Loki, Latin and Adfero

(This post contains very mild spoilers for season 1, episode 2 of Loki, but I'll avoid any really significant details.)

A funny thing happened while watching episode 2 of the Disney+ Marvel series 'Loki' this week. In one particular scene, Loki addresses a crowd in Latin and I was surprised to recognise a word without the aid of the subtitles.

That word was "adfero" and if you look it up, the first definitions you'll find say that it means "to bring" or "to carry", but it also has a more specific meaning.

"Adfero" can specifically mean "to bring news" or "to report" and I know this because when I graduated and got a job writing online news articles, 'Adfero' was the name of the company who employed me.

Loki © Marvel 2021

Interestingly enough, there was another word in Loki's speech that I also recognised as the name of a tool we used internally. I won't say which word as it was never a public tool, but it was doubly surprising to hear a second Latin word I recognised, and for the same reason.

There's no deep meaning to this post, it just amused me and I wanted to record it here. The end of this month marks ten years since I left Adfero but I still have good friends I met there and I see the names of former colleagues achieving great things in the Manchester SEO community and beyond.

Language can be a funny thing. You hear a word in one place and recognise it in another, and suddenly find you can translate (or at least guess) snippets of text or speech in languages you don't even speak.

In an era when instant translations are increasingly available of text and even spoken word (on YouTube, for example) it's sometimes nice to spot something the old-fashioned way and get that momentary thrill of realising you know something in a completely different language.

Counting Down to Ten Years as a Freelance Writer

In early June 2011, after (very nearly) five years working at the online news agency and content creation company Adfero (later Axonn Media), I handed in my notice.

During those five years I had produced around 7.5 million words (this is literally true, not an exaggeration) of original, researched breaking news content, static pages and features for SMEs and global household brand names.

An artist's impression of what my last ten years looked like...

At different times in 2006-11 I was varyingly:

• A 'desk head' responsible for a team of 8-10 correspondents.
• A performance-related pay correspondent with additional workload.
• A self-managed correspondent producing headline news for Adfero's own websites.

There was nothing new left to try and I wanted a change of scenery. Which is ironic, as I switched from working at home, to freelancing at home.

On June 30th after taking a few days off to celebrate my birthday, Adfero offered to release me from working the rest of my notice period, and I left without fanfare (or even a 'good luck' card - try not to neglect your homeworkers in the post-COVID years, people!).

How I Single-Handedly Won Eurovision 2021 for Italy

Last night was the grand final of the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest and an impressive victory for Italy's Måneskin with a total score of 524 points for their song 'Zitti e Buoni'.

I'd like to think I'm at least partly, if not solely responsible for this stunning win, after recently celebrating the seventh anniversary of one of my most successful tweets of all time.

Back in 2014, Eurovision was held a few weeks earlier in the year, with the final taking place on May 10th. In the good old days, the subtitles showed foreign-language lyrics translated into English, whereas nowadays they tend to display them in their original language.

That gave us the gem of a lyric "I love parking inattentively" in the 2014 Italy Eurovision entry 'La Mia Città' by Emma Marrone.

I thought it was a pretty great line, so I took a quick, semi-blurry snapshot of my TV screen and tweeted it with the words "BEST LYRIC OF THE NIGHT", a couple of Eurovision-related hashtags, and CC'd the Twitter account @yplac which celebrates inattentive parking.

BEST LYRIC OF THE NIGHT #Eurovision #Italy cc @yplac pic.twitter.com/JIy3J3UTOS

— Bobble Bardsley (@bobblebardsley) May 10, 2014

Apparently other people also enjoyed the lyric, as to date by May 2021 it has received a total of:

• Over 1,500 retweets
• Nearly 900 likes
• 40 replies

Unfortunately I don't think full analytics were available at that time, so I don't know exactly how many impressions and interactions it's had, but it must be in the tens of thousands at the very least.

It's also featured in several BuzzFeed articles by Scott Bryan which I'm sure have helped it to remain 'current' despite its ever-increasing age over the past seven years. Thanks Scott!

Complete Text for New Website Launch

Text content for new websites is often overlooked during the design process. Web design agencies love to focus on graphics, animations, responsive mobile templates and so on, but don't always include much more than basic placeholder text or even Latin dummy text to fill the space.

It's not their fault - often that's what they've been hired to do, it's just that people don't realise web design doesn't necessarily include website content. Unless you realise in time, this can leave you without complete text for your new website launch. In the worst-case scenario, you might not have any sensible text content at all.

Whether you're still in the planning stage and you want to make sure you have complete new website text for launch day, or you're taking that final step and have just realised your web design agency are not going to fill in the spaces in your pages, I can help.

Make sure you have complete text for all the main pages of your new website.

Starting with your homepage as the first priority, I will work with you to identify the most important pages on your website and fill in any gaps with good-quality content. That might mean descriptions of your products and services, 'About Us' style pages, introductory text for your ecommerce checkout page, and so on.

Short Story Writing

Whenever I am contacted by someone who needs to hire a ghostwriter for a short story, I'm immediately interested. I produce a lot of factual content - online news articles, SEO landing pages, product descriptions etc - but fiction is where you can get really creative with words.

A short story is a search-friendly way to do that. Adjectives and metaphors can create a picture in the reader's mind, while plain text remains the easiest format for Google to crawl and index, adding to your presence in the search results.

In many cases, customers who want to hire a short story writer plan to publish the story in print, whether as a gift for a friend or family member, as marketing materials, as a teaching aid, or for some other purpose out there in the real, physical world.