What are the benefits of labels these days? So again, this is a preference thing.  Like Money Man is an independent artist, you know, and he's streaming, I want to say about 30 million streams a week, right? So he could go into a major label and maybe get to the point where he's streaming 100 million, but he just gave up 80% of that money. So now he's making actually less than he would have been making if he would have just stayed independent. It's really about how large do you want to be because here we go. He's making less from streaming, but now because he's a larger artist, he can charge more for a show.


In our previous video, we mentioned that if a function's one-to-one, it has an inverse function, and as the inverse function switches the roles of domain and range, if you want to find the range of a one-to-one function, just compute its inverse function and find its domain because the two swap places there. Unfortunately, most of the functions we study in a course like pre-calculus or at our college algebra, these functions are not one-to-one. So the previous method of using inverses to find the range of the function has limited use, right? We have to be a one-to-one function. Honestly, the best way to find the range of a function is really just to explore its graph. If we know the graph of it, then we essentially know the range because we can see it on the graph. Now, there are things we can do without necessarily pulling on a graphing calculator to analyze these things from a purely algebraic point of view, but essentially the graph is where we want to go. For this reason, I should say that we've drawn so many different graphs throughout this lecture series, knowing the graph tells us so much about the function. The simplest graphs are those which are transformed from standard graphs. So some of the standard graphs that we've seen this semester, we have various power functions, right? So power functions, this includes things like y equals x to the a, where a could be some type of integer positive integers. We get monomials. It could be a negative integers. We get the reciprocal functions. It could be a fraction. So we get like radicals and then combinations of power functions and radicals together. So power fun. And then I mean, a also could be some irrational number. So there's a huge variety that we can see when it comes to power functions. The other big family that we have to pay attention to is the exponential family, exponential functions, in which case that's a function that looks like y equals a to the x, where your base is allowed to vary. It could be a growth model. It could be a decay model. We can also take inverses of these functions that gives us logarithms. So y equals log base a of x. We should know that graph. Now the inverse of a power function is likewise a power function. So we don't need to separate those two cases. And you know, we also have like the absolute value. That was one we paid a lot of attention to the absolute value y equals absolute value of x. These are some of the basic graphs that we have learned this semester in this, in this lecture series, I should say. And if we can transform these things, then we actually have a good variety of graphs that we could consider. Also, if you equip yourself with trigonometric functions like sine, cosine, tangent, you can basically all of the basic families of graphs that one should know in pre-calculus. So power functions, exponentials, and logs are our main focus. So how can we transform those functions? All right, so given a function, the function's graph y equals f of x, the different types of transformations we can do are things like the following. We can multiply the whole function by a. We could divide inside of the function by b. We could subtract from x and h or we could add to the whole function k. And so this gives us two categories of transformations, the the vertical transformations and the horizontal transformations. And it's important to distinguish between these ones. The vertical transformations are going to be those things that occur outside of the function f, right? You have this format, the vertical things that we do outside of f. The stuff that happens inside the function f, this is the horizontal zone. And things in the horizontal zone kind of work opposite to what you expect, which is why we always do the twilight music when we talk about the horizontal zone. Because it's not what you expect. It kind of works backwards. And so between the vertical and the horizontal transformations, there are three families of transformations we pay attention to. So the first family is reflections. So we could be reflecting across the x-axis or the y-axis. If we're doing a vertical reflection, that means that we're going to reflect across the x-axis. So you have your x-axis here and you reflect across it for that. We call that a vertical reflection because it's the y-coordinate that changes when you reflect downward, right? Y will become negative y and negative y will become positive y. That's the reflection that happens. And that's why we call it vertical reflection. The horizontal reflection is actually the reflection across the y-axis. So we think of it this way. Here's the y-axis. Here's our point x comma y. When we reflect across the y-axis, we're going to get the point negative x comma y. So it's the x-coordinate changes. Vertical transformations change y-coordinates. Horizontal transformations change x-coordinates. Okay? Now the way that we recognize these reflections is that you're going to have some type of multiplication by a negative. If that negative sign is outside of the function, there'll be a vertical transformation reflection across the x-axis. If that negative sign is inside of the function, it'll then cause a horizontal reflection that is reflection across the y-axis. Now of course, if you reflect across the x-axis and the y-axis, this has the effect of reflecting through the origin, like 180 spin. Another type of thing, another type of transformation that we should pay attention to is the idea of scaling, so we could stretch a graph or compress it. Stretching suggests that it gets longer, longer, longer. Compressing means it gets squished smaller, smaller, smaller, like shredder's helmet in the trash compactor from the Ninja Turtle movie, right? So how do you detect a scaling type transformation? Well, this is going to be multiplication. Multiplication outside of the function represents a vertical scale. Now you could do multiplication or division. That is, if you multiply by a number greater than one, that'll vertically stretch the graph. If you multiply by a number less than one, or just divide by that number, right, then that will actually cause a vertical compression. Now we also see that to do a horizontal stretch or compression, we're going to do multiplication inside of the function. Now if you divide by B, that actually causes a horizontal stretch. And then if you multiply by B, that actually does a horizontal compression. So it works backwards, right? So multiplying makes things get bigger in the vertical zone, but in the horizontal zone, multiplying actually makes things get smaller. It seems counterintuitive, but that's the nature of how these transformations work. Okay, now one thing I should mention is that when it comes to functions, we kind of ignore this one a lot, because when it comes to, say, the power functions, you can still see them on the screen right there. When it comes to power functions, we notice that power functions have the so-called Play-Doh effect, that when you have, like, this ball of clay or Play-Doh or Gack or whatever you like to play with when you were a child, and you start to squish it horizontally, like you do some type of horizontal compression, well that ball of clay is going to start oozing upwards, right? So when you start horizontally compressing it, that's equivalent to a vertical stretch. And likewise, a horizontal stretch is equivalent to a vertical compression. So this is the so-called Play-Doh effect. Power functions you think of are made out of Play-Doh. A horizontal compression or a horizontal stretch is equivalent to a vertical stretch or vertical compression, respectively there. So we can often ignore vertical stretching and compressing when it comes to these power functions. Exponentials sort of have that as well, because when you start doing horizontal stretches and compressions to a exponential function, that just changes the base. So it's not, that's truly a Play-Doh. It does have an effect, but you don't necessarily have to worry about horizontal scaling if you allow your base to change. If you don't change your base, then you will have to compensate for those things. The last thing to also consider is the idea of a shifting. Shifting. This is the very shifty one. How do you shift things up and down? Well, if you want to shift things up and down, you just add something external to the function. Adding k goes up. Subtracting k goes down. If you subtract something internal to the function in the horizontal zone, this actually has the opposite effect, right? So subtraction actually moves into the positive direction, which we call right. And adding moves something in the negative horizontal direction, which we call left. And that's how shifts work. Now, to make sure the horizontal zone acts correctly, we have the right order of operations. You do want this to be factored. If you had something like b, let's say bx plus, well, I'll do a specific number. If you had something like 2x plus one, you would actually want to factor this as 2x plus, excuse me, I miss wrote that 2x plus two. If you factor out the two, you get x plus one right here. So this would tell us that we're going to do a horizontal compression by a factor of two, and then you move things to the left by one. So make sure it's factored in order to get the correct transformations. This can be very confusing if you don't factor the horizontal zone. The horizontal zone should always be factored. I also wanted to mention that for logarithms, logarithms as they are the inverses of exponentials, we like, we can consider vertical reflections, vertical, vertical scaling, vertical shifting and horizontal shifting. We don't care about the other stuff for exponentials, but for logarithms, you're going to get the opposites because as you switch from a function to its inverse, vertical transformations become horizontal transformations vice versa. So when it comes to logarithms, we like to consider horizontal reflections, horizontal scaling, and then horizontal shifting, but we also want vertical shifting. You don't need the rest. I mean, you can use them, but it's not necessary. Because it's sort of like a pseudo play-to-effect, not as much, not as prevalent as with the power functions. And so let's then consider how one could graph these type of functions. And then we'll say what this has to do with domain and range. Oh, that's the other thing I want to mention here, that before we get to the examples, one thing I should mention is that when you do a vertical transformation, the vertical transformation only affects the range, because vertical transformations are those that change y-coordinates. The range, the set of all y-coordinates that show up on the graph. So if you do a vertical transformation, you are transforming the y-coordinates of the graph, which could change the range. Vertical transformations always, they can only change the range, they can never affect the domain. On the other hand, a horizontal transformation will change x-coordinates, and the domain is the set of all x-coordinates on the graph. Horizontal transformations can change the domain, but they cannot change the range of the function. So keep that in mind as we go through these examples. So consider the function f of x equals 2 times e to the 1 minus x plus 3. So if I want to graph this via transformations, I need to think of my basic graph. And your basic graph here is going to be y equals e to the x, for which you see its graph illustrated here on the screen right here. This is our basic graph. And so, paying attention to its domain and range, its domain is going to be all real numbers, because there's no number which we can't evaluate e as its power. And the range, though, this is a restricted range for this graph here. The natural exponential, like most exponentials, if there's no transformations applied here, its range is going to be only positive numbers. You'll notice that the graph is asymptotic to the x-axis, it never touches the x-axis, it never crosses the x-axis. Its range is going to be zero to infinity. So what type of transformations are in play right here? We'll see some things. So our function, our function is y equals e to the x. So I want you to think of it in sort of the following way. Our function is y equals e to the box, right? Don't think of it as a variable, think of it as a box. Anything that goes inside this box is going to be inside of the horizontal zone. So the things that are the exponent of e, that's the horizontal zone. The things that aren't exponents of e, turns out those are going to not be the horizontal zone, so those are going to be vertical transformations. So when you examine that, we have this times by two, we have this plus three. So if we enumerate the vertical transformations, what we see here is there's going to be a vertical stretch by a factor of two, and there's going to be a shift up by a factor of three. Those are vertical transformations. Notice how that's going to affect the range of the function, because the other stuff here, the one minus x, this will affect the domain, but this doesn't affect the range. So if we're after the range of this function, I only have to worry about the transformations. You want to go in the right order. You always reflect, then stretch, then move. Those are the order we always go with here. So reflection, there was no reflection. You don't have to worry about that. What does vertical stretching do to the range? Vertical stretching means that we're going to take all the y-coordinates and multiply by two. Well, if you take zero times by two, you get zero still. If you take infinity times two, you still get infinity. So if you just do a vertical stretch, this will not change the range at all. It'll still be zero to infinity. The next one, a vertical shift. A vertical shift means you're going to add one to each and every y-coordinate. The smallest y-coordinate is zero. You add three to that. You get three. The biggest one, which there really is no biggest one, but if you take three plus infinity, that's still going to be infinity. And so we see here that the range of f is then going to be three to infinity because we moved everything up like we see on the graph over here. We can't get below the line y equals three. Now on the other hand, if we think of the horizontal zone, I need to stop doing that. The horizontal zone is going to be affected by this parameter right here. You have this one minus x. This is our horizontal zone. I can't control myself. The horizontal zone needs to be factored though, so we need to think of it as negative x minus one. And so when we do it that way, we can then see what's going on here. The negative sign inside the horizontal zone suggests that there's going to be a reflection. So we're going to reflect across the y-axis. And then the minus one there means it's a shift to the right by one unit. Now what does this do to the domain? Well, reflecting the domain across the y-axis means you multiply all the x-coordinates by negative one. So negative infinity gets times by negative infinity, which then becomes infinity, and then infinity gets times by negative one. Did I say that one right? So negative infinity gets times by negative one, it becomes positive, and then positive infinity gets times by negative one becomes negative. So in that situation, the domain didn't change. The domain will still be negative infinity to infinity, even though it's reflected now. And then if you shift everything to the right by one, I mean, just add one to each point, looking at the end points, negative infinity plus one is still negative infinity, and infinity plus one is still infinity. So the domain didn't change from these transformations. But the final range did. So that's an important thing to notice here. The range is going to be three to infinity. The domain is going to be negative infinity to infinity, like so. And you can see what we did to the graph that summarizing here, we stretched everything by a factor of two. So this graph right here is taller than this one, right? We shifted it up by three, we see that. We then also reflected across the y-axis. So instead of being an increasing growth exponential function, it's actually a decreasing decay exponential graph. And then it got shifted to the right by one. So the original y-intercept moves to the point one comma five. Let's look at another example. Let's consider this quadratic function. Now, if we want to graph this using transformations, we would want something that looks like the following. We would want y equals. Well, let me back up for a second. What's our basic graph? The basic graph in play here, since it's a quadratic function is going to be our basic graph is going to be y equals x squared, which you can see that on the screen right here. That's just the basic parabola of which we're going to transform. But the types of transformations we can do here, we're going to get our what the so-called vertex form we had seen previously for quadratic functions. The vertex form looks like y equals a, which that a will incorporate a vertical stretch or a vertical reflection x minus h squared plus k, which x minus h will do a vertical shift plus k will do a, excuse me, x minus h will do a horizontal shift plus k will do a vertical shift like so. And so we don't have to worry about horizontal stretching compressions because power functions are made out of Play-Doh. And so this is the general thing we have right here, but that's not what this thing looks like. How do we get to this vertex form? Well, with a quadratic function, we can always complete the square. If you can complete the square, then what this will do is it'll put your quadratic function into vertex form for which the transformations are more readily available to see. So g of x, if we're going to complete the square, I'm going to separate the variables x from the constant. I'm just going to use a basically parentheses to act like a curtain. You're going to factor out the leading coefficient from the x squared and from the x.  You'll notice I'm leaving a gap right here for our guest of honor. The guest of honor is identified by the following. Take our number here, we're going to take half of that linear coefficient, which half of two is equal to one. We're then going to square that number, which gives us a one. And that's who we add inside that number. So we added a one inside, we have to then subtract one, you know, so that one plus one minus one cancels out. But as this negative three would distribute on all three of these pieces, we need to make sure we subtract one times negative three. And so then computing that we have a negative three times x squared minus 2x plus one. You'll notice that x square minus 2x plus one because we complete the square. This is a perfect square trinomial. It actually would factor as x minus one quantity squared. And then we have negative one plus three, which is going to be a plus two, which we see right here, the vertex form of this parabola, for which now in the vertex form, we can see the vertical and horizontal transformations of the graph that we couldn't see before. So our vertical transformations, what do we have going on there? You're going to have a reflection across the x-axis. You have a stretch by three and a shift up by two. So let's see, we're going to reflect across the x-axis. We're going to vertically stretch the graph by three. And then there's going to be a shift up by two. Those are our vertical transformations. Our horizontal transformations, the only things we have to worry about there, are going to be this negative two right here. That's a shift to the right, a shift to the right by one. And so that helps us identify the vertex of the parabola. You know, we shifted it up by two to the right by one. So the new vertex will be one one, like so. And then we can apply the transformation. It should be concave downward because it got reflected across the y-axis. And then it should be, it's more stretched out, stretched by a factor of three compared to this one. So it looks skinnier because we elongated it. We stretched it out by a factor of three. So now getting back to the heart of the question, how does this affect domain and range? Well, for your standard function, y equals x squared, in that situation, the domain is all real numbers, and its range is going to be zero to infinity. So what happens by the transformations? So if we take our function g right here, what's the domain of g? Well, the domain of g is only going to, it's going to be the original domain of x squared, but we apply any transformations which are horizontal, which if you add one to negative infinity and infinity, you just get back negative infinity infinity. The domain doesn't change there. That's, that's typical for quadratic functions. On the other hand, if we consider the range of g, vertical transformations can change that. So the original range, right, was zero to infinity. If we reflect that across the x-axis, we times everything by negative one, that's going to give us negative infinity to zero. Infinity times negative one is negative infinity, zero times negative one is still zero. Then if we stretch everything by a factor of three, we'll times these end points by three. So we get negative three times infinity, that's still negative infinity. Zero times three is still zero. And then we shift everything up by two. We're going to add two to these numbers. And now we get our final result. Okay, negative infinity plus two is still negative infinity, and zero plus two would then be two. So the range of this function is going to be negative infinity to two, which looking back on the graph again, we see exactly that. We can get everything below two going down towards negative infinity, but nothing above. Let's look at one more example of this. Let's consider the function h of x equals 10x plus 11 over 2x plus c. This is a linear fraction of this. It's a linear function divided by a linear function. It turns out that every linear function, every linear fraction, excuse me, can be written as transformations of the following basic function. The basic graph here we're going to use is the reciprocal function y equals one over x. Now in order to see the transformations, we can't see it in this improper fraction form. We have to do some polynomial division. You could do long division, you could do synthetic division or something like that. Notice if you do synthetic division, your numerator is 10x plus 11. If you're going to do synthetic division, it's like, oh, this isn't quite work. You could factor out the two and get something like x plus one, but then you have to remember the times by the two again at the end. So I'm a little bit hesitant to do it, but let's just try it anyways. I think, let me show you what I'm having in mind here. So this first thing here, because this is just to avoid long division, which is really not too long, but if you factor out one half out from the bottom, you're going to get 10x plus 11 over x plus one, like so. Now if we do synthetic division, because we're going to divide by negative one, you can use the coefficients 10 and 11, like so. Bring down the 10. 10 times negative one is negative 10 plus 11 is one, like so. So this tells us that h of x can be written as one half times. Your quotient here is going to be 10 plus one is your remainder over the denominator, which is x plus one. And so if you distribute the one half through, what we've now discovered is that h of x can be written as one over two times x plus one plus five. So this now starts to look like a transformation of the graph, y equals one over x, like so. You can see the transformations. Now I'm actually going to rewrite the first part a little bit differently, because the way I had it written, it was involving a horizontal compression. I actually want to think of it as a vertical stretch. So I'm actually going to write it as one half times one over x plus one, like so. And so now we're in a position where we can write our transformations. What transformations are going into play here? So we're going to do a vertical compression. We're going to do a vertical compression by a factor of two. So we're times everything by one half. We're going to do a shift up by five. We see that right here. And then we're going to do a shift right by, excuse me, not, excuse me, we're going to do a shift left by one, because you see that plus one that's going on right there. So these are the transformations in play to the original graph like that. So how does that affect the graph? Well, the standard one over x has an asymptote at the y, the x-axis and the y-axis. What do these transformations do to them? Right? If you have the x-axis, for example, as that asymptote, you vertically stretch it. Well, the coordinate zero doesn't change. If you, if you shift it by five, that does move it up here. And if you shift it to the left, well, it's still just a line horizontal. This will move the horizontal asymptote to be y equals five. If you take the vertical asymptote, what, which is the y-axis, if you vertically stretch it, it doesn't do anything. If you shift it up by five, that doesn't change a vertical line. But if you shift it over to the left by one, that does. And so we see that the asymptotes of this shifted graph will be y equals five and x equals one. We can see those things. Okay? And then moving the rest of the graph, it got shrunk by a factor of one half. So it's going to look a little bit more squished compared to the standard one, what you see right there. And so then you see the graph of h of x in play right here. How does this affect the domain and the range? Well, the original graph, right? Bringing it over here, the original graph, its domain is going to be everything except for zero. And its range is going to be everything except for zero. That's the original graph. So we know the domain and the range of the basic graph. How does this affect the transformations? What is going to be the domain of h? Well, when you look at horizontal transformations, the only thing you did is you shifted everything over by one. So that, that whole at zero, then gets moved over by one. And so the domain is going to be negative infinity to negative one union, negative one to infinity, for which if we were looking for, if we were looking for problems in the domain, we would have gravitated towards that pretty quickly. Oh, what makes the denominator go to zero? Two x plus two equals zero, which means two x equals negative two, which means x equals negative one. We found that point. We could have found that without the transformations. The range is a little bit harder, right? How is the range affected by these transformations? Well, horizontal transformations don't affect the range. If you take the, if you take the original range, negative infinities to zero, union zero to infinity, if you times each of those things by one half, what happens? Well, negative infinity times one half isn't, is negative infinity. Zero times one half is still zero and zero times infinity is still infinity. So stretching it didn't change the range. If you shift everything up by five, how does that affect things? Negative infinity plus five is still negative infinity. Zero plus five, that changes. That gives you five. Zero plus five is five. And then infinity plus five is still infinity. So we actually get that the range is going to be everything except for five, which is the location of the, which is the location of the horizontal asymptote. So when it comes to linear fractionals, we can, we can do an approach like this using transformations, but in a nutshell, it always turns out to be this simple. The domain is going to be everything except for the location of the vertical asymptote. The range of a linear fractional is going to be everything, all real numbers, except for the location of the horizontal asymptote, for which the horizontal asymptote we can find, like we did before. You just look at the ratio of leading terms, right? You're going to get y equals 10 over two, which is equal to five. I wanted to show you this, this approach using transformations. So for linear fractals, we can find their range and domain using much simpler terms.


How many people decided that maintaining their own site may not be for them? It's kind of hard sometimes. You've got to keep up with it. You've got to be on top of it. You can do it though. You've just got to keep on top of it. And just a note, I will be available the rest of the day. I'll be here and available for questions and stuff during lunch and all that. So if you have any other questions, I got some good questions during the break. So thank you. I was asked what I'm actually using for my little guy in the corner here, my image, my video. I'm actually recording this whole thing. It's called useloom.com. And if we go to it, oh, I just stopped it. But if we go to it, this is the entire first half here, first part, I guess. And it's saving it, and that will be available on my website too. This is the first part, so I'm going to close that. I'm going to show you how to start it up. So you can see it's called useloom.com. And it is a free recording software. It also has a desktop version, which is what I'm using right now. Start the recording. Okay, welcome to the second part of WordPress 101 at the Dayton Word Camp. So thank you for being here. We're going to go into some plugins now and finish off this segment of 101. We've got about an hour-ish left, maybe 45 minutes, and then we'll do some questions. So at the end, if you have any extra questions, we're going to talk about plugins. We talked about the site setup plugins that I use a little bit earlier. So there's that list. Again, it will be available on the site. But these plugins are for specific industries and for specific reasons.  Then you get to where those guys are in the back at 81. And we don't want that for anybody. So here are some things you could use if you're trying to do e-commerce. Is anybody trying to do e-commerce? Oh my gosh. It's like the whole room. Let me ask a question of you guys. Have you ever run an e-commerce site before? Okay. Talk to that guy. All of you. Or me.  And so people know who to talk to. Okay. Talk to the people that have their hands raised because it is more than you might think it is. Would you agree, you guys that have done it?  There's so much support. There's so many things that can go wrong. I'm not trying to dissuade you. I'm trying to say like just get some expert advice. Talk to somebody who's done it because it may not be for you and that's okay. But if you really want to do it, you got to kind of know what you're in for. Okay. It's like having a kid. So I like some of these things for different reasons for e-commerce. Easy digital downloads. How many of you are going to do digital content? This is for you. Okay. So downloads, PDFs, video, audio, stuff like that. WooCommerce. That's for any, pretty much any kind of e-commerce that you would want to do. Shipping and all that jazz. Restricted content. That's for like membership sites. You can restrict areas of your site so that only gold level can see this or, you know, and they can only see part of that page. But then platinum level can see the whole page plus this other page. It's just for them. I like to use, when I did membership sites, I liked to use member mouse. Has anybody heard of that one? It's really good. It is paid. The reason I liked it was because they were really responsive with their support and it's a very easy to understand platform. I feel like sometimes WooCommerce can get a little complicated, but it's very easy to understand. And then seamless donations. How many of you are running any kind of donations, nonprofits, that kind of stuff? Churches, those kind of things. Ministries. Seamless donations is awesome. It is so freaking simple and it's done. You don't have to worry about all that junk. Like you set up with Stripe or PayPal. I'm pretty sure those both are in there. And you just have donations. It's done. So it's very, very easy if you're just doing donations. It's really great. What was it? I don't know. There actually is, I have a client on Patreon and they actually, there's a WooCommerce plugin for that, I believe. So I would use that specifically. And sometimes if you go to the Patreon documentation and you look up how it connected to WordPress, sometimes they'll have a specific plugin they recommend and I would use that. If you're using a specific type of system that's not PayPal or Stripe or just regular credit cards that go to a bank account, I would go to the company's website like Converge or Patreon or somebody, whatever company they're using for donations. And I would look up what their documentation is, type in the word WordPress and see if anything comes up with, hey, use this plugin or we like this plugin best. Yes. WooCommerce versus Shopify. Is that your question too? Okay, great. You were laughing so I figured it was. It's going to get me kicked out of WordPress. I know it's going to get me kicked out of WordPress. All right. The question is WooCommerce or Shopify. Are you a developer? Okay. If you have the passion and the drive and the time to really get into WordPress on a developer level, I feel like WooCommerce is amazing because it's so customizable and there's so many things you can do with it. If you're like, I just want to sell pretty things. If that's kind of like the mentality, I just want to sell my stuff and be done with it and do my other things like run my classes or teach my things or do my videos or whatever it is. Just sell stuff and then do something else too. It's not your only deal. The customization is less important. Does that make sense? You want to have a nice site but you don't need to have special FedEx shipping that ships two packages. You want to be like the next Amazon or Etsy or whatever. That's not the point. You want to just sell stuff and do your other stuff. Then I would say go with something else. If you want to be more involved and you want it to be more complex, I had a woman who had a company that she sold medical device covers for people who had colostomy stuff. That's very specific, but she would have like 100 different fabrics. You could add gems and bows and stuff like that to make it more fun for kids and stuff. It's not the funnest topic in the world, but she needed some really complicated shop stuff. Wordpress was the only option. It's so many. It was the only one we could use because it was so customizable. She needed people to help her do it because she wasn't a developer. She just wanted to do her thing and sell her stuff. She hired people like me and another developer to work on it together and make it work. It was pain, but we made it work because it was so custom. If that's the direction you're heading or you want to do membership and stuff like that, that's the direction you're heading. Wordpress is good because even WooCommerce does membership subscriptions and stuff like that. Wordpress is good because you can have a lot of services and those kind of things, but if you just want to sell and not really worry about it and do some other stuff, then Shopify may be a better option. But you really have to go into the brand and the lifestyle of the business. I'm a branding expert, so that's kind of where I take it because I want to see the holistic side, not just which is better, Wordpress or Shopify, but what's better for you as an individual?  Are you going to hire a team? Are you going to have a support customer service group and what happens with it? What happens with returns? What happens with shipments that don't get there? How do you take stuff to the post office? Are you doing all the postages of stamps.com? I could go on with those questions. There's a lot of stuff that goes into e-commerce. That's why I was like, you guys, you need to talk to somebody. You can get to those questions and get some of those things out before you really just pick one piece. I would kind of maybe explore it a little further if you haven't or talk to somebody here that had raised their hand so that you can kind of get past some of that and then you'll be able to have a clear and go, oh yes, clearly I need to use this or this. And you'll have a really clear definition of it. Does that make sense? Yes. So free stuff, uh-huh. Right. I like easy digital downloads just because you can use it without using a payment method. If you're doing a download for like an opt-in, how many people have an opt-in for their email list? Like, you give me your email and I'll give you this PDF, right? Or this thing, this video. I like to actually do that through the email marketing system. So I use Mail or Light and I use that through the email marketing system. So they put their email in, it says thank you, check your inbox, the email that comes to them has a link and that link takes them to the PDF directly. So no one can get to that PDF unless they have exactly that link, which is kind of rare. And it's free anyway, so if somebody finds it randomly and not worried about it, like a code or something, because if somebody goes to a cart, you have to put in a code. Unless you have paid stuff too, like it's a paid thing and you're like, hey, I'm giving you this for free, it's worth $25, then they're happy to put in the code. They want that thing, right? They don't want to pay the $25. But if it's just a $0 amount thing and they're putting in a code to get it, you know, or whatever, they have to put in, because sometimes they'll even force a credit card sometimes if there's even a free amount. I mean, it's very tricky with that. So I try to use things that are a little more alternative, but there's no payment, it's just a link, a button. You can do it that way. Other questions about e-commerce? Yes. Not too hard questions, easy questions. I like that a lot. I've also done Etsy integrated sites with WordPress. People that really are just crafty and they're like, hey, I've already got an Etsy shop, but I want my own site to showcase stuff that I've done or do custom stuff. Then I have them leave their stuff on Etsy, they're familiar with it already. And there's a couple of plugins once called Etsy360 that you can use and actually just put your stuff in Etsy and do what he like what he said with big commerce. Import it in, done. That's it, you're done with it. And all the payments happen on the other platform and all the inventory happens on the other platform just like what he said. So you're really using two pieces, but one that's like he said a little more easy, like a little easier than trying to deal with WordPress but big commerce, you've got that ease of, if I have a Shopify, big commerce that you're using and you're get used to. Yes, donations with additional information. Yeah, seamless donations will do that. You can add whatever field you want it to capture and you can do that that way. There's PayPal donation plugins, there's Stripe donation plugins, like other ones other than just seamless. Seamless is an actual specific plugin, but you can actually add your own fields and capture whatever information you want. You can make up, sometimes I'll even do it where I'll do a ninja form first. It'll say make a donation. It'll take them to a ninja form and then instead of saying submit on the ninja form, it'll actually take them to a second page where they do seamless donations. So I've already captured their information and then they just pay through seamless and it's done. So it's like using two pieces, but for the consumer it looks like one seamless, they just go from the form to the pay and then they're done. So I'm going to do that too. A little more fancy, but it works. Okay. Plug-in tools. How many of you are doing events? You're going to need an event calendar? Okay. The events calendar by Modern Tribe is one of my favorites. It's my favorite. It's really, really good. They have a lot of updates they do and it's just got a lot of great options. Oh, just dropped my mic. Hold on. It's just failing. Okay. Instagram feed. There's actually an Instagram feed plugin in the repository just called Instagram feed and I really like that as well because it just adds an element of kind of updated content to your site without you having to go in there and update content. So your current Instagram feed, you can put it wherever you want pretty much with a little short code. I like MailerLite, MailChimp, Constant Contact, Emma, all those. I like MailerLite the best. You get the most for your money, I feel like, with them. I've done a lot of research on different products and they're the one that has the best value for money and they have their own plugin. So if you're using an email marketing system, you want to look and see if they have a plugin for WordPress and use that plugin. Just find whatever email marketing system you're going to use. Find their plugin and just use their plugin. It will be much easier. There's no code involved. If you're going to be doing Google Analytics or if you want to do that in the future, I use the Monster Insights plugin. That's the easiest one I've found to use.  It's what's called a U code. There's a couple of different numbers strung together and you'll download Google Analytics, drop that number in, and then they'll both kind of connect up that way. There's a couple other steps, but that's the gist of it. Yes, you have a question? Yes, yeah. I would really consider looking at Mailer Lite if you're using one already because their payments are lower than a lot of the other ones because once you get to a certain point that you have to pay. The other thing is sometimes they restrict access to certain things like automation, which is what I talked about with opt-ins. The automation of someone signs up, they get put in X list, then a trigger happens, like an automation happens. With MailChimp, they actually restrict that to only paid users in some cases with certain things you can do with it. I like that Mailer Lite doesn't do that. You can use it on the free version. They also give you heat maps and all kinds of stuff. Look at the one you're using and do some comparisons so that you have the most pieces. Like I said, you want to use fewer plugins, right? So instead of using something like MailChimp and then maybe you have to use another plugin to help you with automation or something, maybe another platform would help with that if you're using those kind of things. So just trying to make sure you get the most you can in the least amount of items that you're trying to either use or pay for. Because I don't think you should pay for things you don't have to pay for. Does anybody else have a question? Hi Online, which is a job board and simple job board. If you're doing any kind of recruiting or anything like that or you have the people who want to have a hiring or career section on their site, you can use these. They're free. They're really good. They're in the repository. If you're going to do any podcasting, Blueberry is on here. And then also Coast Schedules. Anybody heard of Coast Schedule? Awesome. So Coast Schedule is a calendar for your WordPress. And you might think, WordPress lets me schedule posts if I want to. So if we go into posts here and we look at this one, I could schedule this for any time I want, right? Let's say I put it in August and I say, okay, and I have it scheduled. When I go to look at it in posts, this is what I get. A list. I get a list. I don't get anything else. What Coast Schedule does is it gives you a grid calendar. It shows it to me on an actual square grid calendar, which is what, for me, is much easier to kind of like view, especially when you have like 50 or 60 or 70 or 100 posts and you're scheduling them out for a year or whatever it is, six months, you can actually go through and see where your posts are listed. Then what else Coast Schedule does is it says, hey, this is a great post. Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, that's it, that's it, that's it, right? And it will then put those links in your grid calendar because you might actually want to post something in April and then have it post again to social media in August. It lets you do all of that right in Coast Schedule. It's awesome. So if you're going to do blogging, it's definitely the way to go. I also use Social Pilot, which is a third-party app that keeps it contained in WordPress. It's a great plugin, very light, but it does a really good job. Posting to multiple pages or groups on Facebook with one, yes, you can, I believe you can do that with Coast Schedule. All right, tools, I have some tools here. Now some of these get a little more complicated but I'm going to explain them as I go. So duplicate page I mentioned before, duplicate posts, I'm sorry, I mentioned duplicate posts before, you can create a really cool page for each of your people that work at your company or whatever. I really want to reuse this because the bio is in the right place, the photo is in the right place. You can use duplicate page as a plugin and you can just put that in and duplicate your pages so that you don't have to redo each of those pages every time. Now, remember I mentioned builders and I mentioned Divi? With Divi, you don't need duplicate post because you kind of start eliminating some of those plugins, right? I keep hitting this. That's where you start eliminating some plugins. So also when you have plugins in your section there, you can turn them off if you're not using them.  They're called deactivate, they're still sitting in there but you just deactivate them. I'll show you, for example, we'll get duplicate page in here. Here's duplicate page and we'll do duplicate post. So you can see them both. Okay, let's go into plugins. Here they are. They're not activated. I can activate duplicate post. Activate duplicate page. Use them. Okay, now I'm done. I can just deactivate one or both and it doesn't have to run. It's just sitting in there. It's just sitting there waiting for me to start it up and use it. Site origin builder. Now, when I used blue shake themes, when I used to use those exclusively, I used the Site Origin Builder on top of them. Now with Gutenberg, it may not be as needed but if Gutenberg is not your favorite or you play with it a little bit and you're just kind of like, it doesn't make sense to me, sometimes that happens. These developers, they build these things and they're like, this is awesome, it makes total sense and then I get in there and I'm like, what? This does not make sense at all. Example, Hootsuite and Social Pilot. Hootsuite, I don't understand. It's another type of builder that's kind of mirroring modules and columns and putting things in blocks. You basically say, I want some text here and I have three columns. I want some text on this side and I want a picture on this side and in the middle I want another picture that's an arrow that points to the picture or points to the text or whatever you want to put there. Or you can have three columns of text and you have a picture on top of each one like your services or something. You can have multiple with it than just having, here's your text box like it does in WordPress. Now, like I said, they've got Gutenberg and you've got a lot more options but Site Origin Builder is another one that you can try out and play with but it's a plug-in. It goes on top of your theme and I found it really useful and helpful so you can try it out and see if it works for you. Easy Modal. Modal, does anybody know what that is? Modal. You could say, hey do you want to save 10% or whatever? Those are like the e-mail marketing ones, right? Where you put your e-mail in and you say, okay I'll save 10% These are like, hey, you should contact us you click it and it pops up a whole contact box. Now you have to be careful with these because remember we're designing for mobile, right? So you have to be careful with them but you can use them in certain cases. You can also have them pop up to show like a tool tip tip, maybe a definition of something. So I've used those in those cases before. So you eliminate some of that text on your page and put it in a little like pop-up box instead. Jetpack is another plug-in that typically comes with WordPress, but you have to activate it. Let me show it to you. It does require you to have a WordPress.com account to utilize it. But there are some really cool things that I like that it does. Let's do some screenshots here. So it has a few things that it does. It does some more analytics stuff that's more like on the site, not necessarily Google Analytics, but like within the site it gives you some analytics. It does some stuff through WordPress.com. If you have a blog and you want it to kind of be posted out with all the other blogs, it kind of helps with that. It does some stuff with images and video. They're just a little like little tweaks that it will give you that WordPress doesn't have inherently. And it's really nice. So if you want to look through that list, if you install the plug-in it'll say, here's all the things you can do. You can turn them on or off.  Sometimes I use it in websites and sometimes I don't. It really depends on the client and what kind of content I'm doing. It can be a little heavy, so use it sparingly. Messenger chat is actually, how many people have a Facebook page for their business or the company they're trying to work with? Okay, it's a Messenger chat. So what this does is it allows you to, someone to message you using Messenger on your website. So it puts a little blue Messenger circle in the corner. Just like almost like chat with us live kind of thing. And it will actually message you through Facebook. So it's pretty cool. Opening hours, I like this plug-in as well. It's great for if you have some of these hours that change a lot or maybe they're expanding or they're downsizing or they're growing or whatever it may be, then you can have them, allow them to change their hours a lot. But it's always updated on the website. And you can put it in multiple places and only change it one time. So you're not having to go to the home page and change it in the footer and change it in the contact page and change it. You just put it in once. And if you change it once on that section within the plug-in, it changes it on all the other sections of your site for you.  And now it's just about right forward slash about. And you want it to redirect. So somebody has tagged and favorited about dash us. When they go back to that page, it's going to say 404 error. We don't find this page. We don't know what you're talking about because the page is gone. So what you can do is use redirection. And it'll say about dash us is now just forward slash about. And it will redirect them. So anything that they've tagged as a favorite in their website and their browsers, it'll actually redirect them to the correct page. Sometimes I've gone in and cleaned up sites for people. There's a lot of pages they don't need. So I'll just make a list of all the slugs and I'll redirect them to the services page. Like they'll have a ton of pages that are just so extra. And I'll just take all those slugs, put a little document together. And then when I'm done, I go into redirection and start adding them in and say this random weird page goes to services now. So if somebody had favored it for some reason, it'll just take them to the services pages is where they should be in the first place or whatever whichever page it needs to be. If you want to get fancy with stuff and you need to know an idea of a page, sometimes this happens with galleries. If you're making galleries with photos, you might need to know the idea of a photo because word press assigns a number to everything. A reveal IDs is a plugin that I use occasionally to show me the idea of something. If you run across a plugin that says we need the idea of this page, it's not shown anywhere, but this plugin will show you what that ID is. And then WP file manager. Sometimes the media library can be a little bit kind of squirrely and not as user friendly as it should be or could be. And so the file manager just gives you a little bit different view of all the files you've uploaded and some of the files that are in your site. So you can go in there and see it in a little different view. Like I said, sometimes things work for your brain and sometimes they don't. So this is just another way of viewing it. Now I did have a question during the break that I wanted to address, and it was the difference between, oh wait, do we have a question? No, you would use the plugin, install the plugin, and it would show you the files in a different way, just in a different view, essentially. No, it's connected to the site inherent, like inside the site. The question I had was about PHP and CSS. So two totally different languages. And I'm going to tell you another story. So get comfy. Hope you like stories guys. When I was 13, I went to the library, very similar to this one in Ohio. And I told my mom, I said, I want to go to this class. And she's like, fine, I'll take you. It was at night. And it was an HTML 101 class. I was the youngest person there. Everyone else was in their 30s, 40s, had briefcases, scowls on their faces. It was, you know, seven o'clock at night, they hadn't had dinner. They were like, gotta be here for work. And they were struggling. And I was over there like, I loved it. I thought it was the best thing in the world. So we get ready to leave. And it was like a two and a half hour class. It was long. We get ready to leave.  And they're like, okay, check out the books on HTML. This is 1998, 1999. And I'm standing there like, Oh, man, these books look so awesome. And all the adults are just, they just leave. They're gone. They need to be dinner. And I just take all the books and I do this. I put them all in my bag. And I took them all home and I read every single one. And from then on, I couldn't, I couldn't let my mother, you know, get on me about not knowing a language, because I did, just not once she could speak. And I, I loved it. I mean, it was like learning another language.  And just a text editor and just type away and make you something halfway decent. Wordpress has really helped. You don't have to do that anymore. But learning that language was so eye opening for me. And to this day, I use it almost every single day in website design. And if we talk about PHP and CSS, it's just two other languages that WordPress uses. And HTML is pretty much the basis of a lot of the web. As far as like being the foundation, I guess, and it's used a lot. But PHP really allows the web to be more flexible and integrated and plugged in, I guess, to other pieces of the web, whereas HTML, it was a little harder to kind of shove everything into this little more archaic language. And then CSS is just another piece of that. And I call it the pretty language, because it really does a lot of things to make things look beautiful. It's the colors, it's the fonts, it's the imagery sizing, it's how your sites look responsive. And when you're on a phone, you don't see this photo or you don't see this video, you see this photo instead. So the site loads quicker and all that little stuff that just happens, you don't even know it as a consumer, all those languages. But learning HTML as a child, and being in that world from, you know, from being a teenager until now, I can say 18 years later, it's still just as fun, it's still just as exciting. And if you ever get a chance to go to a class like a library class, or you can audit college classes, you can go to these, you know, local colleges and just say, hey, I'm going to audit the CSS class or I'm going to audit the PHP class, do it. Because, you know, I'm not a language person, I don't, I mean, I learned French as a kid, on poteet, that's it, I can't even ask to go to the bathroom. And I don't remember any of it. But HTML, it's in there forever. So if you get a chance, and you're not sure exactly what to do with them or how to use them, look up local classes, look up, you know, local areas, but it's really the foundation. Those three languages are really a lot of the foundation of the web. And WordPress relies heavily on them. And so as you go through, you will see things like iframes, which is HTML, and you'll see things that are, you know, the CSS that we talked about in the Customizer, there's additional CSS.  They're going to say, put this in your site and put this in your site, copy this code. And if you don't know how to read it and at least understand it a little bit, it can be really frustrating. And so getting just a little bit of knowledge can really go a long way for you to be able to look at something and go, I kind of understand it. I couldn't write it, but I can kind of grasp what's happening. You had a question.  And sometimes it's like 50 bucks or something real small amounts. I don't know how much it is here, but you can go to local colleges, community colleges, and look at their audit programs. Sometimes even have like free programming for adults during the day. You know, if you're over a certain age or sometimes they have a programming at night for like community education. And a lot of times it's the same professors and the same people that are doing adjunct. They'll teach those classes as well to make some extra money. So and it's just a couple, you know, it's not usually a lot. And this you can even, like I said, just audit a college class in some cases too. Yeah. Do you have a question? Linda? Yeah, Linda's the online and online class version. Yeah, that's that's a good one too. Yeah, I like I like the in person stuff because you know, I like people. That's why I like this. Do you have a question? Yes. What is it? I can't remember. Next session. He's going to do it. I know, right? What was the other questions? I saw a bunch of hands. Wimpidmap. He's going to go into a month, which I think right? You're going to go into him? Okay. So he'll tell you all about that. I do the simple stuff. I'm not kidding. He's going to go into that though. Any other questions? I had saw some hands. Okay. Um, so yeah, so is that cover those things? Everybody have the other questions about that stuff or any other WordPress related stuff? No? Oh my gosh, you guys just know everything. It's awesome. Yes. So you have a customized theme from a vendor you don't use anymore. And you want to kind of start new. I would probably say go with a staging site so you don't mess up your current site. So go and we'll go into the hosting, set up a staging if we can rebuild on that, change the theme out, do whatever the heck you want because it's not live. And then once that's ready, push that live. That's how I would probably approach it. Okay, guys, well, I have loved talking to you. I'm going to let you go a little bit early so we can talk so we cannot talk individually and talk to each other because we're here for the community part too, right? I love networking. I can't help it. So if you want to talk to me or anyone else, e-commerce people, raise your hand. The ones that need it, the ones that already know it, e-commerce, know it really well. Okay, you see us right now. There's like four of us. Talk to those people, five of us. Talk to those people. If you have e-commerce questions. And like I said, if you talk to all five of us and we all give you a different answer, go with your gut. Right? Always go with your gut because it's always going to be right. All right, thank you guys so much. My name is Elizabeth Pamplone and I will see you soon.


Ever heard the old phrase, strike when the iron is hot? Well, it's never been hotter than now. All this month at Appalachian Wireless, you can get the Samsung GS6 or the GS6 Edge for just one penny when you send them for service. The Galaxy S6, normally $49.99, now just a penny. The Galaxy S6 Edge, normally $99.99, now just a penny. Strike now while supplies last. Better service, bigger savings, serving you for the last 25 years at Appalachian Wireless. The Floyd County Health Department presented evidence of the rising threat of a Hepatitis C outbreak to the Floyd County Fiscal Court Friday and the Prestonsburg City Council Monday, both of which passed resolutions in support of a needle exchange program. Officials say the belief that programs such as these enable the drug user is completely untrue and without a program like the needle exchange program, the spreading of Hepatitis C will not slow down. They're going to use no matter what and what is happening is that they keep sharing and when they share needles that's what is causing the outbreak as far as the Hepatitis C. Floyd County is projected to be number 10 in the nation as far as possible outbreak or hepatitis new cases, so they're trying to get ahead of it right now. All the misconceptions the general public has about needle exchange programs aside, if these intravenous drug users do not feel they can come in and safely exchange their syringes without fear of incarceration they will not come and if they don't come, the program cannot work. We don't plan on turning anybody in that shows up in the parking lot unless they are in top you know show evidence of being under the influence. We are also going to reach out the next couple weeks to law enforcement and ask them to commit to what Senate Bill 192 says that if you have your syringes there in the car and your paraphernalia and you declare that you have it when they pull you over and you are not showing signs of being under the influence then they would not automatically arrest you because you had drug paraphernalia on you. There is no set date for the program to open but officials hope to have the program up and running soon. Reporting from Prestonsburg for EKB News, I'm Shawn Allen.


Canada's federal government plans to introduce a national pharmacare program to provide prescription drug coverage to all Canadians. The program will focus on providing basic care medications to those in need, while leaving the option open for patients to receive specialized medication as needed. This article was authored by Nigel S. B. Rawson.


Still not looking great, but we'll see how this goes, so... First things first, my happiness is not great. I don't really need to spread my religion right now, so... All I can buy is a missionary pagoda. I'll get the pagoda because I guess my happiness down. My unhappiness down, which will be a significant factor in the war.


That's the line!  I would like to see more scheming and less screaming. Okay, I would like to know why. Like, what convinced him? People are more complicated than that. House of the Dragon, episode seven. This episode felt just so iconic to me, by which I mean it just, I don't, I don't mean to say that it is iconic necessarily, but it felt iconic. And there's a few reasons for this, I think. One of the biggest reasons, so that's what I'm just going to talk about at first. As usual, I have divided my notes into sections, but I just wanted to open my time up. How many trailer lines we got in this episode? And every time one hit, it's kind of like when you watch The Sixth Sense and Haley Joelzman says you can see dead people, you're like, that's the line! So we had three that I clocked. There might be more, so let me know. From Coralus of Alarion we got two, and from Auto Hightower we got one. And these lines didn't just feel iconic because they're from the trailer, but they feel a little bit altogether, all three of them do feel a little bit like the thesis of the show, if there is one. Anyway, so those, if you missed them somehow, those were Coralus of Alarion saying what is this brief mortal life if not the pursuit of a legacy? Coralus of Alarion shortly thereafter says that history does not remember blood, it remembers names.  Which are three really, really excellent lines. I mean, I can see they were chosen for the trailer because they are so, they have a feeling of being iconic and they are such a good encapsulation of the themes of the show. So anyway, I just enjoyed those moments. I was the Leonardo DiCaprio meme going, that's the line! Okay, so episode seven, it did have a lot going on. As usual, these episodes are quite cramped. There is no dead weight in these episodes. As usual, my notes don't really have hard dividing lines, but I've kind of divided them between sort of like, there's a lot of like sort of group moments in the show, so I've kind of talked about them as a separate section where like this scene I unpack. And they also have separate notes about like specific characters and what kind of goes on with them for the whole episode. That's kind of what I'm doing here. So let's start out by talking about the funeral scene, which the funeral scene kind of felt like an interesting paralleling or an interesting echo of the wedding scene. So in the wedding scene, I talked about how despite my problems with kind of how that scene ends, how brilliant it was, the way that we sort of had Viserys sitting there and kind of oblivious to the turmoil around him, turmoil that is at least in part caused by his either actions or in actions. So here at the funeral, we saw something a little bit similar in that we see a lot of those same characters that were at the wedding, sort of a reunion of that guest list. Obviously some people absent, the Lena, the person they're there to mourn, as well as Harwin obviously, because he died in the previous episode, and Viserys kind of again oblivious to all the tensions around him. During the funeral, we once again just see a lot of efficient storytelling, like there's so many characters and so many dynamics and so many things that happen to happen kind of off screen, just kind of move things along. So we don't waste a lot of time establishing that Otto High Tower is the Hand of the King, we just quickly show the pin and we're like, he's Hand of the King again, don't need any more, they just trust the audience, we got it, we saw the pin, we know what's up. We see an interesting echoing or paralleling, not for something that happened in House of the Dragon but for Game of Thrones. The episode does this quite a few times and it's not super aggressive and overt but it's there in a way that it feels more like history repeating itself kind of feeling. So Otto High Tower is once again Hand of the King and we get this scene where he finds Aegon, who a lot of people have already compared to Joffrey, with, understandably so, drunk and sitting by himself and Otto is very Tywin Lannister about going and kind of manhandling his royal grandson, like the one person that doesn't have to take any shit and like has his own schemes and plans and is more of a force to be reckoned with than this kind of like pathetic royal princeling. Later on in the episode we also kind of, the dynamic between Otto High Tower and Allicent is a little bit similar to Tywin and Cersei, although Otto seems more supportive of Allicent than Tywin is of Cersei. I really enjoyed how during the funeral scene we saw a kind of huge variety of how grief manifests itself kind of all going on at the same time and again they didn't belabor that point or overdo it at all but there was just like so many different kind of reactions to the death of Laina that we got to see there and I just enjoyed again the variety because there's there's a very I feel like bad writing will just say you know death equals sad and insult equals mad you know it's very like one note very very simple but like grief is complex humans are complex not everyone responds to death in the exact same way so seeing how the kids are dealing with seeing how Damon's dealing with it seeing how her parents are dealing with it seeing how Allicent doesn't care I just I thought that was very very well handled it felt like a very rich scene again similar to the wedding where there's just like so much going on both emotionally and politically between everybody who's present there. I did kind of break my heart when Coralus was talking to his grandson and telling him how he's gonna inherit Drift Mark and he says he doesn't want it which I'm not gonna lie I did laugh at first because it just reminded me of Jon Snow saying I don't want it but when he explained that he doesn't want to inherit Drift Mark because if he's inherited it that means everyone's dead that broke my heart. Damon does laugh a bit during the sort of funeral right but you do get the sense that he's not like he doesn't not care at all that Laina's dead it does seem to bother him that like he is grieving at least a little bit I'm not trying to say like oh Damon secretly is tofty I'm not saying that but like you know again people are more complicated than that I think the way he feels about Laina is quite different from how he felt about his first wife I mean he we saw like he did care about her she wasn't nothing to him he care I'm very sad that they cut the scene of him in the previous episode um holding hugging his daughters after Laina dies um so since they cut that scene it would have been nice to see him kind of grieving with his daughters here at the funeral but they maybe they cut that scene as well maybe they did originally have that but nevertheless even though they cut these softer sides of Damon from the show it still does seem like he's bothered that she's dead it doesn't she doesn't mean nothing to him and later when he's talking to Rainier about her too you know like he's not flippant about it he's like you know he's not gonna say that he was in love with her or anything like that because that would not be true but she wasn't nothing to him it was a bit strange to me um maybe you can explain it to me why Coralus Velaryon has such a big problem with Lainor um going out to the sea to grieve his sister that reaction seemed if a bit you know emotional for a man uh in this kind of environment in this setting all right it felt appropriate for a brother to grieve his sister that way i didn't see anything about it that would be scandalous or gossip worthy or that i just didn't get why Coralus was so upset by that that he would say hey go go get him uh to his boyfriend like that seems more like you're creating a war of a scandal with that so i i really didn't understand that scene or like why Coralus was reacting the way he was but yeah it's kind of tragic to see how much of a Viserys still wants a daemon with him and really um obviously daemon's a big part of it but you really just do get the sense that Viserys heart is with his family like his you know his blood relations that he feels sort of parted from nowadays that he's with Allicent and Allicent's kids and like kind of that's the team that he is surrounded by now and it's pretty clear like when he goes up to daemon and is like once again like oh you come back it's fine you're unbanished like it's fine i miss you come back i'll i'll be there for you you have a place by my side like after everything once again he's like i want daemon back and he's he seems quite happy to see daemon again even under such sad circumstances again much much later in the episode and we'll get to that in more detail but i mean when he takes Rainier aside against Allicent and in the funeral scene he calls Allicent Emma so it's just it's pretty clear if it wasn't already all along that Viserys his heart is with his his daughter and his brother and his his Targaryen family not with Allicent or or his kids with Allicent so moving on then to Rainier and Daemon i kind of like that i mean for all that the show does kind of speed through things i did kind of appreciate that they did just kind of like get right to it with Daemon and Rainier because this is inevitable they've been building this for a while no one is under any illusions about how these two feel about each other so that's just kind of like we're like all right we're doing it just kind of cut right to the chase so i appreciated that because you're like yeah i do still think um it would have been nice to see more of Harwen and Laina i do stand by that but that being said that being in my mind still the best case scenario for the show um i do still think that um now that we saw this conversation between Rainier and Daemon where they're each kind of talking about who Laina and Harwen were to them i sort of felt like i don't know if this is going to make sense or i can explain it in a way that makes sense but the basically like what Daemon and Rainier and the story of the show know about Laina and Harwen is what the other tells them about them so Daemon doesn't really like didn't really personally observe or know much about Harwen and similarly Rainier didn't really personally observe or know much about Laina and her relationship with Daemon other than just knowing that it exists so i feel like then the audience similarly only knows about them what they are telling each other and so their experience of these characters is just like Daemon's and Rainier is where Daemon only knows what Rainier has to say about it Rainier only knows what Daemon has to say about it and the audience likewise kind of only knows what they have to say about it i don't know if that makes sense i enjoyed how um again i don't know if i necessarily call this an echoing or anything um but the way that when Rainier is pitching to Daemon the idea of them uniting or their union that she basically puts it in the same terms with the same arguments in the same reasoning that Daemon gave to Viserys when he himself proposed this very thing which Rainier obviously wouldn't know anything about so i just like the way that it kind of shows once again the show has done this many times to once again show us how much of these two are alike that they think the same they act the same their priorities are kind of the same their strategies and and logic and approach to things is the same so Rainier pitches Daemon's own plan to Daemon without knowing that that's what she's doing so i thought that was a clever way of yet again just showing how sort of simpatico they are now it's giving a little bit towards uh to the end of the episode i was about to have a big problem with the idea that Rainier would sign off on the cold blooded murder of Lenore particularly because of how Rainier has been in the show so far which the characters it doesn't matter if like something that they do or say something from the book if like that's not consistent with how the character has been written in a show so far so the Rainier in the show just abruptly doing a 180 and being willing to murder Lenore just so she can be with Daemon would be a little out of left field especially like it would be left out it would be out of left field no matter what but particularly given the conversation that she had just had with Lenore telling him that he's a good and honorable man and that's a that's a rare thing and that you know she doesn't wish he'd be any different than he is like it seemed a very a sort of heartfelt moment between them so to on the heels of that call for his murder was a bit much to swallow and i was like really so i was kind of like my initial reaction then upon seeing that Lenore is alive i was like oh okay yeah actually yeah i was like Rainier wouldn't murder him okay but then immediately after that i was like hang on a second wait so Lenore was he in on it like when they when the guy attacked him like did they stage that together had they talked about that beforehand we're like let's stage a scene where you're trying to kill me and then obviously they did have to murder somebody so they'd have a body for the fire and like you know who who explained this to Lenore and what made him go yes this seems necessary i agree i should fake my own death and it's just it's a hell of a thing for him to do to his parents after they just lost Lena to then fake his own death like i just feel like i would like to see the conversation that convinced Lenore that this was the way to go because that's a lot for him to give up everything he's ever known his title his position his money um his he just said that you know he cares for even though this kids aren't actually like his by blood he does care for the kids he has with Rainier it's just that's a lot to ask of him and for him to be like okay i just okay i would like to know why like what convinced him you know it's too bad that Lenore wasn't the one that Kristen wanted to run away with because it turns out that Lenore would have been totally down but yeah i i did enjoy before we found out i think it was before we found out that Lenore was actually alive um that again Rainier and Damon sort of plotting this whole thing and then speculating that the people will ask questions and there will be rumors and people will assume that they're behind this that people will talk in the way that they're kind of accepting slash intentionally creating barbaric reputations for themselves which are you know more than they apparently deserve that it might be while scandalous it might be useful to have people think you're capable of something so dark that would be an intentional choice on their part to let it look like they did it that being said though if people will speculate that Rainier and Damon are behind it how does um Corliss and the rest of the ballerians feel about that you know they seem to be siding with Rainier in this episode as as you'd expect so i'm moving on then to Rainier and Allicent which is kind of what this whole show is about right at least so far so i've kind of accepted you know the new Allicent is who she is starting from the previous episode so like you know going into this one you know i'm expecting this new version of Allicent which to me still feels like a completely different character from the previous Allicent but whatever we've moved on this is this is who Allicent is now so moving forward that's who we're dealing with and i still think that how much she speaks up against Viserys in public so like a lot of people were saying to me that like that it's totally believable that she could get away with talking back to Viserys and and maybe possibly um i would agree but she does it in public and that's where i really find a problem with it because i feel like it's not just Viserys that would need to let her get away with this like the rest of like people would be like you can't talk to your king like that you know it's just there's just certain things that you just aren't done you know in public like that so the way she talks in front of him to him in front of other people is still a bit much for me to swallow for this sort of time and place that's being depicted and the way she like contradicts him and asks the guards to basically not just that she's getting away with speaking against the king but who's asking other people to listen to her over the king like that is bold very bold we've seen a consistent sort of theme of the way that Allicent is kind of obsessed with Reynira in a way that Reynira is not obsessed with Allicent so like we often see these scenes where Allicent is the one watching Reynira and Reynira will notice and look back but she wasn't watching Allicent she doesn't give like she doesn't care what Allicent is doing she's like whatever like and i don't i don't mean to say that you know Reynira is so dumb that she wouldn't realize that Allicent is a threat but you know she's she's concentrated on her own plans her own schemes her own efforts her own life and then Allicent is sometimes a problem but she's not like so obsessed with Allicent the way that Allicent is clearly obsessed with Reynira and is constantly worried about what Reynira is saying and doing and where she's where she's going and what's happening with her so i think they've done a good job of sort of like demonstrating that in many scenes in subtle ways and then obviously in confrontations we see that sort of bubble up to the surface the way that Allicent is so preoccupied with Reynira and Reynira is like i gotta get over it and that said Reynira does seem to think better of Allicent than Allicent thinks of Reynira Allicent is ready to assume the worst at all times about Reynira by contrast when Damon is talking to Reynira about the fire in Harrenhal and Reynira says she doesn't think Allicent is capable of cold blooded murder like that that she doesn't think Allicent would be the one that did it now i do think that scene would have been a little more interesting if as i've suggested in my previous video about the previous episode as i said in the book there is speculation about who caused the fire in Harrenhal it's not a certainty in the book and that Larry Strong is one of the candidates one of the options but the Damon Targaryen is also one of the several options if they had kept that ambiguity alive this little chat on the beach between Damon and Reynira about what happened in Harrenhal would have been just a little bit more interesting if we the audience had some reason to think that Damon might possibly have done it himself so how was he going to say to this but i feel like ultimately their goal with this episode or one of the many goals of this episode is to just show how much Damon and Reynira are kind of on the same page which would undermine that a bit granted okay i definitely got the feeling that you know Allicent again she thinks the worst of Reynira all the time but you also get the sense that it's only at the end of this episode that Allicent realizes that she's been dealing with the sort of meat version of Reynira thus far and it's only at the end of this episode when Reynira is with Damon that she's kind of like come into her own in terms of sort of confidence about her position at which point Allicent is like oh shit she was dealing with the nice let's make peace Reynira this whole time and Reynira has reached her limit and Reynira has Damon now so it definitely felt like Allicent's like thought that this you know she was dealing with the worst version of Reynira this whole time but you didn't know how bad it could get if that makes sense and i'm saying that like Reynira was evil at the end of the episode or anything but it was a a bolder Reynira than Reynira that Allicent has dealt with up to this point so it's sort of like oh you thought it was bad before well i'll show you how bad it can be uh the kids in this episode were fantastic i think they did a great job um in a very short amount of time in the previous episode setting up who each of them is their individual personalities and what the tensions are i mean obviously the tensions between the kids are sort of picked up by osmosis from their parents but they themselves have their own rivalries that have developed just on their own based on their own personalities so i think they did a good job setting that up so that in this episode it feels just as fraught as what's going on with the parents it was a little weird to me that it seems that they unless i missed it let me know if i did um but i think they betrothed Aegon and Helena off-screen because last time we checked Reynira was suggesting that Helena be betrothed to her son and now we heard Aegon talking about the fact that he's betrothed to Helena so again maybe i missed it but i don't think they ever showed us a scene establishing that that had been decided so that just felt kind of strange like wait since when like yeah like the kids again the tensions between the kids the actors playing the kids are doing a great job and so i feel like it's really really earned that moment after uh Aamond takes the dragon and he runs into his uh i was going to say cousins but they're his well let's not thank too much about the family lines anyway when he runs into the other kids and we have that intense altercation where he loses an eye i feel like they did a that that moment did come out of nowhere it felt very earned and the tensions between the kids felt like fraught like it felt highly charged and honestly that was much more believable to me than Kristen beating Joffrey to a pulp which did seem to come out of nowhere this scene between the kids felt very earned and and was very well done then we get the big confrontation with the parents and again i think the visual storytelling here was as usual fantastic the way that we sort of visually saw the battle lines being drawn about who's standing on which side of the room the way that Viserys is kind of standing in the middle of it all but there's kind of no one on his side he's kind of an island of indecision and obliviousness while the sides are being chosen around him we've sort of continued here this trend um it's not like a a cut and dry trend you feel free to disagree but this is kind of my feeling of how things have progressed with Reynira and Allison on a repeated and recurring and consistent basis where Allison is the one to kind of like strike first and i mean a lot of things by that i don't necessarily mean that she's always attacking Reynira just go with me on this that Allison slash Allison's side is the one to always strike first but Allison and Allison's side is usually the weaker for it or is punished for it or doesn't come out on top despite being the aggressor if that makes sense and again i don't when i say aggressor i don't necessarily mean she's like trying to fight her all the time so my sort of examples of this are initially in in the very beginning of this all um you know the two of them are supposedly friends which is a it's just a departure from the book and that's fine so the first person sort of do something to fracture the friendship is Allison to not Reynira by going behind everyone's back and hanging out with the king and yes her father made her do it but that is neither here nor there and it's certainly not something that Reynira would be aware of so regardless of who pushed who into it it does happen behind Reynira's back and would feel like a betrayal of that friendship and so you know maybe it's not Allison's fault um that it happened that way you know she just kowtowed to her father but nonetheless something like that breaks a friendship you can't go back to being friends like you were before that's it's not not an expectation you can have but so Allison does this so she strikes first but Reynira remains the heir and kind of does whatever she wants and she doesn't there aren't really any consequences for her then turning around and lying again she doesn't really lie to Allison but for her keeping her own secrets from Allison she doesn't really get punished for this there aren't any repercussions for this and with amon who would be you know on Allison's side when he sees the dragon i know he gained a dragon but he did not need to lose an eye to gain a dragon when he confronted his siblings he was the one that sort of struck first in terms of being the aggressor and throwing insults first and so while he was the sort of one to strike first he's the one that lost an eye and then here in the room between the parents Allison draws blood literally draws blood from Reynira with a knife and at the end of that confrontation the series is pretty clearly on Reynira's side if he's on anyone's side he's definitely not signing with Allison so it's consistently kind of it feels like Allison slash her side are reaching and grabbing and striking and trying to do something but it's Reynira and her side that come out on top so to speak so again it's not like a consistent like i hope i was clear about what i meant about those things um so it just seems like a pattern in this relationship and in this dynamic i definitely enjoyed seeing during this confrontation the way that Damon was happy to be a bystander and sort of like sit this one out and watch it unfold and wait till kind of um the victor emerges he's not going to get into the thick of it just to to begin with and not just that he's waiting but he's also seems to be just kind of enjoying the chaos the tensions that he's for once not the cause of so i thought it was a again you know it wasn't a an aggressive handling of that characterization but it felt extremely appropriate that that would that's what Damon would be doing when now you're like yes that's so Damon of him right now so i just feel like they're consistently good at sort of showing characters behaving in ways other than Allison's that are consistent for who they are and their characterization and continues to develop that further Allison to demanding that Kristen take the eye of one of Rainiera's kids um in front of everybody overriding the king's express command and telling Kristen that he's sworn to her not to the king even though i mean everyone is sworn to the king that's just how this works that was a bit much even for Kristen but i mean in general like that scene i was just like i mean i know vissaries less people get away with a lot but i was just kind of shocked at like how kind of no one in the room reacted to this i mean when she attacks Rainiera you know again i just i mean i know again vissaries is kind of you know infamous for his inaction um that he kind of lets people get away with stuff but there's like lots of guards in the room and like you know it just it felt like so is no one gonna do something about this like that was it was a bit ridiculous it was a bit surcy lannister of her to just kind of be unhinged like that in that scene it was a tad much it felt a little bit like the way that surcy becomes completely irrational when it comes to like Tyrion Lannister being around that she wants him dead and she won't trust him and she just like loses it and sees red is kind of how it felt now in between Rainiera and Allison by the end where Rainiera is the Tyrion so to speak so it was it was a little bit much but overall i did think the scene worked and it was very tense and um again battle lines were drawn so overall i did think this was a pretty fantastic episode i have very my issues with it if i have any um are more just sort of like things that are carryovers from the previous episodes again like not a super big fan of Allison's characterization in general but especially as it is inconsistent with the previous depiction of Allison if this is how Allison was going to be all along i don't necessarily care for it i would like to see more scheming and less screaming more subtlety from her character but if that's how she was going to be all along i feel like younger Allison should have begun to go down this path a little bit sooner so it wouldn't feel so like two different people again i enjoyed a lot of the ways that it did echo game of thrones feeling kind of like history's repeating itself at times with again the way that there's a lot of kind of like lannister influence in how things are going down um so i i enjoyed those sort of like echoes um those i they don't feel like fan service they don't feel like huh recognize this is this familiar it doesn't feel like that at all it feels much more like again history repeating itself and the way that these dynamics have a way of kind of similar things happen when people are put in similar circumstances and there's similar rivalries and the game of thrones is a a cyclical game that the players may change but the game remains the same almost if that makes sense i do think the pacing is a little fast because we're gonna get another time skip um in the next episode i'm excited to see the adult verses of the kids because you know that will be exciting they'll be able to participate more actually in the story when they're not kids but it is a bit fast i do think if the show runners had known what a hit this show would be they would have taken a little more time with things i suspect that they were concerned they have lost their audience if they didn't get to the hurry up and get to the dance of the dragons obviously i don't know that for a fact but it does feel a tad too fast just a tad like i think it the show would benefit from a little bit of breathing room a little bit of time spent kind of digesting and sitting with some of the events of the show overall but that said given the kind of constraints they have with how quickly they need to get through these events i do think they're doing a good job of conveying the important information and helping us along to go through this story so i think ideally it would be a little slower but for being if it needs to be this fast they're doing a good job with it um the child actors were fantastic so i i we were with reyneera and allison longer so i don't know that i can say i will miss them the same way because we didn't really see them that much but they did a great job you know child actors are are harder to find um or like that can act very convincingly and very well i oftentimes just kind of don't expect it and i'm impressed if i find it so they did very good they did a very good job the child actors um i felt that reyneera and daemon's dynamic in this um particularly in this episode it did feel very much like a continuation of the dynamic between daemon and reyneera that we'd seen previously with the previous um reyneera so i thought the the not just the actors looking the same or the script being the same but it felt like between the two actors the the chemistry between them it felt like a just more mature version of what they had before so just like i said in the previous episode these older version of reyneera very much works for me and not just in how reyneera isn't acting in isolation but reyneera is dynamic and chemistry with other characters around also feels consistent and it's really important that it feels consistent with daemon in particular and i think that it really does as always the music the cinematography the costumes the sets all of that is gorgeous fantastic well crafted well done always feels immersive always feels consistent for the world um i haven't mentioned it before but the dragons the dragons are used very well and are are done very well they look as much as you can say something like this about a dragon they look very realistic like they don't just feel like oh a fantasy creature that can fly around and breathe fire i mean the dimensions the weight the size the danger everything about the dragons it feels very real their wingspan everything about them it feels less like a fancy magical creature and more like a very large you know like a dinosaur you know like it feels again the only word i can think of is realistic which is a weird word to apply to a dragon but i think you know what i mean and i think not only are they realistic um i think the show utilizes them very well they doesn't overuse them partly probably because of the cgi budget but they also the scenes where they utilize dragons they aren't just wow what a cool visual the dragons are always used just like everything in the show is always used to further the story to further the plot to further character development so scenes with dragons always feel even more epic for that because it's not just like oh cool visual how epic it's how epic because it is epic for story reasons it is epic for character reasons and so yes it is a cool visual but it's that much cooler because there is more to it more underpinning it than just the visual so yeah those are my thoughts on episode seven it's a great show i'm gonna be sad when it's over it feels like it's going by so fast even though at the end of each episode i'm like oh my god i have to wait a whole nother week for the next one but i can't believe we're already through seven episodes so we're gonna they're only gonna start shooting season two next year so we've got to wait a while before we get the next installment but let me know your thoughts in the comments down below about this episode about the show in general uh do you agree or disagree with me whatever you want let me know i post videos on saturdays at the random times well but i think saturday so like and subscribe to my patreon if you feel so inclined and i'll see you when i see you


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