#Targeting and Measurement

[digitechmediaa-blog]

Delve into Twitter's exploration of new monetization models and its efforts to enhance its advertising platform, uncovering strategies for increased revenue and a sustainable future.

[ironunderstands]

Ngl it’s so funny when I see ppl run face first into hsr’s themes and still not get it, like wow, two characters who’s story revolves around overcoming their pasts to live for themselves and TRAILBLAZE a better future? In Honkai Star Rail? Nooo, it can’t be

[bruisedviolette]

ik everyone always talks about this but omg they were so tiny 😭😭😭😢💔💔 i didn’t realise it at the time because i was around the same age but they were literally babies and now they’re all in their 20s im going to throw up everywhere

☹️

i’m going to cry so fucking hard if there’s a graduation scene in s5 despite me being 21 years old when it comes out ... the passage of time and the grips of nostalgia are really kicking my ass at the moment </3

[theroyalriot]

I thought it was criminal to post the comic strip and not the video I made it for. So here is the tiktok of the Villain Tadashi concept I’ve been obsessed with lately. Some people asked for my headcanons so I put them in the tags!

Design is by me! Concept is from a different tiktok video about a fan altered BH6 ending. I live here now.

[mcytegg]

if team Guardians actually wanted to be a threat, and for bans to be meaningful, theyd lock tf in and grind out echo shards in every ancient city when the border expands so they can have the monopoly on revive beacons.

[ceilingfan5]

do you ever have a problem so stupid and embarrassing you immediately have to inflict it upon a character. come here I have to reassert my dignity-

[equinox-pl]

Just telling you to be wary if you wanna keep your inbox open, I heard some ppl send gore or weird stuff

Ooc: I heard, I'm gonna have to disable media in my asks soon so if anyone wants to send anything with media you can make a post and tag me

Thank you for reminding me anon ^^

And stay safe everyone, Merry Christmas <3

[presiding]

What is your favourite thing about Billie Lurk?

(Answers are obvious possibly but i love when people talk about her👍)

thanks for the ask!! YEAH ME TOO I love when people talk about Billie! I can't say I have a favourite thing specifically, but I can explain why she's my fav. apologies for not taking this qn literally, but -

short answer: she’s really cool

& you can stop reading there, or, for the maybe 2 mutuals who might have time to read this my thoughts on her as a character, her meta, and her character as raw potential...

long answer:

i considered making this entire thing a gush so you could read a gush about Billie. but, part of what draws me to her is that she’s not always well written, and in fandom she’s underrated for a literal protagonist.

since you ask...

billie is a cool character

when I played Dh2 (hadn't played Dh1), I was excited to see a black woman with disabilities who was captaining a massive ship by herself. wow.

then I discovered Billie’s backstory with Deirdre, the way she responded to that, then having to survive while living on the run, and her bisexuality. as well as her history with daud & delilah. fascinating!

she’s an outsider who has so much to lose, and knows what it's like to lose everything - having lost everything not once but three times - but nevertheless speaks truth to power. she's so brave! she went and helped Emily & Corvo and she must have known they might kill her! plus, she’s smart, she’s funny, she gets shit done, she’s gorgeous.

but... the meta

mild critique of fandom & arkane incoming.

skip this bit if you want - you've been warned twice now - jump to tired Hayao Miyazaki and read from there if you'd like my thoughts on writing her.

i thought Death of the Outsider was going to be amazing and then... well. *sad trombone* i've written about that before so i won't keep banging on. i figured others must be disappointed too, so I joined a few fandom spaces in hopes of finding camaraderie.

most people with complaints about DotO didn’t like how the Outsider and Daud were handled. which is valid & I agree. but it seemed like most paid no attention to Billie; when people talk about her it’s with respect to Daud, as opposed to in her own right. you could argue for fandom misogyny because people don’t talk about adult Emily Kaldwin that much either, but in Billie's case, it’s misogynoir (compare & contrast with the popularity of thomas, particularly the popularity of thomas portrayed as a white man for no particular reason that i've been able to discern - i keep asking around, is it in the books???).

i think this is a LOT better now than it used to be, which is fantastic. or perhaps i have found the correct echo-chamber? ha.

ultimately, The Fandom is a fraction of the entire picture, and not even the important bit since The Fandom is not who these games are made for. you can't make money relying on only your hardcore fans even if all of them spent a fortune on merch, this is true for any AAA game.

while it's true that Billie is underrated from a fandom perspective - but Billie as an underwritten protagonist is squarely Arkane’s fault.

it was reasonable when she was a side character - the lack of info in Dh2 makes perfect sense (if anything there was more lore in Dh2 which is kind of wild)-

- but as a protagonist in Death of the Outsider?

.... there’s lousy writing, and there’s whatever is going on with Billie Lurk, a black woman who mostly exists as a foil or saviour for light-skinned characters. In her own game there’s barely any of her own lore except where it's relevant to saving two dudes.

lore hints at, but barely touches on what race means in the Dh universe (xenophobia is stronger in Dh1; separate essay i guess), but Arkane has patted themselves on the back for portraying non-white characters, which feels like the same thing as the aesthetic of diversity we're seeing in advertising currently because it’s in marketing trend guides. it's self-congratulatory and it's a missed opportunity for deeper storytelling.

you can see an example of diversity at its most shallow in the way that Billie’s written: there’s little engagement with her as an entire person with history & wants & preferences, and the world she walks through in that game feels like it has nothing to do with her. you could make a case for alienation as a theme, but then, how do you handle the titular premise of 'Dishonored' without ever letting Billie make changes in an environment without a chaos system? it's disappointing from that angle too.

in my opinion, whatever it's worth, it was an accident Arkane created such an awesome character - they needed someone to betray daud. congrats billie.

all this said, it makes her an underdog as far as characters to enjoy & create art & stories for. it's nice to find so many like-minded, switched on people! <3

billie's character potential

she’s got a wealth of unexplored lore, being deeply intertwined with both Karnaca & Dunwall’s fates & criminal underbellies, as well as her connections to the witches & whalers, and three Empresses.

she’s lived a few distinct lifetimes and in the games we get to meet her at two peaks (KoD & DotO) & a low (Dh2 as Meagan).

her voice is very distinct, her dry & often dark humour is entertaining & fun to write. her perspective is really interesting - she’s had the widest variety of void-powers of anyone canonically, and she’s also lived through the highest highs and lowest lows.

she's got everything going for her :) i couldn't really pick a fav thing!

[knife-em0ji]

When The Moon Hatched is an insane book. It is a fae romantasy but this author went whole hog into building a world that works completely unlike our own, and I can tell she is determined to make it consistent and make sense within her own internal set of rules. I really respect her for trying to do something new, even if the prose is the brightest shade of eggplant I've come across in a while. It's not Good -- the weakness of the prose, especially when she tries a "High Fantasy" tone, holy shit, and the stodgy romantasy beats [even with the twist you can see from a mile away] make this a squarely mediocre read -- but she was definitely ambitious and trying something that puts her work apart from the gazillion other fae romances (there's like, no humans at all in this book, which I respect a lot). She definitely has a Vision, and there's nothing I love more than works produced by self made arteurs with only middling technical skill that are obviously passion projects. Yeah, the story itself is mid and the characters pretty stock when you get down to it, but the world is genuinely interesting and probably the least derivative I've read in any contemporary romantasy. You can tell that she probably read things like Discworld and was like, "I want to do this too! I want to create my own unique planet and then set a sexy faerie romance on it and it'll be my magnum opus."

And you know what??? Good for her. I love that. Friggin large popcorn dammit because reading this feels exactly like watching one of those one-off mid-budget fantasy/sci fi movies from the mid 00s - mid 10s that are firmly mediocre, but still live in your psyche forever. This is truly the Mortal Engines or Chronicles of Riddick -- or, actually JUPITER ASCENDING!!!! -- of the faerie romance genre. I'm only about halfway through, but I'm pretty sure at the rate this is going my opinion isnt going to change much.

Also. People complain that there's tons of made up jargon and they need to consistently refer to the glossary, which I personally don't see because to me it's really quite easy to infer what things mean based on context clues ??????? Like the book never goes out of its way to overly explain what anything is since the POV character has lived in this world for her entire life, so it's all just normal to her, and I very much respect that choice not to exposit more than absolutely necessary. Like idk those 70s pulp sci fi books must have really done a number on my pattern recognition and contextual reading skills, because I'm not having any difficulty at all following and inferring the meanings of the jargon. Like. I really need some of these people who complain about fantasy slang and jargon to try picking up A Clockwork Orange one day. That book is nigh impenetrable with made up slang LOL.

[ghostjelliess]

Publishing: comp titles should show where your book will sit on a shelf. They should be from the last five years and not bestsellers!

Every book on the shelf: BESTSELLER! NYT BESTSELLER! USA TODAY BESTSELLER! INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER! SOON-TO-BE BESTSELLER! TIKTOK DARLING NOW A BESTSELLER!

Agent MSWL: *bestseller* *bestseller* *ultra-mega-bestseller* *ridonculously bestseller*

Me, querying: 😅😅😅 Ummm... It's a black-and gold book... It fits in with the other adult science-fantasy black and gold books 🤗

Nothing in this world makes sense including meeeeee 👻🙃🤡 But look at the pretty stack of black and gold (and Gilgamesh lol).

[114-reprises]

You know what, I hate capitalism just as much as the next person but the thing about some brands is that they're just the best ones. Like dish soap doesn't get better than dawn. Jeans don't get better than Levi's. Deodorant doesn't get better than old spice. I don't know why this is true but like. It is. I've gotten the off brand dish soap before and it's all watered down and doesn't do shit to my greasy dishes. I've used secret, and "all natural deodorants" and they don't last all day, whereas old spice makes aluminum free deodorant that lasts all day and smells great without smelling like "big tough man" (wolfthorn scent). I've gotten jeans from random retailers only sold at target or Kohl's and they're thin and made of half polyester and they wear out within a year. But I bought 2 pairs of men's Levi's the other day and not only was it the best trying-on-jeans experience of my life, they feel actually sturdy, have deep pockets, and fit me like a glove. And if you're a woman or ever buy women's clothes you know exactly how much a struggle buying pants can be. I guess it really is worth it to buy the more expensive boots once every couple years than the cheap boots that wear out only 3 months in over and over again. Like Terry Pratchett said

[obstinaterixatrix]

was thinking of getting a room divider because I don’t like using filters/digital backgrounds for calls (don’t trust like that) and with how I’ve rearranged my bookshelf dresser my future framed print of my ocs is in danger of being visible but I think that’s just an excuse to buy more things and I gotta Stop It. also I can just move the frame somewhere else. I have to keep the config like this tho because it’s a great place to put my lamp

[transgenderbuffoonery]

Alrighty, for the nsfw ask game (you really had me reading almost 100 bullet point like a damn research paper):

11. What does you favourite sexy underwear look like?

If you don't own it, what would your dream sexy underwear be?

lmao real about 100 bullet points but you picked a good bullet point bc i’m actually pissed about this where the fUck do you find cute plus size boxers!!!!! i want some with like lil designs or maybe even a little lace moment or something but in like boy short/boxer style and i cannot find any!!! i’ve been searching high and low all the cute ones don’t go past an xl!!! please send recommendations i’m being so serious

[wastrelwoods]

instagram knows my fucking poison for what i cant be trusted to act responsibly about with adult money and its this shit