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lesbianchemicalplant · 7 months

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If you're surrounded by people who call trans people by their deadnames, you're most likely in a hate group. But a possible alternate explanation is that you're in academia. And it's not because that many academics are openly transphobic -- they just don't know that the site they fully trust, Google Scholar, is telling them to do it. Google Scholar was developed in 2004 and has changed very little since then. It supplanted a lot of hard-to-use library search indices by providing a Google-style interface with a single search box. Now it's the most name-recognized site for searching for almost any paper by almost anyone. One aspect of the design was, authors are just a kind of search term. An author is a cluster of different ways to abbreviate a name, like Firstname Lastname, Firstname M. Lastname, and F Lastname, and you might see different forms in different places, but the underlying name will never change. This is because Google Scholar was built by, and for, cis men with unchanging Western-style names. The "almost anyone" who you can search for excludes trans people, among a lot of other people it represents poorly. And because Scholar will not change, it should perish.

I fought the goog, and the goog won I changed my name in research, retroactively. I broke the assumptions of Google Scholar, and Google Scholar hid my papers from search results when it couldn't model what was going on with them. It would particularly suppress search results for my new name, which were just confusing distractors for the results it really wanted to show, for my deadname. If you ask it how to cite me, it will auto-generate you a citation of my deadname. I fought hard to remove citations of my deadname, replace PDF files, take down papers I couldn't replace, take away all the evidence of my deadname that I possibly could. Not to keep it from the eyes of people, but to keep it out of the Google Scholar model. I partially succeeded in making my new name more searchable, and even got it to show up in the auto-generated citations in some circumstances. For a fleeting moment, I claimed victory. But Google Scholar countered by finding my absolute most obscure things that count as publications, ones that I can't kill because they were not really alive in the first place, and bringing them to the top of my search results, so it can use them to keep helpfully directing you to my deadname. Signing in and claiming papers on an "author page" doesn't help, because author pages are one tiny link in search results that nobody clicks through, because the papers are already right there. Most trans people quit research rather than deal with this, and even though I found myself with more energy and opportunity to fight for my name than most, I quit research too.

There! We fixed it for cis people Google knows about this. I raised the issue with them in February 2019. It became an internal bug report in July 2019, which I have never seen, but from what I've heard about it, it quickly went far astray from what I was trying to tell them. "Allies" inside Google came up with extremely dumbass theories of how to represent trans people in a way that fit Google's preconceptions. I've posted about the problem at various times on social media (mostly Twitter when that was a thing). I tweeted about how Google's name model doesn't even work for cis women, given that many women change their names at some point in their lives. This got some traction and led to an amazingly quick response, along the lines of "oh shit! We fixed it for cis women." The new feature they added allowed a person (who had claimed papers using a Google account) to link together their multiple names, as long as they were okay with all the names being shown at the top of their search results. The first trans person to try using the feature was extremely surprised and dismayed by the prominence it gave to their deadname, and asked "do you think they talked to even a single trans person about this feature?" Nobody has ever heard Anurag Acharya, the creator of Google Scholar, say anything about the problem of name changes on his platform, or really anything attributable to him at all. But I know he knows about it.

The one time we got their attention Google got banned as a sponsor of Queer in AI, partially because of Google Scholar, though if you ask most people now they'll say it's because they profit from AI weapons systems. Which is also a thing. But Google Scholar was enough of a part of the issue that an exec actually got on the phone with non-Googlers about it for the first time. The exec was Jeff Dean, head of AI, whose organization does not actually include Google Scholar. When pressed on the issue by Queer in AI, he defended Scholar's lack of name changes, saying -- I believe this to be a direct quote -- "we have to ensure accurate information". Calling trans people by their names does not fall under the category of "accurate information" to the latently transphobic Jeff Dean. In another rare instance of public communication, a couple of painfully assimilationist trans Google FTEs promoted a horrible idea where publishers would have an API for informing Google that someone's name had changed in their archives. That's right, you wouldn't control your own name, dozens of publishers would, all with their own processes ranging from gatekeepy to nonexistent, and you'd have to out yourself and beg to every one of them to press the Here's A Trans Person button. The only good thing about this proposal is that it was so obviously unworkable that they didn't do it. Aside: If you are a Google full time employee, and you are trans, you are assimilationist. I'm sorry. I know your life circumstances mean you have to be. There used to be non-assimilationists there, and they joined the union and got illegally fired in 2019, or they quit in solidarity with the people who were fired in 2019 or 2021, and that leaves you, keeping your head down and keeping your job. You're still reading this paragraph, and that's amazing, so here's what I need you to know: from your position, you cannot advocate for the needs of trans non-Googlers, unless you allow trans non-Googlers into the conversation. Contract workers, though, you're cool. You fought for a trans man, working at a Google data center, to stop having to wear his deadname on his badge, and you won.

There is a solution I know that Google would not invest a lot of development effort into fixing a pet project like Google Scholar (though, again, "we fixed it for cis women" came remarkably quickly). I know that Google is institutionally incapable of letting people control their own identity without being a gatekeeper, that it's just not in the realm of things they dream of. There is still a solution. It's so easy. It plays to Google's strengths. There's even a business argument for it. They just need to shut it down. Google Scholar can have a plot in the Google graveyard next to Hangouts, Picasa, AngularJS, Cardboard, Inbox, Orkut, Knol, and the dearly departed Reader. It will be missed, for a bit, and then real librarians and archivists can get back to doing the job that Google monopolized. They'll know how to do it better this time. The Internet Archive is already doing it, and they let trans people change their names. I made a site about all this, scholar.hasfailed.us. I haven't been raising the issue enough since the fall of Twitter, and I think it's time that I get back to it.

#google #tech #tech giants #transphobia #trans #lgbt #google scholar #academia #my uploads #my uploads (unjank)

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transmutationisms · 7 months

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i am the world's biggest wikipedia defender (especially against people who say that it's unreliable) because, while i know it's not infallible (is anything, though?), it is peer-reviewed. once, my friend edited the othello page to include a joke we had made and she got her account banned. how do you reckon with wikipedia as a source of knowledge? my understanding of it is that it can serve as a good base for things, but learning never stops and one should read as many sources as possible to gain a fuller understanding of whatever they want to know about. this is a very long-winded way of asking your opinions on wikipedia. my apologies, and i hope today is alright for you :~)

wikipedia obviously gets a lot of flak for the fact that anyone can edit it, which means that people certainly can and do check each other's work, but also that anybody with an axe to grind or just a poor understanding of a subject can potentially really distort the presentation of that topic. there have been some high-profile cases of bad and even dangerous editorialising, like the woman who basically single-handedly is trying to correct a whole bunch of pages for former nazis that really whitewashed their legacies and cited various antisemitic and white supremacist sources to do so. i think it would be foolish to claim that crowdsourced knowledge is inherently accurate, fair, nuanced, &c. wikipedia replicates the biases people put into it, and just having more people edit it doesn't instantly 'average them out' because yknow, we're often talking about widely held positions or prejudices that have also caused distortions in many of the cited sources. also, wikipedia has many more gaps than most people realise, partly because an encyclopedia is necessarily a massive undertaking and also because, by design, it excludes eg oral traditions, non-literate people, &c.

however i do find a lot of wikipedia criticism annoying because it will usually involve trying to counterpose wikipedia to approved academic channels of knowledge production, specifically in a way that sets academic institutions and publishing as an intellectual gold standard that crowd knowledge simply can't compete with. academia is not some kind of magical solution to problems of distortion and bias; academics have their own ways of perpetuating and rationalising prejudices, and reinforcing rather than challenging each other's epistemological authority and laziest, most harmful assumptions. not to mention that many shitty wikipedia articles do actually cite approved academic sources published by university presses! because these characteristics do not actually guarantee that a source is good, only that it passed quality control at a reactionary institution lol.

ultimately i approach wikipedia basically the same way i approach any academic text, which is to say i have to read both with attention to how the arguments are being developed, what evidence they rely on, what ideological assumptions are being made or defended, and so forth. i can't really think of a source or genre of source that i would endorse just reading and uncritically believing; in that sense i certainly agree with people who point out the major potential for inaccuracy in wikipedia articles, only i think this line of criticism is totally useless and blatantly elitist if it simply exempts 'respectable' academic sources or presumes institutional channels of knowledge to be epistemologically infallible.

anyway i use wikipedia to check dates of major events and it's sometimes useful or intriguing simply to see what about a topic interested people enough to write an entry about it. but i don't automatically trust any arguments or analyses in wikipedia articles, any more than i would the thesis of any nonfiction book i pick up.

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sims4legacyaesthetic · 7 months

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Sims 4 Aesthetics Legacy Challenge:

About: welcome to the aesthetics legacy challenge! In this challenge you will not only be fitting into the aesthetic with fashion, but with personality as well. You are not allowed to cheat with the aging(must be set to normal), and you have to build a starter home with only 25,000 simoleons. I hope you enjoy and have fun exploring different aesthetics!

Generation 1: Goth

Traits: Gloomy, Proper, Loner

Aspiration: Best Selling Author

Career: Writer

Welcome to the first generation of the aesthetics legacy challenge, the goth aesthetic. This sim is required to own everything in the colors black and shades of grey(you can have red lipstick if you want). As a gloomy and loner, interactions are going to be rare(excluding a lover). You must complete the aspiration, complete the writer career, have a max of 5 friends(including lover), and have only one child which you never interact with.

Generation 2: Y2K

Traits: Creative, Cheerful, Neat

Aspiration: Party Animal

Career: Designer

Since your gothic parent wasn’t all that loving and you were sick of living in the dark, you decided you wanted a more fun and colorful lifestyle. With this sim you must wear as many colors as you can. You must max 3 different skills, complete the career and aspiration, must have 15 good friends(including lover), and must max your dance skill.

Generation 3: Light Academia

Traits: Bookworm, Perfectionist, Snob

Aspiration: Academic

Career: Politician

Since your previous gen didn’t want to do anything but have fun and be social, you wanted to be smarter and hit the books. This sim must wear white and other light shades and styles which make them appear nerdy. You must complete the career and aspiration. Must max all of the knowledge skills and be an A+ student in all of their education. They must have their own library in their house.

Generation 4: E-Girl

Traits: Geek, Lazy, Materialistic

Aspiration: Computer Whiz

Career: Tech Guru

Your previous gen was very strict about all of the academics, so you wanted to lean more into technology than just books. This sim must wear comfortable but fashionable clothes and wear intense makeup. They must complete the career and aspiration. They must have a very nice game room and require having the more views video station and the drone. Must stream as often as possible and upload a video every day. Must max the programming skill and max fame.

Generation 5: CottageCore

Traits: Green Fiend, Rancher, Maker

Aspiration: Lord/Lady of the Knits

Career: None(your farm)

Your previous gen was all about the newest tech, but you weren’t really a huge fan of all the electronics and wanted a more rustic way of living. This sim must not wear any makeup(lashes are fine) and must wear a dress or trousers. Must complete the career and aspiration and can only gain resources off of the farm(like eggs from chickens and milk from cows).

Generation 6: Grunge

Traits: Music Lover, Socially Awkward, Hot-Headed

Aspiration: Musical Genius

Career: Entertainer

Growing up on the farm with your previous gen helped you learn your love for music. This sim must wear thrifty outfits and shaggy hair. Must complete the career and aspiration and have a music room. Must publish songs every day, max all musical skills, and have 2 failed relationships before you can marry a sim.

Generation 7: Boho

Traits: Freegan, Recycle Disciple, Insider

Aspiration: Master Maker

Career: Gardener

Your previous gen was always making music and never had time to take care of nature. This sim must live on an eco-friendly lot and wear light and warm neutral colors. Must complete career and aspiration. Must max handiness skill and 3 more of your choice. Must have all eco-friendly appliances and must reuse or recycle things when you can. Must have a successful club with the max amount of members.

Generation 8: KidCore

Traits: Childish, Family-Oriented, Jealous

Aspiration: Super Parent

Career: Painter

Your previous gen was focusing more on nature than that truly matters, the family. This sim must wear kiddy outfits and must wear a onesie as their sleep wear. Must complete the career and aspiration, must have a full household(8), and must max the parenting and painting skill. Must be best friends with all your children.

Generation 9: WitchCore

Traits: Goofball, Paranoid, Cat Lover

Aspiration: Spell-craft & Sorcery

Career: Actor

Feeding into the previous gen’s imagination, you wanted to become a spellcaster. This sim must wear a witch hat with every outfit and whimsical clothes. Must complete the career and aspiration, and must have a sorcery basement. Must brew all the potions, must max 5 skills, must marry another spellcaster, must have a human child before marrying the spellcaster.

Generation 10: Villainy

Traits: Overachiever, Evil, Kleptomaniac

Aspiration: Public Enemy

Career: Criminal

Playing with all the alchemy with the previous gen has made you hungry for villainy. This sim must wear evil and dark looking outfits. Must complete the career and aspiration. Must max the mischief skill and 3 more of your choice, must have more enemies than friends, and must have no romantic relationships or children.

#sims 4 #sims 4 gameplay #sims 4 legacy #aesthetic #ea games

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classy-violence · 1 year

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Hmmm what are 3 animes you really like ? ( if any )

Ahhh I've watched so many recently, that's hard!! Gonna exclude movies and stay with series for this haha (plus there's ones I want to watch or are still in the midst of watching so there's that)

Not in order ofc

Cyberpunk Edgerunners (if you count this haha) duude watching this series was a trip from beginning to end, having played a small part of the game as well made it cooler, its also gorey, and unfortunately has a couple sexual scenes (even though I watched it less than a month ago I'm thinking about watching it again tbh)

Demon Slayer (we've watched seasons 1 and 2, and the Mugen Train arc) technically this one's not "finished" but it's gonna be a bit before we get more content so, either way this series has been so so cool so far!! The character designs, the effects, even though the creator said the whole sword elements effects are just for show me and my sister like to believe they're actually there :))

Dorohedoro (gah I want to read the manga so bad) This one's gorey like edgerunners, and technically isn't finished like demon slayer!! Caiman my beloved <33 The story for this one is so cool!! I can't wait to either read or watch what happens further!! The character and monster designs, the way magic works, the trippy visuals, are all so cool looking ^^

Honorable mentions (these include ones I'm not finished watching)

Trigun (the og series, not Stampede, I haven't started that one, also not finished with this one yet)

Pacific Rim the Black

Dragon Pilot

BNA (ofc haha)

Blue Period

Toilet Bound Hanako Kun (the art style <33)

Way of the Househusband

Little Witch Academia

Spy X Family (not finished with this one either)

There's probably more I forgot haha but there's already too much to read anyways ^^

#infodump??#explodes/pos #answered

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villainsandvictimsalliance · 3 years

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I think that this thing with the american heroes is happening because of hori's editor, bnha is popular here in japan BUT is not as popular as people in the west think, I would dare to say that bnha main demographic (??) is made of americans, so I think that the editor is pushing this narrative to make the audience feel more include in the story, but well, seeing you guys reaction to the chapter I don't think it worked

Ohhh that's nice to know! Thank you for the information, anon!

Well, I can't speak for the people on USA, because I'm from Latam and that means I don't fall exactly into their target audience, but my big problem with how they decided to do the American inclusion is that they:

Sacrificed My Villain Academia, that is a really important arc in the manga, for a movie that is not canon.

Well, they actually sacrificed the whole time-line of the last season for this movie.

Gave the N. 1 USA hero a stereotypical design that is on the verge of parody, because most suits like that in the western comics were used as USA propaganda for their wars.

And if not like there wasn't USA representation before in the manga. All Might is a well done character that honors the western comics in a very balanced way. In fact, if you're a fan of the western comics, you can pinpoint where Horikoshi got inspired by them to create certain characters, like Sero Hanta for example, who has many traces of Spiderman.

We already had a good movie, the first one, with characters from USA like David and Melissa Shield. They are very well done and they represent really interesting plots. Also, it's interesting how Horikoshi gave us a well executed redemption arc with David Shield, who was partially the villain of the movie and ended up paying for what he did, but he didn't die or became just a big tragedy, instead getting happy to see All Might okay and be able to be around Melissa.

It is totally wrong to sacrificed the quality of the anime in order to give more attention to the movies. I wouldn't be so angry if they had correctly animated this last season, but they changed the time-line and shortened My Villain Academia. This is going to be a total problem because Horikoshi wrote that arc in a genius way, in order to help the readers understand the villains and build a general sense of why they deserve to live, for example.

Also? Since the second movie, I noted a pattern that I really don't like. They are taking many plot points that were already on the manga and made them the focus of the movies. Why is that wrong? Because then they don't execute those same plot points on the anime. It takes the impact of the plots too, because people already saw them on the movies.

And finally, what people need to understand about the famous flag design is that it's traditions come from war propaganda of the USA. Many heroes with such suit come from the past century and the many wars USA fought in those years. Nowadays, using that type of design is a little ironic or even satiric. And making the suit just a giant flag and calling the hero something like stars and stripes is just... Well, I don't have words for that.

It only makes it more sad that the character is a woman, because we are already lacking good female character representation on the manga. Nothing surprising for sure, but still. When you have a hero already centered on the USA identity, it gets complicated. I think Horikoshi made this new hero a sort of fan of All Might or maybe even a student of him, because that's a clever way of explaining why they share such identity.

And maybe it's because I've been fighting for so long about how nations are a social construct and the identities of such nations have been widely excluding a great part of their populations, but the N. 1 USA hero looks so stereotypical to me. And I mean it stereotypical as in the way Captain America is stereotypical.

The problem with representing other cultures in our actual world is that you need to do your research and pay attention to the details.

And if it worked or no... No idea. This blog is already in the minority side by being a villain main blog. If you add to that the fact that I'm not from USA and I don't share many cultural beliefs from there, you are gonna find that my opinion doesn't matter that much to Studio Bones.

Anyway thank you very much for this ask. It's always helpful to have some insight into the culture and country of the original material. 💞

#Shan's asks #bnha #mha #my hero academia #boku no hero academia #Mha 328 #Bnha 328 #Mha spoilers #Bnha spoilers #Mha leaks #Bnha leaks #Shan's mha opinions #Shan's bnha opinions

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mx-bright-sky · 5 years

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One of the things that draws the audience into the My Hero Academia universe is the world that is presented. Most superhero stories present the heroes as vigilantes, and there is debate over whether or not what they are doing really is “lawful”. But in My Hero Academia, the society is shown to fully welcome the idea of heroes, to the point where being a hero is actually its own profession due to everyone having powers. This is a very refreshing change of pace, because it takes away the conflict with society.

...Or does it?

On the surface level, everything seems to be some kind of “quirky” utopia where everything is good up until the villains start trying to put cracks in the system. But if one takes a closer look at the things put into the world building, it slowly becomes clear that the society in the world of My Hero Academia is a lot more devious than it lets on. The hero society is corrupt and full of many flaws, and even if it is the villain’s goal to make people question it, maybe that is because it should be questioned.

((I should warn, this is like a whole full on essay so you better get comfy where you are if you’re gonna click that “Keep Reading”, which I sincerely hope you do because I spent too long on this for it to be ignored))

First of all is the treatment of people based on their quirks. Some people have quirks that affect their physical appearance, like Shouji, Mina and Kouda; and then there are people who have quirks that make them part animal, like Tsuyu. People in the hero society treat those with animal type quirks differently than they treat everyone else. In an OVA the audience is shown bits and pieces of Tsuyu’s middle school experience, and it is clear that everyone in her old school avoided her. There were various reasons given; they thought the way she acted was odd, they did not like how her tongue stuck out from her mouth, they thought that the way she held herself was funny, and so on so forth. All these reasons come back to the same attribute; that Tsuyu is, because of her quirk, part frog. The same can be said of the friend that Tsuyu makes, Habuko. Habuko was also avoided by everyone else and this was what originally drew them together, and Habuko was avoided because her quirk makes her have the appearance of a snake. It is clear from all of this that people are treated differently (mostly by being avoided) for having animal quirks that make them “odd” in the eyes of others. It can also be assumed from what we know that some people in the My Hero Academia universe would even view them as less human for having such quirks, and it is entirely possible that these people have to fight for their rights simply because of the quirk they were born with.

However, that is not even where the discrimination against people based on their quirks stops. Obviously, while there are many people who’s quirk affects their appearance, there are many people who have quirks that do not; but that does not mean their quirks do not affect how they are perceived by other people. Shinsou, a character introduced during the Sports Festival arc, has a mind controlling quirk. In the eyes of many, this is a “villainous” quirk. Some people will only ever see Shinsou as a villain simply because of this quirk. They say things like “That would be a perfect quirk for a villain,” and it’s shown in a flashback that even people who do interact and talk with him say things like “Just don’t brainwash me, okay?”. Through no fault of his own, Shinsou has been villainized ever since he developed his quirk. But not only is he discriminated against for having a quirk that would be considered villainous, he is also discriminated against for having a quirk that does not give him any physical strength. With the way the entrance exam is designed, there was no way Shinsou could ever pass with the quirk that he possessed. Because of all this against him, it could be argued that Shinsou has to fight harder than nearly everyone else to be accepted as a hero. Despite what everyone says, Shinsou wants to be a hero. However, some people with similar quirks might not have been so determined; how many people were born with “villainous quirks” and then, after being called a villain for their whole lives, decided to become a villain because it was all anyone would ever see them as? It is clear that people with all kinds of quirks experience discrimination for being born with any quirk that would be considered “different” in a bad way.

When it comes to discrimination based on quirks, though, there is one group that might just have it the worst out of anyone: quirkless people. In a world of quirks, the only people who have it worse than those with strange quirks are those with no quirk at all. The audience is shown this clearly through none other than the main protagonist himself, Izuku. Ever since being diagnosed as quirkless, not only was Izuku socially excluded by everyone else, he was bullied. For years, Izuku was bullied and tormented and abused simply for the crime of not having a quirk. Even people with the most useless of quirks looked down on him; in the scene of the classroom from the first episode, it is clear that many of them have quirks that do not have many uses, and yet all of them are laughing at and ridiculing Izuku when it is revealed that he wants to attempt to go to UA. The discrimination does not stop there, either; it was already mentioned in the paragraph above that UA’s Hero Course entrance exam specifically favors people with physically strong quirks, but for quirkless people it is even worse. According to the first episode, there has never been a quirkless student at UA. Not even in the general education course. Izuku even says “They removed that rule,” when asked how he expects to get in even though he is quirkless. That means it was formerly an actual rule that quirkless people could not attend UA. So not only are quirkless people discriminated against by society, they are discriminated against by the system itself. Considering the way that the hero society is now, and how the number of quirkless people will likely decline in the future, it will only get worse if there is not some kind of change to the system.

In all of this discrimination of people with “strange” quirks and no quirks at all, though, there is one thing that should not be left ignored. Yes, most of this discrimination we see is committed by children and young teenagers. One might say, “These are just kids, they can learn to do better.” But to learn from one’s mistakes, it must first be known that something has been done wrong. Which uncovers a much bigger problem, an enabler to all of this behavior; the adults, in all of these situations, do absolutely nothing to remedy this behavior. The adults do not tell people to stop avoiding Tsuyu and Habuko just because their quirks make them “weird”, the adults do not tell people to stop telling Shinsou that he has a villainous quirk or that he would make a great villain, and the adults do absolute nothing to stop the bullying that Izuku goes through. In this situation, these adults should be given most of the blame for these events happening. It is their job to stop these kinds of actions and teach the children that it is not okay to do these kinds of things. But do they? No. Instead, these children will grow up with prejudices against people with animal quirks, people with “villainous” quirks, and quirkless people. Once they are grown up, it will be almost impossible to correct these unfair prejudices. They will think that nothing is wrong with it because it was never stopped in the past. With the hero society that raised them, who can blame them? They were never told it was wrong, and so the hero society as a whole obviously does not see it as wrong. They will continue to raise children to hate those with strange quirks unless something is done about it.

There has been lots of talk about discrimination for people based on their quirk (or lack thereof) but what about the opposite side of the scale? People with quirks that are physically strong and “suited” for hero work are treated as special and they are praised. The audience is shown this through the treatment of Bakugou. It is impossible to deny that the people in charge have constantly given Bakugou the special treatment. They were the ones who fueled his ego, constantly telling him that he was great, that he would be a perfect hero. So much so that Bakugou truly believed that he was the strongest, that no one could be stronger than he was. Additionally, by giving Bakugou this special treatment, they overlooked his bad behavior that should have been corrected. They did not punish Bakugou when he bullied Izuku. To them Bakugou was their “star student”; they could not let him get in trouble over something as “insignificant” as bullying a quirkless student. By treating Bakugou this way, they did him a great disservice. They never actually taught him anything. These adults let Bakugou believe that bullying was okay, that there was nothing wrong with the way he was acting, and that all that is needed to make a great hero is power. Bakugou was never taught the true importance of being a hero because of the special treatment he received.

On the surface, the way that the My Hero Academia society approaches heroes as a whole seems like a good thing. The heroes in this world are rightfully praised for the work that they do, and they can work as heroes full time so that they can give saving people their undivided attention. However, the way that this hero society views heroes is incredibly warped because of the popularization and the way that heroes are treated like celebrities. Exhibit A: the classroom scene from episode one. The students are originally talking about what high schools they are going to attend, along with their plans for the future. However, after announcing this the teacher says, “Why bother. You all pretty much just wanna be heroes, right?” which is followed by the class breaking out into cheers. It is clear that all of them want to be heroes. But if all kids everywhere want only to be heroes, then what does that say for all other job options? Are they all filled by people who wanted to be heroes but failed? Another problem with the glorification of heroes is that it leads to people becoming heroes for the wrong reason. Some people want to become heroes because they want power and fame and nothing more. This system enables people like Endeavor; he is the number two hero despite acting the very opposite of how a hero should act, simply because he is strong and powerful. How many other heroes became heroes for the sake of being powerful? The way that the society itself glorifies heroes is wrong (and this is the only time I will ever agree with Hero Killer Stain on anything).

Along with this glorification of power in heroes, there is yet another problem; battle heroes are far more prioritized than any other kind. We know there are all kinds of heroes. There are support heroes like Recovery Girl, rescue heroes like The Wild Wild Pussycats, and underground heroes like Eraserhead as just a few examples. Yet, they are all outshone by heroes who are more focused on fighting. Everyone is a fan of All Might, or Endeavor, or whatever hero hits villains the hardest. There needs to be more balance in the system, because not every situation is one that a battle hero can handle. Most of the time, though, it is as if hero society itself is even pushing for the new crowd of heroes to go into becoming battle heroes. UA has one hero course, split into two classes. Logically, it should try to give an equal learning opportunity of all types of heroes, but it does not do this. On the first day they have a test on their physical abilities, and then the next they do battle training, then their rescue training is interrupted by the villain attack. After that, they have the Sports Festival, which is all about competing and fighting each other in different ways. Then they have internships where they get to choose, but none of the internships shown really offer much diversity for learning; even Ochako, who wants to be a rescue hero, interns with a battle hero. Then the final exam is about fighting the teachers or escaping. The license exams starts with fighting each other, but then there’s a rescue portion... that has the threat of fighting fake villains thrown in again. There is absolutely no training for underground hero work or support hero work, and the rescue hero work is always over shadowed by battle hero work. It is like there is not a real choice for any of them; they have to be battle heroes. Even though at the start of the series, villains are technically on the decline because of All Might’s status as the symbol of peace. It really is a shame when you consider that most of the students in Class A have quirks that would be very useful for a rescue hero. Jirou can hear people who need help, Todoroki can use ice to reinforce buildings that might be falling apart, Momo can also create things to help with reinforcing and do so much more, Ochako (who wants to be a rescue hero, again) can use her quirk to lift rubble, and there is so much more that all of these students can do. However, the system pushes them towards becoming battle heroes, thus showing favoritism. This favoritism of battle heroes reflects on a society that has become numb to the horrors of fighting and instead finds entertainment in it.

Another way that it is shown that this hero society finds entertainment in fighting is the blatant disregard of safety for students in hero schools such as UA. UA’s motto is “Go beyond; plus ultra” but often by pushing these students past their limits, they can seriously hurt themselves with their quirks. This is most obvious with Izuku’s initial use of One For All. Before learning to control it, anything he did would completely break his bones. However, the school does nothing to prevent him from doing this and continues to leave him as is. The only people who make an honest effort to tell him not to do it are Aizawa and Recovery Girl. Izuku is not the only one pushing himself past what is healthy with the “Plus Ultra” mentality either. Kaminari’s quirk short circuits him whenever he uses its full potential, and even if this is played for laughs, there is no way that constantly going brain dead is good for his health. Even Ochako has problems with her quirk; she constantly pushes herself to vomiting, and this is treated as a minor inconvenience. Then in the Sports Festival, Ochako exhausts herself to the point of collapse. Todoroki almost freezes himself over, and even if that was because he refused to use his fire, the teachers should have done something to stop that. However, again and again, these students hurt themselves by trying to achieve “Plus Ultra” and it is treated as a good thing. Because they are “determined”. These are children, fifteen and sixteen years old, and the adults who are supposed to look after them do not because they want these children to become heroes to fight horrific battles in the future. It is quite honestly disgusting how little UA cares so little about the well-being of its students.

Finally, the last point is that this hero society itself is what leads to the creation of at least some of the villains these heroes are supposed to be fighting. There is, from earlier, the rhetorical question: “How many people with villainous quirks were called villain over and over again until they became one because that was all society would see them as?” But there is more to it than that, and it is the “main” villain himself who proves it: Shigaraki. At a young age, he was found and manipulated by All For One. How did All For One manipulate young Shigaraki? Well looking at every above point; All For One could easily have been telling him at least half of the truth. By neglecting to help Shigaraki or save him from All For One, the heroes unintentionally made a villain. How many other “outcasts” became villains as well? Consider the situation of Toga, for example. There is not much that the audience knows about Toga, besides that she is young and she has a quirk that lets her turn into people when she drinks their blood. Why would someone so young turn to villainy? Where are her parents? There are plenty of possibilities for how Toga’s past led her to the path she is on in current canon. Was she abandoned by parents who were disgusted by her quirk? Were her parents killed in an accident when they could have been saved by heroes? Is she one of the unfortunate few who was constantly told they were a monster until they believed it? The point is that neglect from heroes is what causes some people to fall into villainy.

By looking underneath the surface into the cracks of the hero society of My Hero Academia, it is easy to see that things are not as perfect as they appear. There is constant discrimination against people based on their quirks, and some people are given special treatment based on their quirks; the society thrives off of the violence and glorifies the power in being a hero at the expense of the safety of the students trying to become heroes; and at the end of the day, half of the villains the system is supposed to fight are created by the system itself. Why is this important though? Well, it shows that even when something looks good on the surface, there can still be bad things lurking underneath. This applies to many things, not just the societal structure of a fictional world. It applies to the societal structure of the real world, it applies to people who look nice but are awful people, it applies to that food that’s been sitting in your fridge for a week that you haven’t eaten yet because at first it was too soon to eat the leftovers because you had them yesterday and then suddenly it’s been a week and you don’t know if the food is still good or not. Where was I? Oh right. Repeat after me:

Fuck Hero Society Rights

*bows* thank you, thank you. And if you’ve made it this far then please consider reblogging because I spent my entire day on this. *throws glitter in the air* bye

#my posts #tldr: fuck hero society rights #reblog this dammit #my metas

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arcaneranger · 5 years

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Final Thoughts - Summer 2019

Hey, look who finished the season perfectly on time, even if he did so by dropping a bunch of stuff last minute! (Technically, as of writing, I haven’t finished Re:Stage Dream Days, but you can rest assured that it’s bad.)

I thought I was going to do a first impressions rundown video for the entire season at once, since my impression posts don’t tend to get a lot of engagement anyway, but since I didn’t end up going through with it, I’ll summarize my point - summer started strong, and even here at the end, I can easily say it’s the best season thus far in what’s largely been a letdown year for seasonal anime (and a god damn renaissance for long shows, thanks to My Hero Academia, so if I seem down on a season that had Dororo, or Vinland Saga, or Fruits Basket, remember that I exclude those shows from my considerations until the end of the year).

This season saw several high-profile continuations like A Certain Scientific Accelerator, Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls In a Dungeon II, and Symphogear XV, but also new works by creators like Mari Okada, and anticipated adaptations of Astra: Lost in Space and Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest, and in the end, well...a lot of those were mixed bags at best, but the biggest drawback I will remember Summer 2019 for is that it was drowning in bad isekai shows. The aforementioned Arifureta, the basically-counts Danmachi, and also Isekai Cheat Magician, Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks, The Lost Ones, Demon Lord Retry!...it just never ended, and that’s not even counting If It’s For My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat a Demon Lord.

Speaking of all that stuff, let’s get right into it, yeah?

28 shows were simulcast this season, and of those, I…

Skipped 4:

Yami Shibai 7, Starmyu Season 3, A Certain Scientific Accelerator, and Lord El-Melloi II Case Files: Rail Zeppelin Grace Note were all skipped because I have not watched the previous series.

Dropped 15:

Worst of the Season: If It’s For My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat a Demon Lord!

I dropped this after one episode because I found the aesthetic and tone to be aggressively boring and I found even the cute daugheroo character to be utterly generic in execution...and then later found out oh boy was I right to drop it, based on how many people compared it to the Bunny Drop manga that we don’t talk about. *shudders*

Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest

Wins the “biggest tryhard” award for being just the most straightforward an SAO award gets, right up to being grimdark for dumb reasons. The first episode alone had inconsistent animation, and that just did not bode well for the future...and the plot instantly reminded me of Slime, which soured on me over time. I let this one go sour after one shot.

Demon Lord, Retry!

The blandest of beige this season, Demon Lord had neither the story nor the production values to reel me in or convince me it was anything but the Overlord wannabe it so clearly was.

Isekai Cheat Magician

This show was a pretty transparent attempt to have an isekai story with a childhood friend romance plot, and while I’m fine with one and a half of those things, it couldn’t execute them in any decent way by the end of the first episode, and just wound up being largely boring.

Wasteful Days of High School Girls

Speaking of boring, what if Nichijou wasn’t funny? You’d get something like this.

Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?

So the tone this one ultimately ended up having was pretty much exactly what I expected after the premiere - it leaned too hard on jokes that weren’t as funny as it thought they were, and too hard on the dumb hentai mom trope, and neither of those things interested me in the slightest. Pretty okay with having left this off the watchlist.

The Ones Within

I have stated multiple times in the last few weeks that Symphogear is great because it can convince you that it’s a work of genius. The Ones Within has, unfortunately, convinced itself that it’s deep social commentary of some kind, rather than a bargain-bin Danganronpa with no real thought put into it.

Are You Lost?

I’m amazed that we got another Eromanga Sensei this season and it flew entirely under the radar. For God’s sake, the first episode featured a young teenage girl eating a bug and drinking her own urine. I just didn’t see myself being particularly entertained by the shock value longer than the premiere.

Ensemble Stars (4/10)

I can’t tell if this one is actually over, but Funimation’s site doesn’t list any new episode premieres coming up, so I’m gonna assume it is? I gave this one a shot and hung onto it because it took UtaPri’s premise and gave it the slightly more serious tone I was looking for, but dropped it after the second episode started to drown us in side characters with no hint that the floodgates were closing, rather than giving ample screentime to a select cast so they could actually become at least two-dimensional before throwing in more people we’re supposed to care about.

BEM

BEM suffered from an unfortunate lack of distinct personality, which sucks when it seems to have had a decent story to tell. Nothing else about the show wound up sticking out to me, though, which has me fully convinced that Production I.G.’s name is only on this to boost recognition, and the second-billed LandQ studios did the majority of the work. And their best-known other show is Swordgai. So...

To The Abandoned Sacred Beasts (5/10)

I have gotten absolutely no pushback so far for my decision to tear into this show because it should have been a different show, so I’m gonna take that as a general agreement of my earlier statement. What a waste of a concept.

Cop Craft (5/10)

This one I still think I was not crazy to pick up after the first episode, because it wasn’t until the third that the animation tanked hard and the pacing went absolutely nuts, and apparently stayed that way. Did they write a thirty-nine-episode story that had to be condensed into twelve or something?

Magical Sempai

This one I probably would have kept watching if the majority of its humor wasn’t just the title character embarrassing herself in lewd ways. It was funny, but I didn’t see myself enjoying anything more than one episode of it.

GRANBELM (6/10)

This one I got halfway through before realizing that, during my end-of-season catchup, I had absolutely no desire to return to. The plot didn’t really start moving until the fifth episode, and in that time I had not gotten particularly invested in the characters, especially since the show makes fun of the viewer for thinking that the big mecha dream battles actually had stakes beyond “you don’t get to be The Thing”. At least it looked nice and the mecha designs were very original.

Are you willing to fall in love with a pervert, as long as she’s a cutie?

There were four shows this season with questions for titles. Just saying! This one actually had me hooked right up until the end, revealing that not only is it a fanservice show, but a fetish pandering one. That being said, if I were attracted to women, I could have seen myself getting something out of it, what with the decently moody tone and good production values.

I put 2 On Hold:

Is It Wrong to Try To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon? II

I’ll probably come back to this when the third series comes around, just to give it one more chance to pull me back in, but ditching my favorite character for harem antics and character shilling just did not endear me to this long-awaited sequel.

Re:Stage Dream Days!!

This one’s not actually on hold, but I don’t have any other good place to mention it. This one I’m gonna make it through just on willpower, not because it’s good, but because it starts out as the most shameless rip-off I’ve ever seen in anime, specifically of Love Live!.

And I Finished 7:

Kochoki (5/10)

I thought I was gonna give this one a 7 at least, for nearly the whole season, for being a decently-told and somewhat new telling of Nobunaga’s early life with great production values for Studio Deen...right up until the structure fell completely apart at the end, almost completely out of nowhere. I’m still in awe of the gall this show had to literally skip over the final battle.

How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift? (8/10)

This one came right the fuck out of nowhere and totally blew my expectations out of the way from the very first episode. Looking at the summary, I was convinced I was gonna drop this after the premiere...and found myself totally hooked by its cheery visual presentation and excellent sense of meta-comedy, not to mention its genuine educational value.

Astra: Lost In Space (8/10)

One of two adaptations I was really looking forward to this season (along with Fire Force), Astra was pretty much what I expected - a very good translation of a very good manga that ran for the perfect amount of time to be divided into twelve-ish episodes. A fantastic and memorable cast of characters enhanced a surprisingly twisty story, and Lerche made it all look just as good as I’d hoped.

The Demon Girl Next Door (8/10)

Speaking of defying my expectations, another show I was expecting pretty much nothing from, maybe one I could compare to Gabriel Dropout or something, that was instead an incredibly charming story of a girl trying to save her family by defeating a magical girl...with a very, very loose definition of the word “defeat” in play. I couldn’t have asked for much more from this one, aside from maybe a sequel?

Given (9/10)

Speaking of “Lerche” and “gorgeous”, this profoundly gripping story of a spacecase and a loner hesitantly making music together blossomed further and further as it went on, and became my new go-to reference point for explicit gay relationships in anime. It went where even Yuri On Ice!!! couldn’t, and left me desperate for a Part Two.

O Maidens In Your Savage Season (9/10)

My write up for this show was one of my longest in recent memory, and I stand by it - even if Okada had to write a few plot contrivances in to get where she’s going, at least she presented her cast in an incredibly thoughtful way and gave them a satisfying payoff, with the knowledge that they’re teenagers and all of their problems can’t be solved in one semester. The high water mark for discussions of sexuality in this medium.

BEST OF THE SEASON: Symphogear XV (9/10)

Anime is wonderful, and so am I.

So that wraps up summer! We’ve got a lot to look forward to in fall, even if My Hero Academia and Food Wars’ fourth series will both ultimately end up on a list in the distant future next year. Will Psycho-Pass 3 redeem the series? Will Azur Lane be better than Kantai Collection? Will Beastars beat Aggretsuko as the biggest furry panderer of the year? Only time will tell. And then I’ll tell you all what I think it said.

#summer 2019 anime #anime #symphogear #symphogear xv #o maidens in your savage season #astra lost in space #kanata no astra #given #the demon girl next door #machikado mazoku #how heavy are the dumbbells you lift?#dumbbell nan kilo moteru?

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kinhnghiemsovn · 5 years

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Amazon vs. Google: Decoding the World's Largest E-commerce Search Engine

Posted by Lorna_Franklin

As real estate on Google becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, moving beyond a website-centric e-commerce strategy is a no brainer. With 54% of shoppers choosing to shop on e-commerce marketplaces, it’s no surprise that online marketplaces are the number one most important digital marketing channel in the US, according to a 2018 study by the Digital Marketing Institute. While marketplaces like Etsy and Walmart are growing fast, Amazon maintains its dominance of e-commerce market share owning 47 percent of online sales, and 5 percent of all retail sales in the US.

Considering that there are currently over 500 million products listed on Amazon.com, and more than two-thirds of clicks happen on the first page of Amazon’s search results—selling products on Amazon is no longer as easy as "set it and forget it."

Enter the power of SEO.

When we think of SEO, many of us are aware of the basics of how Google’s algorithm works, but not many of us are up to speed with SEO on Amazon. Before we delve into Amazon’s algorithm, it’s important to note how Google and Amazon’s starkly different business models are key to what drives their algorithms and ultimately how we approach SEO on the two platforms.

The academic vs. The stockbroker

Google was born in 1998 through a Ph.D. project by Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin. It was the first search engine of its kind designed to crawl and index the web more efficiently than any existing systems at the time.

Google was built on a foundation of scientific research and academia, with a mission to;

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — Google

Now, answering 5.6 billion queries every day, Google’s mission is becoming increasingly difficult — which is why their algorithm is designed as the most complex search engine in the world, continuously refined through hundreds of updates every year.

In contrast to Brin and Page, Jeff Bezos began his career on Wall Street in a series of jobs before starting Amazon in 1994 after reading that the web was growing at 2,300 percent. Determined to take advantage of this, he made a list of the top products most likely to sell online and settled with books because of their low cost and high demand. Amazon was built on a revenue model, with a mission to:

“Be the Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” — Amazon

Amazon doesn’t have searcher intent issues

When it comes to SEO, the contrasting business models of these two companies lead the search engines to ask very different questions in order to deliver the right results to the user.

On one hand, we have Google who asks the question:

“What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?”

Amazon, on the other hand, wants to know:

“What product is the searcher most likely to buy?”

On Amazon, people aren’t asking questions, they’re searching for products—and what’s more, they’re ready to buy. So, while Google is busy honing an algorithm that aims to understand the nuances of human language, Amazon’s search engine serves one purpose—to understand searches just enough to rank products based on their propensity to sell.

With this in mind, working to increase organic rankings on Amazon becomes a lot less daunting.

Amazon’s A9 algorithm: The secret ingredient

Amazon’s business model is a well-oiled revenue-driving machine — designed first and foremost to sell as many products as possible through its online platform. While Amazon’s advertising platform is growing rapidly, and AWS continues as their fastest-growing revenue source — Amazon still makes a large portion of revenue through goods sold through the marketplace.

With this in mind, the secret ingredient behind Amazon’s A9 algorithm is, in fact: Sales Velocity

What is sales velocity, you ask? It’s essentially the speed and volume at which your products sell on Amazon’s marketplace.

There are lots of factors which Amazon SEO’s refer to as "direct" and "indirect" ranking factors, but ultimately every single one of them ties back to sales velocity in some way.

At Wolfgang Digital, we approach SEO on Google based on three core pillars — Technology, Relevance, and Authority.

Evidently, Google’s ranking pillars are all based on optimizing a website in order to drive click through on the SERP.

On the other hand, Amazon’s core ranking pillars are tied back to driving revenue through sales velocity — Conversion Rate, Keyword Relevance and of course, Customer Satisfaction.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the key factors behind each of these pillars, and what you can optimize to increase your chances of ranking on Amazon’s coveted first page.

Conversion rate

Conversion rates on Amazon have a direct impact on where your product will rank because this tells Amazon’s algorithm which products are most likely to sell like hotcakes once they hit the first page.

Of all variables to monitor as an Amazon marketer, working to increase conversion rates is your golden ticket to higher organic rankings.

Optimize pricing

Amazon’s algorithm is designed to predict which products are most likely to convert. This is why the price has such a huge impact on where your products rank in search results. If you add a new product to Amazon at a cheaper price than the average competitor, your product is inclined to soar to the top-ranking results, at least until it gathers enough sales history to determine the actual sales performance.

Even if you’re confident that you have a supplier advantage, it’s worth checking your top-selling products and optimizing pricing where possible. If you have a lot of products, repricing software is a great way to automate pricing adjustments based on the competition while still maintaining your margins.

However, Amazon knows that price isn’t the only factor that drives sales, which is why Amazon’s first page isn’t simply an ordered list of items priced low to high. See the below Amazon UK search results for “lavender essential oil:”

Create listings that sell

As we discussed earlier, Amazon is no longer a “set it and forget” platform, which is why you should treat each of your product listings as you would a product page on your website. Creating listings that convert takes time, which is why not many sellers do it well, so it’s an essential tactic to steal conversions from the competition.

Title

Make your titles user-friendly, include the most important keywords at the front, and provide just enough information to entice clicks. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing titles on Amazon, in fact, it may even hinder your rankings by reducing clicks and therefore conversions.

Bullet points

These are the first thing your customer sees, so make sure to highlight the best features of your product using a succinct sentence in language designed to convert.

Improve the power of your bullet points by including information that your top competitors don’t provide. A great way to do this is to analyze the “answered questions” for some of your top competitors.

Do you see any trending questions that you could answer in your bullet points to help shorten the buyer journey and drive conversions to your product?

Product descriptions

Given that over 50 percent of Amazon shoppers said they always read the full description when they are considering purchasing a product, a well-written product description can have a huge impact on conversions.

Your description is likely to be the last thing a customer will read before they choose to buy your product over a competitor, so give these your time and care, reiterating points made in your bullet points and highlighting any other key features or benefits likely to push conversions over the line.

Taking advantage of A+ content for some of your best selling products is a great way to craft a visually engaging description, like this example from Safavieh.

For an in-depth breakdown on creating a beautifully crafted Amazon listing, I highly recommend this post from Startup Bros.

AB test images

Images are incredibly powerful when it comes to increasing conversions, so if you haven’t tried split testing different image versions on Amazon, you could be pleasantly surprised. One of the most popular tools for Amazon AB testing is Splitly — it’s really simple to use, and affordable with plans starting at $47 per month.

Amazon sponsored ads

The best thing about Amazon SEO is that your performance on other marketing channels can help support your organic performance.

Unlike on Google, where advertising has no impact on organic rankings, if your product performs well on Amazon ads, it may help boost organic rankings. This is because if a product is selling through ads, Amazon’s algorithm may see this as a product that users should also see organically.

A well-executed ad campaign is particularly important for new products, in order to boost their sales velocity in the beginning and build up the sales history needed to rank better organically.

External traffic

External traffic involves driving traffic from social media, email, or other sources to your Amazon products.

While external sources of traffic are a great way to gain more brand exposure and increase customer reach, a well-executed external traffic strategy also impacts your organic rankings because of its role in increasing sales and driving up conversion rates.

Before you start driving traffic straight to your Amazon listing, you may want to consider using a landing page tool like Landing Cube in order to protect your conversion rate as much as possible.

With a landing page tool, you drive traffic to a landing page where customers get a special offer code to use on your product listing page—this way, you only drive traffic which is guaranteed to convert.

Keyword relevance

A9 still relies heavily on keyword matching to determine the relevance of a product to searcher’s query, which is why this is a core pillar of Amazon SEO.

While your title, bullet points, and descriptions are essential for converting customers, if you don’t include the relevant keywords, your chances of driving traffic to convert are slim to none.

Every single keyword incorporated in your Amazon listing will impact your rankings, so it’s important to deploy a strategic approach.

Steps for targeting the right keywords on Amazon:

Brainstorm as many search terms you think someone would use to find your product.

Analyze 3–5 competitors with the most reviews to identify their target keywords.

Validate the top keywords for your product using an Amazon keyword tool such as Magnet, Ahrefs, or Keywordtool.io.

Download the keyword lists into Excel, and filter out any duplicate or irrelevant keywords.

Prioritize search terms with the highest search volume, bearing in mind that broad terms will be harder to rank for. Depending on the competition, it may make more sense to focus on lower volume terms with lower competition—but this can always be tested later on.

Once you have refined the keywords you want to rank for, here are some things to remember:

Include your most important keywords at the start of the title, after your brand name.

Use long-tail terms and synonyms throughout your bullets points and descriptions.

Use your backend search terms wisely — these are a great place for including some common misspellings, different measurement versions e.g. metric or imperial, color shades and descriptive terms.

Most importantly — don’t repeat keywords. If you’ve included a search term once in your listing i.e. the title, you don’t need to include it in your backend search terms. Repeating a keyword, or keyword stuffing will not improve your rankings.

Customer satisfaction

Account health

Part of Amazon’s mission statement is “to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company.” This relentless focus on the customer is what drives Amazon’s astounding customer retention, with 85 percent of Prime shoppers visiting the marketplace at least once a week and 56% of non-Prime members reporting the same. A focus on the customer is at the core of Amazon’s success, which is why stringent customer satisfaction metrics are a key component to selling on Amazon.

On the other hand, if you are meeting your minimum requirements but other sellers are performing better than you by exceeding theirs, they could be at a ranking advantage.

Customer reviews

Customer reviews are one of the most important Amazon ranking factors — not only do they tell Amazon how customers feel about your product, but they are one of the most impactful conversion factors in e-commerce. Almost 95 percent of online shoppers read reviews before buying a product, and over 60 percent of Amazon customers say they wouldn’t purchase a product with less than 4.5 stars.

On Amazon, reviews help to drive both conversion rate and keyword relevance, particularly for long-tail terms. In short, they’re very important.

Increasing reviews for your key products on Amazon was historically a lot easier, through acquiring incentivized reviews. However, in 2018, Amazon banned sellers from incentivizing reviews which makes it even more difficult to actively build reviews, especially for new products.

Tips for building positive reviews on Amazon:

Maintain consistent communication throughout the purchase process using Amazon email marketing software. Following up to thank someone for their order and notify when the order if fulfilled, creates a seamless buying experience which leaves customers more likely to give a positive review.

Adding branded package inserts to thank customers for their purchase makes the buying experience personal, differentiating you as a brand rather than a nameless Amazon seller. Including a friendly reminder to leave a review in a nice delivery note will have better response rates than the generic email they receive from Amazon.

Providing upfront returns information without a customer having to ask for it shows customers you are confident in the quality of your product. If a customer isn’t happy with your product, adding fuel to the fire with a clunky or difficult returns process is more likely to result in negative reviews through sheer frustration.

Follow up with helpful content related to your products such as instructions, decor inspiration, or recipe ideas, including a polite reminder to provide a review in exchange.

And of course, deliver an amazing customer experience from start to finish.

Key takeaways for improving Amazon SEO

Focus on driving sales velocity through increasing conversion rate, improving keyword relevance, nailing customer satisfaction and actively building reviews.

Craft product listings for customers first, search engines second.

Don’t neglect product descriptions in the belief that no one reads them—over 50% of Amazon shoppers report reading the full description before buying a product.

Keywords carry a lot of weight. If you don’t include a keyword in your listing, your chances of ranking for it are slim.

Images are powerful. Take your own photos instead of using generic supplier images and be sure to test, test, and test.

Actively build positive reviews by delivering an amazing customer experience.

Invest in PPC and driving external traffic to support organic performance, especially for new products.

What other SEO tips or tactics do you apply on Amazon? Tell me in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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patriciavetinari · 2 years

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I think it's absolutely fair to admit it's weird when people try to pigeon hole every picture of bedsheets as some kind of aesthetic, but here in my personal space I would actually like to scream into the void about trying to figure out and/or build the aesthetic as a fat person.

This is a sub-problem of the issue of availability of varied clothing for fat people, obviously, but I also feel like this is definitely, like... A problem of mental images? And imagery and design in general? Many styles and subcultures, when they are explored, are only explored through the example of thin people. I don't know how to explain, other than if you google 'goth' or 'vintage' or 'dark academia' or 'cottagecore' or 'manic pixie' or whatever, all of these is going to show thin people. And most of these are obsessed with thinness even if there has been a plus size community or a veneer of body positivity. Unless you add 'plus sized' and then you will find very little and will eventually land somewhere in rockabilly.

I mean that not only I am a roundcheeked person in a world obsessed with cheekbones, I'm also a person consisting of roundness in a world obsessed with geometric lines and angles and protruding bones.

I guess I'm saying that fatness really isn't romantisized which of course it isn't given the rampant fatphobia, but I find it a whole separate kind of pain and a personal challenge to like myself not only despite the weight or the size as numbers, but with the roundness it gives me, the intrinsic features that have been excluded from styles and aesthetics for decades.

I love the posts talking about soft tummies and chubby cheeks and such but honestly, they are not something that helps me that much. I've mentioned it before that it's super annoying when anyone says 'fat people are so soft like clouds like cherubs so cute so nice to cuddle' like they are talking about a fucking body pillow.

I want to be known for elegance and grace and I want to explore like noire femme fatale aesthetic which is all represented by stick thin rita hayworth types with only collarbones and ribcages and cigarettes and the only curve allowed is jessica rabbit kind of breasts. And some jokers bring up like dita von teese as an example of plus size or round face which is, you know, absurd. It's a thin woman with visible ribcage and cheekbones.

It's fucking frustrating. There are no examples, no role models, no aesthetic that celebrates the face that looks like mine. All round features. I hate smiling because it makes my face wider and rounder and eyes smaller. I mean I obviously have a long way to go when it comes to self acceptance but it's bloody hard to do when every style and aesthetic out there is celebrating every feature opposite of what I have and whenever the features I DO possess are mentioned it's always this 'friend shaped cute so soft like a cloud like pillow so nice, absolutely not elegant or graceful or ravishing or entrancing or glamorous or striking or bewitching, just cute'.

This is a very superficial issue and a very personal one but every day is an agony. My aesthetic is something sharp like daggers and knives, bittersweet like dark chocolate, elegant like violin or harpsichord, cool like eucalyptus, and the world still is only prepared to celebrate me if I embrace the 'cute chubby tummy pillow cloud my little pony funny candy floss poof and fluff' that I have on the outside it seems.

I don't know.

It's hard. I like my body, I genuinely got better at this. I'm a gorgeous human being. But the fact that there is nothing for me to get for my body to like how it's presented to the world is agony. The fact that I cannot change people's perception of me as cute chubby wannabe vaguely goth is pain. Don't even get me started on sexy. I have never been made feel sexy by other people in the first place but even in theory I'm not a fan of the whole mommy milkers side of things, like I want to feel and recognized as femme fatale sexy not huge fat mommy milkers sexy.

#to be clear i'm not hating on people who do feel sexy in those terms #i applaud and celebrate them #but i can't live like this #long post #personal rambles

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downtheaxon · 6 years

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hello friends and followers - two days ago, I found out I won (earned?) the biggest/most prestigious phd scholarship in canada (a vanier cgs)

other than two days of celebration (and exhaustion, as my masters/phd is always way more work than I anticipate), I have a lot of complicated feelings about this:

tw: frank discussion of psychiatry, including depression, suicidal ideation, and self harm

firstly, as you know, I’ve been struggling with my mental health for most of my adolescent and adult life. I recently (read: monday) brought back journals from my childhood home to my apartment in montreal and the earliest mention of suicidal ideation that I could find dates from around my 13th birthday i.e. over 10 years ago. and that breaks my heart.

9 days before I found out I won the vanier, I had my first psychiatry intake appointment. I spent an hour discussing essentially everything that has brought me to this point, and couldn’t shake what the doctor who referred me there a few weeks prior had said: why have you never seen a psychiatrist?

I’m more aware now (than ever) how long I suffered in absolute silence, with no care, and really truly believed my suffering was self-made, deserved, and normal for me. I didn’t get any form of psychiatrist help until after I left my abusive relationship in the winter of 2014 shortly after I turned 20 (and I am so so grateful for the relationship I built with my psychologist, who I still see).

even with a history of suicidal ideation and attempt (singular), extensive history of self harm (all kinds), mental illness in the immediate family, unstable/traumatic upbringing, clear social isolation, obvious blatant unhappiness, no one thought to take mini-me to see a doctor. I exclude the time I briefly met with my brother’s psychiatrist shortly after I turned 18, who suggested I might be a borderline personality ten minutes into meeting me but didn’t follow up on this.

I always thought this was my fault and that my feelings towards myself were justified. when I was young, my self harm made sense - I deserved to be hurt (and others hurt me without consequence, so clearly I was the designated punching bag). my abusive relationship reaffirmed this, and a circuit in my brain intensified and fully, at my core, believes that I am worthless, awful, deserving of pain. and that’s really scary to me because now, at age 24, after years of therapy and self-compassion, I know on many levels that that isn’t true. but on other levels, I still believe it.

why am I talking about this? because after the elation of winning the vanier, I was hit with incomparable sadness. I don’t deserve the vanier - not only that, but it would be better if I reject it so that it goes to the next person on the waitlist, someone more deserving as me. my brain even ventured into see, if you’d killed yourself earlier in the year, then the next person on the list would have it and it wouldn’t go to waste on you. along with this thought came a profound urge to self harm and destroy myself.

academia induces enough imposter syndrome as is. couple that with a mental illness, and the toxicity becomes overwhelming and unbreathable.

don’t get me wrong, I’m happy. I’m very very happy. this honour opens many doors for me, be it the financial freedom to afford healthcare for my cat if she needs it, take my partner on a trip to europe, move into a bigger apartment, and and get a monthly massage (or a nintendo switch - or both), as well as the exclusive trainings and professional travel opportunities that are included with the award.

but I don’t feel like I deserve it - while also feeling like I do. knowing I ranked in the bottom 5, knowing I got it by the skin of my teeth (is that the expression?), also knocks me down a peg (and trust me, I don’t need to be knocked down a peg.

I don’t know what my point is with all this. my point is a few things: my partner is moving in in two weeks, after two years of a long distance relationship. that’s extremely exciting and makes me feel like the luckiest person in the world. I’ll be financially secure in my phd (thanks to the vanier), which also makes me feel lucky. after a trip next month, I’ll start SSRIs which will hopefully take the edge off my pain and that also makes me feel lucky. a lot is happening all at once.

I guess my point is this: my illness feels more central to my life than my phd does. and my phd is very important to me, but it always comes second, and always exsits within the context of my illness. I prioritize therapy and doctor’s appointments and good eating habits and regular sleep and time for myself over experiments, because I can’t exist otherwise.

my other thought and point: I’ve suffered a lot in my life, and perhaps it’s pretentious to say that I’ve suffered more than others my age in my program but it feels that way most days. I’m exhausted from all this suffering. the vanier feels like a life raft in this sea of difficulty and trouble.

another thought: I’ve always used school to cope. when things got worse at home, my grades got better. after I figured out how to take tests, it always felt like something I could control. friendships were hard, dealing with home was hard, loving myself was hard, but school was always easy. and I know that that isn’t as common of an experience and am so grateful that that was mine. because being good at school is what saved me - it’s what allowed me to move out (to do a phd), to build a social circle, and to reach financial independence and stability.

a last thought: I never know how public to be about my struggles in my immediate academic circle. I wish I were braver. I’m realizing slowly that visibility does not have to be self-indulgent - I wish I knew someone in an academic position above mine who talked about succeeding in academia in spite of a long history of mental health struggles and trauma. I wish I did more, outreach wise. I’m good at this one-on-one, and I’m proud of how good of a mentor I can be to my students, both academically and personally. but, on a bigger scale....

no one wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.

thank you for reading, should you have gotten this far. I’m submitting my phd proposal today, in order to pass my comps/proposal at the end of april. that’s terrifying and exciting all at once. I don’t know if I belong in academia, I don’t know if I deserve the success I have, but when I feel well, I want to take full advantage of what luck and opportunity have given me.

I keep telling my partner: we’ve had enough unhappiness. it’s time for the happy times of our life to start. (although I am terrified of something awful happening, because my experience suggests just that).

I’m grateful and I’m struggling. I’m successful and I’m traumatized. I’ve spent months trying to reconcile these two opposing states, and perhaps the vanier (which acknowledges my extracurriculars, my outreach, all reflective of my need to teach, mentor and decrease mental illness related stigma) is doing just that. or perhaps it creates a larger divide. it’s hard to say.

feel free to send me a message should you want to chat about this. I’ll be working on my phd candidacy presentation all day (what an odd terrifying wonderful bizarre exciting and frightening life).

#personal #imposter syndrome #mental health in academia #phd

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infolearn · 5 years

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Amazon vs. Google: Decoding the World's Largest E-commerce Search Engine

A lot of people forget that Amazon is a search engine, let alone the largest search engine for e-commerce. With 54 percent of product searches now taking place on Amazon, it’s time to take it seriously as the world’s largest search engine for e-commerce. In fact, if we exclude YouTube as part of Google, Amazon is technically the second largest search engine in the world. As real estate on Google becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, moving beyond a website-centric e-commerce strategy is a no brainer. With 54% of shoppers choosing to shop on e-commerce marketplaces, it’s no surprise that online marketplaces are the number one most important digital marketing channel in the US, according to a 2018 study by the Digital Marketing Institute. While marketplaces like Etsy and Walmart are growing fast, Amazon maintains its dominance of e-commerce market share owning 47 percent of online sales, and 5 percent of all retail sales in the US. Considering that there are currently over 500 million products listed on Amazon.com, and more than two-thirds of clicks happen on the first page of Amazon’s search results—selling products on Amazon is no longer as easy as "set it and forget it." Enter the power of SEO. When we think of SEO, many of us are aware of the basics of how Google’s algorithm works, but not many of us are up to speed with SEO on Amazon. Before we delve into Amazon’s algorithm, it’s important to note how Google and Amazon’s starkly different business models are key to what drives their algorithms and ultimately how we approach SEO on the two platforms.

The academic vs. The stockbroker

Google was built on a foundation of scientific research and academia, with a mission to; “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — Google Now, answering 5.6 billion queries every day, Google’s mission is becoming increasingly difficult — which is why their algorithm is designed as the most complex search engine in the world, continuously refined through hundreds of updates every year. In contrast to Brin and Page, Jeff Bezos began his career on Wall Street in a series of jobs before starting Amazon in 1994 after reading that the web was growing at 2,300 percent. Determined to take advantage of this, he made a list of the top products most likely to sell online and settled with books because of their low cost and high demand. Amazon was built on a revenue model, with a mission to: “Be the Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” — Amazon

Amazon doesn’t have searcher intent issues

When it comes to SEO, the contrasting business models of these two companies lead the search engines to ask very different questions in order to deliver the right results to the user. On one hand, we have Google who asks the question: “What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?” Amazon, on the other hand, wants to know: “What product is the searcher most likely to buy?” On Amazon, people aren’t asking questions, they’re searching for products—and what’s more, they’re ready to buy. So, while Google is busy honing an algorithm that aims to understand the nuances of human language, Amazon’s search engine serves one purpose—to understand searches just enough to rank products based on their propensity to sell. With this in mind, working to increase organic rankings on Amazon becomes a lot less daunting.

Amazon’s A9 algorithm: The secret ingredient

Amazon may dominate e-commerce search, but many people haven’t heard of the A9 algorithm. Which might seem unusual, but the reason Amazon isn’t keen on pushing their algorithm through the lens of a large scale search engine is simply that Amazon isn’t in the business of search. Amazon’s business model is a well-oiled revenue-driving machine — designed first and foremost to sell as many products as possible through its online platform. While Amazon’s advertising platform is growing rapidly, and AWS continues as their fastest-growing revenue source — Amazon still makes a large portion of revenue through goods sold through the marketplace. With this in mind, the secret ingredient behind Amazon’s A9 algorithm is, in fact: Sales Velocity What is sales velocity, you ask? It’s essentially the speed and volume at which your products sell on Amazon’s marketplace. There are lots of factors which Amazon SEO’s refer to as "direct" and "indirect" ranking factors, but ultimately every single one of them ties back to sales velocity in some way. At Wolfgang Digital, we approach SEO on Google based on three core pillars — Technology, Relevance, and Authority.

Evidently, Google’s ranking pillars are all based on optimizing a website in order to drive click through on the SERP. On the other hand, Amazon’s core ranking pillars are tied back to driving revenue through sales velocity — Conversion Rate, Keyword Relevance and of course, Customer Satisfaction.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the key factors behind each of these pillars, and what you can optimize to increase your chances of ranking on Amazon’s coveted first page. Conversion rate Conversion rates on Amazon have a direct impact on where your product will rank because this tells Amazon’s algorithm which products are most likely to sell like hotcakes once they hit the first page. Of all variables to monitor as an Amazon marketer, working to increase conversion rates is your golden ticket to higher organic rankings. Optimize pricing Amazon’s algorithm is designed to predict which products are most likely to convert. This is why the price has such a huge impact on where your products rank in search results. If you add a new product to Amazon at a cheaper price than the average competitor, your product is inclined to soar to the top-ranking results, at least until it gathers enough sales history to determine the actual sales performance. Even if you’re confident that you have a supplier advantage, it’s worth checking your top-selling products and optimizing pricing where possible. If you have a lot of products, repricing software is a great way to automate pricing adjustments based on the competition while still maintaining your margins. However, Amazon knows that price isn’t the only factor that drives sales, which is why Amazon’s first page isn’t simply an ordered list of items priced low to high. See the below Amazon UK search results for “lavender essential oil:”

Excluding the sponsored ads, we can still see that not all of the cheap products are ranked high and the more expensive ones lower down the page. So, if you’ve always maintained the idea that selling on Amazon is a race to the bottom on price, read on my friends. Create listings that sell As we discussed earlier, Amazon is no longer a “set it and forget” platform, which is why you should treat each of your product listings as you would a product page on your website. Creating listings that convert takes time, which is why not many sellers do it well, so it’s an essential tactic to steal conversions from the competition. Title Make your titles user-friendly, include the most important keywords at the front, and provide just enough information to entice clicks. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing titles on Amazon, in fact, it may even hinder your rankings by reducing clicks and therefore conversions.

Bullet points These are the first thing your customer sees, so make sure to highlight the best features of your product using a succinct sentence in language designed to convert. Improve the power of your bullet points by including information that your top competitors don’t provide. A great way to do this is to analyze the “answered questions” for some of your top competitors.

Do you see any trending questions that you could answer in your bullet points to help shorten the buyer journey and drive conversions to your product?

Product descriptions Given that over 50 percent of Amazon shoppers said they always read the full description when they are considering purchasing a product, a well-written product description can have a huge impact on conversions. Your description is likely to be the last thing a customer will read before they choose to buy your product over a competitor, so give these your time and care, reiterating points made in your bullet points and highlighting any other key features or benefits likely to push conversions over the line. Taking advantage of A+ content for some of your best selling products is a great way to craft a visually engaging description, like this example from Safavieh.

Of course, A+ content requires additional design costs which may not be feasible for everyone. If you opt for text-only descriptions, make sure your content is easy to read while still highlighting the best features of your product. For an in-depth breakdown on creating a beautifully crafted Amazon listing, I highly recommend this post from Startup Bros. AB test images Images are incredibly powerful when it comes to increasing conversions, so if you haven’t tried split testing different image versions on Amazon, you could be pleasantly surprised. One of the most popular tools for Amazon AB testing is Splitly — it’s really simple to use, and affordable with plans starting at $47 per month.

Depending on your product type, it may be worth investing the time into taking your own pictures rather than using the generic supplier provided images. Images that tend to have the biggest impact on conversions are the feature images (the one you see in search results) and close up images, so try testing a few different versions to see which has the biggest impact. Amazon sponsored ads The best thing about Amazon SEO is that your performance on other marketing channels can help support your organic performance. Unlike on Google, where advertising has no impact on organic rankings, if your product performs well on Amazon ads, it may help boost organic rankings. This is because if a product is selling through ads, Amazon’s algorithm may see this as a product that users should also see organically.

A well-executed ad campaign is particularly important for new products, in order to boost their sales velocity in the beginning and build up the sales history needed to rank better organically. External traffic External traffic involves driving traffic from social media, email, or other sources to your Amazon products. While external sources of traffic are a great way to gain more brand exposure and increase customer reach, a well-executed external traffic strategy also impacts your organic rankings because of its role in increasing sales and driving up conversion rates.

Before you start driving traffic straight to your Amazon listing, you may want to consider using a landing page tool like Landing Cube in order to protect your conversion rate as much as possible. With a landing page tool, you drive traffic to a landing page where customers get a special offer code to use on your product listing page—this way, you only drive traffic which is guaranteed to convert.

Keyword relevance A9 still relies heavily on keyword matching to determine the relevance of a product to searcher’s query, which is why this is a core pillar of Amazon SEO. While your title, bullet points, and descriptions are essential for converting customers, if you don’t include the relevant keywords, your chances of driving traffic to convert are slim to none. Every single keyword incorporated in your Amazon listing will impact your rankings, so it’s important to deploy a strategic approach. Steps for targeting the right keywords on Amazon: Brainstorm as many search terms you think someone would use to find your product. Analyze 3–5 competitors with the most reviews to identify their target keywords. Validate the top keywords for your product using an Amazon keyword tool such as Magnet, Ahrefs, or Keywordtool.io. Download the keyword lists into Excel, and filter out any duplicate or irrelevant keywords. Prioritize search terms with the highest search volume, bearing in mind that broad terms will be harder to rank for. Depending on the competition, it may make more sense to focus on lower volume terms with lower competition—but this can always be tested later on. Once you have refined the keywords you want to rank for, here are some things to remember: Include your most important keywords at the start of the title, after your brand name. Use long-tail terms and synonyms throughout your bullets points and descriptions. Use your backend search terms wisely — these are a great place for including some common misspellings, different measurement versions e.g. metric or imperial, color shades and descriptive terms. Most importantly — don’t repeat keywords. If you’ve included a search term once in your listing i.e. the title, you don’t need to include it in your backend search terms. Repeating a keyword, or keyword stuffing will not improve your rankings. Customer satisfaction Account health Part of Amazon’s mission statement is “to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company.” This relentless focus on the customer is what drives Amazon’s astounding customer retention, with 85 percent of Prime shoppers visiting the marketplace at least once a week and 56% of non-Prime members reporting the same. A focus on the customer is at the core of Amazon’s success, which is why stringent customer satisfaction metrics are a key component to selling on Amazon.

Your account health metrics are the bread and butter of your success as an Amazon seller, which is why they’re part of Amazon’s core ranking algorithm. Customer experience is so important to Amazon that, if you fail to meet the minimum performance requirements, you risk getting suspended as a seller—and they take no prisoners. On the other hand, if you are meeting your minimum requirements but other sellers are performing better than you by exceeding theirs, they could be at a ranking advantage. Customer reviews Customer reviews are one of the most important Amazon ranking factors — not only do they tell Amazon how customers feel about your product, but they are one of the most impactful conversion factors in e-commerce. Almost 95 percent of online shoppers read reviews before buying a product, and over 60 percent of Amazon customers say they wouldn’t purchase a product with less than 4.5 stars. On Amazon, reviews help to drive both conversion rate and keyword relevance, particularly for long-tail terms. In short, they’re very important. Increasing reviews for your key products on Amazon was historically a lot easier, through acquiring incentivized reviews. However, in 2018, Amazon banned sellers from incentivizing reviews which makes it even more difficult to actively build reviews, especially for new products. Tips for building positive reviews on Amazon: Maintain consistent communication throughout the purchase process using Amazon email marketing software. Following up to thank someone for their order and notify when the order if fulfilled, creates a seamless buying experience which leaves customers more likely to give a positive review. Adding branded package inserts to thank customers for their purchase makes the buying experience personal, differentiating you as a brand rather than a nameless Amazon seller. Including a friendly reminder to leave a review in a nice delivery note will have better response rates than the generic email they receive from Amazon. Providing upfront returns information without a customer having to ask for it shows customers you are confident in the quality of your product. If a customer isn’t happy with your product, adding fuel to the fire with a clunky or difficult returns process is more likely to result in negative reviews through sheer frustration. Follow up with helpful content related to your products such as instructions, decor inspiration, or recipe ideas, including a polite reminder to provide a review in exchange. And of course, deliver an amazing customer experience from start to finish.

Key takeaways for improving Amazon SEO

As a marketer well versed in the world of Google, venturing onto Amazon can seem like a culture shock — but mastering the basic principles of Amazon SEO could be the difference between getting lost in a sea of competitors and driving a successful Amazon business. Focus on driving sales velocity through increasing conversion rate, improving keyword relevance, nailing customer satisfaction and actively building reviews. Craft product listings for customers first, search engines second. Don’t neglect product descriptions in the belief that no one reads them—over 50% of Amazon shoppers report reading the full description before buying a product. Keywords carry a lot of weight. If you don’t include a keyword in your listing, your chances of ranking for it are slim. Images are powerful. Take your own photos instead of using generic supplier images and be sure to test, test, and test. Actively build positive reviews by delivering an amazing customer experience. Invest in PPC and driving external traffic to support organic performance, especially for new products. What other SEO tips or tactics do you apply on Amazon? Tell me in the comments below! Read the full article

#amazonphotovs.googlephoto #googledrivevs.amazondrive #googlevs.amazonecho

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atsumus · 7 years

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Get to Know Me Better

i was tagged by @seamarmot, thank you so much! ^-^

Rule: tag 9 people you want to get to know better NICKNAMES: elea or sometimes elli... and QUEEN OF OIKAGE! that’s what people on the internet call me at least Zodiac sign: pisces sun, virgo moon, aquarius rising Height: 161cm ... if you squint lmao Last thing googled: one piece naruto netabare Favorite music artist: i have too many.. and i listen to a lot of different stuff.. like everything from one direction and taylor swift to fall out boy and panic! at the disco. also lana del rey, marina and the diamonds.. halsey.. coldplay, the wombats, arctic monkeys.. florence and the machine.. of monsters and men, mumford and sons.. many many many more.. Song stuck in your head: “the good, the bad, and the dirty” by panic! at the disco Last movie watched: if anime counts too “koe no katachi”, if not “fantastic beasts and where to find them” What are you wearing right now: grey cozy socks, white sweatpants with a floral design, white-cyan-striped nightdress, and a grey hooded jacket, a dark blue scarf (it’s summer hot outside but i am ill yay) Why did you choose your URL: because I LOVE MIYA ATSUMU SO MUCH Do you have any other blogs: ohhh boy, way too many.. i’ll exclude group blogs and only mention the few most active ones:

@inoyamanaka - naruto/boruto

@harolds - music, lyrics, tv shows, movies, artists, celebs etc.

@mcclainlance - voltron

@kiyoomis - nsfw art (i posted one drawing so far lmao)

@wakatoshi - resources

What did your last relationship teach you: i have difficulties letting go for absolutely no fucking reason, but i’m actually 100% good on my own (i mean, without a romantic partner, not without people in general of course), so i don’t want a new relationship unless i really, really think it’s a good idea (so probably not anytime soon, maybe never again lmao bye what’s a love life if you have anime)

Religious or spiritual: spiritual I guess.. definitely not religious Favorite color: green, especially pastel tones and really dark ones Average hours of sleep: during the “depressed what’s sleep” phase it’s a maximum of 6h a night, during the “depressed i will never get up again phase” it’s a minimum of 12h a night... there is no in between Lucky number: i don’t think i have one lol Favorite characters: this would be a way too long list so here are a few from recent fandoms... kageyama tobio, oikawa tooru, miya atsumu, aomine daiki, kagami taiga, akashi seijuurou, lance mcclain, keith kogane, pidge gunderson, bakugou katsuki, todoroki shouto, midoriya izuku, dazai osamu, nakahara chuuya.. and many, many more.. How many blankets you sleep with: usually one or two (don’t ask about the amount of pillows though lmao) Dream job: as a kid i always wanted to become a paleontologist, but i guess by now i’d like to become an author and/or programmer/computer scientist and/or graphic designer.. Lipstick or chapstick: chapstick (only the “isana” ones from “rossmann” though) Last song you listened to: “seven devils” by florence and the machine

Top 3 shows: haikyuu, kuroko no basket, boku no hero academia okay so this time i’ll actually try tagging people i wanna get to know better and not just the people i always tag and talk to lmao @alien-iwaoi @iwaizumi-hajimie @oizumi @kourai @haiyse @shouhei @bakugoukatsvki @yulicechan @hairuko (i know everyone’s busy, so just do it if you want to, of course! ^-^)

#thanks for tagging me #<3333 #tag meme #elea talks #doing tag memes always reminds me of how many mutuals #and how i don't really talk to most of them #or actually never talked to some of them at all #i'm happy nevertheless #^-^

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nebris · 7 years

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America’s hidden philosophy

When Cold War philosophy tied rational choice theory to scientific method, it embedded the free-market mindset in US society

The chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) was worried. It was May 1954, and UCLA had been independent of Berkeley for just two years. Now its Office of Public Information had learned that the Hearst-owned Los Angeles Examiner was preparing one or more articles on communist infiltration at the university. The news was hardly surprising. UCLA, sometimes called the ‘little Red schoolhouse in Westwood’, was considered to be a prime example of communist infiltration of universities in the United States; an article in The Saturday Evening Post in October 1950 had identified it as providing ‘a case history of what has been done at many schools’.

The chancellor, Raymond B Allen, scheduled an interview with a ‘Mr Carrington’ – apparently Richard A Carrington, the paper’s publisher – and solicited some talking points from Andrew Hamilton of the Information Office. They included the following: ‘Through the cooperation of our police department, our faculty and our student body, we have always defeated such [subversive] attempts. We have done this quietly and without fanfare – but most effectively.’ Whether Allen actually used these words or not, his strategy worked. Scribbled on Hamilton’s talking points, in Allen’s handwriting, are the jubilant words ‘All is OK – will tell you.’

Allen’s victory ultimately did him little good. Unlike other UCLA administrators, he is nowhere commemorated on the Westwood campus, having suddenly left office in 1959, after seven years in his post, just ahead of a football scandal. The fact remains that he was UCLA’s first chancellor, the premier academic Red hunter of the Joseph McCarthy era – and one of the most important US philosophers of the mid-20th century.

This is hard to see today, when philosophy is considered one of academia’s more remote backwaters. But as the country emerged from the Second World War, things were different. John Dewey and other pragmatists were still central figures in US intellectual life, attempting to summon the better angels of American nature in the service, as one of Dewey’s most influential titles had it, of ‘democracy and education’. In this they were continuing one of US philosophy’s oldest traditions, that of educating students and the general public to appreciate their place in a larger order of values. But they had reconceived the nature of that order: where previous generations of US philosophers had understood it as divinely ordained, the pragmatists had come to see it as a social order. This attracted suspicion from conservative religious groups, who kept sharp eyes on philosophy departments on the grounds that they were the only place in the universities where atheism might be taught (Dewey’s associate Max Otto resigned a visiting chair at UCLA after being outed as an atheist by the Examiner). As communism began its postwar spread across eastern Europe, this scrutiny intensified into a nationwide crusade against communism and, as the UCLA campus paper The Daily Bruin put it, ‘anything which might faintly resemble it’.

And that was not the only political pressure on philosophy at the time. Another, more intellectual, came from the philosophical attractiveness of Marxism, which was rapidly winning converts not only in Europe but in Africa and Asia as well. The view that class struggle in Western countries would inevitably lead, via the pseudoscientific ‘iron laws’ of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, to worldwide communist domination was foreign to Marx himself. But it provided a ‘scientific’ veneer for Soviet great-power interests, and people all over the world were accepting it as a coherent explanation for the Depression, the Second World War and ongoing poverty. As the political philosopher S M Amadae has shown in Rationalising Capitalist Democracy (2003), many Western intellectuals at the time did not think that capitalism had anything to compete with this. A new philosophy was needed, one that provided what the nuanced approaches of pragmatism could not: an uncompromising vindication of free markets and contested elections.

The McCarthyite pressure, at first, was the stronger. To fight the witch-hunters, universities needed to do exactly what Allen told the Examiner that UCLA was doing: quickly and quietly identify communists on campus and remove them from teaching positions. There was, however, a problem with this: wasn’t it censorship? And wasn’t censorship what we were supposed to be fighting against?

It was Allen himself who solved this problem when, as president of the University of Washington in 1948-49, he had to fire two communists who had done nothing wrong except join the Communist Party. Joseph Butterworth, whose field was medieval literature, was not considered particularly subversive. But Herbert Phillips was a philosophy professor. He not only taught the work of Karl Marx, but began every course by informing the students that he was a committed Marxist, and inviting them to judge his teaching in light of that fact. This meant that he could not be ‘subverting’ his students – they knew exactly what they were getting. Allen nevertheless came under heavy pressure to fire him.

Allen’s justification for doing this became known across the country as the ‘Allen Formula’. The core of it ran like this: members of the Communist Party have abandoned reason, the impartial search for truth, and merely parrot the Moscow line. They should not be allowed to teach, not because they are Marxists – that would indeed be censorship – but because they are incompetent. The Formula did not end there, however. It had to be thoroughly argued and rigorously pervasive, because it had to appeal to a highly informed and critical audience: university professors, whose cooperation was essential to rooting out the subversives in their midst. Ad hoc invocations of the ‘search for truth’ would not suffice. It had to be shown what the search for truth – reason itself – really was. Allen’s ‘formula’ thus became philosophical in nature.

Like the logical positivists of his day, Allen identified reason with science, which he defined in terms of a narrow version of the ‘scientific method’, according to which it consists in formulating and testing hypotheses. This applied, he claimed in a 1953 interview with The Daily Bruin, even in ‘the realm of the moral and spiritual life’: Buddha under the banyan tree, Moses on Sinai, and Jesus in the desert were all, it appears, formulating hypotheses and designing experiments to test them.

The Allen Formula gave universities two things they desperately needed: a quick-and-dirty way to identify ‘incompetents’, and a rationale for their speedy exclusion from academia. Since rationality applies to all human activities, the Formula could be used against professors who, like Butterworth, were competent in their own disciplines, but whose views in other fields (such as politics) had not been formulated ‘scientifically’. Moreover, and conveniently, rationality was now a matter of following clear rules that went beyond individual disciplines. This meant that whether someone was ‘competent’ or not could be handed over to what Allen called members of ‘the tough, hard-headed world of affairs’ – in practice, administrators and trustees – rather than left to professors actually conversant with the suspect’s field. Professors thus found themselves freed from having to deal with cases of suspected subversion. Small wonder that, according to the historian Ellen Schrecker, Allen’s actions, and his rationale for them, set a precedent for universities across the country, and catapulted Allen himself to national fame – and to a new job at UCLA.

The Allen Formula was administered, at UCLA and elsewhere in California, through something called the California Plan. Imitated to varying degrees in other states, the Plan required the head of every institution of higher education in California, public and private, to send the name of every job candidate at their institution for vetting by the state senate’s committee on un-American activities. The committee would then consult its database of subversives and inform the university whether the candidate was in it. What to do next was, officially, up to the university; but the committee’s policy was that if an identified subversive was actually hired, it would go public, issuing subpoenas and holding hearings. As Schrecker notes in No Ivory Tower (1986), no college could hope to deal with such publicity, so the Plan effectively gave the committee ‘a veto over every single academic appointment in the state of California’.

The California Plan was supplemented at the University of California by a memo in April 1952 from President Robert G Sproul to department chairs and other administrative officers, directing departments to canvass the publications of job candidates to make sure that they ‘prohibited the employment of persons whose commitments or obligations to any organisation, communist or other, prejudiced impartial scholarship and teaching and the free pursuit of truth’. As the language here makes clear, it is not merely communists who are the problem, but anyone who is not ‘impartial’. Sproul, like other academics, followed the Allen Formula.

This official emphasis on scientific impartiality excluded adherents of a number of influential philosophical approaches from employment in California. Non-communist Marxists whose beliefs reposed on readings of history rather than on logic and mathematics were said to have abandoned what was rapidly defined as philosophy’s ancient concern with strict objectivity in favour of what Allen called ‘leading parades’. Existentialists and phenomenologists did not follow the experimental method (and the former tended to be atheists as well). Many pragmatists did not even believe that there was a single scientific method: true to their name, they believed that scientific enquiry should be free to apply whatever procedures worked. Moreover, whether a method ‘worked’ or not in a given case should be a matter of its social benefit, a dangerously collectivist standard in those difficult days. It was far safer to see the scientific enterprise as what Allen called it in Communism and Academic Freedom (1949): a ‘timeless, selfless quest of truth’.

The California Plan operated in the greatest secrecy. Ending someone’s career in public required extensive justification, multiple hearings, and due process, all of which could provoke damaging public outcries. The need for secrecy also explains why the Plan emphasised preventing hires rather than rooting out subversives already in teaching positions. As the committee noted in its annual report for 1953, professors already on campus had networks of friends and supporters. Efforts to remove them often produced loud backlashes which, in the committee’s view, invariably benefitted the Communist Party.

According to its advocates, the Plan was a great success. In March 1952, 10 months after it was implemented, the committee’s staffer, Richard Combs, estimated that it had prevented about one academic hire per day in the state. The next year, Allen himself declared that ‘so far, the arrangement is working to mutual advantage’.

As long as Allen remained chancellor, the Plan’s secrecy was successfully maintained at UCLA. Two years after he left, however, attacks resumed: the anthropologist John Greenway was fired in 1961 for suggesting that the Roman Catholic Mass exhibited traces of cannibalism. Three years after that, the philosopher Patrick Wilson was denounced by leading Los Angeles clergymen for the way he taught philosophy of religion. The seven years of silence while Allen served as chancellor at UCLA are testimony to his, and the Plan’s, success at tamping down controversy. We will never know, of course, the number of job candidates who lost their careers before they even started.

Things took a different turn at the university’s other campus, Berkeley. Unlike Allen, Berkeley’s chancellor, Clark Kerr, refused to cooperate with the Plan – with the result that, unbeknown to Kerr, a university security officer named William Wadman took it over. Wadman’s view of his job went well beyond merely forwarding the names of job candidates. It amounted to a general political policing of the faculty, and this attracted national attention. In March 1954, after Wadman’s activities became public, an article in the far-off Harvard Crimson quoted Richard Combs: ‘If, after looking over charges against a professor and investigating them, Wadman thinks the man should be removed, he goes to the state committee and discusses the case. If the … committee agrees with him, the information is passed on to the president of the university [Sproul], who calls for the professor’s resignation.’

The initiative in this arrangement clearly belonged to Wadman. The committee itself was known to be rabidly anti-communist and eager to justify its existence by capturing ‘subversives’, while Sproul’s assent to its findings is portrayed as virtually automatic. The Crimson article goes on to summarise Combs as saying that ‘any professor in the college – not merely those in classified research – can be dealt with in this manner’. Which means, if true, that every professor in the college – not just those in classified research – owed his job to the benign disregard, at least, of Wadman.

As all this was happening, US academics also faced the task of coming up with a philosophical antidote to Marxism. Rational choice theory, originally developed at the RAND Corporation in the late 1940s, was a plausible candidate. It holds that people make (or should make) choices rationally by ranking the alternatives presented to them with regard to the mathematical properties of transitivity and completeness. They then choose the alternative that maximises their utility, advancing their relevant goals at minimal cost. Each individual is solely responsible for her preferences and goals, so rational choice theory takes a strongly individualistic view of human life. The ‘iron laws of history’ have no place here, and large-scale historical forces, such as social classes and revolutions, do not really exist except as shorthand for lots of people making up their minds. To patriotic US intellectuals, rational choice theory thus held great promise as a weapon in the Cold War of ideas.

But it needed work. Its original formulation at RAND had been keyed to the empirical contexts of market choice and voting behaviour, but the kind of Marxism it was supposed to fight – basically, Stalinism – did not accept either free markets or contested elections as core components of human society. Rational choice theory therefore had to be elevated from an empirical theory covering certain empirical contexts into a normative theory of the proper operation of the human mind itself. It had to become a universal philosophy. Only then could it justify the US’ self-assumed global mission of bringing free elections and free markets to the entire world.

Scientific method was already installed as coextensive with reason itself – philosophically by the logical positivists, and politically by the Allen Formula. All that was needed was to tie rational choice to the scientific method. This was accomplished paradigmatically by the UCLA philosopher Hans Reichenbach’s book The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951). In a crucial paragraph, Reichenbach wrote:

a set of observational facts will always fit more than one theory … The inductive inference is used to confer upon each of these theories a degree of probability, and the most probable theory is then accepted.

Facts always underdetermine theories, and this requires scientists to choose from an array of alternative theories, under a preference for highest probability. Science thus becomes a series of rational choices. Which meant that by 1951 there was a unified intellectual response to the two pressures: appeals to science fought the domestic subversives, and when science was integrated with rational choice theory it entered the global conflict. The battle was on, and what I call Cold War philosophy began its career, not only in fighting the Cold War of ideas, but in structuring US universities – and US society.

To be sure, interest in the California Plan seems to have petered out well before California’s anti-communist senate committee was disbanded in 1971. Even before then, the Plan was not entirely successful, as witnessed by the hiring in 1964 of the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse to the philosophy department at the University of California, San Diego. That hiring was not without problems, however; public outcries against Marcuse culminated, in 1968, in armed guards, organised by his graduate students, spending the night in his living room.

But to say that with the waning of McCarthyism Cold War philosophy itself vanished from the scene is far too simplistic. The Cold War lasted until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and Cold War philosophy is still with us today. Thus, humanists long ago abandoned McCarthy-era attempts to subject their work to scientific method (as New Criticism was held to do). But in universities at large, intellectual respectability still tends to follow the sciences.

Cold War philosophy also continues to structure US society at large. Consider the widespread use of multiple-choice tests for tracking students. Whether one takes an ACT or a SAT, one is basically being tested on one’s ability to choose, quickly and accurately, from a presented array of alternative answers – under a preference, of course, for agreement with the test designers. Rational choice thus became the key to one’s placement in the national meritocracy, as illustrated by what I call the ‘40’s test’: if you know that someone has got 440, 540, 640 or 740 on the SATs (under the scoring system in effect until March 2016), you usually know a lot about their subsequent life. Someone who scored a 440, for example, likely attended a community college or no college, and worked at a relatively humble job. Someone with a 740 was usually accepted into an elite university and had much grander opportunities. Many countries, of course have meritocracies – but few pin them as tightly to rational choice as the US does.

Cold War philosophy also influences US society through its ethics. Its main ethical implication is somewhat hidden, because Cold War philosophy inherits from rational choice theory a proclamation of ethical neutrality: a person’s preferences and goals are not subjected to moral evaluation. As far as rational choice theory is concerned, it doesn’t matter if I want to end world hunger, pass the bar, or buy myself a nice private jet; I make my choices the same way. Similarly for Cold War philosophy – but it also has an ethical imperative that concerns not ends but means. However laudable or nefarious my goals might be, I will be better able to achieve them if I have two things: wealth and power. We therefore derive an ‘ethical’ imperative: whatever else you want to do, increase your wealth and power!

Results of this are easily seen in today’s universities. Academic units that enable individuals to become wealthy and powerful (business schools, law schools) or stay that way (medical schools) are extravagantly funded; units that do not (humanities departments) are on tight rations. Also on tight rations nationwide are facilities that help individuals become wealthy and powerful but do not convey competitive advantage on them because they are open to all or most: highways, bridges, dams, airports, and so on.

Seventy years after the Cold War began, and almost 30 after it ended, Cold War philosophy also continues to affect US politics. The Right holds that if reason itself is rooted in market choice, then business skills must transfer smoothly into all other domains, including governance – an explicit principle of the Trump administration. On the Left, meritocracy rules: all three of Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominees attended law school at either Harvard (as Obama himself did) or Yale (as Hillary Clinton did). The view that choice solves all problems is evident in the White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s presentation of the Republican vision for US health care, at his press briefing last March 23: ‘We’ve lost consumer choice … The idea is to instil choice back into the market.’

Part of the reason for Cold War philosophy’s continuing dominance is that though it is really a philosophy, proffering a normative and universal theory of correct reasoning, it has never been directly confronted on a philosophical level. Its concern with promulgating free markets and contested elections gave it homes in departments of economics and political science, where it thrives today. Philosophers, for their part, have until recently occupied themselves mainly with apolitical fields such as logic, metaphysics and epistemology.

On a philosophical level, however, Cold War philosophy has some obvious problems. Its ‘ethics’, for example, is not a traditional philosophical ethics at all. From Plato to the pragmatists, philosophical ethics has concerned the integration of the individual into a wider moral universe, whether divine (as in Platonic ethics) or social (as in the pragmatists). This is explicitly rejected by Cold War philosophy’s individualism and moral neutrality as regards to ends. Where Adam Smith had all sorts of arguments as to why greed was socially beneficial, Cold War ethics dispenses with them in favour of Gordon Gekko’s simple ‘Greed is good.’

Another problem with Cold War philosophy’s ethics concerns what I will call ‘disidentification’. Whatever I choose has at least one alternative; otherwise there would be no choice. But if I identify myself at the outset with any of my plurality of alternatives, I cannot choose any alternative to it; doing that would end my identity and be suicidal, physically or morally. Therefore, any alternative I consider in the course of making a rational decision is something I can walk away from and still be me. This is not an issue for rational choice theory, which concerns cases where my identity is not at stake, such as choosing which brand of toothpaste to buy, or (usually) which candidate to vote for. But when rational choice theory becomes Cold War philosophy, it applies to everything, and everything about me becomes a matter of choice.

This in turn leads me to abandon my own identity, in the following way: suppose that what I am choosing is my religion, and that my alternatives are Catholicism and Hinduism. If I am already a Catholic, however, Hinduism cannot be a serious alternative, because one’s religion is (usually) part of one’s identity. If I am to choose between Catholicism and Hinduism, I must put both at a distance. I must ‘disidentify’ with them. And since Cold War philosophy bids us to take this stance on all things, at the limit the moral agent must be disidentified from everything, and can have no other fundamental identity than being a rational chooser, ie someone who first orders her preferences according to transitivity and completeness, and then opts for the highest utility. That is a pretty thin identity. Everyone has certain characteristics that they simply cannot or will not relinquish under any circumstances. What else is there to live for?

The widespread success of rational choice theory, coupled with the problems of Cold War philosophy, suggests that the problem lies in what differentiates the two: Cold War philosophy’s claim, inherited from Allen, to universal, and indeed sole, validity as an account of human reason. If we look at the history of philosophy, reason has been many things. For the Greeks, it was basically the capacity to grasp universals – to see present givens as instantiations of underlying structures. For René Descartes, it was the ability to provide an a priori and so ‘unshakable’ foundation for beliefs. For Immanuel Kant, it was the ability to generalise conceptions to the maximum, which provided the foundation for the absoluteness of the moral law. Similarly, freedom has not always been merely a matter of choice. For Aristotle, you act freely, are responsible for an action, when you desire to perform that action and your reason tells you it is the correct action in the circumstances. To act freely is thus to act from your entire moral being. This idea, that freedom is really the capacity for complete self-expression, is summed up in Hegel’s pithy remark that true freedom is the apprehension of necessity: it is to understand, in a particular situation, what it is that you have to do in order to be you.

None of this suggests that we should stop valuing freedom of choice. But we should stop assuming that making choices amounts to freedom itself, or that making them rationally is the whole job of human reason. Freedom of choice, like free markets and contested elections, is valuable only when situated within wider horizons of value. Divorced from them, it becomes first absolute and then disastrous. Free markets, for example, are wonderful tools for enhancing human life. So are MRIs; but you can’t just drop an MRI on a street corner and expect it to function. Both kinds of device require proper installation and constant tending. The penalties for ignoring this became evident in the financial crisis of 2008.

The absolutising of things such as freedom of choice – the view that free markets and contested elections suffice for a good society – is a view that came into prominence with the early Cold War, when the proliferation of choices was our main contrast with Soviet Marxism. In reality, there is much more to a good society than the affordance of maximum choice to its citizens. With market fundamentalism dominating the US government, and with phantasms being paraded in the media under the sobriquet of ‘alternative facts’ that you can choose or reject, forgetfulness of the McCarthy era and the Cold War philosophy it spawned is no longer a rational option.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-cold-war-philosophy-permeates-us-society-to-this-day

@catcomaprada

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rei-reviews · 7 years

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Winter 2017 first impressions!

This new season of anime has been very special to me. Not just because all of the shows I've been following have pretty good but because this season I'm currently following 6 anime! And i haven't followed so much seasonal anime since the summer of 2014

So to fill in some time on this blog until I finish my voltron review I decided it'll be neat to write my short impressions of every show I'm watching so far, even though this isn't the most original idea...

And I will be excluding sequels like konosuba season 2 and rakugo shinjuu- descending stories because not everyone watched their first season.

Ms. Kobayashis Dragon Maid (Kyoto animation) (episodes 1-2)

So far, This show tells about the day to day life of office worker kobayashi and her dragon maid torou, who became her maid to pay her a favor to save her life and because she fell in love with her.

I did not have the highest expectations of the show because... It sounded like the typical trash anime is known for, with the exception of no highschool setting. But now that I've seen this show I can safely say... It's cute. Kobayashi makes for a solid straight man for her maid, and her other dragon friend antics and I've always liked seeing fish out of water stories. I definately had a good laugh with this show more than once. And the animation by KyoAni definately manages to shine in this production in its own subtle ways. The jokes are well timed and well animated and while I'm not a big fan of Tohrus design, I liked how they animated her as a dragon.

If your an avid fan of slice of life comedy's this is a show you'll probably enjoy. I can definitely see why this show won't be for everyone's tastes and it won't change your opinions of this shows overall genre but it's still a good watch Reccomendation level: 3/5

ACCA 13 (Madhouse)

This political thriller takes place in a fictional kingdom of 13 districts. It has managed to contain peace for almost a century not because of a reality show death game but thanks to its inspection department ACCA, who kept supervision on every district and made sure order is prevailed. However it is alluded that some people are planning to overthrow the king and ACCA and our main protagonist Jean Otus who's himself a member of ACCA, becomes the center of the conspiracy.

Unlike Dragon Maid I was pretty exited for this show because of the premise and the show's director Shingo Natsume. And perhaps this exitement got the best of me. That isn't to say this show is awful but it's first 3 episodes are definately a slow burn.

It spends a lot of time establishing the setting and the worlds government but it does it in a way that feels rather mundane. That makes sense because the world of ACCA 13 is seemingly peaceful but it still effected of how engaged I was with the show. But what kept the show from being totally boring is its cast of characters. I can't say I've fallen in love with them yet but Jean's cool demeanor was very appealing and all of the ACCA members seemed to be pretty quirky and intriguing enough.

The presentation for this show is definately a good one, considering its created by many talented people .The character designs are very stylish yet appropriate to their profession and the way this show sets up its world makes it look very appealing. The background music was also a lot of fun to litsen to because it helped make things less mundane and the show's opening song is definately a strong one.

Im still reluctant about fully reccomending the show because of the rather slow 3 episodes. It's definately not a show you see every season but here's to hoping it'll start kicking things up in its next episodes

Recommendation level- 3/5

Scum's Wish (Studio Lerche) (episodes 1-2)

Hanabee Yasuroka and Mugi Awaya both have unrequited but strong crushes for their teachers. Mugi fell in love with his teacher Akane after she tutored him, and Hanabee's crush on her teacher Narumi stemmed from the fact she's known him ever since he was a child.

So because they both share Mutual unrequited loves, they decide to start dating each other so they can use each other for as a substitute for their respective crushes. They have only three rules for their relationship: 1) the relationship will end once one of them got together with their loved ones 2) They will not have sex with each other . and 3) they will not fall in love with each other.

This setup that Mugi and Hana created for themselves is unhealthy and even borderline toxic but this show is fully aware of that. And it manages to capture this toxicity not just through how The couple interacts but also through the direction of its visuals. The intimate scenes are pretty sexy but they're composed in a way that makes you feel tense and uncomfortable. And I love it.

I always had a soft spot for seeing stories that explored unhealthy relationships (with awareness of course) and this show really feels that niche of mine in a satusfying way. There's a lot of potential in this set up to get great drama from the two main leads as they struggle with the rules of their relationship, as well as some of the side dramas (with one of them including Hana's good friend also having a crush on her. That could be very interesting)

However, I do feel that Mugi needs some more fleshing out in comparison to his partner Hanabee, who is a very interesting character I can somewhat understand.

Even if this show will end up tanking, I'll definately watch it until the end to see where things will go because as far as I'm concerned I'm hooked If you guys want to see a good drama show then give this show a chance though it can get rather sexual so it's not for everyone.

Recommendation level: 4/5

Little witch academia (studio trigger) (episodes 1-3)

After almost 4 years since the original Little Witch Academia OVA aired we are finally getting a full TV show! And boy is it exiting.

The premise of this anime is pretty simple: a girl named Akko joins a magical witch academy because she's a huge fan of a witch named shiny chariot, who she adored since she was young. Her main conflict however is that she is the only student in the academy that was born to non magicians. This is the story of her going into the witch academy, meeting new friends and learning how to become a witch despite her disadvantages.

The premise is simple and definately inspired but BOY is it executed with so much charm and passion! All of the characters in the show are super likable and mostly stray from archetypes that plague a lot of anime, the animation has brilliant sakuga moments and is filled with expression and the world building is very inventive!

And did I mention that so far this show is completely devoid of sexual fanservice? That is amazing honestly This show really brings me back to when I was a little kid. It's so refreshing to see a light hearted magical girl show that isn't trying to be a "dark subversion" of the genre but still has a lot of smart writing!

So yeah, so far this is the hottest show of the season for a good reason! I reccomend that everyone should at least give it a try and maybe try watching this show with a younger sibling or something alike.

Reccomendation level: 5/5

So yeah! These are the shows that I decided to follow this season in addition to sequels. I'd love to hear what you guys think of those shows and what are your general thoughts! At the end of the season I'll probably do a roundup of all of the shows I finished and maybe dropped so look forward to that!

#ACCA 13 #little witch academia #miss kobayashi's dragon maid #kuzu no honkai #anime review

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frabjous-fragment · 3 years

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a critique of lesbian discourse from a nonbinary perspective

(saw something that upset me enough to want to get my opinion out there, so here i am, turning to my tum blur dot com poe eh tree blog to engage in lgbt discourse. happy pride)

I am an agender person designated male at birth. I consider myself pansexual with asexual characteristics, but historically, I have mostly been romantically involved with people who could be painted broadly as transfeminine. Because of this, binarism that tries to divide me from the lesbian community has always stuck out to me more. I hope to illustrate to people who will keep an open mind how the dismissal of individuals identifying themselves as bi lesbians is rooted in binarism.

This carrd seems like the most comprehensive and mainstream formulation of the argument I could find, so I'll go down it point by point. Before diving in, though, I want to point out that the author, an asexual and nonbinary dfab lesbian, feels so strongly about this issue that they operate a blocklist of people who identify as bisexual lesbians on Twitter. Bear the fact that people feel strongly enough about the issue to draw lines in the sand through the community in mind, as we dissect the causes, effects, and purposes of this issue's hot button status.

tl;dr: There is no antagonistic conflict of interest between bisexual women and lesbian women.

"Lesbian is not an umbrella term." It's not surprising to me that the carrd opens like this, since the entire argument requires this prior, but the formulation here is actually very weak and even concedes things that weaken it further. "These simplifications of people's sexuality were grown out of as queer people started to create labels and spaces that more accurately described them." Buckle up, because most of the rest of this post rests on this very loaded throwaway sentence. This is a simplification of the truth and overlooks some pretty unfortunate history. The fact of the matter is that bisexual and asexual people were included in the discourse of the gay rights movement from the very beginning. The Asexual Manifesto was written in 1972, and Donny the Punk, founder of the first LGBT student movement, identified as bisexual (recorded in writing earliest in 1972- incidentally, when he discusses his break with elements of the gay liberation movement, due to his treatment after falling in love with a woman in 1970). Therefore, the argument that people simply used weak terminology like "homophile" in the early days because there was not more specific terminology available to people lacks something. The cruder truth is that it was all people needed for compatibility, to go to gay hookup spots, make friends, have sex, and maybe find a long term relationship. Bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual, and further subcommunities arose with the rise of gay identity politics, and conflicts of interest within it. Who would these conflicts of interest be revised out of our community's history? The answer is simple and unfortunate- sexism. Donny was far from the only individual met with the sentiment that he was a gender traitor- lesbian separatism, an unfortunate reaction to real issues the early gay movement had with representing lesbians, swept through lesbian spaces in the 70s, devastating bisexual and transgender women and bolstering the nascent bisexual and transgender movements. By the end of the decade, TERF queen Janice Raymonds included "testimony" from other bigots against two named trans women existing peacefully in lesbian spaces, in her hate screed The Transsexual Empire, quoting another TERF's writing as saying "I feel raped when Olivia passes off Sandy ... as a real woman." This is an obvious appropriation of the language of personal rights to justify bigotry, judgment, hate, and exclusion. All manner of feminists and lesbians have attempted to whitewash the darker sentiments of this period by dismissing the proponents of radical, genocidal propositions like Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto as "just venting" or "fringe lunatics". (To not get too into it, Solanas went back and forth on whether or not her work was satire, in a manner I find eerily similar to what reactionaries do when they put 'this account is satire' on their Twitters.) This is easy to prove incorrect; non-buzzword, actual, political misandry had reached the highest levels of feminist leadership and academia. Observe what one of the first professors of women's studies in the world, Sally Miller Gearhart, had to say on "the male question": I) Every culture must begin to affirm a female future. "The future is female" is a phrase that has been effectively neutralized and recuperated by less radical elements, which I am all for. It is vague enough to work to better ends than the next two points by itself. II) Species responsibility must be returned to women in every culture. Here it becomes more clear that, in the minds of many prominent feminists of the 1970s, women would have to be supreme over men. There isn't much of another way to interpret the statement that women must bear all responsibility for humanity. III) The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race. How would this be done? The only answer is eugenics through selective abortion imposed by the state, and genocide. Clearly, even from just a perspective of women's rights, this is inadmissible to anyone who is genuinely pro-choice on the

subject of women's bodies, even though this is not a situation we usually think of. The very suggestion of this is fascistic. Make no mistake that the modern sentiment against bi lesbians is not rooted in the same fascist gender essentialism. One denies that "benign" anti-bisexual and anti-transgender sentiments still predominate in lesbian and gay communities at your own risk. Not only are you speaking over the lived experiences of people like me, you are speaking against the statistics. Not only do incredible majorities of 88.5% of gay men and 71% of lesbian women, compared to 48% of bisexual and similar people, still exclude trans people from romantic and sexual considerations due to the subliminal sexism they learn from both mainstream society and their LGBT communities, but surveys show that gay men and lesbian women respectively distrust bisexual men and bisexual women's attraction to them and affiliation with their communities. (Also widely*... couldn't resist pointing out the common eggcorn.) "Lesbian used to be the term that described all sapphics, but isn't anymore, and that's a positive thing. Having more specific labels has allowed for people's bisexuality and pansexuality to not be erased in common language, and was a step towards getting rid of the pressure for people attracted to multiple genders to 'pick a side'. The emergence of terms like 'bi/pan lesbian' and 'bi/pan hetero' reinforces the notion of needing to 'pick a side', and obscures the common definitions of all the sexualities involved" This is that concession that I mentioned earlier. Credit where it's due, it's an elevation of the discourse to actually admit this when other people won't even do that. But it again ignores why these pressures exist, and incorrectly presupposes a demand for terminology that could be argued to be divisive without looking into why such a demand exists in reality. In a world without these terrible and stupid issues of sexism, people would simply say "I am both gay and straight" and everything would be dandy. Nobody has ever called themselves "bi/pan hetero" and I'm almost not even being hyperbolic. It's not an identity community. Proposing this just sets up the writer's argument that the terminology of "bi/pan lesbian" (and its more accurate parallel, "bi/pan mlm", which I have seen- putting aside my qualms with the limitations and binarism of xlx terminology even when the left operator is nb) divides the bi/pan community. This is the same logic battleaxe bisexuals who view the pansexual label as biphobic and attack people they see as bi (and yes, pan people are also bi by definition) use for their argument that the pansexual label divides bi people, when the only people that I see it "dividing" are the same people getting pissy about trifling points of queer theory that nobody else cares about for no proven reason. In real spaces, nobody tries to get bisexual people to line up on one wall and pansexual people to line up on the other. Pan people do not engage in biphobic discourse. The issue is empty; a non-issue. This it shares in common with the bi lesbian discourse, where the issues are not directly with the communities under fire, but instead vague, abstract, unsubstantiated and unfalsifiable notions of "omg you'll make the straights think [blank]!!" It seems like a theme where, even within LGBT, majorities attack their negations and accuse them of being divisive for asserting themselves and asking for some solidarity in return for the solidarity they provide in the community; you see this with asexual and trans people as well, but that's not what this post is about. Since the entire argument is built on this first point, I could honestly stop here, from a logical perspective. But people have strong emotional responses to the subsequent points, and without going through those, people will change "is not" to "ought not to be" and carry on.

"Making Distinct Spaces for Different Sexuality's Unique Experiences is Important." Around here is where the carrd really starts to resort to trying to twist truisms against their opponents, and on the briefest reflection this doesn't work. The idea that the term "bi lesbian" erases the distinction in between bi women and lesbian women seems to me to commit a category error by defining lesbian women as exclusively homosexual women and then pointing out the obvious truth that these women are distinct from bisexual women. The truth is, bisexual women and lesbian women are not categorically different in really any way other than their relationship to heterosexuality, a distinction easily expressed by- you guessed it- the label "bi lesbian". To reiterate and combine into earlier points: There is no antagonistic conflict of interest between bisexual women and lesbian women.

"Woman Aligned Nonbinary People are Included in Lesbian Attraction". Another truism. Let's move on to the single clause of the single sentence that contains the actual argument- "implying otherwise by wanting to separate that attraction into a new label is enbyphobic invalidating lesbian attraction" So, hi! As a woman aligned nonbinary person, I am here to tell you that this is not correct! I think this is a lot easier for dfab nonbinary people and dmab binary trans women to say than is it for dmab nonbinary people like myself to say. When your identity is as arcane as "I am not a woman but I identify with women because I am of a marginalized neutral gender", a lot more people decide not to take you seriously. If you take out the bolded words, this statement becomes correct, so we're going to focus on them. The only people saying anything about non-binary people not being included in lesbianism by default are the antis and the radfems they unwittingly serve, who actually do believe that point and see it as a good thing. But unfortunately, as a dmab nonbinary person who does not get sorted as a woman under binarism, my experience has been that I am already excluded from lesbianism in practice. If you get sorted as a woman under binarism, good for you! But to say that all lesbians do is obviously incorrect, when you consider all the budding trans women who still have beards and face largely similar issues in the lesbian community. To say that this state of affairs is fine is harmful to trans people; to say that this is different from what people like me face is arbitrary, and arguably binarist. Sapphism needs to look deeper than the surface and accept a foundation built on ties of solidarity and identity with no tests of purity.

"Having a Lean or Strong Prefrence Does Not Make You Any Less Bisexual". (Preference*, firstly.) I am not sure what this truism is doing here. Even many bi lesbians would agree that preferring other women is not what makes them lesbians, their membership in the lesbian community is what makes them lesbians. Refer to the above point; each community should be built on nothing more than solidarity and identity.

"Lesbians Don't Have Attraction to Men or Men-Aligned Nonbinary People, Even When on the Split Attraction Model". Here it is, the Big Chungus of arguments in the bi lesbian discourse. This is one that is seen often that people feel very strongly about, and probably the most contentious, since the implication that bi lesbians facilitate abuse of lesbians seems to motivate how a lot of people feel on the subject. Who has the power here? The insinuation that bi women have more privilege than lesbians is silly and biphobic. Clearly, it's the abusive men who have all the power in this arrangement. So how is the presence or absence of bi lesbians going to change what abusive men, who don't believe in sexual orientation, let alone care about it, decide to do? It can only change the excuses they use, which are chosen at convenience. This is a trick that patriarchy has played on us to get us to attack each-other instead of the enemy. For such a common and spicy point of rhetoric, I'm surprised I didn't write more against it here, but I really feel that the argument against it is that simple. I'll add a personal note here, and say that the dismissal of the divergent opinions of people sorted as males under binarism, alleging that we're "rapey" and want to appropriate things that aren't ours rather than participate in solidarity, is incredibly harmful to those of us who happen to be lesbians, even by the strictest trans-inclusive definition.

"Trans Women are Women". Truism. This is by far the weakest point. Nobody is advancing "bi lesbian" as a trans-inclusive label, though as I said above, it's a statistical fact that bisexual people are much more trans-positive than homosexual people, and therefore, as a transgender person, I tend to feel more welcomed around them. Of course, that's not a categorical distinction, but an unfortunate tendency.

"A Lesbian isn't Less of a Lesbian for Previously Dating Men". Truism. This is a stronger point, but only because it is closer to real rhetoric supporting the idea that bi lesbians are "real". Bisexual women will answer the question of "would you be open to dating a man again?" in the affirmative, and homosexual women will answer in the negative. Some members of the lesbian community do not completely rule out the prospect of dating men, even though it is not something they currently pursue.

The above are the reasons why the community should not fall into the bi lesbian discourse, and the refutations to its arguments. In order to be in full solidarity with fringe members of our sub-communities against bigotry, we must not fall into needless categorical division of groups when our interests are the same. There is no antagonistic conflict of interest between bisexual women and lesbian women.

#bi lesbian #pan lesbian #bi discourse #lesbian discourse #pan discourse #lgbt discourse #pride discourse #queer theory #agender #bi lesbian discourse

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