#Influencers Guide

[ideadeco]

The U.S. TikTok Ban Explained: Challenges and Strategies for Global Content Creators

Uncover how the TikTok ban in the U.S. reshapes opportunities for creators, marketers, and brands. Explore expert strategies to adapt, diversify platforms, and secure your digital marketing success in an ever-changing social media world. #TikTok

On January 19, 2025, TikTok was officially banned in the United States, cutting off approximately 170 million users from one of the world’s most influential social platforms. The ban, rooted in national security concerns over potential data sharing with the Chinese government by parent company ByteDance, has sent shockwaves through the digital marketing ecosystem. Despite TikTok’s denials of…

[clowns-ofthesame-circus]

alice is one of the most important characters in hatchetfield but yall don’t want to have that conversation

[fishpout]

messy doodle of them... + my awful handwriting

I don't think Longan would be a perfect parent, but I believe that in order to fully finish the themes of death/mourning Longan needs to embrace the fact that new life still carries on the memories of the past, despite not being able to bring the past back entirely. 💔

I don't like the idea of a "redemption arc" as in "arc of a character attempting to ATONE for their actions" because i can't really see Longan feeling guilty enough for what they've done to cookies to try and ATONE for that specifically. However, I dont want them to remain an antagonist!

They may be extremely morally reprehensible but ultimately it stems from grief and loss. Dragon Eye could symbolize a new realization that the "Age of Dragons" could just be their own child and raising them. Otherwise their story theme just goes unfinished (assuming it ends in death.)

I see a lot of predictions of Longan dying/being sealed away and Dragon Eye being adopted by Choco Bark/Lychee/Others and I always find it so sad despite how evil they are (not saying being evil/morally reprehensible detracts from complexity) it all really stems from a misdirection of pain and a deep repression of their emotions.

The most impactful ending, to me, would be a realization that an age of Dragons will never exist again, but those who were lost can still live on within a new generation. 💔💔

(Also my solution to the fact Longan is VERY MUCH A THREAT and has done awful things w/o remorse is just like Millennial Tree maybe coming down and bringing both Longan and Dragon Eye into their care?? I think Millennial Tree's love and morality could counter balance Longan's constant murderous intent and influence... please??can they raise THEIR kid together. please. Please. Please. It'd be so cute. ) (I'll try and draw longantree later,, part of my agenda)

[stormingfrost]

Kinda obsessed with the historical context of Rise of the Guardians. Pitch wanting the Dark Ages to come back, which historically was the decline of culture and records. The Guardians rose at the same time as the Renaissance with the rise of culture, knowledge, and science. (Tooth in particular mentions that she hasn’t been out in the field for 440 years, give or take, which would put that smack dab in the middle of the Renaissance) 

The way Pitch doesn’t want the world to change, the way the Guardians change in tune with the world. The way Jack, who lived in has a human in the 17th or 18th century, who lived in the time after the Renaissance and lived witnessing the world all the way to the modern era, is there to show the Guardians how much they missed and how they can further change and improve for the more modern world. These characters are immortal beings who have so much power over the world, it makes so much sense that when they fall and rise in power it impacts the world that they want to influence, for better or for worse. 

[sinnbaddie]

Personal tmnt iteration

[terribleinfluence-tour]

We've put together a time zone guide for the Australian and New Zealand TIT Shows, so that everyone is able to track what time M+G and the shows start!

If you are wanting to know what time the show will start in your time zone, most shows have an expected start of 8pm. To find this time in your zone, add 3 hours :)! We apologise that we are not able to include every time zone in this guide, but attached to this post is a world clock site in which you can look up your time zone and add the dates you are wanting to track + it also comes in a mobile app!

https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ We are so excited for the AU/NZ leg of Terrible Influence, and are so keen to bring you any tour content that pops up along the way!💜💙

[theminecraftbee]

so i've been seeing this occasionally in the tags lately and i thought i'd bring up:

if you want someone to click or reblog your fic link you cannot simply post a link to the fic with either no description or a single sentence of description. if you do not put something beyond a link and a sentence, no one is going to click it.

part of this is basic internet safety (don't click links if you don't know where they're supposed to go), but a large part of this is that you have to catch someone's attention to make them click and leave the page they're on! people, in general, aren't going to click a link that doesn't interest them. you should interest them! so, how do you do that?

put some kind of image above your link in your post. this is BY FAR the most certain way to get reblogs and catch people's eye, but it's also the most time-consuming if you aren't already good at edits or art yourself. moodboards, little edited headers, or gifs can help you here (depending on fandom). art you've made yourself or have permission to use is absolutely the best option here, but it's by far the most time-intensive and difficult. full disclosure: i don't do this! that's because i am absolutely pants as a visual artist, even in the realm of editing or selecting gifsets. but if you have this skill and are sad your fics aren't getting attention on tumblr, this could be a potential answer!

write a summary and some kind of note with the link. there's a slightly cluttered cheat way to do this later in the list, but personally i find that formatting your fic post yourself is the best way to make these posts look good. i normally go fic link (making sure the link embed has the title) - summary of fic beneath that in a blockquote - an author's note about what to expect beneath that summary. however, everyone has different standards for how to do this! some people i know like to make sure tags and rating are present; some do not. some put some of this information beneath a cut; some do not. the main key here is to make sure there's just enough information above the cut in the main post that if i, a stranger, am browsing the tag and find your fic, i have enough information to know if it's something i might be interested in! i can always click to see the ao3 tags if i am intrigued, so it doesn't need to be all the information. just enough to catch my eye!

just post the whole fic to tumblr, including a link at the top or bottom. this is the most efficient non-art way to get notes on a fic you post, since, unlike a link with a description, a tumblr user doesn't have to leave the website to read and decide if they're interested or like it enough to reblog. however, there are two downsides. the first is that the fic almost always has to be short (~2k words if you use a cut, less if you don't), since most tumblr users aren't using the website expecting to read a bunch. the second is that doing this will mean most of your fic's readers likely will read it from tumblr, rather than following the fic to ao3. which, you may not care! i certainly don't when it comes to the ficlets i write directly to tumblr. however, it means i really don't recommend doing this with a multichapter fic.

use ao3's share button to automatically make a tumblr post. fics on ao3 have a "share" button, located above the tags and summary. this has a tumblr option, which you can then use to automatically post the fic link to tumblr. this is a bit cluttered since it includes all of the tags from the fic, alongside the full summary, rating, wordcount, etc. personally, i would then edit a little to remove some of that information so that it's more eyecatching and less overwhelming, but if you don't want to, that's also fine! that is still almost always going to be better than posting the link by itself with a single sentence to describe it, and isn't half-bad formatting-wise.

finally, you'll note my posts for ongoing chapters aren't normally given this treatment or fandom tags (although i almost always include a summary of some kind on them). this is because i generally don't want people finding my fic for the first time from a random chapter in the middle. i don't mind if they do, but i'm not going to spam the tag and i'm not going to make THAT much of an effort to make the post appealing. new chapters are things that might tell one of my followers that there's an ongoing fic they should look out for, and tell my current readers and followers that there's, well, a new chapter, but generally they aren't going to hook people. however, if you post chapters a lot more infrequently than i do, or if you simply have the energy to, there's nothing stopping you from applying these to chapter posts as well!

the thing is: look, at the end of the day, i agree with people who say you should write for yourself. how many notes you get isn't a big deal, i promise; the most important feeling is, ultimately, the feeling you get when you finish something and know you made it with your own hands. some of my favorite writing achievements are NOT my most popular, but are my favorites for reasons entirely unrelated to popularity. however, i see a lot of writers bemoaning how badly their fic posts do, when their fic posts are the ao3 embed and a single sentence that reads "this is my new fic enjoy"; the thing is, there are things you can do to make that link into something that someone is more likely to read and/or reblog! (i know i personally don't like reblogging links if i don't know their contents for the aforementioned internet safety reasons.)

just because you write for yourself doesn't mean that you can't give yourself a little leg up in finding your audience. it's worth it both for yourself and your readers, i promise.

[just-your-average-author]

a memory I forgot to share from when I went to the tour was my older best friend who's like a sister to me drove with me to Durham and she didn't see the show but wanted to drop me off for safety. we were driving around, trying to find the right entrance when she points and says "I see three girls with purple hair, and a guy with cat whiskers I'll drop you off here."

[bruhstation]

can't it even be more obvious thomas. why are you surprised that a sudrian historical site filled to the brim with armor and weaponry that dates back to the middle ages has old people afflicted with the gold dust working around the castle

[rxttenfish]

apparently i don't have enough projects because i started another. oops.

[mychemicalweevil]

I grew up around military bases and families, so I don’t know why I haven’t spent as much time analyzing the Second and Fourth Houses. I’ll start with this: in my experience, military kids either end up joining the military or wanting nothing to do with it as adults. Obviously we know where Judith and Marta place on that spectrum, but I think if Isaac and Jeannemary were given a little more time they’d make a different choice.

[bloodbrown]

DLC giving us no information about Gemini while also giving him 200x the annoying dialogue has turned me into hardcore pemini shipper

[archivingbarca]

lamineyamal: ELEGANCIA. 🤍

(ig story, 14/07/25)

[thepersonalwords]

You need courage because at various moments in your life you might need to attempt something new, push yourself outside your comfort zone, challenge the status quo, change your story, or overcome your fear.

Mensah Oteh, The Best Chance: A Guide to Discovering Your Purpose, Reaching Your Potential, Experiencing Fulfilment and Achieving Success in Any Area of Life

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Madeline Ashby’s ‘Glass Houses’

I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

Glass Houses – published today by Tor Books – is Madeline Ashby's terrifying technothriller: it's an internet-of-things haunted house story that perfectly captures (and skewers) toxic tech culture while also running a savage whodunnit plot that'll keep you guessing to the end:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765382924/glasshouses

Kristen is the "Chief Emotional Manager" for Wuv, a hot startup that has defined the new field of "affective computing," which is when a computer tells you what everyone else around you is really feeling, based on the unsuppressible tells emitted by their bodies, voices and gadgets.

"Chief Emotional Manager" is just a cutesy tech euphemism for "chief of staff." The only person whose emotions Kristen really manages is Sumter William, the boyish billionaire CEO and founder of Wuv. Sumter hired Kirsten because they share a key developmental trait: both were orphaned at an early age and had to raise themselves in a media spotlight.

Both Sumter and Kristen had been in the spotlight even before their parents' death, though. Sumter was the focus of the intense attention that the children of celebrity billionaires always come in for. Kristen, though, was thrust into the spotlight by her parents: her prepper cryptocurrency hustling father, and her tradwife mother, whose livestreams of Kristen's childhoods involved letting the audience vote everything from whether she'd get dessert after dinner to whether her mother should give her bangs.

Kristen's parents died the most Extremely Online death imaginable: a cryptocurrency price-spike sent her father's mining rigs into overdrive, and when they burst into flame, the IoT house system failed to alert him until it was too late. The fire left Kristen both alone and horribly burned, with scars over much of her body.

Managing Sumter through Wuv's tumultuous launch is hard work for Kristen, but at last, it's paid off. The company has been acquired, making Kristen – and all her coworkers on the founding core team – into instant millionaires. They're flying to a lavish celebration in an autonomous plane that Sumter chartered when the action begins: the plane has a malfunction and crashes into a desert island, killing all but ten of the Wuvvies.

As the survivors explore the island, they discover only one sign of human habitation: a huge, brutalist, featureless black glass house, which initially rebuffs all their efforts to enter it. But once they gain entry, they discover that the house is even harder to leave.

This is the setup for a haunted house story where the house seems to be an unknown billionaire prepper's IoT house of horrors. As the survivors of the crash suffer horrible injuries and deaths on the island, the remaining Wuvvies bolt themselves inside, setting up a locked-room whodunnit that runs in parallel.

This is a fantastic dramatic engine for Ashby's specialty: extremely pointed techno-criticism. The ensuing chapters, which flip back and forth between the story of Wuv's rise and rise to a top tech company, and the company's surviving staff being terrorized on a paradisaical tropical aisle, flesh out Ashby's speculation and the critique it embodies.

For example, there's the political culture of Ashby's future America. Wuv are a Canadian company, headquartered in Toronto, and we gradually come to understand that Canada is the beneficiary of an exodus of tech companies from the US following a kind of soft Christian Dominionist takeover (Kristen and Sumter often have to wrangle rules about whether women are allowed to enter the USA in the company of men they aren't married to and who aren't their brothers or fathers).

The flashbacks to this America are beautifully and subtly drawn, especially the scenes in Vegas, which manages to still be Vegas, even amidst a kind national, legally mandated Handmaid's Tale LARP. Ashby uses her futuristic speculation to illuminate the present, that standing wave where the past is becoming the future. Like everything in the shadows of a haunted house tale, this stuff will make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end.

I'm a big Madeline Ashby fan. I have the honor of having published her first story, when I was co-editing one of the Tesseracts anthologies of Canadian SF. I've read and really enjoyed every one of her books, but this one feels like a step-change in Ashby's career, a leveling up to something even more haunting and brilliant than her impressive back-catalog.

Madeline and I will be live at Chevalier's Books in LA on Aug 16 as part of her Glass Houses tour:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-madeline-ashbys-glass-houses-tickets-965286486867

Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/13/influencers/#affective-computing

[terribleinfluence-tour]

UK + IE + EU Timezone Guide !

Hi everyone!💜 As we enter the final leg of the Terrible Influence tour (😭), I've put together another timezone guide for everyone! It's a little different to the AU/NZ guide as there aren't as many timezones as there were in the last leg; but I hope it'll still help and that it's easy to understand!

As the previous guide, this one follows the time that M&G begins at 5pm (and may vary due to venue allowances!) To find what time the show starts, add 3 hours! Currently, information about the January 26th matinee show in London has not been released, but I'll update with the timing information for that as it comes !! We once again apologise that we are not able to include every time zone in this guide, but attached to this post is a world clock site in which you can look up your time zone and add the dates you are wanting to track + it also comes in a mobile app! https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/

Thanks again for following our blog on this journey, and we look forward to bringing you content from the final leg of the Terrible Influence tour! 💙💜