Category Archives: Mind Uploading

1 AM Update: Moderate and Enhanced risk for severe storms for NW FL & SW AL. Stay weather aware and up to date with the First Warning Channel 3 Weather Team!

Several severe thunderstorms popped up in Southwest Alabama and Northwest Florida shortly after 11 p.m. on Tuesday night.

Northwest Florida and Southwest Alabama will continue to face the risk of strong to severe storms through the morning hours.

In fact, a Severe Thunderstorm Watch has been issued for some of the Alabama counties in the WEAR-TV viewing area until 8 a.m. Wednesday morning -- Conecuh, Escambia, and Monroe are several of the counties included in the watch.

This means that conditions are favorable for severe thunderstorms to form; however, keep in mind, an isolated severe thunderstorm will still be possible for areas not included in the watch.

Scattered severe storms will be possible during the morning hours through the afternoon and possibly the early evening all ahead of a cold front that will bring us cooler and drier air.

As of 1 a.m. Wednesday morning, the Storm Prediction Center has placed areas along and south of Alabama/Florida state line under a "Moderate Risk" (4/5) for severe storms. The risk zone was lifted northward to highlight the areas with the most favorable atmospheric conditions for severe weather to occur.

An "Enhanced Risk" (3/5) exists for most of Northwest Florida and Southwest Alabama counties in the WEAR-TV viewing area.

Damaging winds, large hail, frequent lightning, torrential rain, and isolated tornadoes will be possible -- including the risk for strong tornadoes.

The greatest risk for tornadoes appears to be in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and South Carolina; however, the risk for tornadoes still exists for Northwest Florida and Southwest Alabama.

Wednesday will be a "Weather Aware" (#WxAware) day, so you must have your severe weather safety plan ready to go should any warnings be issued.

Have multiple ways to receive warnings -- WEAR-TV, cellphone, weather radio, etc.

The First Warning Channel 3 Weather Team will be monitoring these storms carefully.

Be sure to tune into 3 In The Morning with Meg McNamara starting at 4:30 a.m. for the latest details!

Don't forget, you can share your weather photos with us by uploading them to Burst. Here's a look at our weather album powered by you:

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Severe Weather Risk on Wednesday - WEAR

Dennis Tracy, MUTV Entertainment Producer April 2, 2017

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Welcome to the darkest year of our adventures,Rick said to Morty in the garage.

It sure seems like it.

The rest of the season wont be out until summer, but an April Fools broadcast isnt a bad way to have your favorite show come back. Especially when the infamous question, Wheres season three? has been hammered into the minds of die-hard fans, myself included.

The Rickshaw Rickdemption picks up at a family friendly restaurant, Shoneys, with Rick telling the story about how he broke free from the prison. It doesnt take long before its revealed that a Galactic Federation agent (Nathan Fillion) is inside Ricks mind and wants the formula out of Rick about how he created the portal gun.

This leaves Rick with two options: stay inside the Shoneys restaurant and have his brain melt, or give the agent what he wants.

Rick is no fool, so he uses this as an opportunity to free himself from prison. He fools the Galactic Federation by uploading a virus from a fabricated origin story about Ricks portal gun.

This leads to absolute mayhem with multiple Ricks killing each other and the Galactic Federation rapidly collapsing on itself.

Morty, on the other hand, seems to be adjusting just fine without his demented grandfather dragging on their misadventures. Under the Galactic Federation, Morty is 35 and can rent a car.

He spends most of the episode trying to convince Summer that their grandpa should not be their hero.

I wanted you to have a normal life, thats something you cant have when Rick shows up. Everything real turns fake, everything right is wrong. All you know is that you know nothing, and he knows everything, Morty says to his sister when they are faced with other-dimension Ricks.

Morty has seen first-hand the kind of trouble he and his grandfather can get into over the last 21 episodes. At this point, it is frustrating and wearing him down.

Who can blame him? Hes tired of his intelligence being insulted by his grandfather, sister and parents, and they have to travel to another dimension to live after Morty gives his crush a love potion that managed to spread a disease across the world.

Theyve also come close to death on multiple occasions (such as in the Purge episode and an animaticfrom an upcoming episode this season), and it all feels like its going to reach a boiling point where the family may never be the same again.

When Morty shoots Rick in the head with the fake gun he thought it was real at first, he thought, for a brief period, that he was free from all the insanity his grandfather put him through.

Whos stupid now?! Morty yells to Rick after shooting him.

In the first episode of the show, Rick and Morty are in the garage when Morty loses control of his bodily functions, causing him to be paralyzed for 72 hours. Rick sets up what the show will be about: those two going on adventures forever.

However, at the end of this episode, its a mirrored version of the Rick we first saw. Rick looks more menacing than he did in the first episode, saying that everything he just did was to bring himself as the main patriarch of the family and seek revenge against Jerry.

Poor Jerry, too; for the first time in a while, it seems like he is finally winning, with him getting six promotions to whatever job he had with the Federation.

Honestly, I think the best part of this was seeing everyones reaction to the new episode. I texted my 15-year-old brother to turn on what was scheduled to be Family Guy, and he was shocked and delighted to see a new Rick and Morty episode.

Whatever happens next in these 13 episodes, Im here for it. Wubba Lubba Dub Dub gang, season three is off to a fantastic start.

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Stealth Rick and Morty premiere a delightful surprise - Marquette Wire

David Crowley began keeping a journal in April of 2014. He was twenty-eight years old, and he lived in Apple Valley, Minnesota, with his wife, Komel, and their four-year-old daughter, Raniya. The journal was a life report, since I suspect my feelings right now in nostalgia or reflection might be of value, Crowley wrote. By the time he stopped making entries, seven months later, he had inadvertently created a psychological document of which very few examples are known.

Crowley had been a soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan. Afterward, he had gone to film school, and in 2010 he began writing a script that he called Gray State, in which a totalitarian foreign regime conquers the U.S. government and a band of patriots form a resistance. On LinkedIn, Crowley described Gray State as a film about a near future collapse of society under martial law.

Crowleys engagement with Gray State was consuming. Every little part of this project is me, he recorded himself saying. In addition to writing six very different drafts of the script, he made three trailers, for which he auditioned, rehearsed, and directed the actors; drew storyboards; designed costumes; found locations and got permits; acted as the director of photography, overseeing as many as four cameras at once; and composed music and special effects. As if inhabiting the world he was creating, he periodically cut his hair in a Mohawk and wore combat fatigues and body armor. An actor named Danny Mason, who helped write the first draft, told me that Crowley would take him on hikes through the woods at three in the morning. Wed come to a clearing and hed say, See that field? Mason said. Imagine there being a convoy there and fires in the distance.

Crowley posted a trailer for Gray State on YouTube in 2012. It has been watched more than two and a half million times, and the film has more than fifty-seven thousand followers on Facebook. Its supporters included conspiracy theorists, survival groups, Crowley wrote, libertarians, veterans, and the military, many of whom believe that the government has plans to impose martial law, confiscate guns, and hold dissidents prisoner in camps built by FEMA.

Crowley had a patchwork system of beliefs. He regarded himself as a Libertarian, but he identified with the left-leaning wing of the Party, not the militant onebeing a soldier had made him a pacifist. After uploading the trailer, Crowley spoke at a Ron Paul event in Tampa, hoping to raise money. Gray State, he said, would explore such trends as the slow yielding of our quiet American towns and streets to a choking array of federal surveillance grids, illegal police checkpoints.

Through a crowdsourcing campaign, Crowley collected more than sixty thousand dollars, much of it after the conservative radio commentator Alex Jones had Crowley and Danny Mason on his radio show Infowars, in 2012, to discuss the impressive film youre working on. The world depicted in Gray State was already happening here, Jones said. The people who have hijacked our country, theyre admitting it. Theyre admitting that were an occupied nation by foreign banks, theyre admitting theyre getting rid of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

We have people who are living in the Alex Jones world who know whats going on, and the people who simply dont, Crowley replied. Gray State, he added, was factual and could be described as a documentary. (Jones declined my request for an interview.)

In January of 2015, Crowley and his wife and daughter were found shot dead at their home. Reports of their deaths appeared in the United States and abroad. The Huffington Post called Crowley a military man, and USA Today called him a filmmaker. The police determined that Crowley had shot his wife and child and then shot himself, but commentators on the Internet soon began saying that Crowleys death seemed suspicious and mysterious, and that he had likely been murdered by government agents intent on preventing the movie from being made. Among certain conspiracy-minded, anti-government, Libertarian, and alt-right believers, Crowley has become a species of martyr. In January, the international hacking collective Anonymous, which declared war on Donald Trump last fall, posted a tribute to Crowley, suggesting that the government killed him. A spokesman, wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and addressing my brothers and sisters of the world, said that the circumstances do not sound right.

On Facebook, there is a page called Justice for David Crowley & family, which says that its purpose is to help to clear the good name of David Crowley. The page is overseen by an accountant in Minnesota named Dan Hennen. He and Greg Fernandez, Jr., a tech worker in California, conduct long discussions on YouTube in which they find fault with the police investigation and ask why someone whose future seemed so promising would kill himself.

Hennen believes that the crime scene was staged by Crowleys killer. He mentions a sliding glass door at Crowleys house that the police discovered slightly openVery suspicious in Minnesota in the winter, he told me. Furthermore, no neighbors heard gunshots. A forty-calibre gun, which is what the police found, is so loud that it would have woken up the whole neighborhood, Hennen said. I believe a silencer, or a suppressor of some sort, was used by the killers.

These theories are contradicted by Crowleys journal, which was given to me, along with videos and recordings, with the permission of Crowleys family, by the filmmaker Erik Nelson, who produced Grizzly Man. For A&E IndieFilms Nelson has made a documentary about Crowley called A Gray State, which will have its premire in a few weeks, at the Tribeca Film Festival. Nelson read the reports of Crowleys death, which led him to watch the Gray State trailer. It seemed incredibly well made, he told me. It was clear this guy was in command of all the skills necessary to his craft. When he read that the police had found hours of videos and voice recordings on Crowleys computer documenting his family and the progress of Gray State, he thought that they might be the basis for a film. Nelson saw Crowley as a solitary obsessive, fiercely making art in an unlikely place.

The journal is dominated by Crowleys notes as he wrote Gray Statewhat he wished for it to be, his anxieties about whether he could manage it, and the audience he imagined it would reach. He also wrote about his ambitions in general (to have a screenplay produced by 2016, to be a millionaire by 2017), his feelings for Komel (God I love that woman. Strong, beautiful, ferocious, and deadly intelligent), and his determination to be a good father. As the entries progress, however, insights appear to arrive unbidden and to impose themselves on him. Im expecting to wake up somebody else, he wrote. Vast personality changes are happening too fast to write about every day. And: I am being prepped for some slide into oblivion or destiny.

Crowley was losing his mind, and he didnt seem to know it. Journals of people overtaken by psychosis are rareaccounts of madness tend to be written by people in the midst of their illness or retrospectively by those who have recovered. Crowley was handsome, gifted, and charismatic, but he was also deeply unsure of himself. He owned a number of self-hypnosis recordings meant to overcome his insecurities. He thought that the convulsive things that were happening to him were the result of his endeavor to become more confident, poised, and commanding. He thought that he was developing a new self.

Crowley was born on July 7, 1985, the middle child of Dan and Kate Crowley. His brother, Dan, Jr., a personal trainer, was older by three years, and his sister, Allison, an architecture student, was younger by two. The three of them were brought up in Owatonna, Minnesota. Dan, Sr., is an engineer who has his own company, which makes equipment he designed to coat solar panels and architectural glass. He and Davids mother divorced when David was twenty.

In ninth grade, David met a boy named Mitch Heil in a computer class. With friends, they played an army game called Airsoft, which is like paintball except that it uses pellets, and the guns are more realistic-looking. They dressed in soldiers uniforms and wore helmets and carried backpacks and decorated their faces with camouflage paint. After a while, David began bringing his fathers video camera to the Airsoft game. That evolved to Im not getting what I want, and wed start staging our own little scenes and stories, Heil told me. On weekends, theyd gather at one of their houses and watch the films.

In 2003, toward the end of eleventh grade, David told his parents that he and Mitch were joining the Army after high school. In the real Army, they thought, you also played combat games, but you got paid for it. His parents would have preferred that he go to college, but Dan, Sr., felt that he shouldnt oppose something his son felt strongly about.

In June of 2004, David and Mitch went through basic training at Fort Benning, in Georgia. Eventually, Mitch was sent to Afghanistan, and David was sent to Germany. While the other soldiers went into town at night to drink, David taught himself German and read calculus and chemistry books. In 2006, he went to Iraq, where he was a mortarman. Later that year, he was among the first to arrive after a car bomb killed more than forty soldiers. Dozens of men, he wrote, were moaning and wailing ghouls, their skin hanging off in gray ropes, one sitting very still in my seat with half his body an oozing yellow mess whimpering can we please hurry? Could you hurry, please? Toward the end of the year, he returned to Germany greeted by no one, and slept with first and only prostitute.

In 2007, David was transferred to Fort Hood, in Texas, and in 2008 he met Komel, at a bar in Waco. The next day, he introduced her to another soldier as his girlfriend. Komel, who was a senior at Baylor University, lived with her mother and father, Naila and Anjum Alam, and her younger sister, Sidrah, who was in high school. Three years earlier, they had come from Pakistan. There the girls and their mother had each had a driver, and the house was run by servants. In the U.S., they had to learn to manage for themselves.

Within weeks of meeting Komel, David found out that he was being stop-lossedthat is, his service was being extended without his consent. Furthermore, he was being sent to Afghanistan. He immediately asked Komel to marry him.

Komel told her father that she was serious about David. While I was talking to her, David comes to the house for the first time, Anjum told me. He came in and he was ready to fight with me. Komel said that they were getting married in two days and that David was leaving in two weeks. I was completely in shock, Anjum told me. Finally, I said, Fine. If you guys love each other, who the hell I am to come between you.

David so resented being stop-lossed that he told his commanding officer in Afghanistan that he couldnt be responsible for another soldiers life, and he was assigned to deliver the mail. Komel got pregnant late in 2008, during one of Davids leaves. When he was finally discharged, in June of 2009, he was disgruntled, and he told Komel not to come to the ceremony for returning soldiers. Instead, he had her wait outside in the car. I dont want the Army controlling how I reunite with my wife, he told another soldier.

Raniya was born in August of 2009. In September, the family moved from Waco to Minnesota, where Komel knew no one. For the first six months, she was miserable, her sister said. She would call crying: Its so depressing here, and its always cold.

David and Mitch had planned on going to film school after the Army. Mitch got out first and hung drywall while he waited for David, and then they enrolled in the Digital Video and Media program at the Minnesota School of Business, in Edina. Komel took a position as a research assistant at the University of Minnesota, while studying for a masters degree in nutrition. By nature, she was outgoing, but David discouraged her from having people over. She really wanted to have couple friends, a woman named Sarah Johnson, who worked with her at a dietary clinic, told me. David would always mess it up, though. Komel and Johnson later began a side business involving nutrition as a healing method. Johnson felt that the closer she and Komel became the more David inserted himself between them. He insisted that they record their conversations, because he wanted Komel to have documentation if there were ever any disagreements.

Gray State began in the summer of 2010, when Danny Mason, whom David had met through a professor at film school, sent David an e-mail with links to Web sites devoted to conspiracies and suppressed information. According to Mason, He came back in thirty-six hours, having stayed up for twenty-four hours, and said, Youre on to something, lets see where this goes.

Gray State is a hectic and vengeful fantasy. After the conquering force imposes martial law, soldiers come to Minneapolisthe seat of the government, since the coasts have fallen. Some people submit to the new regime and live as before; others retreat to the hills to gather guns and make a plan.

Before writing a first draft, David and Danny Mason wrote scenes for the trailer, which they shot with Mitch Heil in 2011. It is two minutes and forty seconds long, and it cost six thousand dollars. No scene lasts more than six or seven seconds. A number of scenes were filmed in front of green screens, which David filled with C.G.I. helicopters, tanks, and other military equipment. The sets are lit sombrely, so that the people, the buildings, and the rooms seem cast in shadow. The twilit quality makes it feel as if David were not so much entering a world as trying to get out of it.

The trailer has three actsorigin, resistance, and outcome. It begins with red crosshairs defining an aerial bombing target in a city. A man starts awake, breathing heavily, and shields his eyes from a powerful light just beyond the drawn blinds of his room. The words It happened while we were sleeping appear in white letters on a black screen.

Television news reports show military trucks rolling across bridges and people fleeing. FEMA troops in riot gear advance on a crowd of protesters. A soldier walks along a row of citizens on their knees and shoots each in the back of the head. The city burns. In one eerie shot, Komel and Raniya appear as a mother and daughter watching news reports while light from the television plays across their faces.

To keep track of his story, David constructed a version of a storyboard, taping file cards and Post-it notes and scraps of paper to a wall. The arrangement covered about twenty-five feet, and it looked like the flag of a hapless and turbulent nation. David called it his writers wall, and he said that it could be read horizontally for the story or vertically for the themes. He had a friend film him standing in front of it, like a weatherman, while he said that it exemplified his use of ancient methods of storytelling.

In June of 2013, David sent a draft of Gray State to a script consultant in Colorado named Linda Seger. Seger liked the scripts intricacy, but felt that it had too much action, too much information, and too many characters. She also thought that it needed a happier ending. (The main character died.) She suggested revisions, and a year later David sent another draft. Seger remembered the scripts, she told me, even though she has read thousands of them. It had a nice sense of style, and it had real feeling to it, she said. I felt like I was in the middle of the danger.

David and Komels attachment to each other was ardent, but it also had an unrealistic cast. There was an almost teen-aged feeling about their love, where its all-consuming, Sarah Johnson told me. Komel said to a friend, Davids the only person that I like in this world, but on two occasions she thought of leaving him. In 2011, she felt that he wasnt contributing enough money or time to the marriage, but they discussed it and he agreed to do more. He got work as a cameraman and video editor, usually in advertising, and saved enough money to return to Gray State. The second time was late in 2013. By then, he was very much living in the world of Gray State, Mason told me. My hunch was Komel wanted some form of normalcy, not just the dreary, apocalyptic world vision that David was living through.

Komel called her father. According to her sister, Sidrah, She was crying and saying, Dad, I cant do this anymore. I want to come home. Anjum asked if David was hurting her. When she said no, he was sympathetic but told her, You have a family. You make it work.

In May, 2014, a month after David began the journal, he flew to Los Angeles, where he had arranged to meet several people who were interested in Gray State. Among them were two producers, Michael ODonnell and Mike Boggio, who have a company called Michael Entertainment Group. David called them the Mikes. When they said they wanted to option the script, David wrote that it was one of the most important days of his life.

Believing that she and David would be rich by the fall, Komel quit her job at the dietary clinic and began to plan her own business. Meanwhile, David arranged to meet the Mikes again in Los Angeles. To prepare, he rehearsed. Mikes meeting two, the outline, he began. Projecting power, confidence, talk fast. Talk fast, easy, and project. He expected the Mikes to ask how the rewrites were going. If you want to talk rewrites, I suppose we should talk contract, he said. The imaginary exchange lasted an hour.

The day before the meeting, Komel found David curled on the floor in the bathroom, crying. She comforted him by telling him that he was brave. He worried that the Mikes would regard him as a fraud, but they told him that Gray State was their most promising project. He was totally professional, not quiet, not shy, very confident, Mike Boggio told me. We left that meeting thinking, We got to have a deal with this guy.

Over the summer, Komels mother received a diagnosis of cervical cancer. Komel and her father argued over the phone about treatments, and, afterward, she and David decided that her family was trying to manipulate her and that she should no longer speak to them. The following day, though, David heard Komel on the phone talking heatedly in Urdu and became angry. After they argued, she wrote, I expected him to show me a little more compassion. She told herself that she would feel better in the morning, but she had nightmares. I start experiencing degrees of separation between David and I, she wrote. I guess I forgot we were two different people in two different bodies.

A psychosis can overwhelm and disable a person, or it can appear episodically, in the form of disordered thoughts that are themselves an attempt to ward off a collapse. At the end of July, David suffered a psychic crisis that involved a deep understanding stretching my mind past what my body can tolerate. He went on to write that he had undergone a 20 minute physical episode of visions of pure deep horror, long insight stretching unbroken like a panorama. The visions subsided, however, and he returned to his regular life, taking Raniya to her sitter, having family dinners, reading and writing, and working out in the back yard with Komel.

In September, David revised Gray State for the Mikes. He wrote for thirty-one hours, then Komel read the script, and he sent it to the Mikes so that it would arrive for one of their birthdays, on September 17th, along with a Gray State poster. He was unsettled when they didnt respond immediately.

Reading the journal, one searches for the moment when David became permanently unmoored, when his fantasies eclipsed him, but it isnt so simple. Preparing to write the draft he sent to the Mikes, however, he made an entry that seems to predict his collapse:

The moment of my purpose has arrived. And if the universe awaits my consent for the go ahead then I say do your worst you filthy sticky bitch, I know youre going to reward and seduce me before killing off what I love and burying what I build and destroying me as awfully as possible in horrible retribution for having thrust my ability so far into your black void that generations hence will still be expanding on what I started, settling the void, conquering the dark, until the greater objective is served.

No life has only one outcome, but as David waited to hear from the Mikes he seemed to relinquish ground that he never recovered, or, if so, only intermittently. It is as if the writing and making of Gray State were a means of containing the violent fantasies within him, and when the project faltered they swamped him.

The Mikes reacted as producers do, by considering the scripts merits and difficulties. My first pass, from story content, was: This is kind of a road map for the next American revolution, Michael ODonnell told me. My second pass was breaking it down to what it costs. When David finally heard from them, on September 26th, they said that Gray State might be better as a TV series. They did not offer him the contract he had counted on.

David was devastated. Making Gray State was his whole world, Sidrah said. In a Facebook post written after Davids death, Mitch Heil said that he didnt think David knew how to cope with failure on this scale. He went on, In my heart I feel like the stress, the message, the story, and his thought process caused his world of fiction and reality to blur.

David began to have trouble sleeping, and for an hour one night he lay awake and cried. I guess the big wait created a lot of anxiety that needed resolution the situation couldnt provide, he wrote. Hence the bad weather! Im serious, moment by moment for a long time, the weather has been following my mood.

He stopped saying that he was going to be famous. He didnt say they were moving to California anymore, either, a friend named Chris Peck told me. All he said was That was a pipe dream.

As if to salvage years of work, David put aside Gray State for a documentary that he called Gray State: The Rise, which he assembled from interviews with himself, friends, and Internet commentators; news footage; and a brief interview he had once filmed with Alex Jones. It expresses the belief that the Gray State has arrived. We are already going into a scientifically designed Orwellian control system that is meant to use humans up like natural resources, Jones says. Davids purposes also shifted. Sean Wright, a friend of his who worked on the documentary, told me, He was changing his mind from entertainment to waking people up.

David believed that the documentary would establish a Gray State brand, which might one day include video games and combat games. To further the brand, he planned to make the documentary available free. Working on it possessed him as entirely as writing Gray State had. Meanwhile, he and Komel stopped returning most phone calls and texts and e-mails. Anjum sent Komel a photograph of her mother, Naila, in the hospital, hoping to provoke her into speaking to him. Immediately, he received a call from David, who said that he and Komel wanted nothing more to do with him or the rest of the family.

Sidrah and her fianc, Vincent Sotelo, who is now her husband, decided to drive to Minnesota from Waco to check on Komel. A few months earlier, Anjum had lent David and Komel a car, and, as a pretext, Sidrah planned to tell them that he needed it back. She would leave her own car for them.

Sidrah and Vincent left Waco on October 16th and drove for sixteen hours. They arrived at around seven that evening. With Vincent standing behind her, Sidrah knocked on the door. David opened it, and she said, Im here to see my sister.

We want nothing to do with youI thought I made that clear, he said, and shut the door.

She knocked again. David said, Go sit in the car. Vincent saw a shadow on a wall behind David and felt sure that it was Komels. When David came out to the car, he said there was no way Sidrah could see her sister. Sidrah said they had come to exchange cars. David said that he needed an hour to get the car ready but he would return it only if they took both cars, which meant that Sidrah would have to drive sixteen hours to Waco by herself. She said she couldnt. Fine, David said. Deals off. Then he went back into the house.

Vinny and I looked at each other, like, What now? Sidrah told me. Vincent knocked on the door again, and David came out. Vincent extended his hand, and David hesitated then shook it. Her mom needs her daughter, Vincent said. You said an hour, right?

When they returned, Sidrah saw David watching them from a picture window beside the front door. The car was on the street, and on the dashboard there was a photograph of Komel, Sidrah, and Naila. Komel had written on the back of it, I have always loved you and Mom and always will. Sidrah and Vincent decided to leave their car for Komel, in case she ever needed to flee. Sidrah wrote, I love you, too, on the back of the photograph and left it on the dashboard, and they drove away quickly.

A mania shared by two people, one of whom appears to be dominant, is called a delusion by proxy and is rare. The treatment begins by separating the people sharing the delusions. Davids entry for October 30th says, cryptically, Komel got raptured today. Shes still here. That morning, he had gone to Home Depot, and when he returned Komel came into the kitchen and asked him to hold her. She said something was very wrong. Something about, Do not fear, sweet body, for we have felt this pain together, David said in a recording that he made immediately afterward on his phone. He went on, paraphrasing her, Dont worry about the pain, because you do not know how to feel pain, and you will return to the dust and your dark slumber, and I will be gone.

I have my mission, she had told him. She said she had heard a womans scary voice and asked if he had heard it. Sounding distraught, she reproduced the voice: Ive warned you, Ive warned you. Then: I want you. Please come with me, please come with me, your place wont come to me.... Theres nothing left here.

David went into his office and shut the door. This took a lot out of her, he said into his phone. He had held her while she began to shake and weep and howl, and then she said, This is what rapture is.

Komel came into the room then and lay down on the couch.

You said you were Egyptian, David told her. You said youd come from very far to find me, and Rani and I need to come with you, and theres not much time.

The primary emotion was that of, like, desperate, desperate love, like hopeless love, he continued. And on some level your soul has committed to mine, and were going to go somewhere and Ranis coming with.

Those were the last words, Komel said, her voice pitched just above a whisper.

After Komel quit her job, she told a woman shed worked with, Heidie Lish, that she was writing a book about eating disorders. We had coffee around Thanksgiving, and she told me she wasnt writing the book anymore, Lish said. She was reading a lot of books about religions and people who dont eat for forty days. She said there were people in the world who didnt need to eat at all. Then she started talking about how she never left the house anymore.

The week before Christmas, David and Komel visited their friend Chris Peck. They were uncontrollably, zealously happy, Peck said. David gave me some books, one about how to succeed in Hollywood, one about writing, and then he handed me a bunch of notes for a screenplay I was writing, and he gave me back video games I had lent him. He gave me back everything I had ever lent him. Komel wished me Merry Christmas, and, quick as they were in, they were out. High spirits are characteristic of people resolved on suicideit is why so many stories of suicide include someone saying, We thought he had got better. The decision often gives people a feeling of being released from their troubles.

Dan Luttrull served with David in Afghanistan, but he hadnt spoken to him in a while. Then, late one night a few days before Christmas, I was sitting on the computer, drinking, and I got a message from him, he told me. They discussed the Army, their lives, and Gray State. He was drinking absinthe, and I was drinking whiskey and beer, Luttrull said. After about two hours, Luttrull said that he was ready for bed, and David asked him to delete their exchange. His exact words were If youre truly my brother and my friend, youll do it. I promise youll understand soon.

The last entry in the journal reads, I am no one. It is everyone else who is someone. On Christmas morning, David made a list of plans for the coming year. Christmas: 6 day countdown meme: It will be a new year, he wrote, and he reminded himself that December 30th was the last day to crowdfund! Then, with a pistol that he kept in a safe in the bedroom, he shot Komel and Raniya as they lay on the living-room floor. Sometime later, he sat down beside them and shot himself.

The next morning, Dan, Jr., left presents for David and Komel and Raniya on their doorstep. The familys dog put its paws on the frame of the picture window and watched him, but he didnt look inside.

A neighbor found them. On January 17th, after returning from a holiday trip, he saw the presents scattered on the stoop and figured the family was away. He piled the packages neatly, then heard the dog barking, which he thought was strange, if they were gone. Then he looked in the window.

The police found the sliding glass door on the back deck slightly open. A light was on in the dining room; strings of Christmas lights and a synthetic Christmas tree were lit. Komel was lying on her stomach on the floor near the tree, and Raniya lay across one of her legs. David was on his back next to them. Komel had been shot twice in the head, and Raniya had been shot once behind her left ear. The dog had scavenged the remains. Komel was identified at her autopsy from a photograph on the Internet, showing a tattoo on her left wrist of a heart with All you need written inside it. David was identified from tattoos on his left wrist and shoulder.

Bloody footprints led into the kitchen and down the hall to Davids office. A laptop was open on the kitchen counter. When an investigator applied a swab to the keyboard to collect a blood sample, the words I have loved you all with all of my heart appeared on the screen. In a window behind it was a playlist that David had titled Ascent. It consisted of fifty-three songs, most with despairing themes, that he had presumably meant to run continuouslyapparently, the batteries on the speakers had died. In the office was an open notebook with dried blood in the margins. David had written, Open The Rise most recent version, and Submit to Allah now.

In the living room, David had done something that the police omitted from their incident report and waited months before telling the families. With his hands covered in his wifes blood, he stood on the couch and wrote on the wall, Allahu akbar, which means God is great. On the floor by Komel, he had placed a Koran, opened to a prayer of forgiveness.

A few days after the bodies were discovered, Davids father and sister went into the house. The police had told them that they should have it cleaned first, and the cleaners had cut out the floorboards where the blood had warped them, so it was clear where the bodies had lain. On the wall behind the couch was a rectangle of white paint. Otherwise, the house was as it had been. On the kitchen counter, Allison found Davids wedding ring, with blood on it. Dan, Sr., tried to imagine what Komel and Raniya had been doing. Were they reading a book, maybe playing on the floor? he said. You think yourself in circles.

A friend of Davids, Mason Hendricks, went into the house several times on the familys behalf to sort through David and Komels possessions and see what was worth keeping. When he saw the white paint on the wall, he felt certain that something had been written beneath it, because he and David had talked about berserkers and Norsemen and the practice of writing in blood to leave a message before dying.

Last spring, I went to the house with Hendricks. It had been repossessedthe neighbors hope that whoever buys it will tear it down and build a new onebut Hendricks knew the code on the finance companys lockbox. It had been more than a year since the killings. Clothes hung in the closets where David and Komel had left them. The Christmas tree was still there, and there was a small shrine of candles and dried flowers where the floorboards had been cut away. The white paint on the wall was still there, and I wondered if the cleaners had washed the wall or had simply painted over the letters and they were still there.

The electricity had been turned off, and the only light came through the windows. The sense that something terrible had happened was inescapable, partly because the place still looked as it had in the crime-report photographs. It was difficult to decide whether the house felt neglected or preserved. We stayed long enough for me to walk down the hall from the living room and look at Davids office, which still had papers in the file cabinet; Raniyas bedroom, with her drawings taped on pink walls and shoes on the floor and loose glitter here and there; Davids workroom, in the basement, which had posters for Gray State on the wall; and David and Komels room, with the sheets still on the bed. On the kitchen counter was a small stack of business cards for MindBody Dietician LLCHolistic Nutrition Therapy, Food Allergies, Autism, Autoimmune Conditionson which there was a photograph of Komel, smiling.

Since her daughters death, Naila Alam has spent most of her time in the hospital being treated for cancer; she is now in hospice care. She would ask Sidrah why Komel hadnt called to see how she was, or why she didnt answer her phone, and Sidrah would demur. I would say, Why talk about them? Its just hurtful. They dont want to hear from us, but she would see my expression.

Finally, Naila, exasperated, asked if Komel was still alive, and it just came out, Sidrah said. I told her, Do you really want to know the truth?

Naila asked if Komel had died in a car accident. I said, David killed her. Is he in jail? she asked. Wheres Rani?

A few weeks after the deaths, the Crowleys held a memorial for David and Komel and Raniya. Perhaps a hundred people came. In the months following, Dan, Sr., assembled a time line of David and Komels final year, organizing their e-mails and texts and Davids journal onto a spreadsheet. It has five hundred and thirty-seven entries under the headings Date, Source, and Event. He thinks of it as representing pieces in a really big puzzle I dont know how to put together. One afternoon, I sat with him and Dan, Jr. Theres this endless list of issues we are struggling with, he said. They wanted to be left alone. David wanted to get his movie done. He was annoyed with people. I get that.

I remember you didnt talk to your dad for four years, Dan, Jr., said.

Five years, Dan, Sr., said. I didnt kill myself, though. His shoulders slumped. I figured theyd come through, he said. The thought that it might have been possible to intervene haunts everyone who knew them.

On Davids desktop, Hendricks opened Gray State: The Rise and discovered that David had left behind a video specifying the order in which files should be assembled to create the documentary. He followed the instructions and posted the movie on Vimeo as The Rise.

Sidrah and Vincent had their first child, a girl, in August. They had hoped that she would arrive on Raniyas birthday, but she didnt. Danny Mason maintains Davids Gray State Facebook page, posting videos and remarks every few weeks, usually critical of the government. He and Dan, Sr., own the rights to the concept, and, while Dan, Sr., is uncertain what outcome he prefers, Danny Mason still hopes to make Gray State.

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Death of a Dystopian - The New Yorker

THERE are ghosts haunting the release of this ambitious science fiction film. Firstly, the source material, the acclaimed manga comic books and anime films, whose fans no doubt will be pouring over this live-action adaptation, eager to find fault. And theres been the controversy over the whitewashing casting of Scarlett Johansson as the lead character.

Dust away the obfuscation (and its no more than that) and what we have is a sci-fi that faithfully draws upon the imagery of those Japanese sources, but also fits into the tradition of Blade Runner, Total Recall and The Fifth Element films that created near-future metropolises that are at once fantastical and familiar. Theres also an unavoidable dash of Robocop, in the main character of a law enforcement officer who is almost all machine.

In this future, people are routinely enhanced with cybernetic body parts. But when a young woman is saved from a car crash, shes taken a step further, with just her brain housed in a machine her mind the ghost inside the shell. In fact, its obvious that the car crash has just been made up, by the evil corporation that is trying to develop a new breed of soldier. Major, as shes known, is the first.

A year later she is the prime asset in an anti-terrorist unit, able to leap off buildings, become invisible and generally out-jump and out-fight everyone around her. But shes also suffering, perfectly cognisant of her condition as barely human. As a cyber-terrorist, Kuze (Michael Carmen Pitt), starts killing a specific group of scientists, Majors concerns come into sharper focus.

With Snow White And The Huntsman, Brit director Rupert Sanders showed no lack of visual panache. Here hes marshalled his designers and special effects teams towards an aesthetic that seems largely faithful to that of the original aesthetic of the manga and anime, albeit with a live-action muscularity. Some scenes, such as Majors creation and a chase sequence through the city, are simply gorgeous.

Sanders also had the good sense to cast top-notch actors to add depth to the comic-book characters, including Danish actor Pilou Asbk (the spin doctor from TVs Borgen) as Majors sidekick Batou, the great Japanese actor Takeshi Kitano as their boss and Juliette Binoche as the scientist who created her shell.

As for the star, shes actually very well cast. In fact, theres no actor today who so consistently portrays otherness. Johansson was superb as the malign alien in the Glasgow-set Under The Skin, the voice of a romantic operating system in Her, and a woman whose evolution is sped up in Lucy. For an actress who came to fame playing the sweetly ordinary (Lost In Translation) she really can turn on the mysterious, ethereal and just plain strange.

Here she conveys Majors artificiality along with a neglected humanity desperately trying to reassert itself. And thanks to her Avengers outings, she happens to do kick-ass action rather well.

Despite its scale and ambition, the film isnt revolutionary or heart-stopping. It takes a while to adjust to its dense visual style (it will repay repeat viewings) and two-dimensional plotting. But slowly it exerts a hold, not least because the theme the loss of identity, of humanity as we become more and more technologically advanced seems desperately relevant.

Kuzes mode of cyber-hacking is a case in point he hacks peoples brains. And it seems terribly believable, that sooner or later were going to be uploading, downloading directly in and out of our minds, losing ourselves in the mix.

Also released ...

Free Fire (15)

America in the 1970s. Two groups of men and a woman enter a warehouse to conduct an arms deal. Everyone is on edge. And when two henchmen start taking shots at each other, all hell breaks loose. Director Ben Wheatley follows his adaptation of JG Ballards dystopian satire High-Rise with a very different proposition, one that doesnt bother with themes or subtext just one, film-length shoot-out. Its a novel, if risky idea, with a humorous script and a game cast, which includes Cillian Murphy and Bree Larson.

Graduation (15)

With his landmark film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, Romanian director Cristian Mungui charted the grimness of the Ceau?escu regime. His latest suggests that his country is still mired in day-to-day corruption. After a doctors daughter is attacked on the day of her final exams, he is concerned that she wont get the grades needed for university. Egged on by his self-serving, back-scratching environment, he takes steps to ensure she does. But will he get away with it?

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Film reviews: Ghost In The Shell and other releases - Herald Scotland

Getting started

Aside from the setup process, which is now narrated helpfully by Cortana, there aren't many surprises here. Your desktop and apps still look the same, so don't go in expecting a major facelift from last year's Anniversary Update. But, given that Windows 10 already looked fairly refined, I don't think that's a real issue.

Instead, you can look forward to many small improvements. The built-in Night Light mode makes it easier to work after dark by reducing the amount of blue light on your monitor (similar to the popular app Flux and the Night Shift feature on iOS and Mac OS). You can now use Windows Ink to mark up your photos and videos. Additionally, you can upload music to OneDrive and listen to it in the Groove app, which could serve as an easy way to jam out out to your music library on the Xbox One.

The real reason this update is interesting, though, is because of the bigger additions.

Paint 3D, an evolution of the classic Paint app in three dimensions, is the highlight of the Creators Update. Just like the original version (which is still available in Windows 10), it's basically just a blank canvas for doodling. But it's also much more full-featured, since creating 3D objects isn't as simple as 2D drawings.

The app's interface is pure minimalism. Along the top, you can choose between brush tools, 3D objects, 2D stickers, text, canvas effects and Remix 3D. The latter option is particularly interesting, as it's being positioned as a community for uploading and sharing 3D creations. On the right side of the screen, you have different options for all of those tools. If you've used Paint before, you'll be familiar with some of them: The brushes include markers, pencils and crayons. This time around, though, you can also give them matte and metal sheens.

Things get more interesting with the newer tools. The 3D models include a man, woman, dog and cat by default, but you can also add more from Remix 3D. There are also geometric 3D objects, and you can turn doodles into sharp and soft-edged 3D objects. While the initial assortment of objects feels a bit generic, I have a feeling kids will enjoy drawing their own, as well as collecting new figures from Remix 3D. As for the stickers, those serve as both 2D objects for your canvas as well as textures for 3D objects. Perhaps the most useful new addition: There's now a history bar for reversing bad decisions, and it can also generate a video of your creation process.

I didn't think much of Paint 3D at first, but my mind changed the instant I overlaid a leafy texture on top of a 3D cat. That's the sort of thing you previously needed pricey and complex 3D modeling software to do -- now it's a free part of Windows 10 that's simple enough for kids to use. Even manipulating the 3D objects blew my mind a bit. You can rotate any model using the buttons displayed around them, and you can even change their position in relation to other objects on the 3D canvas without much fuss. Paint 3D offers plenty of helpful hints for using these features, but they're also laid out easy enough for anyone to figure out with a bit of experimenting. That's simply good software design.

While Paint 3D is intriguing on its own, it's particularly inspired when taken together with the Remix 3D social network. If you've used a Windows machine before, there's a good chance you've sketched out something in Paint, only to have it sit in obscurity on your hard drive. By having a way to quickly share creations, as well as bring in art from others, Microsoft is also hoping to spark a bit more creativity among Paint 3D users. It's easy enough to search for new items from Remix 3D within Paint 3D, but there's also a Pinterest-like website for you to browse community submissions (you can even manipulate items in 3D within Edge).

One big takeaway from the Creators Update: Microsoft is mastering the art of synergy more than ever before. For example, you can take your creations from Minecraft and dump them into Paint 3D. And eventually, you'll be able to 3D print them from the app, as well. That may not be useful in most homes, where 3D printing never quite took off, but it could be huge for schools that jumped on that bandwagon.

Expect to hear a lot more about Windows 10's game bar in the Creators Update. Microsoft is pushing the feature heavily now (you can activate it by hitting the Windows key + G), in part because it's the way you activate Windows 10's built-in game broadcasting feature. Clearly, Microsoft didn't waste any time integrating Beam's broadcasting tech after snapping them up last summer. The company is targeting less experienced streamers, who might not have the patience to deal with Twitch streaming. The company tells us Beam's tech also sports sub-second latency, which allows for near real-time feedback between what you do and what your audience sees.

Your Xbox Live friends are alerted whenever you start a Beam broadcast (there's that whole synergy thing again), and you can view them from either a PC or Xbox One. And yes, Xbox One owners will also be able to broadcast their games using Beam.

The Creators Update also introduces a new "Game Mode" into Windows 10. Simply put, it prioritizes your system resources whenever you're playing a supported game. So, if for example you have Photoshop running in the background while you're playing Doom 3, your PC will focus more CPU and GPU horsepower on the game. Microsoft reps say that by doing so, Game Mode will ensure higher peak performance as well as more consistent frame rates.

I didn't have a chance to test out the final version of the feature on my gaming rig, but on the Surface Pro 4 I noticed a slight bump of around five frames per second while running Minecraft with Paint 3D and several browsers open. That's not much, but I'll take whatever I can get, especially on a machine running integrated graphics.

Intriguingly enough, Microsoft also hinted that Game Mode could eventually apply to other apps. Artists would likely want to allocate as much horsepower to Adobe Photoshop and Premiere while they're working, for example. While the company's spokespeople wouldn't say anything for certain, it sounds like Microsoft has something along those lines in the works. Or perhaps it could simply rebadge Game Mode as "Turbo Mode" or something more generic.

You know things have changed quite a bit when Microsoft's Edge is beating Google and Firefox to innovative browser features. With the Creators Update, you'll be able preview tabs by hovering your mouse over them, which could be useful if you're the sort of person who ends up piling dozens of tabs into a single window. (To be fair, Opera did this first.)

Even more useful for tab-aholics, you can now set collections of tabs aside for later viewing by hitting a single button. (And no, there's no limit to the amount of tabs you can save.) You can also browse and restore those bundles of tabs easily. Sure, you'll have to wait a few seconds for them to reload, but it's a much more useful way for tracking your tabs than saving them to your bookmarks. Because, really, who uses bookmarks anymore? It's a feature that clearly reflects our changing browsing habits.

If you were expecting a momentous shift in the way Windows 10 looks and works, the Creators Update will probably disappoint you. What's more important, though, is how Microsoft is fundamentally shifting its focus towards creativity. Paint 3D could end up showing someone that they have the ability to design things in entirely new ways. And the built-in game streaming feature could end up creating some new online stars. I'll take that over a minor facelift any day.

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Microsoft's Windows 10 Creators Update lives up to its name - Engadget

Interview by Kev Kharas Photography byDamien Maloney Courtesy: Unlimited.World

(March 22, 2017, Boston, Sri Lanka Guardian) Russian-born Maria Konovalenko is one of the most visible faces at work in the pro-longevity community today. A zealous advocate for the fight against human ageing and a PhD scientist and researcher at the trailblazing Buck Institute in California, her ultimate goal is to use advances in science and technology to help people live the longest, healthiest lives they possibly can.

Her ethos that ageing and dying should be seen as diseases that humanity can work together to cure challenges everything we understand about natural life cycles. It also hints at the possibilities that lie ahead for radical human lifespan extension an extra 30 years in her lifetime, she conservatively estimates, then rapidly up to 200, 300. Beyond that, lies the rather more distant goal of human immortality.

VICE: Can you give me a broad overview what youre up to currently?

Maria K:Im in the third year of my PhD inBiology of Aging, set up by USC and the Buck Institute, the leading organisations in the field. I became a student here in the programmes first year so basically it started with us, were the guinea pigs. I feel incredibly privileged. Im focusing on ageing and stem cells in mouse tracheas were trying to figure out which genes are responsible for the failure of tissue to replenish itself.

With the emergence of things like the Google-fundedCalico Labs, would you say theres been a more concerted push to understand the secrets of immortality in recent years?

Not immortality. Were way off that. What were looking at now are the basic mechanisms that drive ageing, figuring out why our bodies lose their regenerative potential over time. Some people are answering different questions for example, why do we develop neurodegenerative pathologies, like Alzheimers? Were all looking at different mechanisms and then trying to interfere with them to slow down ageing. You can extend the lifespan of a worm ten times thats unbelievable! but when you look at more complex animals, like mammals, its not as effective.

What do you think we can expect within the limits of our lifetime?

If youre in your sixties or seventies, hopefully, within the next decade or so, well have a therapy that will extend your health span the years in which youre generally healthy and free from disease. Thats based on recent discussions at one of the big ageing conferences, and what some of the key biologists believe. If youre in your thirties, your life expectancy and the probability of more breakthrough techs being developed is way higher.

We could develop a combination of things that have a synergistic effect. For example: the Buck Institutes Dr Pankaj Kapahi created a worm that had two tailored genetic mutations if administered separately, these mutations had been shown to give about 100 and 60 percent extra lifespan, respectively. But, administered together, they didnt yield to a 160 percent increase in lifespan it was actually an increase of almost 500 percent!

How could AI help expand human lifespan?

AI could change the fate of humanity. People in biology are already dealing with tons of data, but AI would be able to come up with models and predictions based on the entire breadth of existing human knowledge in biology, very quickly. Heres an example: the IBM AI-supercomputer Watson was able to digest all our collective cancer knowledge and diagnose cancer patients more accurately than human physicians. AI wouldnt just be the tool that scientists use it would be the scientist.

What kind of opportunities could radically extended lifespans give us as a species?

I think that liberation from biological ageing is one of the most wonderful things that could happen to humans. We could end pain, disease, suffering; we could go to different planets, deal with the technological problems that space travel poses, create new worlds.

What do you think the global economy might look like in such a world?

Everything would immediately be different in a world with AI. Its very hard to make any meaningful predictions beyond its arrival. But I believe that when it does, technological progress will be the main driver of the economy. The economy of the previous two centuries was driven by what was inside the Earth oil, gas, things like that. Right now, the most expensive companies are tech companies.

If people were born into a world with the expectation of significantly longer life 200, 300 years what do you think would happen to punishments for crimes likemurder?

It would be costly for the government to keep criminals alive in prison for 200, 300 years. Wed have to rethink our old penitentiary system. If a person has done something wrong, maybe we could use tech to change underlying psychological factors that caused the person to commit the crime in the first place. Maybe well come up with a neurotransmitter cocktail, for example, that lets us treat criminals as if violence is a curable disease?

How about the ideal of romantic monogamy if people are living much longer, will they still want to spend their entire lives with one person?

People are very interesting creatures because our relationships adapt and change along with us. I know I might sound extremely optimistic, but there are way too many dystopias in the movies; how might the world look if everything goes right? If the future-society changes so much that monogamys no longer beneficial for an individual, then people will adapt. Chances are the number of pairs staying together for life will decrease. But I dont think it will hit zero.

As a generation, what kind of legacy do you think we should be looking to leave behind?

Definitely extending lifespan and health-span by somewhere in the region of 30 percent. This will happen within the coming few decades. As for the bigger legacy, people are building the base of the algorithms that will hopefully create AI in the more distant future. So that will probably be part of our legacy, too.

Do you believe in life after death?

I dont. However, have you seenBlack Mirror? The San Junipero episode I believe thats a very basic, optimistic representation of what mind uploading might look like in the future. If you could somehow transfer consciousness from a biological subject into some kind of storage device that could be life after death.

Is that something youd enjoy?

Absolutely. I dont want to die. You would be forever young.

Why would you like to live forever?

I would like to implement my dreams. And they range from having a pair of wings, to being able to drink a cocktail in a bar on Mars, to solving the existing problems of the world economic inequality, diseases that make our lives miserable, things like that. I have an endless list of dreams. And thats why I need an endless amount of hours.

Featured image: Maria at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California, credit Damien Maloney

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Science to Beat the Death: 200 300 years old human in the Future! - Sri Lanka Guardian

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SEO audits are the cornerstone of every SEO specialists work with clients. So how should SEOs go about conducting audits and what important steps should be kept in mind? Weve got answers for you in this episode of Search Engine Nerds.

Anna Crowe, Search Engine Journals Product Strategist and Marketing Manager at Firesnap, joins SEJ Executive Editor Kelsey Jones to discuss best practices in SEO audits. Anna and Kelsey also talk about how long it takes to see results, whether or not to include social media, and real examples of how audits have made a difference in a websites visibility.

Anna: Audits differentiate between clients. But typically, if I get a new client, I like to do a full SEO audit from the technical side to the link building side and to the content side right whenever I get them. Then I like to schedule them quarterly, so hopefully, four times a year.

If we have a really big campaign or any cool inbound marketing strategies were working on, Ill do an audit right after that just to see if theres any weird changes or any different influences, especially if we did any website restructuring. I know I had a client that had millions of pages, and we restructured a lot of those pages. We did an audit right after that and found some errors we wouldnt have noticed if we didnt implement an audit right after.

Kelsey:Its a good point to do one every time theres a change because I think sometimes a developer will make a change and not think it makes that big of a difference, and it really does.

Anna: It depends again on the clients site. I work with a lot of small businesses, so a lot of their websites are between a hundred to 300 pages, so theyre smaller and I can typically pump those out within one to two months. Because they are a smaller business, I like to keep the budget cost low. But then, I have bigger clients that come to me with millions of pages and they want something super technical, and that can take anywhere from six months to a year depending on the different sections of their site, how quick the developers turnaround time is, and all those different factors that you dont really have control over. But you always try to do whatever you can with what youre given.

Kelsey: I think there definitely needs to be a good line of communication and also making sure clients understand how important some of these changes are that you need to be making.

Anna:Exactly. Its an education process.Education is so important for clients at the beginning because SEO is something that changes all the time. Something that was cool last year is not necessarily so cool this year, so definitely keep that education process going. I know I like to try and email my clients once a month with some new things that have happened and things that we might want to change to their website based on the new things happening in SEO.

Anna: I do have my own personal checklist I go through for every single client.There are obviously different things to look at, so it is based per website, and then company goals will help me prioritize what needs to get done within an audit first. If they have a really big editorial team, maybe the content is a little bit more important than some of the structural changes to the website.

Kelsey: Thats a really good point, prioritizing based on whats most important to the client.

Anna: Right. It shows youre actually listening to them and you care about their business. You want them to succeed based on their business goals and you can be part of their team, too.

Anna:Whenever Im done with the technical side and the content side of things, Ill usually move to social media just because its an easier transition and easier for the client to grasp. A lot of times, they already have someone working on their social media strategy, so Ill just partner up with them, have them walk me through what theyre currently doing, and see if there are any small tweaks we can change whether its their Facebook description or actually uploading files with a keyword name into the images on Facebook. Small little things like that can make a difference and connect the dots between social media and SEO.

Kelsey:I think they all work together so its always good to keep an eye on it because you are involved in the companys online presence. So just being aware of what else theyre doing, whether its social media or PPC, I would say its always a good idea.

Anna: Depending on what the issue is, for me, its usually four to 12 months. Honestly, it just depends on what were working on. Like my link building campaigns for fixing internal link structures or 301 redirects, we usually dont see any movement until about six months. If I dont see any movement in the six-month timeframe, I go back and check my processes, make sure I didnt miss anything. But I really have clients that dont see any traffic movement until that year mark.

Then, you have those random things that happen. It happened to me two summers ago where we made one change and saw a drastic impact in one month. I think it also depends on what Google is focusing on at that time.Four to 12 months is usually my range, which clients hate hearing that, but its the truth.

Kelsey: Yeah. Maile Ohye, who recently left Google, did a video this year about hiring SEOs, and she said that you should expect to not see changes until four to 12 months:

Anna: Ive luckily been in both positions. Ive been working in-house as an SEO person and obviously externally, too. When I was in-house, we actually worked with an amazing search agency and they were super helpful. Even though I had extensive knowledge of SEO, I really appreciated having an external resource that wasnt necessarily biased about the company goals or internal plans and could really look at it from a strictly SEO perspective. That leads into what Im doing now, and I think my clients appreciate that because they can often get sidetracked by bigger brand goals that arent necessarily SEO goals.

Kelsey: Yeah, good point. It probably just depends on the company, and how theyre structured, and what they need.

Anna: I would always be testing. This industry changes so much that unless you start experimenting with things and with different websites, youll never know whats going to work. What works for one client might not work for another and vice versa, so always be testing, always be checking, and keep up with the trends, and keep your mind fresh.

Think you have what it takes to be a Search EngineNerd? If so,message Kelsey Joneson Twitter, or email her at kelsey[at] searchenginejournal.com.

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Image Credits

Featured Image: Paulo BobitaIn-post Image #1: Bub0Bub0/DepositPhotos In-post Image #2: drogatnev/DepositPhotos

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Best Practices for 2017 SEO Audits [PODCAST] - Search Engine Journal

Upload your favourite images to Instagram on Windows without a touchscreen PC Advisor How to upload photos to Instagram from a Windows PC Instagram has now rolled out to Windows PCs and laptops, but unless you have a touchscreen you'll have trouble uploading photos. Here's how to use Instagram on Windows, and how to upload images to Instagram on Windows 10. Select, edit, and post images to Instagram from your PC or laptop

By Martyn Casserly | 16 Mar 17

Instagram has fast become the go-to site for sharing photographs online. Aside from Facebook, that is. With over 400 million active monthly users, and 75 million people logging on each day, there are morefilter-enhanced creations than you can shake a stick at. Instagramis a phone app, though and can be a little bit tricky on a PC, even with an official app now available. It's not impossible, though.Herewe show you how you can take part in the fun via Windows rather than an iPhone 7 or Samsung Galaxy S7.

See also:How to take better photos with your iPhone

Visiting the Instagram website and logging into your account (or creating one) gives you access to the web version of the app. While you might expect this to allow you the same abilities as the mobile version, one very important feature is missing - you cant upload any images.

When youre logged in, the main page will show your photo feed just as it would on the app itself. Along the top of the page youll also see three icons in the upper right corner. These are for Explore (finding new people to follow), Notifications (who liked your images), and Profile (all the images youve uploaded). Using these you can still enjoy the various images that have been shared, but there is no way to edit or add to your collections.

You can also now download a dedicated Instagram Windows app from the Windows Store, but you still won't be able to upload any images without a touchscreen Windows laptop or tablet. Read on for a workaround.

Read next: How to print from your phone

There are a number of third party apps that extend Instagrams features on Windows. One that allows uploads is InstaPic, which can be downloaded from the Windows Store. To do this go down to the taskbar on your Windows desktop and click on the shopping bag icon that has the Windows logo at the centre. When the Store opens youll just need to click on the search bar in the upper right corner and enter InstaPic. Once youve got the app on the screen click on the Free button to install it on your machine, then click Open.

When the application launches youll need to click the Register with Email button and create a new account. With that done you link your Instagram account and then you can upload images directly from the InstaPic app. We encountered several problems with other functions on the app, mainly not being able to see timelines due to the Find Friends on Instagram feature proving unresponsive, plus often a lack of notifications. With this in mind we think It would be best to treat InstaPic as a pure photo editor and uploader that works in tandem with the web version of Instagram.

Along the top of the screen youll see the various icons for Search, Notifications/Likes, Profile, and Instagram Direct. This last one allows you to send images privately to specified users. The one we want to focus on though is the Shutter icon to the right of Instagram Direct. Clicking this opens up your PC camera.

From here you can click the blue circular button to take a picture, or click on the rectangular button to the left which opens up Windows Explorer and lets you search for any image you have on your machine.

When you find the picture you want to post to Instagram double-click it to open up the editing Window.

Now you can go through the normal processes of enhancing the image. This includes cropping, applying filters, and many of the editing features youd expect on the mobile version of Instagram. We did find that the selection of filters is quite small, with a few of our favourites missing, but if you really want to use your PC to post on the service then this is currently the best offering we could find.

Once youve finished touching up the image click the arrow in the upper right hand corner and youll see the Share menu appear. Just as you would on Instagram you can now write a caption, tag any people in the image, and send to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Flickr if youve connected those accounts.

When youre happy with everything click Share at the bottom of the window and your image will join the masses on Instagram and hopefully get a few likes.

Read next: How to move photos from Flickr

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How to upload photos to Instagram from a PC: Upload your favourite images to Instagram on Windows 10 without a ... - PC Advisor

Foresight Institute, a leading think tank and public interest organization focused on catalyzing future technologies, announced their inaugural class of Fellows today.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (PRWEB) March 13, 2017

Foresight Institute, a leading think tank and public interest organization focused on catalyzing future technologies, announced their inaugural class of Fellows today.

The Foresight Fellowship is an exclusive one-year supportive program committed to giving participants the support and mentorship to accelerate their bold ideas into the future. The ten selected Fellows are working on technologies that have massive potential for the future, especially with technology that is relatively undervalued in the media.

The Fellows will provide new perspectives on topics such as Molecular Machines (Nanotechnology), Space, Longevity, Mind Uploading, and AI Ethics. They were reviewed on the criteria of technical ability, originality, experience, and potential for impacting the state of these technologies in a big way. Each Fellow will receive personalized attention, exposure to opportunity, and mentorship from leaders in their fields. During the one-year program, Fellows will be invited to engage in events, connect to mentors and other Fellows, and increase their skills to succeed with their endeavors.

Steve Burgess, President of Foresight Institute says, "There's nothing new in the world is an adage that has met its match. The Foresight Fellows are up to the challenge and we look forward to what they bring forth. The Foresight Fellowship Program is itself new, and we're excited about working with this talented group and the prospects they bring to possible technological breakthrough for a better world for everyone."

Since 1993, Foresight Institute has been rewarding those who are making strides in the field of Nanotechnology with the Feynman Prize. In 2016, one of their former Feynman Prize winners, Sir James Fraser Stoddart, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with molecular machines. Foresight Institute recognizes that providing a strong network and knowledge base for new Fellows to access will accelerate their missions and reflect Foresight's goals to further support those making important strides in key fields. The early identification and support of big research ideas is where Foresight Institute creates the most impact.

The Fellows

It is an honor to welcome the following Fellows into the 2017 Foresight Institute Fellowship: Jonathan Barnes, Synthetic Polymer Chemistry Chuyang Cheng, Molecular Machines Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli, Biomolecular Machines Eric Hinterman, Space Technology Cosmo Mielke, Longevity Michael Skuhersky, Mind Uploading Eva-Maria Strauch, Protein Engineering Berhane Temelso, Computational Chemistry Nell Watson, Machine Ethics Christopher Wilmer, Molecular Machines

To learn more about the Foresight Fellowship program and follow the news, visit foresight.org or view the video in the link at the end of this release.

About The Foresight Institute Foresight Institute is a research organization focused on transformative future technologies. Founded in 1986, its mission is to discover and promote the upsides, and help avoid the drawbacks, of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and similar life-changing developments.

For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2017/03/prweb14142965.htm

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2017 Foresight Fellows Announced in Molecular Machines, Space, Longevity, Artificial Intelligence - Benzinga

IANS | New Delhi March 10, 2017 Last Updated at 15:22 IST

Doing a quick U-turn in about 24 hours, digital payments firm Paytm on Friday suspended the two per cent charge it announced for adding money using credit cards.

"We are suspending the two per cent charge on credit cards for adding money to wallet, keeping users' convenience in mind. We will introduce new features to prevent credit card misuse in adding money," Paytm said in a blog post here on Friday.

With an intent to prevent the misuse of transfer to bank facility at 0 per cent, Paytm had earlier applied a refundable fee of two per cent on add-money through credit cards.

"At the same time, we are conscious that this move caused inconvenience to a large segment of our users, including those who are using their credit card for genuine transactions," it said.

The withdrawal of the two per cent charge apparently came in view of losing out to competition after mobile wallet major MobiKwik on Thursday announced that it would continue to offer free uploading of money.

"In order to popularise the government's vision of a cashless society, we at MobiKwik have decided not to charge two per cent on credit card recharges so that more people can transact online without having to worry about additional charges," MobiKwik founder and CEO Bipin Preet Singh said on Thursday.

Paytm had announced the two per cent charge, starting March 8.

For those who were charged, the amount was to be refundable in the form of a gift voucher to be used for recharging phones, paying bills, etc. through the Paytm wallet, it also said earlier.

Paytm had announced the charges because some users started funding their wallet with their credit cards and transferring it to the bank all for free.

--IANS

mm/in/vt

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Doing a quick U-turn in about 24 hours, digital payments firm Paytm on Friday suspended the two per cent charge it announced for adding money using credit cards.

"We are suspending the two per cent charge on credit cards for adding money to wallet, keeping users' convenience in mind. We will introduce new features to prevent credit card misuse in adding money," Paytm said in a blog post here on Friday.

With an intent to prevent the misuse of transfer to bank facility at 0 per cent, Paytm had earlier applied a refundable fee of two per cent on add-money through credit cards.

"At the same time, we are conscious that this move caused inconvenience to a large segment of our users, including those who are using their credit card for genuine transactions," it said.

The withdrawal of the two per cent charge apparently came in view of losing out to competition after mobile wallet major MobiKwik on Thursday announced that it would continue to offer free uploading of money.

"In order to popularise the government's vision of a cashless society, we at MobiKwik have decided not to charge two per cent on credit card recharges so that more people can transact online without having to worry about additional charges," MobiKwik founder and CEO Bipin Preet Singh said on Thursday.

Paytm had announced the two per cent charge, starting March 8.

For those who were charged, the amount was to be refundable in the form of a gift voucher to be used for recharging phones, paying bills, etc. through the Paytm wallet, it also said earlier.

Paytm had announced the charges because some users started funding their wallet with their credit cards and transferring it to the bank all for free.

--IANS

mm/in/vt

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

IANS

http://bsmedia.business-standard.com/_media/bs/wap/images/bs_logo_amp.png 177 22

Link:

Paytm to continue free uploading of money - Business Standard