, you call me.”
WIth that, he terminated the call. I haven’t been in contact with him since; despite searching with the help of other people involved in the forbidden media crowd, the name ‘Zelda Plunick’(sp?) hasn’t come up yet.
------
The deaths and injuries caused by Money for Nothing seem to have largely been swept under the rug. [Carter], the contestant from Episode 4, declined a request for an interview, as did all other living contestants I could find, and I’m not about to bug [Host] or [Actress].
The video of Episode 5 has been analyzed by some other people in my community-- they’ve tried fiddling with the colors on the video, but that can only do so much. We’ve determined that the figure is tall, but not anomalously so; maybe 6’4”, and is likely male.
Like [Riley] said, he did break an NDA on this. He’s apparently wealthy enough to settle out-of-court, and I’ve heard nothing from entertainment news about a big honking lawsuit, so I’m assuming he’s going to be fine up until the second I post this.
I normally keep this kind of analysis and history to our own little group. But something happened a few days back that got me spooked enough that I decided to post this out into the broader world.
The USB drive I had the video stored on went missing around the start of the year; it was already uploaded to others in the channel, so I didn’t really need to keep it. But I came home two days ago, and found it sitting on the desk where I do the majority of my work.
In addition to the audio file, there was a photograph on it. A man in my room, standing in front of my webcam, his head out of frame. He is wearing a white T-Shirt with what I now recognize as a set of TV ‘bunny ear’ antennas on the front-- the same shirt that was in the recording from Episode 5 of Money for Nothing.
-------
That’s all I have for today. Should this not get taken down by whatever NDA the Network suits have on [Riley], I’ll be back with a first-hand experience-- my time watching one of the great lost gimmick films of the 1960s, Laurence Forrest’s The Maddening Quiet.
submitted by CursedMediaStudent to nosleep [link] [comments]

Never. Ruin. Your. Sister's. Prom. Dress.

Disclaimer: Its not my story, its a friend's. I dont condone it either, so please don't shoot the messenger. I make no claims of nobility in her actions, nor do I defend them.
So this takes place when I was 16, wide-eyed, full of wonder and (much to a lot of judges displeasures) unable to be tried as an adult. I had myself a big brother we'll call Elio. And like many big brothers at the time, he was coming to terms with his flowering sexuality (among other things that went shooting up from otherwise flat surfaces whenever Robin appeared onscreen in Batman Forever). He did his best to keep it a secret, plastering playboy centerfolds over his Ariana Grande posters, and stoically sitting through the game with my dad during superbowl parties (albeit through gritted teeth probably wishing he could watch a Britney Spears music video instead). But much like a Nintendo switch under the tree on Christmas Eve you can't keep something this major under wraps for long where nosy kids are involved. The nosy kid in this case being me.
Like many twinks who came before him upon discovering an alternative lifestyle from the rigid confines of toxic heterosexual masculinity, Elio took it upon himself to explore his feminine side with all the zeal and passion of a prophet with a message. (Mount Hira in this scenario being a nightclub bathroom while the Angel Jibril was a 6'6 YMCA trainer who spelled his name Johnni with an i). Ironically this eagerness to play up the girly shtick was how he came to succumb to the worst sin you can commit as a brother- stealing your sister's clothes. (A message to all the gay men reading this. Her wardrobe is not your experimental laboratory, and you ain't Dr. Frankenstein).
Now in my defense if Elio had the decency to just ask me to borrow my stuff, under the guise of shopping for some made up girlfriend with the same shoe size/colors/height as myself, I'd have happily obliged. Heck, if he had just offered himself up as a sacrificial lamb modeling for my startup "clothing line" (sixteen year old me considered herself a fashionista with a penchant for designing outfits and recycling her wardrobe to bring them to life) id have been all to eager to be his guide into the world of women's fashion. But the two-faced bastard opted to sneak into my closet and try on my stuff without permission. He thought he was being slick putting them back when he was done, but I was a petite womens zero and he was a mens medium. Now had he simply owned up to being incompatible with my measurements and admitted his crime to me the first time, I might have restrained from the retribution I'd go onto unleash. But instead he continued to indulge in his deluded fantasy that we were the same size and for weeks, I'd try on my clothes only to find them grotesquely stretched out of shape, with no explanation. I tried hiding my clothes in parts of the closet i didn't think the thief would check, only for him to find them. I began sleeping with my favorite clothes like a stuffed animal, but even my embrace couldn't protect them from being warped beyond wearability. I started hiding my junior prom dress under the bed. At one point I was lowkey starting to consider the possibility that I was beginning to shrink. And had I not come home early from a cancelled SAT prep session one afternoon (my tutor got wind of a family emergency halfway through), this story might have otherwise ended with me in a straight jacked begging some burned out shrink to save me before I went microscopic. But fate had other plans. I made a beeline for my room to find sounds coming from behind the door. Upon realizing that I was bearing witness to the dastardly clothing deformer, I hid in the bathroom in the corridor and peeked through a crack in the door for the culprit to leave my room. Imagine my shock when I discovered it was Elio. To my horror, I watched him go under my bed to place something there and upon his departure my worst fears were confirmed- he had tried on my beloved prom dress! (Earlier in the week I had bragged to him about the lengths I had gone to hide it from the "closet ghost" thinking it would go through one ear and out the other with him, and just wanting an excuse to flex on how smart I was to take extra precautions). I storm in, demanding to know why he was wearing my clothes. He condescendingly tells me that he looks better in them than I do.
I was heartbroken to find that the zipper had broken and the fit was horribly mangled! I went down in tears begging for my mom to tell me it could be salvaged, only for her to tell me what I prayed she wouldnt). She wasn't particularly sympathetic, thinking i had done the damage myself, and refused to buy me another one. I demanded that Elio pay me back for the dress so I could buy another but he gave me less than half of what it cost. He refused to believe that it cost more than what I said it did, and unfortunately, my mom didn't have the receipt to prove it on account of being a bit scatterbrained when It comes to keeping track of payments. When I threatened to tell her that he was the one who ruined the dress, he laughed and said they'd never believe me. In spite of my rage and fury sending me into a frenzy of hysterics, I still knew he was right (the two faced bastard deserved an Oscar for his straight facade and even if he was prancing around in a rainbow unitard singing born this way by Lady Gaga, my folks were the type who would deny his gayness right up until the moment they came home to find him getting jackhammered on the kitchen table by a Puerto Rican bodybuilder). I realized that if I wanted to get even, I needed my own plan or action. And that was to hit him where it hurt. But where exactly is the weak spot on your brother when his standard boy ones have long since gone numb from an overuse of fleshlights, and his rectal cavity as a storage unit? The answers lay in his phone.
After several weeks of casually walking behind the couch every time Elio whipped out his phone on it, I finally figured out his phone pin. He always locked his room, but thanks to some youtube tutorials on how to pick a basic door lock with a Bobby pin, that problem quickly resolved itself. Every time Elio went to shower, I'd sneak in and hack his phone, giving myself a fifteen minute crash course on all things valued by ur typical bottom. It turns out he fancied himself the next biggest thing in the drag scene. He was using my outfits to cement his status as "the rising star of the social media drag scene". I thought about deleting his account but I didn't want him suspecting me of it and tattling to my folks. Besides, he could always just create a new one and start over again.
He liked drag race, Kpop and iced coffee, but i couldn't exactly ruin his chances of getting on the show, and in the digital age, he had no cds to smash or switch out. Of course there was always the option of spiking his coffee with something nasty but I wanted him to feel the pain I did. And that pain simply wasn't comparable to a wasted $5.99 plus tax. I was about to concede defeat after about 2 weeks of trying to find something, when I discovered he downloaded grindr.
After my initial revulsion to the app (no not because of I was a homophobe. But because his profile and was full of his nudes) Regardless of what he was into, I didn't find my brothers ding dong appealing. I doubt any sister does). Elio wasn't really into hookups, but apparently he did like sending nudes to whoever asked for them. Its important to note that he always blurred or blacked out his face for privacy, and he appeared to color in the background of all his pictures with the image editing on his phone post production, and he always kept his location on "Never". I suddenly understood why he had taken to hogging the bathroom for up to 20 minutes over the weekend. I just assumed that he was just paying the price for going to Chipotle every Friday with friends but now I knew. He was basically trying to find the best angles for his customers. And just like that I finally had a plan.
What I did next was not something Im proud of but I was bitter, hurting, and desperate for payback. Not making excuses just telling it like it is. I downloaded grindr onto my own phone, and created a fake account. I used some stock photo of a six pack for my profile and punched in a bunch of fake info including a spoof GPS location (shoutout to the internet for walking me through the process!). I knew it would really make a difference to my brother. He didn't really seem to care who was getting his naughty pics so much as how "cute" he looked in them. The boy fancied himself a bit of a male model and I guess he decided grindr was the best place to get a feel for the industry.
Anyways, over the course of several weeks I became one of his regulars, routinely asking him for pics (all of which I promptly deleted upon receiving). I messaged him so frequently and stroked his ego the way I knew he liked it to be stroked (I had gone through enough of the chats backed up on his phone to know what kind of compliments made him more likely to keep sending stuff instead of just getting bored and blocking someone after the second or third time he sent them pics, before moving on to someone else). I boiled what made him tick down to a science and it wasnt long before I had him eating out of the palm of my hand). Eventually I had earned a spot in his heart as one of his "exclusives". At my suggestion, we'd start having "sessions" where we'd schedule times for him to "flood my basement", sending me caches of pics he'd taken over the course of the week while I would live chat my reaction as to the effect they had on me. It was gross and I always felt nauseous afterwards, but I wasn't going to let squeamish scruples stand between my revenge. Not after how far I'd come.
The next phase of my plan involved my search on pornhub for a pornstar who sounded similar to my dad, with a nice loud "battle cry" (do you guys see where this is going? If you want to back out now, no one will blame you) who was typically paired up with pillow princesses with considerably softer Eventually after several fruitless searches ending with me crying in a fetal position asking myself how much longer I could keep this up, and if it was worth it followed by the world's most twisted pep talk about how "I was a fighter who could do it" (basically think that scene from Joker where Arthur puts on his clown makeup crying and you've got something of an allegory for my struggle), I finally found a guy who sounded similar enough to my dad. I downloaded several videos featuring him roughhousing with some anorexic twenty somethings onto my laptop, strung them together with some crude online video editing app, converted it to audio, and separated my leading man's climactic hollers from the soft whimpers. I saved the file on my computer under the codename "Brand new Take on Oedipus".
Last but not least, I approach my dad under the guise of needing his help for a school project, while my brother is off with his friends. I tell him I'm acting out a one woman play for my drama midterm and I need him to be the voice of my protagonist's off screen father. I ask him to recite a series of lines for me to record on my phone, all the while encouraging him to "say them naturally". These lines include but aren't limited to "I told you not to disturb me. What is it?" "Is everything alright?", "now isn't a good time to talk", and most importantly "I finished my work so I think I'll head out to join the rest of the family at the movie theatre. See you later". I move the audio files onto my laptop and eagerly anticipate approaching the turning point of my master plan.
One Saturday morning, I had arranged for a "session" in which my folks would be out of the house and I'd be with them. Or so Elio thought. You see, my mom, dad, and younger brother were all going to the park near my house on a typical family outing. We'd go to the park, then take a walk around the local lake, and maybe catch a movie if we felt like it. We usually go around 4-5 ish and come back at night. I know that today will be a movie day because my baby brother has been nagging my folks to go see some kids movie for a while (which he learned was out this weekend courtesy of yours truly ;) Before I left the house, I made sure my bedroom door was wide open (important for later). While at the park, I asked to play on my dads phone, citing a low battery on mine to explain why I couldn't use it. Then I sent Elio a text telling him that "dad" had just recieved a call from his boss telling him he had some extra work he needed to finish. "I" was going to be in my office across the hall from his room, and could not under any circumstance be disturbed as I had a lot of stuff to do and very little time to finish it before the deadline. I waited to make sure he had read the text and sent me a thumbs up emoji in response before I told my folks that I wanted to head back home on account of me getting an early visit from the "lady in red". Not one to stand between a lass and her time of the month, my dad let me go home.
Feeling like a ninja, I returned to the house, all the while sending Elio my reactions to what we'll call his "cute little peach" (we had technically already started the "session" fifteen minutes ago). I crept into the house, snuck into my room on tiptoes. Thanks to my open door, I didn't have to worry about Elio hearing the creak of it from inside his room (they were next to each other), praying he didn't come out for any reason in time to find me, I retrieved my laptop and the Bluetooth speaker I used to listen to music in the shower, and tiptoed into my dads office, now making sure to close the door and lock it with enough force for him to hear from inside his room where I knew he was sending me the pics. I then send Elio a text apologizing for "being stuck doing something stupid. But now you've got my undivided attention baby". Now its time for the grand finale (in more ways than one). First I connect my currently muted laptop to my Bluetooth speaker (which I've put at maximum volume in advance). Then, I open the Oedipus file and start to run it, while I text more and more raunchy and unhinged reactions to the incoming pictures. Just as we're approaching the end of the video containing the loudest yell (I saved the best for last), I text Elio that he's "making me cum so hard like the little slut he is" just in time to turn up the volume to the loudest setting on my laptop, riiiight before the tarzan like whoop of passion I know is around the corner.
The scream played loudly enough to break the sound barrier. Calling it merely loud was the understatement of the century. It was enough so for me to have to cover my own ears despite putting on earplugs in advance. I wouldn't have been surprised if the neighbors heard. I wouldn't be surprised if people in Siberia heard. But one thing was certain. There was no way my brother didn't. I shut off the Oedipus file, lower the volume, and keep my finger on the recordings of my dads voice.
At first nothing happens. All is silent not unlike the universe before the big bang. The mounting tension would have been enough to send me into a heart attack had I implemented this scheme in my 50s. It takes every ounce of my will not to scream from the suspense. The agony is pure torture. I feel paralyzed in anticipation but I force myself to turn my attention to the grindr chat... I will myself to repeatedly punch in questions asking why Elio stopped sending pics all of a sudden, while keeping my ears alert for any hint of a noise from beyond the door. Time crawls to a standstill. Then.... just when I begin to wonder if the lack of results stems from me losing my grip on reality from the stress of waiting.... I hear the creak of a door turning on its hinges. The sound is faint enough to make me question its existence. By now I'm almost painfully adjusted to the waiting period. Enough to the point where part of me almost wants to deny hearing it out of fear of whether or not I'll react subtley enough not to blow my cover if its real.... but it can't possibly have been real... and then I hear something else. Footsteos across the room.. Its soft, timid and hesitant, but very much present.... knock knock knock. I take a deep breath and prepare to play one of the tapes. The following conversation ensues: Elio- Elio on the other side of the door Dad- Dad's prerecorded voice
Elio: Dad... are you in there? Dad: I told you not to disturb me. What is it? Elio: ... How long have you been in there? Dad: I've been in here for a while. Elio: I um... I heard a scream. Is everything ok? Dad: Oh yeah... I screamed because I dropped something on my foot. (I specifically encouraged my dad to say this line like he was hiding something). I'm ok now though. Don't worry about me. Elio:.... Ok... if you say so... Dad: I love you Elio: Yeah me too I guess?
I hear Elio go back into his room and within seconds I hear a notification for the grindr chat. He apologizes for the delay and like the putty in my hands I know he is, says exactly what I was banking on him to. Elio: You're not gonna believe this but my dad is in the next room and I heard him screaming at the same time you told me you were cumming lol.
And now commences what I believe the French refer to as the pies de resistance. I leave him on read and tiptoe downstairs with my apparatus while he waits for a response. Quiet. As. A. Mouse. Then I set up my laptop and speaker for one last audio blast. I put on my shoes and chill out for a few minutes watching his texts get more and more hysterical, begging me to respond with "lol thats so wierd" and to assure him it was all a coincidence. A merciful sister would have realized that avenging her dress shouldn't come at the cost of her brothers peace of mind, and come clean about the prank. I sent the following text to him. "Elio we are never going to speak of this. Not to your mom, not to your siblings, not to me. If you attempt to bring it up, you will no longer be allowed to stay in this house. We are going to put this incident behind us and go about as if nothing happened. I want you to delete your account on this website and every single picture that you posted on it. If you know what's good for you, never go back on the app again while living under my roof"
Then I blocked him before the final phase of my plan. From downstairs, I blast up both volume settings and fire up the last line I asked my dad to record; "I finished my work so I think I'll head out to join the rest of the family at the movie theatre. See you later". This time I hear Elio respond "Wait, what?" From upstairs, I can hear him coming down. Now its time to kick it into high gear. I shove my laptop and speaker under into a cabinet under the sink, jam my feet into my shoes, and sneak out through the back door and hide behind the shed.
After a few hours, my folks appear in the driveway and I rush out to welcome them back and come inside, as though I was with them the whole time. His relationship with my dad was never quite the same afterwards and many a night for years to come i overheard father bemoan his nonexistent relationship with his little slugger. Elio ended up moving out less than a year after the prom dress incident. He finally came out via a Facebook post a week after settling in to his new apartment. He blocked my parents on every social media platform and went completely NC. Any attempts on my dads part to reignite their father son bond was met with cold apathy and indifference when Elio wasn't flat out refusing to talk to him. For years the only time they ever met in person was at extended family get togethers. I felt a bit bad for my dad but it worked out in the end. Elios determination to distance himself from my dad resulted in him growing closer to me as a result. I think he didn't want to risk losing his other kids the way he did his oldest.
In all honesty, I'd have been happy to let Elio fester in guilt and shame for the rest of his life (we were never really close growing up and the prom dress incident was nothing more than the tiniest of tips on the largest of icebergs). But over the years our relationship slowly mended and perhaps it could have evolved into something that roughly resembled a healthy sibling relationship had he not tried to take over my wedding planning and revealed his own plans to get a free engagement ceremony/coming out party by hijacking my reception with a proposal to his then boyfriend. I tried to reason with him but his unyielding stubbornness forced me to pull the uno reverse card I hoped I'd never have to use. I sent him a text revealing that all this time dad had no idea he was gay, and that I was the one talking to him on grindr. I concluded my message with a warning if he showed up, I'd have security escort him out and afterwards I'd tell the whole family that he sexted his sister in high school and I had the nudes to prove it (I never kept any but he didn't know that) . He might have been able to reveal i was a liar had he not deleted his old grindr from back then. I then blocked him on all platforms before he had a chance to reply. He didn't come to the wedding, I never saw him again, and my quality of life greatly improved as a result of his absence in it.
TLDR: my closeted brother secretly starts wearing my clothes in order to boost his presence as a social media drag personality. He ruins my prom dress as a result and refuses to pay me back for it when confronted. I catfish him on grindr and trick him into believing he was sending nudes to my dad. His relationship with my family falls apart after I threaten him to never speak of what happened. I let him boil alive for years with what he thinks is his scandalous little secret, until i get engaged, and he tries to take over my wedding and use it to propose to his boyfriend. I reveal to him that I was the one pretending to be our dad all those years ago then threaten to show his boyfriend and the rest of my family all the nudes he sent me and accuse him of being an incestuous perv if he comes to the ceremony, before I block him
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What do you think of this article by David French?

Hello people of Christianity!
I am a lurker and am curious what the people of Christianity feel about this article by David French. French himself is a devout Christian but has some criticism for the Christian activists who participated in the insurrection the other day. The Dispatch is paywalled so I can provide the content down all the way at the bottom. His basic thesis is that there was a fundamentalist Christian element among the people that stormed the capitol that should call for a reckoning among prominent Christian activists today. It of course goes without saying that Christianity as it is practiced is very diverse, and this event should not be seen as denigrating the idea of Christianity itself, but a discussion can be had about the way it is practiced/preached among Americans in the present.
Though I myself am not a devout Christian (I hope I am not breaking the sub's rules by posting), I am subscribed because I want to become more sensitive about Christian's concerns, especially in regards to US politics. Am curious what the people here think about French's framing here. I think one of the more empowering messages here for christians is this part from French (my emphasis added):
And the rebuttal has to come from within. The New York Times isn’t going to break this fever. Vox won’t change many right-wing minds. But courageous Christians who love Christ and His church have a chance.
There is also this report by Vice that discusses how some younger activists in the Christian Evangelical community have a different vision for where they want to see their movement go, though admittedly this report is two years old. Am curious to see if there is an emerging generational divide in all of this as well.
Edit: formatting
His post on the Dispatch :
I’m going to be honest. I can’t shake the sadness. I can’t shake the anger. We have to be clear about what happened in Washington D.C. on January 6th. A violent Christian insurrection invaded and occupied the Capitol.
Why do I say this was a Christian insurrection? Because so very many of the protesters told us they were Christian, as loudly and clearly as they could. The Atlantic’s invaluable religion reporter, Emma Green, compiled considerable evidence of the Christian presence in her excellent report. I saw much of it with my own eyes. There was a giant wooden cross outside the Capitol. “Jesus saves” signs and other Christian signs were sprinkled through the crowd. I watched a man carry a Christian flag into an evacuated legislative chamber.\
I could go on and on. My colleague Audrey Fahlberg was present at the riot, and she told me that Christian music was blaring from the loudspeakers late in the afternoon of the takeover. And don’t forget, this attack occurred days after the so-called Jericho March, an event explicitly filled with Christian-nationalist rhetoric so unhinged that I warned on December 13 that it embodied “a form of fanaticism that can lead to deadly violence.”
Are you still not convinced that it’s fair to call this a Christian insurrection? I would bet that most of my readers would instantly label the exact same event Islamic terrorism if Islamic symbols filled the crowd, if Islamic music played in the loudspeakers, and if members of the crowd shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they charged the Capitol.
If that happened conservative Christians would erupt in volcanic anger. We’d turn to the Muslim community and cry out, “Do something about this!” How do I know we’d respond in that manner? Because that’s what we’ve done, year after year, before and after 9/11. And while there were many times when Christians painted the Muslim world with an overly-broad bigoted brush, it is true that violent insurrections do not spring forth from healthy communities.
That’s true abroad, and it’s true at home. During this summer’s riots, I wrote multiple posts detailing the extraordinary difficulty in quelling urban unrest once violence starts. Sometimes the unhealthy community is suffering from the effects of systemic injustice. Sometimes it’s dominated by outrageous and unreasonable grievances. Sometimes it’s infested with unhealthy fears and grotesque ambitions. Often there’s a combination of all these factors in play. But the violence always has a cause.
This is the time when some readers will respond, “Now’s your chance, David, tell the world the legitimate grievances of the Christian church! Tell the left why people are so angry!” No. Sorry.
Think of it like this. Riots weren’t justified when police knelt on a man’s neck while his life drained away in Minneapolis. Riots weren’t justified when police killed an innocent woman in a botched, reckless raid in Louisville. Riots weren’t justified when a black man was executed in broad daylight by wannabe vigilantes in Georgia.
If that’s true (and it is), then don’t think for one second it’s appropriate for Christians to air their grievances when the right-wing Christian riot was motivated by terrible lies. If a riot isn’t justified when agents of the state actually kill innocent black men and women, it really isn’t justified when you falsely believe wild election conspiracy theories or when you falsely believe a cabal of cannibal pedophiles control Washington and Hollywood.
Marching for a lie is bad enough. Rioting for a lie is an atrocity
So the answer is simple, right? Law enforcement should arrest the perpetrators, victims of conspiracies should sue for slander, and Christian leaders should endeavor to aggressively confront conspiracies and condemn violence. Then we can heal.
Well, no. I’m afraid our challenge is much more difficult. Have you spent any time in conversation with those who fully believe the stolen election narratives, or with people who are committed to QAnon or Q-like conspiracies? It’s a terrible persuasive challenge. Your very resistance to their delusion is evidence of your corruption.
The problem is that all too many Christians are in the grips of two sets of lies. We’ll call them the enabling lies and the activating lies. And unless you deal with the enabling lies, the activating lies will constantly pollute the body politic and continue to spawn violent unrest.
What’s the difference between the two kinds of lies? The enabling lie is the lie that makes you fertile ground for the activating lie that actually motivates a person to charge a thin blue line at the Capitol or take a rifle to a pizza parlor.
Here’s an enabling lie: America will end if Trump loses. That was the essence of the Flight 93 essay in 2016. That was the core of Eric Metaxas’s argument in our debates this spring and fall.
Here’s another enabling lie: The fate of the church is at stake if Joe Biden wins.
And here’s yet another: The left hates you (this sentence sometimes concludes with the phrase “and wants you dead.”)
I could go on, but the enabling lies that have rocketed through the church for years share important characteristics. They not only dramatically exaggerate the stakes of our political and legal disputes, they dramatically exaggerate the perfidy of your opponents. Moreover, when the stakes are deemed to be that high, the moral limitations on your response start to fall away.
After all, when people believe our national destiny hangs in the balance, they often respond accordingly. Or, as I said in a December 4 newsletter warning about potential violence, “if you argue that the very existence of the country is at stake, don’t be surprised if people start to act as if the very existence of the country is at stake.”
Why do so many people fall for these enabling lies? In my book, which warns Americans that our divisions are so great that they could fracture the nation, I noted that catastrophic partisan narratives are often supported by actual events (such as a violent incident or an act of unlawful censorship). These facts, however, are then wrongly used to make sweeping conclusions about tens of millions of ideological opponents.
The fact that a Bernie Sanders supporter tried to execute multiple GOP congressmen at a baseball field does not prove the sweeping statement that “the left hates you” or that it “wants you dead.” Do you think, for example, the Christian attack on the Capitol is now proof that your average Baptist is willing to kill to keep Trump in power? No. It is not.
We are, however, constantly in the business of taking exceptional behavior from our political opponents and trying to argue that the exceptional is emblematic. It proves what “they” are “really like.” It’s an extremely comfortable mode of thinking. It repeatedly reinforces our priors.
It’s also lucrative and beneficial for a certain class of pundit, activist, and politician. There are two classes of people who are most pernicious—the actual liars and their timid allies. The actual liar is the person who’s constantly, intentionally whipping up his or her audience for personal gain. He relentlessly escalates the rhetoric even when he knows he’s spreading or enabling falsehoods. Donald Trump is the archetype of the actual liar.
If you want to know why so many Republicans are now furious at Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz after the Capitol attack? Because they know that both Hawley and Cruz have no excuse for pressing the election objection. They know that Hawley’s raised fist to the crowd before the attack was self-aggrandizing and provocative.
But the actual liars would flounder if not for their timid conservative allies. Here’s a quick way to identify the timid. Pull up a public voice on Twitter, on Facebook, or on their publication’s web archive. If it is exclusively or nearly-exclusively dominated by anti-left content, then they’re not telling you the whole truth. They may not defend misconduct on the right (so their conscience is somewhat clear), but they won’t call it out either. After all, there are libs to own.
Oh, and here’s one more tell that someone’s a liar or a timid ally: if they tell you that critics of Trump dislike him simply because of “mean tweets” or “bad manners” or “sharp elbows.” After all that’s transpired, it’s hard to believe they speak in good faith.
I get why people are timid. I get why even those who are deeply troubled by Trump still focus their fire on the other tribe. Telling the truth to your own tribe can be personally devastating and even physically dangerous. After all, if your friends and neighbors believe one of the enabling lies, then you’re a traitor. You become a threat to the nation or the church.
My friend Russell Moore stated the problem well in a powerful essay for The Gospel Coalition:
"I cannot tell you how many people will say one thing in private, and something completely different in public. I am not referring to prudence in not airing everything publicly that is meant to be private. I mean instead saying the exact opposite in public what they will say in private.
Why?
For some people, it’s what C. S. Lewis warned us about—the desire for the “Inner Ring.” But for many more people it’s the fear of mobs. People are not afraid of mobs overrunning their houses the way they have overrun the Capitol. But they are fearful of dealing with those who do believe in these endless conspiracy theories or who make distinctions between sheep and goats not on the basis of theology, or even political ideology, but in levels of enthusiasm for personalities associated with such ideologies. Many are just exhausted, knowing that every word from their mouth will lead to psychological warfare."
But if you train your fire exclusively (or nearly exclusively) on the left or on those terrible Never-Trump traitors you’re safe. Then you’re a hero. Then you’re bold. And when you get blowback from your enemy, it’s only proof of your courage.
And so the enabling lies spread. They poison hearts. They poison minds. They fill you with rage and hate, until along comes the activating lie, the dangerous falsehood that pushes a person towards true radicalism. How does a person come to the conclusion that cannibal pedophiles dominate Hollywood? Or that a vast conspiracy of politicians, lawyers, journalists, and tech executives (including conservative politicians, lawyers, and journalists) brazenly stole a presidential election?
You believe that when you know your enemy is evil. You believe that when you know they will destroy the country. In that context, fact-checks and rebuttals aren’t just wrong, they’re naïve. All too often, when you’re arguing with the person who believes the activating lie—the falsehood that immediately motivated them to take to the street—then you’ve already lost.
If the church plays whack-a-mole against Q and Stop the Steal while it tolerates and spreads enabling lies, expect to see the insurrection continue. Expect to see it grow. After all, “they” hate us. “They” will destroy the country. “They” will stop at nothing to see the church fall.
Rebutting enabling lies does not mean whitewashing the opposition. It does not mean surrendering your values or failing to resist destructive ideas. It does mean discerning the difference between a problem and a crisis, between an aberration and an example. And it means possessing the humility to admit when you’re wrong. It means understanding that no emergency is ever too great to stop loving your enemies and blessing those who persecute you.
And the rebuttal has to come from within. The New York Times isn’t going to break this fever. Vox won’t change many right-wing minds. But courageous Christians who love Christ and His church have a chance.
We have to lead with honesty and understanding. When you’re in your partisan bubble, the enabling lie is seductive. I’ve fallen for it. In years past, I even spread it. I’ll close with these words from an essay I wrote in response to 2019’s attacks on so-called “David Frenchism.”
Many years ago, before I deployed to an actual war, I gave a speech at a conservative gathering in which I actually said these words: “I believe the two greatest threats to the United States are university leftists at home and jihadists abroad.” Looking back, I’m ashamed I said it. It was fundamentally wrong, as I quickly learned during my deployment. In the course of almost a year in Diyala Province, Iraq, I saw the most dreadful things, sights that haunt me today. Eastern Diyala under al-Qaeda’s thumb was one of the deadliest places on Earth. And as much as I disagree with university radicals, I lived a happy life in law school in deep-blue Cambridge, Mass. My son was born in deep-blue Ithaca, N.Y. I served as president of FIRE while living comfortably on the outskirts of Philadelphia’s so-called “gayborhood.”
My political opponents are my fellow citizens. When I wore the uniform of my country, I was willing to die for them. Why would I think I’m at war with them now? I disagree with the Left and much of the populist Right, vigorously. If and when any of my political opponents seek to undermine our fundamental freedoms, I’ll be there to pick a legal, political, and cultural fight with them. I won’t yield. I won’t stop. I won’t be weak. But I also won’t turn my back on the truths of scripture. I won’t stop seeking justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly. There is no political “emergency” that justifies abandoning classical liberalism, and there will never be a temporal emergency that justifies rejecting the eternal truth.
It took a war abroad for me to absorb this perspective and imprint it into my heart. And as a deeply flawed man, I often fail to live up to the pledge above. But I see things more clearly now, and I’m honestly ashamed that I didn’t see things more clearly before. I hope and pray it doesn’t take a war at home for Christians to gain the eyes to see and ears to hear the truths that rebut our enabling lies.
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/r/QOTSA Official Band of the Week 40: THE BEATLES, PART TWO

Welcome back! And welcome, everyone, to the 40th Official Band of the Week post! If this were a wedding anniversary, the traditional gift would be Ruby. As you and I are not married, and this is 40 weeks and not 40 years, I will instead content myself with fond memories of Pokemon Ruby.
My first advice for you as a reader this week would be to go back to read the Part One post. This write up continues where that one left off.
To recap: John Lennon had a shitty upbringing with bad parents and tragedy all around, and turned to music to cope. He started a band called The Quarrymen. Paul McCartney and George Harrison joined that band. Lennon’s friend Stuart Sutcliffe also joined but found it to be too much work and quit. Pete Best thought it was awesome and was happy to join.
Best, Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison cut their teeth playing nightly gigs in Hamburg and then later in Liverpool. The band, now called The Beatles, got tons of buzz, got a manager, got a record deal, and went into the studio. They fired the handsome Best and replaced him with this thing.
Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr proceeded to record seven hit albums and make some teen movies and became the biggest band in the world. Bigger, you might say, than a particular religious deity.
As we leave behind the month of Banuary and now enter Bebruary, our focus on bands with the letter B continues.
Thanks for sticking around! It is time for Part Two of THE BEATLES.
About Them
With Revolver, The Beatles had set a high-water mark in their recording careers. Many critics consider it to be the best album they would ever release.
How do you follow that up?
By doing something completely different.
The vast majority of Rock music, from the 1950’s to the present day, has been released on an album. These albums are typically between 40-80 minutes in length and contain a 7 or more songs. Fall below 40 minutes and 7 songs and you are in EP range; go above 80 minutes and you go into Double LP range. Most recordings lie somewhere in between.
The standard for songs was to put the best or most catchy ones as the first one or two tracks on either side, and to bury the rest of the tunes later on the record. This was in part because the popular songs would then be easier to play right at the start, and in part because the audio quality (particularly the bass) tended to deteriorate the closer you got to the middle of the vinyl album. So LP records ended up being some good songs with filler.
And most of these albums are just gatherings of songs -- basically, whatever ideas the band had for songs, all thrown together, and then pressed into vinyl (or released on Bandcamp or to Spotify or on 8-track or cassette...you get the idea). There is a whole long history of this separate from the current narrative, but suffice it to say that the album is to music what the book is to publishing: the accepted and standard form. To stretch this further, the album was like a collection of short stories, each one distinct and different from the rest. This really is still the case today. We live in a world dominated by the single track, with most of us picking and choosing our playlists of individual songs rather than playing through an entire album.
I’m sure you can see where this is going.
The boys thought and thought and wondered how to follow up Revolver. What followed shook the recording world to its core, and in particular sent other artists into a spiral.
The concept album.
What if the entire album was thematically linked, and there were no throwaway tracks? What if each song was like a movement in a symphony? What if each track was not a separate short story but a chapter in a larger novel?
And so, in 1967, we get to the absolutely groundbreaking album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Sure, there are some that might argue that The Beach Boys album Pet Sounds did it first. However, Brian Wilson famously had a nervous breakdown when he heard Strawberry Fields Forever, a song that was cut from Sgt. Pepper’s. He reportedly pulled over in his car, burst into tears and said, “They got there first”. So it is kinda tough to argue that The Beach Boys were the pioneers here when their own leader says they weren’t. And yes, you could argue that Frank Sinatra had done this before, as had Bing Crosby, and Nat “King” Cole, and a number of Country artists. Hell, a broad definition of what a concept album could be might even include a Christmas album.
But The Beatles did it with Rock and Roll.
Whole books have been written about Sgt. Pepper’s. There are conspiracy theories about the photos on the cover, which contributed to the long standing tinfoil hat wearing idea that Paul McCartney had died and was replaced by a lookalike. The cover of the album is a who’s who of important people in the 60’s.
The album revolves around the story of the fictional titular band and their experiences. From the very first tuning sounds that open the album to the haunting chord that ends A Day In The Life, it was unlike anything that had come before. So many innovative things happened on this record that they are tough to list. It was widely considered to be the soundtrack of The Summer of Love. It used orchestral music. It was mixed with multiple takes and sound effects. There were various musical styles, sometimes within the same song. It elevated Rock music to an art form.
Oh, and if the drug use was not open enough, it also had the song Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.
The tour for Revolver had been disastrous. There were death threats in Japan, hate from Imelda Marcos fans in the Philippines, and John Lennon had shot his mouth off and was caught on a microphone saying that The Beatles were “more popular than Jesus”. He also met and started hanging out with a woman named Yoko Ono.
That one did not sit well with fans in the Bible Belt, and led to riots and record burning. The Jesus comment, not the Yoko thing.
So when the band spent months in the studio, expectations for Sgt. Pepper’s were high. Some wanted the band to succeed and others were (quite literally) praying for them to fail.
As it turns out Jesus is also a Beatles fan. Allegedly. Not sure if he was a Yoko fan though.
Sgt. Pepper’s won multiple Grammy awards, went to number one everywhere, and remains a cultural landmark in recording. Its influence cannot be overstated. Our very own QotSA famously did their own concept album in Songs For the Deaf, following the groundbreaking trail The Beatles had blazed.
The most interesting thing that happened, though, was that The Beatles flat out stopped touring. They just did not do it. They wanted to make music, and they wanted to do it in the studio. The Revolver tour was so terrible that they did not want a repeat of it, and the work on Sgt. Pepper’s was so amazing that they wanted to spend more time recording.
Just by way of comparison, Sgt. Pepper’s took The Beatles over 700 hours to record. Compare this with their first album - Please Please Me - which they reeled off in 13 hours.
Since the band refused to tour, the studio wanted to find a way to still milk that cash cow keep The Beatles relevant in popular culture. Immediately after their landmark concept album, they conceived of a made for TV movie. This would be called the Magical Mystery Tour.
It was awful.
Today, we mostly know the name from the song. The BBC TV movie was a series of vignettes and short sketches loosely connected about a group of people on a ‘mystery tour’ - essentially a bus trip where the destinations are a surprise. In this story, the tour members meet a group of ‘magicians’ (our heroes) who take the tour members on weird adventures.
There is a coordinated attack on a stuffed cow. There is an incomprehensible Drill Sergeant. There is a spaghetti incident. People watch strippers. The guests walk on tables. There was a sequence where the band were selling ice cream and lollipops. A man chases women around a pool. There was even footage from Dr. Strangelove for a flying sequence. Nothing made sense, and the public reaction was a resounding thumbs down.
You know how when you are high or drunk, certain things make total sense? Like, it was totally a good idea to call your ex and try to get back together? Magical Mystery Tour was like that. It made sense to the band when they made it, but when they saw the final product it was utter trash…just like my ex. After it aired McCartney went on TV to make a public apology for it. In fact, the reception was so poor that no one even bothered to keep the original negatives of the film.
The only good thing to come out the film was the EP of the same name, which had the title track and The Fool on the Hill and Hello Goodbye and the monster single All You Need is Love. That last song was actually released as part of a live TV event in the summer of 1967 and was absolutely huge for the band. It didn’t appear in the TV show but it was added to the soundtrack for later releases.
But what was on the album and on the TV show was the completely fucked up and drug induced track I Am the Walrus.
The track is a complete and utter drug trip, written by John under the influence of LSD. The Beatles were just trying to show that they could write absolutely anything and make it popular. Seriously, a Walrus? Egg men? Corn flake sitting? Lewis Carrol references? Lennon deliberately wrote the lyrics to confound and confuse scholars who were trying to analyze the band’s work. After he completed it he famously quipped, “Let the fuckers work that one out.”
And the drugs don't stop there. Just listen to Blue Jay Way, Flying, and the ever insane Strawberry Field Forever. If you’ve somehow never heard any of these, you’re in for a wild ride.
Yet all the same, contemporary critics were not impressed with the album. The TV film was a mess, and even though history has vindicated the soundtrack, it was largely panned at the time as well, due to how much critics hated the film.
Instead of doing something more in line with their fun and fluffy previous movies, the band doubled down on the drugs with Yellow Submarine. But in a kid-friendly kind of way. Sort of.
This animated film is set in Pepperland, which is a beautiful, peaceful and idyllic country that (clearly) needed to increase their military spending.
Pepperland is immediately overrun by the armies of The Blue Meanies, led by Venuz B Meanie, known as ‘His Blueness’ and his fierce weapon, the Dreadful Flying Glove.
Yeah, you read that right.
What is even weirder for you right now is that while this movie plot doesn’t make a lot of sense, it is way easier to follow than the lyrics in I am the Walrus, so you are just letting it go.
Basically, the film revolves around the journey of Young Fred, the last free person in Pepperland, to find and recruit The Beatles to journey back to Pepperland to help overthrow the Blue Meanies. This is accomplished, and the Meanies are then assimilated into Pepperland culture. In this process multiple Beatles songs, old and new, are worked into the script and performed. The band only appear at the end of the movie in a short live action sequence. The voices of their animated counterparts were provided by actors.
While the animation in the film looks rudimentary and was immediately out of date (for reference, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and Scooby-Doo look more realistic and have better movement), the film was whimsical and fun and wayyyyyyy better than Magical Mystery Tour. In fact, the movie has had a lasting impact and continues to resonate today. If you don’t believe me, consider this: in Avengers: Endgame, Iron Man calls Nebula a Blue Meanie. Which is actually accurate, all things considered.
The soundtrack of the movie - including the new tracks All Together Now, Hey Bulldog, and Only a Northern Song - was released as the band’s tenth album. Also included on this release (since it was also in the movie) were Yellow Submarine (duh) and All You Need is Love (again). The flip side of the vinyl was all the orchestral numbers from the film. This became their tenth studio album, and was (essentially) a record to satisfy the studio rather than a true new effort.
If you are a Beatles nerd, you’ll notice that I have not yet mentioned their ninth album, and just referred to their tenth.
This is because it took a while to actually animate Yellow Submarine (though it in part looks like it was drawn by some talented 11 year olds as a school project). The live action bit at the end of the movie was recorded before the band famously went on a retreat to India and then went on to record The Beatles (which most people call the White Album ).
So after a disastrous Magical Mystery Tour and leaving the animators to spend almost a year completing Yellow Submarine, The Beatles decided that they wanted to go on a vacation.
Doesn’t a vacation sound nice? Remember when we could actually go and visit other exotic locations?
This vacation was not just to be a chance for the band to decompress - it was for them to go and take a three month course in guided meditation led by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, India. The goal was to seek out Eastern wisdom and a new outlook on life. It was a deliberate attempt to achieve enlightenment and inner peace.
Have you ever gone on vacation with friends from work?
It rarely goes well. You learn a lot about your friends that you probably did not ever want to know, and they see you at your worst. Like, too much information kinda stuff.
This trip was worse than that.
To be fair, the upside of this trip to India was a prolific explosion of songwriting. The downside was the trip itself was a complete shit show, and the Maharishi totally hit on a number of the wives and girlfriends of the band. Ringo tapped out before two weeks had gone by. McCartney lasted a month, and Lennon and Harrison made it two months before they also quit.
The fact that they all went there together but left separately was a real indicator of not only how bad the retreat went, but of how the band members were growing apart. There had been some foreshadowing of this. When Pete Best was the most popular Beatle, he was turfed by the other three. Lennon especially had been jealous of Best’s growing fame in the group he had founded. If one takes a look at the Lennon/McCartney songwriting partnership, it is clear that the early Beatles records were dominated by Lennon. But McCartney’s incredible talent as a songwriter - as evidenced by Yesterday and Eleanor Rigby - was quickly growing to eclipse Lennon’s own. Many music critics have stated that the early Beatles were about Lennon, but the second half of their catalogue are about McCartney.
This was a huge problem for Lennon.
Plus Lennon was now dating Yoko Ono.
Ono was almost 10 years older than Lennon, and became the missing mother figure in his life.
Lennon had met Cynthia Powell at the Liverpool College of Art and had married her in 1962 when she got pregnant. His son Julian was born in 1963 and because The Beatles were touring, he did not see him for three days. Powell’s marriage to Lennon was kept secret so that Lennon could still attract young female fans. It is a matter of record that Lennon beat Cynthia. Remembering this behavior, Lennon said: “I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically - any woman. I was a hitter.” After coming home from a holiday, she found Lennon and Ono together in her home wearing bathrobes. Her marriage was over.
Lennon was barely involved in raising Julian, and remained distant and absent in his upbringing. Julian Lennon famously grew closer to Paul McCartney than to his own father. The elder Lennon spent years in the 1970’s focusing on his relationship with Ono and his other son rather than with Julian. In his will, John Lennon left his first born son almost nothing.
The other Beatles - especially McCartney - did not approve of Lennon’s behavior with his wife and son. This contributed to their dislike of Ono.
Ono was an avant garde artist in her own right, and had met Lennon at an art show in 1966. She had been married twice before she met Lennon. According to accounts, when they met, she had no idea who he was. But she soon learned he was a millionaire musician and wanted to sell him her art. She continued to reach out to him and Lennon grew more and more intrigued by her.
So there were deep divides in the band when they recorded the White Album, and those divides turned up in the music.
Conceived as a counterpart and opposite pole to Sgt. Pepper’s, The Beatles was a double album without any unifying theme. Sgt. Pepper’s had one central concept and an incredibly busy cover; The Beatles was a disparate and fractured double-LP with absolutely zero cover art. One album inspired Weezer and Metallica; the other did not.
Many of the songs on the White Album had been conceived and written in India. The tensions that had surfaced in India continued into the studio. For the first time, legendary producer George Martin grew so frustrated with the band during the recording sessions that he left and took a vacation. Ringo Starr flat out quit the band for two weeks during these sessions before the other members asked him back, leading McCartney to do the drumming on Back in the U.S.S.R and Dear Prudence. Lennon refused to collaborate with McCartney on songwriting at all, calling efforts like Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da “granny music shit”. Lennon also brought Ono to the recording sessions, which ticked everyone else off.
The band had started their own corporations and label - Apple - and the White Album was released on that new label. But instead of the album being a unified effort, it really ended up being a set of quasi-solo projects. The band members described the recording process as difficult and fractious, and the songs themselves were George with the Beatles, John with the Beatles, Paul with the Beatles. Also, Ringo was (sometimes) there.
Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s may be their best albums, but The Beatles undoubtedly had some of their greatest songs. And it was clear that the best songs on the album were almost all McCartney songs. Back in the U.S.S.R, Blackbird, Helter Skelter, Why Don’t We Do It in the Road? and Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da were all immediately successful. Contrast these with Lennon’s efforts of Julia, Dear Prudence, Glass Onion, Sexy Sadie and Revolution. Only the latter song became a bona fide hit. Harrison even had a better song in While My Guitar Gently Weeps on the album than any of Lennon’s efforts.
But the best song that came out of these sessions, and maybe the greatest Beatles song of all time, did not even make the album. Released as a non-album single to promote Apple records in 1968, Hey Jude is perhaps the definitive Beatles song and, like Yesterday before it, is clearly a Paul McCartney tune. Even if you are not a fan of them you know this song. I honestly defy you to not sing along with the outro. The band themselves knew immediately how great it was, and released it with Revolution as a B-Side. Only Lennon dissented with that plan (which was not a shocker).
Hey Jude was an international number one hit. In a time of war and turmoil, it was interpreted as a plea for kindness and positivity. But the truth was that it was McCartney’s heartfelt message to young Julian Lennon - who would have been five years old at the time - about how, despite the fact that his father had ignored him, things would get better. And while that may not have ended up being strictly true for young Jude Julian, the message of hope struck a chord with audiences everywhere.
In an effort to try to mend some of the cracks in the band, Paul McCartney conceived of a film and album idea to capture some of the creative process. For the first time, the band entered the studio without producer George Martin, and turned to producer Phil Spector for the project. McCartney had wanted the band to tour again, but he was alone in this. He instead thought up the idea of filming the recording sessions and a live concert and putting it all together as a movie with a soundtrack. The working title of this project was Get Back. The band wrote a song of the same name to go with it. A photo shoot was done to mirror the cover of Please Please Me, and to show the change over time in the band while at the same time getting back to their roots. They brought in camera crews to document the process.
The band did their final public performance on January 30, 1969 on the roof of the studio, which was captured on film. But behind the scenes things completely fell apart and the band lapsed into angry lethargy. Harrison and Lennon allegedly got into a fistfight during the sessions. While a bunch of songs were recorded, the album and film project was left unfinished.
After this failure to produce an album, the band recognized that they needed George Martin to unify them. Martin agreed to produce another album with The Beatles provided that the band - and especially John Lennon - would do exactly what he told them to do, and be disciplined and professional.
The Beatles agreed.
The result was the album Abbey Road which, for some reason, has been canonically called their Gayest Album. I am really not sure why I am including this information but seeing as I saw this in my research, you now have to as well.
The cover of Abbey Road has the iconic photo of the four members of the band crossing the street. The photo has become a cultural touchstone and the site of it is now a common fan destination, with people going with friends to recreate the shot. It also reinforced the urban myth that Paul McCartney had died and was replaced by an imposter. Some interpreted the picture as Lennon, in white, being a Christ-like figure leading the others, with Ringo, in black, being an undertaker, followed by McCartney, barefoot, as a corpse, and Harrison, in denim, as the gravedigger.
To me, that seems like both a huge stretch and that someone had a ton of extra time on their hands to conceive of this kind of nonsense.
But others would point out that McCartney had a cigarette in his right hand - and he was left handed. They also said that the license plate of the car behind him, which read ‘28IF’, meant that McCartney would have been 28 if he had lived.
Again, a huge stretch. But this urban myth not only sold a lot of tinfoil, it contributed to the sales of the album. With tracks like Come Together, Something, Octopus’ Garden, Carry That Weight and Here Comes the Sun, it is loaded with Beatles classics. It even had an upbeat tune about a serial killer in Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. The 2nd half medley, capped off with The End, is a beautiful finale. But the cracks in the relationships were all still there. Lennon tried to insist that all of the songs that he had written on Abbey Road be on one side, almost as a Lennon EP. Martin refused. Lennon dismissed and derided McCartney’s work on the album.
Abbey Road would be the last time the Beatles would record together. In fact, six days before the album was released, Lennon formally quit the group. The Beatles were over. McCartney publicly declared that the band were no more in April of 1970.
The movie footage from Get Back and the songs recorded for it were the only unreleased material that the band had left. Phil Spector mixed and remixed the album a number of times before it was finally released, along with the film, under the name Let it Be. Even though people knew the band had broken up and were done, this was their swan song.
Released in May of 1970, it was not without controversy. Phil Spector added banter and chatter captured in the recording process, as well as orchestral parts and overdubs to a number of songs - most notably The Long and Winding Road. These additions did not sit well with McCartney. And while the album would win an Academy Award for the Best Original Score, McCartney would eventually release a revised version of the album called Let it Be...Naked with Spector’s additions removed. Two of Us and Across the Universe and Get Back and the (now) title track of Let it Be are Beatles classics that may have been born out of conflict, but are amazing songs nonetheless.
After the breakup of The Beatles, each of the members went on to have continued success in music. Harrison released solo albums, did a famous international concert for Bangladesh, personally funded and supported the Monty Python movie Life of Brian, formed and toured with The Traveling Wilburys, and survived being stabbed with a kitchen knife by a deranged fan in 1999. He died of cancer in 2001. He was 58.
John Lennon did much in his time after the Beatles. He and Yoko Ono would be married in 1969. They famously held peace protests and Bagisms and Bed-ins in support of anti-war efforts. His first solo song was Give Peace a Chance, which has become an anti-war anthem. Ono and Lennon had one son, Sean Lennon, in 1975. Lennon had a successful solo career and moved to New York City. He remained largely estranged from Paul McCartney for the rest of his life. He was murdered in New York in 1980, which created an outpouring of international grief.
Ringo Starr released a number of albums on his own in the 1970’s. His music was most notably done in collaborative efforts with other artists, including Quincy Jones, Maurice Gibb, Elton John and Marc Bolan. He even collaborated with Lennon and Ono’s Plastic Ono Band. After Lennon’s death, he collaborated with Harrison on All Those Years Ago as a tribute to Lennon. Through the 1990’s and into the 2000’s he toured with his All-Starr Band, a supergroup which at times included Tom Petty, Joe Walsh, and Jeff Lynne. He would play originals, Beatles tunes, and songs by other band members. He was knighted by Prince William in 2018. He is still alive today..
Immediately after The Beatles, Paul McCartney founded the band Wings, which became one of the most successful bands of the 1970’s, with seven platinum albums. With songs like Maybe I’m Amazed and Jet and Live and Let Die and Helen Wheels, he continued to top the charts for decades. His tours would include Beatles tunes as well as the new material, satisfying both sides of his fan base. He has collaborated with artists ranging from Dave Grohl to Michael Jackson. He was knighted in 1997 by Queen Elizabeth. He has an asteroid named after him. The guy is, to this day, a living music legend.
And he played a private concert for Josh.
Look, The Beatles are quite simply an amazing band that have influenced everyone. If you haven’t heard of them, I envy you - because you have so much to discover.
Enjoy!
Links to QOTSA
Check out the deep respect that Josh Homme has for George Harrison in this video where he is given the opportunity to play Harrison’s guitar. It is moving.
Josh Homme and Sir Paul McCartney both worked on the Dave Grohl project Sound City.
Apparently, McCartney was almost a member of Them Crooked Vultures - but learned from Dave Grohl that John Paul Jones already had the gig.
McCartney also went out of his way to play a show out in the desert for Josh and 300 fans. Imagine Sir Paul McCartney performing a show just for you. That is just amazing.
Their Music
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
With A Little Help From My Friends
A Day In The Life
Strawberry Fields Forever
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
Magical Mystery Tour
I Am The Walrus
All You Need Is Love
All Together Now
Back In The U.S.S.R.
Blackbird
Helter Skelter
Revolution
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Hey Jude
Get Back
Come Together
Maxwell’s Silver Hammer
The Long And Winding Road
Two Of Us
Let It Be
Show Them Some Love
/Beatles - a huge subreddit with over 125,000 members.
/TheBeatles - almost 26,000 members.
Previous Posts
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Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
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The Black Keys
The Beatles, Part One
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difference between thumbs up and heart on facebook video

The growing heart emoji means that a person's heart is growing in size Meaning The pink emoji, which looks like hearts inside another, has been created to give the impression of a heart increasing ... If we "heart" a post, the red heart changes to a thumbs up icon and remains as a thumbs up. If we click the heart more than once, though, we "un-heart" the post (the same action which previously was called "Revoke my heart" in the 3-dot menu) and the icon changes back to a red heart. The emoji can be accessed via the Like button in the same way that the current Facebook reaction staples of thumbs-up, laughter, sadness, amazement, love and anger. Use the Like as you would any thumbs-up, just like you used to. Love is a heart emoticon; use it when you’re super in love with the post or the person who posted it. Ha-ha is a squinchy-eyed grin. The 💛 Yellow Heart emoji is available on different types of platforms such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and Snapchat. More specifically, on Snapchat, when you put a Yellow Heart beside one of your Snapchat friends, you’re saying they are your best friend and you are theirs. To transcend cultures and languages, Facebook uses symbolic menu icons at the top of the page. The silhouette of two people shows where friend requests are managed. The chat bubbles represent inbox and instant messages, and the globe icon houses notifications. Just to the right of those symbols is a lock icon, representing privacy settings. F acebook says that a user reacting with the love, sad or angry emoji is an indicator that a person feels more strongly about a subject than another they simply hit Like on. "Over the past year we ... Starting next week, the care emojis will start appearing on Facebook’s main app (the emoji face embracing the heart), while the new reaction will appear on Messenger (in the form of a pulsing ... To create the thumbs-up symbol on Facebook, click the area where you want the symbol. Enter the shortcut on your keyboard . Type the following in your keyboard: open parenthesis, the letter "Y" in caps, and then closed parenthesis. The end result should look like this: (Y). Click Enter. Once you have entered the shortcut, hit Enter on your ... Facebook now places more value on the other reactions than it does on the standard “thumbs up” or “like”. I can understand why. It takes just a little more effort, so it is easy to see why it might be interpreted as a more thoughtful and deliberate response to a post than simply hitting the default.

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difference between thumbs up and heart on facebook

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