#To be honest i think we need to rid ourselves of the idea of gender as something innate even though its nice to teach to well-meaning

[sammygender]

the thing thats always missing in conversations about gender in general is the fact that 'cis', as an identity, is not a innate Thing Some People Are, but rather a state of acceptance society grooms us into from birth

[the-elusive-libbin]

Ummm, do you have any Akutagawa (bsd) headcannons?

I sure do!!! Akutagawa Ryunosuke is a man who is full of bloodlust and jealousy, so much in fact that it actually kind of rules his life. I’ll admit I did have to re-watch a few Bungou clips to remember the way he acts but none-the-less I think I finally have enough of his personality in my head to get a few vore canons down. I know I spoke with the person who sent me this ask in private and they have no preference to microxmacro or same size vore so I shall write a bit for both types.

WARNING!: POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOR THE BUNGOU STRAY DOGS ANIME AND MANGA SERIES FROM THIS POINT ON!

************************************************

-As usual we find ourselves asking whether or not Ryunosuke Akutagawa would devour someone alive….He would!. Should this man find out he can swallow someone, he would probably do it a lot when ordered to do so as an effective method of disposing of the weak enemies that stand before him.

-Firstly let me just get this out there: Akutagawa would fatally digest his prey most of the time, in fact this is almost always the case. Why should he have to go through the trouble of devouring someone when he can’t digest them? Does one not devour food with the controlled mindset of ‘this is my meal, it will be devoured and give me energy?’ Precisely, one does not intentionally spit up a sandwich after it has been eaten. 

-To be totally honest, Akutagawa does not care about the life of the person inside his belly, he would have killed them with a knife, a gun or his own powers anyway so regardless of process, the outcome of death is the same. Secretly, Akutagawa does not like digesting same-size prey as it takes too long and is a hassle. Tiny prey are easy game.

-So what would make him want to swallow someone? Three reasons I can think of off the top of my head: 1. He has used vore as a method to get rid of people before and will do so again should it prove effective.This is of his own and his boss’ will of course. 2. The port Mafia orders him to devour someone or a few people. 3. The final possibility, if Dazai asks/orders him to swallow someone. I’m talking about any version of Dazai, Mafia Dazai speaks for himself but I think the concept of Akutagawa being praised by the suicidal maniac would be enough to coax him into vore even if Dazai has left the mafia by this time. This may take more thinking though.

-When committing acts of vore of his own accord, Akutagawa has devoured same-size people but he prefers swallowing tinies for reasons I will mention very soon.

Gonna split this now into two separate canon sections for Microxmacro and Same size because I know some of you guys prefer different ones~

SAME SIZE:

- This asshole struggles when it comes to same size vore. He kind of reminds me of a small, yappy dog with a loud bark and a bite to match but struggling to pull through with his threats. What I mean by this is that he’ll happily threaten to devour his soon-to-be prey with the intention of putting them into his stomach and he’ll grab his prey and go for it with force too...But he’s so small and skinny that he struggles to get the prey down into his belly.

-Even if his stomach can stretch to accommodate a single prey, that is about all he can manage. His skinny frame struggling to contain a huge, bloated mass that refuses to cease in its thrashing. Akutagawa attempts to act like he can in fact handle his meal and attempts to give orders to his men at the same time. So stubborn. It’s rather embarrassing really. 

-He wishes he could devour more than one of this kind of prey as he believes it will allow him to assert dominance by showing others what could become of them should they mess with him. Unfortunately this is not the case and the poor thing ends up a panting, humiliated mess. Of course he’ll threaten the blush away from staining his cheeks and refuse to admit his struggles. He has not been bested, he has swallowed a human whole! 

-Anyone who dares mock Akutagawa in a stuffed state will be either next on the menu to be savoured at a later date or killed on the spot. Subordinates included. Is he embarrassed by any of this? Of course! But he’s not gonna show his blush, he’ll hide it however he can. This is especially true for Akutagawa in the early stages of the show.

-The guy is quick to anger so of course he has swallowed people during a fit of rage before without meaning to do so. Imagine he’s halfway through swallowing someone and realizes that he shouldn’t have taken it that far. But he needs to save face and swallows them down anyway with a struggled ‘Gulp!’ It’s their own fault for getting in the damn way.

-Akutagawa prefers to swallow larger prey (when he has to) in the comfort of his own quarters, allowing only his sister Gin or at a push Higuchi into the room to aid him. Ultimately he prefers to be alone during this time as he finds his overly full state to be humiliating. Having the two women that care most about him fuss over his engorged stomach is less than ideal.

-Secretly the guy is touch starved and would love nothing more than to have someone rub his swollen belly to help sooth it or aid his digestion. This is Akutagawa we’re talking about here folks and unfortunately his own personality gets in the way of his belly rub ideals. Should he be tied down and forcibly have his belly rubbed (Not that one would dare) then he would be furious and possibly unable to hide his embarrassment. 

-His digestion is embarrassingly loud and obnoxious at the best of times but when he’s got an entire person to get through it is worse. Walk in on him mid digestion and hear those loud churning groans and be prepared to face the consequences of a red faced mob boss and his weapons.

-Akutagawa doesn’t care if he starts from the head or from the feet as long as the prey gets in his belly, it’s his job after all. He starts off cool, swallowing in gulps but then the prey’s head enters his stomach and he already feels full. The poor guy can’t eat much so stuffing his belly is hard for him. Eventually he manages to get the entire person down with pure willpower but his belly churns painfully and he falls to the ground, unable to support his own weight. Rashomon may emerge to hold up his bloated tummy for him. -After this, his belches and hiccups are soft and uncontrollable much to the mafioso’s embarrassment. Again, he’ll try to hide his blush if he’s not alone.

-Akutagawa is quick to anger as I may have mentioned previously and so punching and yelling at his gut would often occur. He does this when the prey inside won’t stop thrashing, when he’s too full, when he’s starving and even just when his belly is making too much noise. The most embarrassingly irritating scenario is when Akutagawa doesn’t feel hungry or full and his belly churns for no reason. There is no need.

MICROXMACRO:

-Akutagawa much prefers to devour tinies as they are easy to swallow and enter his stomach quickly. There is not much fuss and no mess. No struggled gulping and over bloating. Also a perk of this size difference is that the mafioso can erase multiple people at once.

-He will often make sure his stomach is starved before eating a tiny as he likes the idea of doing away with the prey quickly. If his stomach is craving a meal, it is more likely to digest the meal it has been longing for rapidly. He may be a murderer but he canonically hates torture and prefers to have things over with quickly. This is probably another reason as to why he doesn’t like swallowing conscious same-size prey.

-Akutagawa can’t eat much normally so I imagine five cupcake sized tinies would be enough to sate his hunger and bloat his belly. He would be stuffed and bloated after eating 10 or more. He would rather not do this because then his meal takes longer to digest in his gut.

-I imagine Higuchi has bought him a bowl of small criminals before and told Akutagawa that Mori demanded he dispose of them orally. How the mafioso’s eyebrow twitched as he glared at his subordinate in annoyance. He prefers not to overindulge. He doesn’t realise that she is staring at him for a while, and so swallows the little people down with contempt. When he does notice he will fluster before angering and kicking the girl out of the room.

-When eating tinies, he takes a few, looks them over, regarding them. He is not checking their nature, gender, age or any of the sort because none of that matters to him. Canonically he has no qualms about who he kills. The tinies he is given to devour have upset the port mafia, that is all the information he needs to devour the poor souls. The mafioso is secretly checking for dirt however and wondering about the taste.

-Let me be clear, no amount of begging will save these tinies. I think if Dazai or the boss orders him to devour these people then that is good enough for him.

-Not wanting to keep the tiny person in his mouth for any amount of time, he tilts his head straight back and drops the tiny inside. As soon as they hit the back of his throat, he swallows straight down, not bothering to follow the bulge down his throat with his finger. His stomach groans hungrily and Akutagawa wills it to hush in his mind. The prey hits his stomach which immediately wraps around them to digest, hugging the prey from all angles.

-Akutagawa likes the feeling of the prey going down his throat at this size, it’s intriguing to him. He also is able to feel the small movements inside his belly since he’s so skinny and his stomach is so sensitive. 

-Sometimes his belly doesn’t like having tinies inside it and his stomach sets off grumbling sickly and proceeding to give its owner heartburn and indigestion. This almost always occurs when he is stuffed. His stomach acid is strong and digests easily but his stomach itself is weak. Moving around with a full belly makes him nauseous.

-Belches? Unsightly to say the least. Akutagawa will stifle his belches into his fist unless he really can’t stop them. Should a loud belch escape his lips, he will be rather flustered by it and shake it off; this can be said even when he is alone. The mafioso’s belches are hardly ever loud and are usually wet and strained.

-Once Akutagawa has devoured a tiny or a few tinies, he will continue with his work business as usual, like nothing happened. He has a habit of gently placing a hand on his stomach when he has prey inside.

-”But Libbin! I hear you say.” “What about safe, non-fatal vore?” I hear you, let me think. So Akutagawa is the type to usually devour someone upon order, if he eats someone it will usually be to erase them, however should someone order him to keep someone safe inside his belly, he would have to do it. He’d be a mix of annoyed and confused at this as well. I see him actually worrying about digesting the tiny to the point where he researches the human stomach and its capabilities and eats some food beforehand to ensure his stomach has other things to digest first. He eats, touches his stomach, is this enough? Better eat some more just in case. Repeat a few times. I see him going totally overboard and eating way too much accidentally whilst overthinking. The poor thing is already full of food and then has to swallow a person he cannot digest on top of that.

-It’s not that he cares about the person he’s swallowing but if he digests someone when he’s not supposed to he’ll be scolded and he can’t have that.

-Should he decide to trust his stomach and swallow a tiny he cannot digest while it is empty he may learn how to control the digestion. If he manages that he will be happily surprised. His stomach will moan in hunger as it complains for food, upset that it cannot digest the only morsel inside.

-Self indulgent scenario time: Once Mori decided to test Akutagawa’s stomach capacity after the boss realised his subordinate could devour people to erase them for him. As a doctor, he knew his way around a stomach and performed an examination before and after Akutagawa swallowed a person. Then he filled him with tinies until he was at max capacity. Of course Akutagawa agreed to these tests as they ‘helped’ the port mafia…..In reality Mori just wanted to admire his handiwork and embarrass the younger male. Secret reports from the incident state that the younger male had never been seen so red faced and flustered. Then again, he had never before had a person place an accusing ear against his bare stomach as it digested people before. A strange scenario for anyone to find themselves in really, you can’t blame him.

So there’s some long awaited canons for you. I hope I could do him justice~ I do really want to draw him more now ^_^

[a-dose-of-reality]

I am so irritated by genderists right now, like you must be too. what is it with them and putting everyone into boxes? like, gender is a social construct made of harmful stereotypes that pretty much NO ONE ASKED FOR. so like, there is no such thing as being 'cis' or playing up to your assigned gender. transgender is different from being transsexual. one is a mental disorder and should be treated as such. let's stop making more gender boxes? lol? like, 'demi girl' and 'flux gender' wtf is this?? let's just get rid of the stereotypes, let people wear and act how they want and learn that it's your personality, not your gender? people? omg.  

Person: some people feel they belong in another body though. gender feels different for everyone. 

Me: sounds like you're describing transexuals rather than transgender people. so now i ask you this:

how does one feel a gender? and if everyone feels them differently, how do they know its a gender and not just their personality?

gender seems to be an aesthetic. like, people like aesthetics, the mood that comes with them. like space aesthetic would make you feel a certain way, probably calm and thoughtful. maybe people are thinking of genders as aesthetics?

i literally think people think gender is their personality. because think about it, most of the people who mess about with gender are young people who are just turning into adults. they're confused, they've never had a personality before, because before they were just kids. ignoring the fact that gender is literally stereotypes; they probably read about people online that say 'yeah, there's a name for people like you that prefer to wear comfy clothes and use this type of shampoo: a man! congratulations! you're trans!' and the poor kid is like 'personality? what's that? my personality is a man.' 

and as for transexual issues:

i personally think that a woman is a person with a woman's body and a man is a person with a man's body. i do not think we can change this because its simple biology (also, why change it? they are names for people with cirtain body parts.) and that's okay. its fact, it doesn't need to be a social issue, and making it such has had and is having negative impacts on people medically. the fact that surgery and hormone blockers are so easily available freaks me out, to be honest. they are such dangerous procedures and the people who are usually involved in them are young people who are literally just experiencing growing up. we all get insecure about our bodies and most women think 'ugh, this oppression shit really sucks. I wish I was a man, they have a such a great time'. and when a kid goes to a psychologist and says 'i hate my body i wish I was the opposite sex', instead of the doctor saying 'its the patriarchy that's creating your dysphoria, lets help you feel better about your body', they usually actually say the opposite and be like 'you can mutilate yourself via expensive and life-threatening procedures!'. which benefits no one and actually fuels the child's self-hatred. 

this also bothers me because the world was just starting to pay attention to women. now its back to men again! we were all like 'women deserve respect, we want equal pay and no more rape!' and then a bunch of dudes who like to wear dresses were like 'what about us? we are women too! we're oppressed!' even though they never were because they're men. 

we're fighting for the same feminist shit we fought so hard for in the 1940s. 

i also don't like the idea of men being able to enter women-only spaces just because they say they are a woman too. we get raped and beaten. we deserve a safe place. we earned this safe place. men own everything, all we have is a female only bathroom. bathrooms are not even about gender. they're about body. 

and the fact that a man thinks he can call himself a woman and suddenly be one is quite frankly, insulting. like, do men know what we've been through throughout history? what people have done to us? he thinks he can come in and be all like 'yeah, I'm a woman, I've been so oppressed' even though for most of his life he had a dick and therefore all the luxuries that come with it? like, dude, being a woman isn't an emotion. no one feels like a woman. what makes us women is our bodies and what we've been through. if you think you have the wrong genitals and that bothers you for some reason, seek psychological help. don't change the definition of 'women'. don't take our struggles away from us. 

i think that rather than focusing on what body a person has, we should just all be equal. I think saying 'yeah, I'm a (man or woman)' should have the same effect as someone saying 'im left-handed'. their body works differently. so what? it shouldn't be the focus of our lives.

person: i just always felt i am supposed to be a man. i have an ideal body image in my head.

me: lol literally EVERYONE has that. 

in my head, my whole life, I've wanted to be thinner with pitch black bob cut hair, large blue eyes etc. because I've been socialized to think thin and boyish is attractive. all the ads aimed at women feature women that look more like men because they're thin. it's the patriarchy. I also wanted to look like a thin girl with cute hair because I find thin girls with cute hair attractive and I want to be attractive. 

no one wants to look how they were made to look. we wish we had the power to change ourselves. 

everyone. 

that's what growing up is! you are not feeling this alone! we all feel that way. you will probably grow out of it a bit as you grow up because hating your appearance is on the Teenage Experience box. you're literally just growing up. you're not alone. maybe if kids spent more time talking to other kids instead of being on the internet they would realize other people feel that way to and there's nothing 'wrong' or 'special' about them. they'd probably feel so much more accepted.

so basically: 

my opinion on gender: let's get rid of those harmful stereotypes, please! No more stereotypes? Oops, genders no longer exist. What a shame. *sarcasm*

my opinion on transexual issues: sex is biological. No one really likes the way they look. However, really hating your body to the point of wanting to hurt yourself isn't natural. seek help if you hate your own body. Let's build people's love for their body rather than offer to mutilate themselves. 

P.S: have you noticed how people seem to think they are supposed to be attracted to their body? And if they are not attracted to themselves they assume they need surgery. I had a friend who thought she was supposed to be a man because she didn't like the look of her body. Turns out she was just straight/ wasn't attracted to women so naturally she wasn't attracted to herself. You don't need to be attracted to yourself.

[crisprandcas-blog]

Let's Go Exploring! #4

Note to readers: Let's Go Exploring is now a newsletter! Want to get our link collections and semi-coherent ramblings straight to your inbox? You're in luck! SIGN UP today!

Hello readers! It has been an eerily beautiful March week (thanks climate change, I guess), our respective science projects have been full of ups and downs lately, and we are ready to sit down and scream into the internet for a while. 

This week, we have been re-reading the Two Bossy Dames back-catalogues to Improve Ourselves, and came across this ask:

I used to think of myself as a creative person. Then I ended up in a field where I consume other people's awesome creative output all day, and in a city whose main industry is Big Smart Ideas. Now I'm stuck feeling like I need Big Smart Ideas and Awesome Creativity to be worthwhile, but at the same time I'm paralyzed by the fact that my crappy little initial efforts aren't going to be as great as the work I see around me every day. What's the point of putting a lot of work into something crummy? As ladies who also consume culture professionally, how do you keep that from paralyzing your own creativity?

Which had this answer:

We are not competition for these people. We are their colleagues. Their work informs ours, and (we flatter ourselves slightly), one day ours will inform theirs. There’s room for all of this and way more besides! Whatever your field of endeavor is, you’re practicing it right alongside of a bunch of other people, and yeah, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but we bet you could do a bang-up job refining its design and rebalancing it.

Read the whole thing OBVS but basically we want to share this advice because it helped us so SO much in even contemplating starting a science link roundup/newsletter/writing team. We aspire to Dame Sophie and Dame Margaret levels of excellence and insight! In particular, the message offered by this answer is that you have a new perspective to offer just by being your unique self. Sure, other people may be making a similar thing as whatever it is you want to be producing, but you can add to the collection of amazing work by DOING amazing work.

We are trying to add to the collection of science-themed commentary already made excellent by the likes of Ed Yong, Erin Barker, Liz Neeley, Carl Zimmer, Peter Aldhous, and many others, and trying to inject our own background, experience, and humor into it. We started this for ourselves and for a few close friends, so we don't have to continually remind ourselves that this isn't a competition, but it does occasionally bubble to the surface of our self-conscience brains. "How many twitter followers do we have today?" is a question Cas finds herself asking far too often, for example.

When that question rises up of its own accord, what she tries to ask herself instead is "What have I written today that I'm proud of?" In fact we both think this is a question that everybody should ask themselves (possibly in a form more tailored to your particular choice of extracurricular content creation) instead of focusing on how many people have thumbs-up'd or hearted their stuff lately.

The above was written entirely for our own benefit, but we hope it helps you in your own endeavor to greatness, whatever form that takes!

The Links

Crispr reads:

This week, WIRED excerpted a book called Deadliest Enemy: A War Against Killer Germs. I haven't read the book, but the WIRED article is a quick read about what we can expect from a post-antibiotic world, and a reminder about why it's hard to regulate antibiotic use. (One problem: it's difficult for doctors to refuse anxious parents a prescription they don't think is necessary, especially when it seems basically harmless and might even help.) The article opens with a story about the bacteria found in the 4-million-year-old Lechuguilla Caves, which have genes that make them resistant to common antibiotics. This is cool but scary: cool because biology, wow! Scary because it's a reminder that a lot of bacteria already have all the tools they need to escape our attempts to get rid of them. Antibiotics were a miracle, no doubt, and they changed the world, but fighting bacterial infections will continue to be a war waged in every generation. Hopefully we'll be waging that war with effective antibiotics, but you never know.

On that note: the graphic novel Surgeon X is a cool comic about post-antibiotic London. It's not perfect, and I'm going to let it play out for a few more issues before I decide whether I'm totally sucked in, but I love the timely concept and the social commentary. Read it and have Thoughts? Let me know!

Very related to antibiotics: yesterday was World Tuberculosis Day. Many of us, me included, think of TB as a disease of the past. Only Victorian ladies in novels get consumption! (Side note - did you guys know that tuberculosis shaped Victorian fashion for decades? Looking ill was totally in!) But it's definitely still a very present disease -- 1.8 MILLION people died of TB in 2015, and drug-resistance is really f***ing us over in this case. Luckily we're a lot more knowledgable about what TB is caused by and how to treat it nowadays... no more eating the liver of a wolf boiled in wine! A common treatment of the past was shipping people off to the "fresh air" -- which probably did actually help a lot in some cases. They would travel to places like Colorado (mountain air, fewer people) and live in sanatoriums, where patients lived in semi-isolated huts. This week I learned that many of those huts that were used to house TB patients in Colorado have been turned into tool sheds and art studios! So cool.

And finally: Why surgeons make good artists. George Butler draws surgeons at work and talks about the similarities between art and surgery. Great artists make me jelly.

Cas reads:

Oh hey y'all. Did you need a reminder that coding is the most useful skill you can learn today or tomorrow, but preferably yesterday? Well, let WIRED give you one anyway. Why yes, WIRED, I should be learning to code in my "spare time". Many, many people have told me that programming is the path to the future. Let me complain about this for a hot second: I actually like to code. I've taken a few intro programming classes and I find it fun, satisfying, and completely unapplicable to my day-to-day work. I could 100 percent design a project in my field around messing with with the mass amounts of data available to scientists. I could 200 percent improve my job prospects by doing so. But I work and read all day in order to make sure my project is moving forward and I'll have a satisfying story by the time I'm thinking about graduating... and this doesn't require any computer skills beyond basic command of word-processing and access to the right computer tools. The thought of learning to competently code simultaneously makes me prematurely tired. To be honest, in my free time I'd rather be doing what I am right now: reading random things on the internet and writing about them. 

But yes, coding is the way of the future. So: people who HAVE learned to code when they didn't need to- how did you do it? What motivated you? Was it fun? Tell me your inspiring stories! Somebody give me a good kick in the butt! (I promise I'll thank you later.)

ANYhoo, moving on: National Geographic did an article about how weird small things look. Look, phage! 

And speaking of phage, this is an AWESOME book about them. It's hand illustrated AND free. Download it today! Or buy it for a lot of money... I'm seriously considering it as coffee-table-topping material.

More small things: Ernst Haeckel drew a lot of microscopic animals in the 1800s/early 1900s and MAN are the prints beautiful. He also drew bigger stuff but I like his depictions of the crazy diversity of protozoa best.

Something not so small: the gender bias in academic peer review. Especially in men against women... duh.

Randomness from the week: flat-faced bunnies!  Really cold leaves! Lego tape!

And we're done! Thanks for reading, and keep exploring!

[charly-ra]

Making Memories: Creating Content People Remember (MozCon 2019)

Last year at MozCon, I talked about how as content marketers, we need to grow up and we need to be more accountable. And while we haven’t exactly solved all of our problems, we are seeing some positive results.

According to Point Visible, 70% of marketers are prioritizing content quality over quantity. Even better, 77% of B2B marketers are creating content based on stages of the buyer journey. Those are great stats to see and as content marketers, we are making progress.

The thing is, we can always be better. Whether you’re a content marketer who wants to try something new or an SEO who relies on content to be successful, there are so many things we can do.

So instead of thinking about how we can grow up, I want to think back to what we did as kids – we read. We read things like the Velveteen Rabbit and Where the Wild things are. We read Dr. Seuss and Cinderella. We read these great stories that used words and images to capture our imaginations and connect us to these characters for life.

Now I’m not saying I want everyone to go out and create a classic story, but what I am saying is I want us to think about how we as content marketers can use our storytelling skills to connect people to our brand. To create something that people remember.

Because there are already brands out there doing just that. Take Wegmans for example. Wegmans is a grocery store based out of Rochester, NY that has done an amazing job curating and creating content for social, for email, and for their print magazine.

  The key to all of these things, is they create content their audience cares about. They create content their audience can relate to, that helps solve their problems, and makes their life easier. They create things that are actually memorable.

That becomes our jobs. Our jobs as content marketers, as storytellers, is to create something that does just that. To create something they care about, that reflects their interests, and that connects them to us.

And to do that, we need to make sure we are doing these four things:

Identify Audience Needs

Think Simple

Get Creative

Tell a Story

Identify Your Audience Needs

Let’s be honest, this alone isn’t a new tactic. As marketers, we have to understand who our audience is and what they want. This should always be our goal as marketers but it certainly needs to be our goal if we want to create something our audience will remember. We need to find out who they are, what they care about, and what problems they have. 

Who is your audience? 

To understand who our audience is, we can spend thousands of dollars a month on tools that tell us this, or we can use the ones we already have.

Google Analytics Demographics – It’s not perfect but it will certainly show you some information on who is coming to your site.

Email Database – Analyze your email database to better understand locations and job titles.

LinkedIn Audiences – Location, seniority, job function…LinkedIn is another one that isn’t perfect but it will certainly give you insights into your audience.

SEMRush Display Research – This is a tool I really like. If you are running display ads, you can get insights into who is actually seeing your ads. If you aren’t, try a competitor. You might get some good info along the lines of age, gender, interests, and more.

What do they care about?

When we are trying to identify the needs of our audience, we have to ask ourselves, ‘what do they care about?’ This is where our search prowess comes in and where some of our favorite tools can shine some light:

BuzzSumo – An all-time classic in my book, BuzzSumo’s Influencer Tools show us what people are sharing and what topics they talk about most frequently.

Keyword Everywhere – Keywords Everywhere is a browser extension that shows you the various keywords and suggested keywords around a search. Take a look to see what else people care about.

Kparser – Kparser is another free keyword tool that not only shows you all of the various terms related to your primary term, but it also will show you terms by Google News, Amazon, Youtube, Google Images, and more. It’s a really great way to understand what your audience is looking for across various platforms.

Identifying what our audience cares about isn’t that much different than keyword research or content research. At the end of the day, we want to know what they are looking for.

What problems do they have?

Creating something helpful is key to creating something that’s memorable. Just like how we can use keyword research to understand what our audience cares about, we can use our amazing question tools to find out what problems they have.

SEMRush – One of the things I love about SEMRush is the various functions and tools within the platform. In this case, the topic research tool can prove indispensable. We can identify not only the top headlines dominating search for our industry but we can also identify the questions people are asking. Brilliant!

BuzzSumo – BuzzSumo’s Question Analyzer not only gives you questions related to a specific topic but will also group the questions into themes.

Storybase – Storybase is a tool that’s fairly new to me and what I like about it, is it offers topics, questions, and also demographics tied to your queries. Pretty cool stuff at a relatively low cost.

There are certainly more tools that can help us find questions but the message is this —  if we don’t understand who our audience is, we’ll never know what content will resonate with them.

Think Simple 

One of the hang-ups I have with content is the idea that we have to go big. But that’s not true. What we need to be doing is helping our customers, answering their questions, and giving them the things they need.

A brand who does a really great job of this is Summersalt. Summersalt is a swimwear company that promotes inclusivity, body positivity, and environmental awareness. Seems like a lot just to sell suits right? The thing is, they really do tell that story in their marketing. And they do it in a simple way. Here are some images from their Instagram:

They also have what I think is a brilliant, and very memorable piece of content – their swimsuit size finder. Unlike competitors, who have put together long-winded explanations or unhelpful charts, they built a tool that asks you five simple questions. At the end, it not only gives you a size but also recommended swimsuits that would be a good fit.

That is brilliant content and they do it based on your body and your needs!

So how can we keep it simple? There are a few ways:

Get to the point.

Have you ever to find a recipe online? You’ve likely encountered the life story with a recipe at the end. Yes, that story is valuable in connecting with your audience but give users a way to access the recipe right away. Give them what they want.

Forget word count.

Look, I know that we are often fighting the search results. I spend hours analyzing competitor content and SERPs to understand how I can make mine better and that often means making something bigger and better. But it doesn’t mean you have to make everything bigger.

The same thing goes to answering questions. Don’t bury the answer. Whether you are creating a how-to video, a step-by-step guide, or even a comprehensive article, answer the question as soon as possible. Every piece of content doesn’t have to be the biggest. The next time you’re writing, throw your content into a summary tool like eSummarizer to see what you can get rid of.

Be helpful.

The content I remember is content that is helpful. The Summersalt swimsuit fitting tool isn’t just a cool piece of content, it’s a cool piece of content that’s simple but also helps me figure out what I need.

Think simple means giving your audience what they want in a direct manner.

Get Creative

Creative is hard. As a result, we default to generic images. In fact, according to Venngage, stock photography (40%) and infographics (37%) are the most frequently used visual content. Ugh! Stock images do not equal memorable content.

We want images that connect customers to our brand, inspire them to take action, get their attention, and stand out in a sea of junk.

A couple of months ago I came across this ad on Facebook:

Not only did I stop scrolling but I clicked on the ad. It was colorful, it was fun, and it stood out in my feed. Fast forward to a few weeks ago when I was in REI, and what do I see? This same exact coat! The ad was so eye-catching that I remembered the coat, saw it in the store, and even tried it on. That’s the impact visuals can have.

Now, here’s the challenge. Most of us, including myself, see images or videos and think, I don’t have time for this or I’m not a Photoshop expert. The great thing is, you don’t have to be. We now live in a world where technology has made this easy. As Arby’s would say, we have the meats…well, the tools.

A few tools that can make your life easier and help you create better content include:

Pixlr – Pixlr is a photoshop alternative that’s easy to use and great for editing pictures.

Remove.bg – This is one of the coolest tools I have used in the past few months. With Remove.bg, you put in a picture of people, and it’ll remove the background.

Snappa – Similar to a Canva, Snappa can help you create cool data graphics that can be used for just about anything.

Recordit – I love making gifs. They are fun, they catch the eye, and they can drive engagement better than a static image. Recordit is a free tool that will do both screen recordings and gif creation.

Giphy – How about straight-up gifs? The Giphy app allows you to upload photos or videos, and it’ll spit out a gif for you. Easy as pie!

Images play a role in everything we do as marketers. In emails. In print. In search. Go beyond stock images and starting creating something worthwhile. Upping your creative game doesn’t have to be hard and if you really want to make something that your audience remembers, you are going to have to move beyond words.

Tell a Story

I want to circle back to the idea of stories. Because when we are talking about creating something that’s memorable…you need a story. And that can be an image, a video, or just a great story.

Take for example Casie’s Dog Bakery. Casie sells dog cakes and dog treats and she wants to get the message across that dogs love her baked good. What tells a better story?

  or this…

Telling a story doesn’t have to mean writing the next great children’s book. It simply means creating something that allows you to get your story across in a way that people remember and connect with.

Final Thoughts

As content marketers, as SEOs, as digital marketers in general…we should always be evolving. That means taking our content beyond the traditional blog post, taking it beyond stock photos, and creating things that show results. Creating things that stick in people’s heads and make them remember you as the brand that helped them or the brand they trust.

That starts with the four things above and it starts with you. Start trying new things and testing them. Create a gif and test it against the static image. Create a simple FAQ page and see how it performs.

Our job as content marketers is to create content that helps our audience and helps our business. It isn’t magic. It isn’t brand new. It’s simply progress.

  from http://bit.ly/2lCNif2

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How to Address Family Secrets Without Causing a Rift

New Post has been published on https://www.substanceabuseprevention.net/how-to-address-family-secrets-without-causing-a-rift/

How to Address Family Secrets Without Causing a Rift

Do you keep secrets from your family?

If you’re mentally rifling through all the skeletons in your family closet, you’re definitely not alone. Even those who pride themselves on openness probably have a secret or two that they’re not willing to share — even with the people they hold most dear. From issues as traumatic as sexual violence, to those as relatively mild (but still potentially contentious) as who we vote for, most of us have secrets we’d rather not share with our families.

Keeping certain things to ourselves can be a normal and healthy aspect of privacy. But more serious secrets — those that are motivated by shame, or that could potentially impact a family member’s wellbeing — can haunt families for years and disrupt healthy familial bonds.

But how can we tell the difference between healthy privacy and harmful secret keeping? And if we do choose to open up about tough subjects, how can we preserve our family relationships — if it’s healthy to preserve them at all?

I caught up with Rachel O’Neill, Ph.D., an Ohio-licensed professional clinical counselor and Talkspace therapist, for a conversation about why families keep secrets, and how to talk about the things we’d rather keep secret.

Why Do Our Loved Ones Keep Secrets?

“Every family is different, but I think in general families tend to keep secrets around things that they have some sort of shame associated with,” says Dr. O’Neill. Besides shame, family members can be motivated to keep secrets if they fear that revealing something would upset the family equilibrium or have implications in the broader community.

Some common secrets Dr. O’Neill sees in her practice include gender and sexual identity; physical, sexual, or substance abuse; or even an unpopular political opinion (something Dr. O’Neill says she’s seeing families hide more often in the current political climate). In the wake of the #MeToo movement, Dr. O’Neill also says she’s heard from a number of people who have been inspired to open up about sexual violence they previously kept secret.

In some circumstances, secret keeping isn’t motivated by shame but rather, by the desire to protect someone. This often takes the form of a parent or caregiver trying to protect a child from information they think would be too painful. However, says Dr. O’Neill, this desire to protect can sometimes backfire.

“Oftentimes parents and caregivers tend to try to do what they think is in the best interest of a person, of their child, and I think sometimes that is misguided,” she says, citing examples of parents not telling children they were adopted or not being open with children about the death of a loved one.

In these situations, Dr. O’Neill advises that honesty is the best policy. “The more honest we can become in these family relationships the more we can decrease the long-held stigma and the shame associated with these kinds of secrets.”

Healthy Privacy vs. Harmful Secret Keeping

Not all secret keeping is unhealthy, however. After all, we all have parts of ourselves that we don’t wish to share with anyone else, or parts of ourselves we reserve for spaces outside the family — whether that be the exact details of our voting records or of our sexual escapades.

“When I hear ‘keeping a secret,’ to me there’s that aspect of wanting to rid oneself of it, that idea of keeping this as a burden,” Dr. O’Neill says. On the other hand, she defines privacy as an active choice that the person is okay with. With privacy, says Dr. O’Neill, a person feels “a level of comfort with having decided to not share this information.”

Research backs up this distinction. A recent study found that the psychologically stressful part of secret keeping isn’t actual the act of lying about your secret. Instead, it’s the stress of thinking about the secret so much, and therefore feeling inauthentic. It stands to reason, then, that people who feel comfortable with their secret may obsess about it less.

On the other hand, there are some secrets that definitely shouldn’t be kept. If your secret could negatively impact someone else’s health and safety, it’s important that you come forward. Pressuring someone else to keep quiet about potentially harmful issues is also a major no-no.

According to Dr. O’Neill, this kind of enforced secret keeping unfortunately often occurs around instances of family violence and substance abuse.

“It becomes this network of secret keeping,” she says. “There’s the perpetrator, the person who’s perpetrating the abuse or the substance abuse and there’s those individuals around them who are intent on keeping that information a secret.” This becomes an abusive pattern in which survivors are made to, in Dr. O’Neill’s words, “suffer in silence.”

This is reflected in the statistics about sexual violence. According the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), 2 out of 3 sexual assaults go unreported to the police. Among survivors who didn’t report, 7% said they didn’t want the perpetrator to get in trouble. And overwhelmingly, perpetrators are close to victims, with 33% of rape victims assaulted by an intimate partner and 34% of the people who abuse children are their family members.

The Courage to Open Up

“We tend to make changes in our life when we become uncomfortable with something,” says Dr. O’Neill. She says that people often choose to reveal family secrets when an outside event inspires the revelation, or when it simply becomes too burdensome to keep the secret inside.

This makes sense, considering that secrets can feel like an actual, physical burden. One 2012 study found that people who were preoccupied with secrets perceived hills to be steeper, distances farther, and physical tasks more onerous than those without secrets. The more we think about secrets, the study found, the heavier they seem. That’s why opening up about the secrets that are weighing on us can feel like a literal unburdening.

The Discomfort of Revealing Family Secrets

When family secrets are revealed, however, this sense of unburdening can also be accompanied by serious discomfort, as truths we assumed about the people we’re close to change rapidly. In the wake of such revelations, Dr. O’Neill says, the path to healing depends on what the family members’ previous relationships were like, as well as the nature of the secret.

In situations where the family members have an otherwise good relationship and the secret, though potentially discomfiting, was kept with the best of intentions — for example, an otherwise loving family keeping the real cause of a family member’s death secret with the intention of protecting a child — there is potential for the family members to work through the issues and heal.

In contrast, when the family relationship was already strained or the secret was harmful, like physical or sexual abuse, healing can be much more fraught.

Dr. O’Neill says that it’s best to tailor responses to what impacted individuals want. In cases of violence and abuse, she says, one of the most important things is to remember that the survivor is never responsible for what happened to them and should not have to take on the burden of coming forward if they don’t want to.

“My goal with working with folks is always to help foster a sense of acceptance around what has happened in the past,” she says. “If you choose never to come forward, you’re not responsible for this person continuing to abuse, that’s just simply not fair for a survivor to have to bear that burden.”

Sometimes, healing can best occur by taking the person who offended out of the picture entirely, i.e., removing them from your life. In any case, O’Neill says it’s most important to first prioritize the needs of the survivor and then, if they wish, engage with the family unit.

Healing Relationships

While it’s definitely possible to heal individually and as a family after the revelation of a disruptive secret, it’s best to establish an atmosphere of healthy honesty in the family from the beginning.

Many issues that were once stigmatized, like adoption, divorce, and LGBT sexuality, are becoming increasingly accepted. Talking about these issues with openness and honesty right off the bat helps affirm to all family members that their experiences aren’t shameful, but are normal and valued.

In these situations, honesty is a form of love. When it comes to preventing abuse, experts advise being open about healthy sexuality and teaching children healthy boundaries beginning from early childhood.

By cultivating honesty within families, we can prevent issues from happening or deal with them in a healthy manner when they do arise. Of course, if you do still choose to keep some things within the bounds of healthy privacy, we promise we won’t tell grandma about your new boyfriend.

Source: https://www.talkspace.com/blog/2018/11/addressing-family-secrets/