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thesunnyshow · 4 years

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Name: Ezralia Vali, but all my friends call me Elv

Writing Blog URL(s): @ezralia-writes (@haylo4ever was my OG writing account 5 years ago)

Age: 19

Nationality: Asian American

Languages: English and un poco Espanol

Star Sign: Aries

MBTI: INFJ

Favorite color: As of now, red

Favorite food: Pasta

Favorite movie: The Golden Compass, but Howl’s Moving Castle and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time are close choices too

Favorite ice cream flavor: Vanilla with chocolate syrup or caramel

Favorite animal: Narwhals

Go-to karaoke song: Uh, Who Do You Love (Monsta X)

Dream job (whether you have a job or not): TBH, my dream job is being a manager/CEO of a tech job (realistically) or a backup dancer for kpop groups (unrealistically)

Coffee or tea? What are you ordering? Neither, hot coco (coffee in the future to keep me sane)

If you could have one superpower, what would you choose? Mind-read

If you could visit a historical era, which would you choose? Sengoku Japanese period or in England when kings and queens were bloody powerful

If you could restart your life, knowing what you do now, would you? Yes

Would you rather fight 100 chicken-sized horses or one horse-sized chicken? 100 chicken-sized horses

If you were a trope in a teen high school movie, what would you have been? Please, I wanna be in the nerdy girl and jock romance but honestly, I’m probably just the side, hermit character.

Do you believe in aliens/supernatural creatures? Yes but I know they don’t exist

Fun fact about yourself that not everyone would know? Uh, I talk a lot about myself but I have trypophobia - there should not be holes in things that are supposed to be whole.

What fandom(s) do you write for? As of now, I write for BTS, GOT7, NCT, Monsta X, and Stray Kids

When did you post your first piece? May 26, 2020 (Dec 7, 2014 was my OG post on ff.net haha)

Do you write fluff/angst/crack/general/smut, combo, etc? Why? I write fluff, angst (lots), and sometimes crack. While I can rec some awesome smuts, I don’t feel comfortable writing explicit smut as of yet, although I will elude to some smexy time. I do have a WIP that I will one day write that will definitely include smut because it’s part of the story.

Do you write OCs, X Readers, Ships...etc? I have some OG OCs and my starter fics on Tumblr were third-person female reader. However, recent works include x you (reader) and I find that really fun and easier to write! I don’t really write any ships for Kpop.

Why did you decide to write for Tumblr? Having read so many awesome works on Tumblr made me want to write and hopefully have other readers experience the same feelings I do when I read that great piece. However, my original goal was just to write for Monsta X since there aren’t a whole lot of fics for them but also because I have too many ideas running in my mind. Lastly, I just write for myself.

What inspires you to write? The groups I write for, other things I read (like mangas and/or shows), and especially songs!

What genres/AUs do you enjoy writing the most? I write best fluff for established relationships because otherwise it’s all just angst, which is a lot of fun to write while keeping it not too toxic unless stated otherwise for plot. I also love silly fics for giggles. As for Au’s I enjoy regular day to day life with a spin or fantasy based Au’s.

What do you hope your readers take away from your work? I hope they just feel a strong emotion - depending on the genre. I hope that they get to the end and find all the nuances I try to sprinkle throughout the story hinting to clues or plot devices. That’s always what I try to aim for.

What do you do when you hit a rough spot creatively? Cry. Jokes aside, I take a break/breather to refocus and take time for myself. I also read professional works to take my mind off things or get inspired.

What is your favorite work and why? Your most successful? My personal favorite of my published works would be my Han Jisung x reader, Promise. It was my first kpop fic and a gift to my friend. I think it’s a hallmark of my return to writing and I look forward to publishing more of my favorite plots! My most successful is Spiderling, a Jeon Jungkook x reader fic, not surprised at all that my first official BTS fic would be the most popular one of my current works haha.

Who is your favorite person to write about? Honestly, I have so many ideas for Changkyun haha. I feel like he’s totally boyfriend material and can fit different roles from a total fratboy to a soft boyfriend. But I’m trying to expand both my writing and pairings and it’s a fun challenge to write for the different boys.

Do you think there’s a difference between writing fanfiction vs. completely original prose? I actually do! In my honest opinion, fanfiction is work about an already established character/person/universe. It’s easier for me to think up ideas for characters already prepped because I personally get lost in the details already of thinking up terms/universes to place the story in. I have a character that’s already established and people know about without having to elaborate on those finer details.

What do you think makes a good story? Proper formatting goes a long way. While I don’t judge on grammar and spelling mistakes, it is a much smoother read if people follow basic narrative-writing skills. I feel like anyone who can embody their own style and ideas (without being discriminatory or mean), then they’ve really got me hooked.

What is your writing process like? A mess. I know a lot of people outline, and I try that sometimes. But, normally I just get straight into writing what I’ve brainstormed, maybe adding some notes for future events here and there. If I get tied up at a certain part, I make a messy line break and start another scene.

Would you ever repurpose a fic into a completely original story? Yes. Funnily enough though, I repurpose my original storylines for fics, but if I could, I would write an original story.

What tropes do you love, and what tropes can’t you stand? I can’t stand cliches but I WILL cry over them if they’re well-written and/or have a spin on them. So, ultimately I’m down for anything. Enemy to lovers isn’t always my favorite but @gukyi does a great job, since that’s her renowned trope.

How much would you say audience feedback/engagement means to you? A lot! I have a few lovely mootz that always have something nice to say, but I would love more reader interaction! Of course, I’m a newer writer and haven’t blown up so it is to be expected that I’m a little lonely right now. I hope that’s not a long-term thing.

What has been one of the biggest factors of your success (of any size)? Who I write for. I hate to be blunt about it, but certain members and/or groups truly are more popular which is a shame at times. Plus, interacting with more mootz and authors as well as joining discord chats and networks helps by meeting new people who will interact with you and your content.

Do you think fanfic writers get unfairly judged? Yes, at times and with certain topics. We all know people will go on anon and tear anyone down for whatever reason.

Do you think art can be a medium for change? Definitely! Writing for the public,(especially fanfic and reader-based fics) especially in these times, means you have to adapt and adhere to the ever-changing times. We have a role to play in how people perceive things, whether that’s regarding an IRL person or how we view others with representation.

Do you ever feel there are times when you’re writing for others, rather than yourself? Huh, as of now, I feel like I’m writing for myself. Without a lot of interaction, I don’t feel pressure. I do want to write for other groups, but as of now I’m trying to pick up speed with certain groups. I have a lot of WIPs, so we will see where I end up.

Do you ever feel like people have misunderstood you or your writing at times? Not that I know of, haha.

Do your offline friends/loved ones know you write for Tumblr? No, haha.

What is one thing you wish you could tell your followers? I love you!

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers who might be too scared to put themselves out there? Don’t be afraid! It’s scary, but the worst that can happen is not writing!

Are there any times when you regret joining Tumblr? HAahaha, only because the site’s interaction roles have drastically dropped and a lot of the features suck. But the people I’ve met… priceless. I love them all and a lot have impacted my life so positively.

Do you have any mutuals who have been particularly formative/supportive in your Tumblr journey? Yes! All of them!

Pick a quote to end your interview with:

Stan yourself first! <3

#@ezralia-writes #@haylo4ever #thesunnyshow #featured author #episode 42 #bts #got7 #nct #monsta x #stray kids

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acuppellarp · 5 years

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Welcome (again) to A Cup-pella, Morgan! We’re excited to have you and Sandy Owen in the game! Please go through the checklist to make sure you’re ready to go and send in your account within the next 24 hours.

OOC INFO

Name + pronouns: Morgan + she/her Age: 26 Timezone: EST Ships: Sandy/Chemistry, Sandy/Happiness Anti-Ships: Forced!!!

IC INFO

Full Name: Sandy Patience Owen Face Claim: Meghann Fahy Age/Birthday: 29/February 4, 1990 ~ Aquarius queen Occupation: Pediatric Surgeon Personality: Intelligent, Ambitious, Passionate, Silly, Guarded, Resolute, Nurturing Hometown: Charlotte, North Carolina Bio:Before her little sister came along, Sandy was the apple of their parents’ eyes. She was read to every single night, her lunches always had fruits and veggies, and her dreams were sugar plums almost every night. Then came Penny, and Sandy’s dreams became much different. Sandy became the big sister of anyone’s dreams. Their parents noted how careful Sandy was when holding Penny and just how loving she was toward the baby. They just knew the two would be best friends.

Sandy was always considered a leader as she was growing up. She wasn’t a huge sports fanatic, mostly because she would rather be busy with her studies or the piano. As their parents were both in the medical field, Sandy felt pressure to do well in school. Thus, she tried her very best at all times. For as long as she could remember, especially after becoming a big sister and helping her mother at every chance, Sandy wanted to work with babies and children. Whether that was a pediatrician or a pediatric surgeon, she wanted to help little ones feel better.

Headstrong and full of energy, Sandy always knew her place was at the front. Though she could have just as easily been a bully, growing up with a sibling so close in age forced her to set a good example in front of little Penny. She soon became the girl that stood up for others in every situation. As it were, the quality paid off when she completed externships at the local hospital as her favorite patients were the little ones that couldn’t always express how they were feeling. This developed her need even further to stand up for the little humans that were in pain and help them in anyway she could. Her future career seemed to be solidifying itself before her eyes.

At the age of 15, Sandy sat her parents down with a poster presentation on her sexuality. Because of her research and the passion inserted in her words, her parents felt that she had truly thought about what she was saying. They accepted her with love and tears in their eyes. Being bisexual may have been fine in the Owen household, it was still continuously difficult outside the doors. The loving nature of her parents and sister could only get Sandy so far. It was up to her to stand up for herself at school and anywhere else. Loads of people talked behind her back stating that she was going through a stage, many thought she was doing it for attention. When she did get her first girlfriend at the age of 17, boys would flock to them on their dates to the movies and prompt them to kiss. It only took Sandy punching an unruly boy to get them to settle down once and for all. For the rest of her time in high school, she had few people bully her into submission. It just couldn’t be done.

Her first girlfriend followed her to UNC Chapel Hill where she studied Pre-Medical Sciences. The relationship didn’t last long as Sandy devoted far too much time to her studies. Sandy had decided, against her advisor’s wishes, to take more credits than was advised so that she could graduate early and begin her graduate plans. As much as Sandy was focused on her career and studies, she still made time to join a sorority, find her first boyfriend, break up with her first boyfriend, and find out that she was really into Moscow mules.

After she graduated a year early, Sandy began her graduate career at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. At the age of 22, Sandy was finding that she was going to spend most her life in school. Though she was decently okay with that fact, she made a promise to herself to make the effort in relationships if her studies did not suffer. Much to her chagrin, the majority of her relationships did not last longer than 6 months. The reasoning all differed, but Sandy knew it was because they could not handle her busy schedule of classes and preceptor hours. She understood how they felt in some way, knowing the stories her parents would tell. It still left her incredibly lonely, yearning for something more in her life.

3 years into her graduate program a shockwave soon came that ripped through Sandy’s life, tearing up every root that ever grounded her. The death of her father came as a complete blindside. The man was healthier than his peers and always went to every doctor appointment, assuring himself a long life to watch his daughters have babies of their own. Family was so important to him. Sandy rushed home, throwing all her responsibilities out the window, begging the heads of her program to understand that she may need a few weeks off to gather up the pieces of her life. They obliged, the people at Johns Hopkins had families of their own and respected Sandy enough to know that this was a defining time in her life.

To say that the Owens were devastated would be an understatement. Sandy even considered transferring closer to home just to be closer to her mom. Suzie Owen would not have any part of that. There were many nights where Sandy would end up in her mother’s bed begging her to let her transfer home, but at the end of the 3 weeks, Suzie and Penny helped Sandy pack her things to send her back to Baltimore. Sandy ended up with a chip on her shoulder that increased her focus tenfold, something her colleagues didn’t think was possible. She took it upon herself to have her father’s legacy mean something, to complete her residency, become a surgeon, and live her life in his honor. It was the least she could do.

The years seemed to fly by as Sandy devoted herself almost entirely to her career and her family, letting other aspects of her life fall by the wayside. After her graduation and residency, Sandy made the final decision to follow Penny to New York City. Though unconventional, she knew that her little sister was wise beyond her years and made the best of decisions for her life. Sandy had to make sure Penny was going to be well taken care of and protected at all costs. So in September of 2019, Sandy made the adult decision to move herself to New York and start all over again.

Pets: No pets because she doesn’t have the time. She wouldn’t be opposed to getting a cat in the future.

Relationships:

Penny Owen: As the older sister, Sandy has ALWAYS looked after Penny. Whether they were in elementary school, high school, or in New York City as adults. Being that the two are close in age, they do have their arguments every now and then, but they are thick as thieves. After the passing of their father, they grew closer and closer. Sandy finds herself holding back emotions from Penny at times to protect her, however.

April’s Growers: After moving to New York, Sandy found herself a routine with the hospital, her home life, and her sister. She needed something more. With that, Penny told her about the Growers and Sandy had to join. Sandy likes to come up with ideas for the group to accomplish and loves to work with the group and her friends.

EXTRA INFO

Lives in 15 CORNELIA ST APT 7F by herself currently

Twitter name/twitter URL/description: Dr. Owen/sandyowen-md/☼

Five latest tweets:

@sandyowen-md: I’m just glad I get to wear teddy bear scrubs whenever I want #aesthetic

@sandyowen-md: I promise I’m not glaring at you, my glasses are getting fixed. #innocentbystander

@sandyowen-md: Siri, google insomniac cookies begin order

@sandyowen-md: apple cider > pumpkin spice #comeforme

@sandyowen-md: There’s just something about snow that amazes me everytime…

#accepted

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julystorms · 6 years

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FINAL POST

All right, it’s been 5 or so months since I last posted here.

The long and short of it is that SnK wasn’t the only reason I left this blog. Real life/work stress was a big part of it on top of SnK’s clumsy handling of delicate subject matter and the SnK fandom’s overwhelming insistence that the author of SnK was a genius (and I was the dumbass who just Wasn’t Looking Closely Enough to Realize It).

It was just too much to deal with all at once.

Y’all know my stance on how fiction can and does affect reality, so let’s not go there. The issue I have was that all of these negative things wadded themselves up into a giant hateful ball in my mind. This blog, and the fact that its very foundation was almost entirely based on being an SnK blog...made me feel gross and ugly. Look, I don’t think it’s silly to be disappointed or put off by something you’ve been thinking about and dissecting and having fun with for literal years of your life. It’s been something like 4.5 years I’ve been following this series! I’m upset that something I thought might do a 180 and be great...ended up feeling bad to me. It’s hard to see something with potential lambaste itself like this, especially when I’ve spent four and a half years following it and defending it.

You are free to disagree. I totally understand that some of you adore the series for the good parts, or you ignore the hateful things; maybe you’re just here to see how it ends. I can respect that.

But I literally can’t exist without being critical. I know a lot of my followers resented my posts because it makes them feel stupid or weird for liking the things that I criticized. I tried to stop being negative (because constant negativity is a downer), but it was hard to exist in a fandom space where I felt I couldn’t say my piece any longer without putting off people who followed me.

But hey, after a break... I feel a lot better! I think I’ve come to terms with wanting to like a series/a world/characters/whatever, but struggling to because of fandom opinion and my personal discomfort, not to mention the frustration and uncertainty of the series itself.

SnK isn’t any different than Harry Potter or RK or Twilight or any other series where the author turned out to be shitty or misinformed or just generally an idiot.

If my salt makes you uncomfortable or uneasy, this is goodbye. I had fun here! I enjoyed interacting with you guys, talking characters and meta with you. It was lovely. But if reading my meta and posts makes you feel bad about yourself or uneasy or just awful? It’s okay to break ties. Sometimes it’s necessary and I want you to take care of you; have a good one!

For those of you who would like to follow my new blog, the url is @mannatea.

Please view this blog as an archive. I hope some of you will still find it useful. :)

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bow-down-im-your-queen-now · 6 years

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Guess who’s still alive

It me, I’m back!

So I guess I owe an explanation

Hi, okay so it has been a while, actually, it's been longer than a while it been two years. A lot has happened in that time period and I personally have grown so much as a person and have changed but all for the better. When I started posting my writing on this blog and began reaching out to other people it was amazing. It was great coming in to contact with people with similar interest as my own and it was such an eye-opening experience. It made me realize how much I enjoyed writing as a hobby and how much fun it was to interact with people with similar interest.

I started this blog as a source of entertainment but also an escape. I was still in high school during the time that I was posting frequently and I was dealing with a lot of personal issues. Stress with school and getting ready for college, issues at home, my own personal problems that I had to face, as a naïve and easily stressed 17-year-old it was more than I could handle. I was juggling too much with school, working, maintaining a social life, and also up keeping on things that made me happy like writing among other things. I had to take a step back from this blog simply because I had to prioritize other things in life and in doing so what was simply supposed to be a small breakaway turned into a prolonged absence. That pretty much sums up the reason for my absence. While I was away I lot of exciting things happened though, I graduated high school and was accepted into my dream university and that has been what I have mainly been focusing on in recent history.

I am extremely happy with life, I'm in love with school (even though the broke college student life is a real and unforgiving bitch), I'm happy with my job, I've gotten the chance to meet so many interesting people and socially have challenged myself to face all fears and simply live happily. But in focusing so much on those things I haven't really prioritized the things in life that I used to love doing. Art is a big part of my life but recently it has been something I have been doing less and less for personal indulgence and instead has been for a grade or money and writing was also something I used to love as a way to express myself and be creative. As silly as it may seem to some writing fanfiction is such a relaxing and enjoyable was to indulge in a topic that you might already love. People who also love writing will get it and so will those so may simply enjoy just reading it, it's fun. I want to go back to doing things that I love and posting on this blog is one of them, I have missed writing so much and I have been wanting to pick it back up for a long time now I just haven't had the courage or motivation to do it. But enough is enough there is no point in putting something off if I have the means to do it and it makes me happy.

How often will I be posting here gaining? I have no idea.

Will another hiatus happen again? More likely than not yes, I only hope that now I can at least start giving a heads up.

While I was away I was still writing here and there, mainly in the notes on my phones so I'm sure you can imagine just how awful some of the fics I put together were but two years is a long time, some of the things I tried to piece together I have moved over to my laptop and have turned into actual full lengths fics that are ready to be posted. In the time that I was gone I also got the chance to watch so many TV shows and movies, things I want to start writing fic for, in fact, some of the fic I have already done and ready to post have nothing to do with Divergent, the Fandom this blog has been mostly based on. I have some fics for Divergent, all centered on my love Eric of course, but I hope everyone who is still following this blog for that content can understand that I feel my interest have grown and expanded and that as I start back up posting on here the content I will create will reflect that.

The fandoms I want to focus this blog on are:

-Divergent

-Walking dead

-Supernatural

-DCEU

• Justice League

• Suicide squad

-Sons of Anarchy

-Marvel EU

• Black Panther

• Guardians of the Galaxy

That’s all of it for now maybe I will add to it or maybe there are some fandoms on the list above that I will never write fics for. I don’t know, I'm just going to take things as they come. I think this will be a fun journey and appreciate that so many of you have stuck around as long as you have When I stopped post on this blog we had just hit 500 and after almost two years of absence that number is now at 753! For those of you that followed while I was gone just a quick introduction, Hi my name is Lauren and I really really like writing fanfiction even though I'm kind of lazy and inconsistent with posting. I'm sorry for the lack of content but now that is hopefully going to change.

I currently have eight fics that are done and ready to be posted.

• 'A match made in…' (Divergent, Eric x reader, 1.4k)

• Eric x reader Drabble (Divergent)

• Dean x Reader Drabble (Supernatural)

• The New Sam (Supernatural, Soulless!sam x reader, 7k)

• Unnamed (Justice League, Barry Allen x reader, 3k)

• Happy face (Sons of Anarchy, Happy x reader, 1.5k)

• Unnamed (Sons of Anarchy, Happy x reader. 3k)

• Erik x reader drabble (Black Panther)

I would say I have about ten other fics all across the fandoms that need to be finished or are in the process of being edited. I wanted to wait before I made this announcement until I had a crazy amount of fics stockpiled and ready to be posted just to make sure that I could post more consistently but you know what I'm ready to come back so here we are.

The Divergent Eric x reader drabble is short but something I am going to post either tonight or tomorrow evening so look out for that.

I just want to say thank you again to everyone who stuck around and two all the people who sent sweet messages checking to see if I was okay, I saw them I'm sorry I didn’t respond I just needed to take a break from the blog. I'm excited for all that’s to come on this new version of this blog and I have even been thinking about changing my URL to commemorate the fact that this is a new chapter!

I'll talk to you all soon!

-L

#im back #woo hoo #me

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opisafascist · 8 years

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"I can't take criticism so I send out my minions from 4chan out to get you" blocklist

I’ll be honest, I do not get what are these peoples deal but they seem to always get on the bad side of everyone and they can get to this very contrarian personality from 4chan /v/ so I’ll just take that a hint to making a list of them, they aren’t fascists by any means, crypto-fascists at the least, but they often gobble up the worst of people from this website and have probably been co-opted by fascists multiple time because of their apatheticness and coyness, the whole “I’m not a SJW! I don’t like protesters, fighting for something is dumb!” kind, shit they aren’t even probably right-wingers so this is a very special blocklist because I keep seeing them on tumblr whenever something bad happens, in fact i see so many fascists on this site only follow these people, so it’s probably better to block them to cut off their social rings immediately.

--The list that has probably already been made once--

moontouched-moogle - Not much interesting to talk about here they’re just this hive mind for /v/ people. They kind of helped me build this list a bit.

thefeelofavideogame - This guy never catches a break of not minding their own business and can’t help but feel cynical about anything but just ‘vidya’

nentindo - This one deserves a special mention because they’re 15 years old so it’s better to just block them and ignore them in advance rather then let them act elitist, i mean jeez kid you’re 15 you BARELY experienced life yet. Like really this amount of them surrounding themselves by adults that don’t wish them the best is an unhealthy obsession for them at it is.

inkerton-kun - Dontcha hate when a porn artist has to have a ‘personality’

steven-universe-official - Kind of like the grand papi of this gang, I don’t even need to tell people to block them because I think about everyone does already due them sending their weird combination of anti-feminist fans around sending hate to anyone that would do criticism against their shitty attitude, technically in the recent years they kind of toned down on going around spewing bullshit and being THE uncle tom but it’s good to double check

dream-cassette - Oh this one I’ve heard of the most! Used to make child porn by the name of hoshime, in the name of rule 34, along the lines she deleted her original blog because she believed the obviously fake “down with cis” situation was the biggest EXAMPLE OF BIGOTRY in the world and the not absurd at all rival towards inequality (ignoring how it works systematically) and ever since then she’s been hanging out with the anti-sjws.

thathomestar - I think they used to be a 100% gamergater but then again almost everyone here on this list was at one point. They still have that suspicious aura of “all the misery in the world is the left-wing’s fault for fighting back against their human rights being removed rather than just submitting!”. Says everything that is politically incorrect is just a joke, might be just a weird case of /pol/’s law (haha, get it?)

mr-cappadocia - Also an infamous gamergater, they sorta hold a grudge so much against social justice they end up sounding like they’re high on sherm. You know those try-hards that sound REALLY hard to sound politically incorrect? Yep! They sound like that. I also recommend blocking leopirate too as they are also a hotspot for gamergaters. Both are pretty terrible Islamophobic people.

takashi0 - The OG Anti-SJW Brony of Tumblr! What a title.

shitpost-senpai - I don’t even know why this guy’s on this list they’re just a 100% obvious fascist to the point they won’t stop being antisemitic about everything but hey, I guess because they like anime and metal gear rising that’s enough for them to fit in this blocklist... They’re also constantly being reblogging by this social ring of people and could just be the reason why a sum of people don’t trust them.

maoh - They hate it when people fight back against oppression in general, the old cuck-like mentality of “No, don’t do anything, don’t fight back and die and it will be a win!” without knowing that peaceful protest holds no consequence and allows fascists to do anything they want to do at any time while removing human rights. They’re very petty about god damn children rather than just let them be too. What kind of an adult is this? Kind of funny that they changed their description recently from “I dislike the left-wing of tumblr” to “zero tolerance for faux morality and art censorship”, dude got some brand new codewords to pass off “I hate criticism” and “I’m a nazi sympathizer cuck and I’ve been brainwashed by the enemy to say that violent dynamics, no matter how history shows the story otherwise, is ineffective in justice and is villainous, anyways let me just frantically love an anime where they beat someone up”. It’s basic praxis and how the world works!

shameshack - Ey! the-cringe-channel, known for producing their own cringe content because for some odd reason they keep ignoring the academic values of things and brush ofF everything in the world as mindless paranoia but probably aren’t a very smart person themselves and would rather waste their life making fun of kids and fueling the quickly made anti-sjw blogs on this website that all have urls like “tumblr-is-dumb-because-i-hate-minorities”, out of everyone who acts coy about why people dislike them, this one acts the most coy out of them all, what a malicious kind of guy. I really don’t know if they legit don’t get how things work in the real world because they take silly things seriously and serious things as if they were silly. Have you ever tried living life once where you have to don’t have to keep insecurely looking down on others that are just harmless oddities to fuel your ego or what?

--End Of List--

Just copy and paste each url onto your blocklist if you wanna.

Again I repeat these guys aren’t “fascists” and will deny they’re “anti-sjw” (Even though they don’t do anything to show for it besides say “Oh don’t worry we make fun of anti-sjws too! But we sound exactly like them when we go against our vague idea of social justice”), but fascists and crypto-fascists always seem to be around these people because they act coy about it all the time for the sake of being contrarians. They don’t want to care about them being followed by neo-nazis, just the power of having many followers that come straight from 4chan’s /v/! Almost the same as sympathizers.

It’s the same odd link towards people who take video games and substancless anime too seriously and... Neo-Nazis, seriously what’s up with that? Anyways be careful when you criticize anime or them and don’t have them checked!

Special mentions: KanColle fans I guess? Moe anime attracts a lot, and I guess that’s what happens when a medium genre is 100% bottom feeders towards substanceless girls just being cute, blogs with gray backgrounds, the nihilists that blog about trump jokes “ironically” (poe’s law), youtube celebrities, it’s more about ethics in games journalism and not objective game design. It’s not like they can’t be analytical ABOUT EVERYTHING right. Like how video game game design isn’t the only analytical theory in the world to take into consideration when criticizing media. Why is it always the gamers?

Won’t say it again! Act coy about it all you want but take the loss because you guys have negative connotations and never really worked on it.

This isn’t a “Reach” like a lot of you guys keep blaming it to be one or just belittle it as just “discourse” (the most thrown around word ever), the fact is just that you simply won’t accept the weight of your actions by either doing bullshit yourselves or allowing fascists to co-op your communities because you guys aren’t actively critical at all despite your contrarian image.

Anyways this blog’s been moving slow (Which is good! Unless they've just been more secretive) to the point I gotta make a list out of these infamous dudes that i’m pretty sure everyone on tumblr already blocks or at least is suspicious about the people who reblog from them so i’m gonna go jack off to hentai rather than cowardly reblog ecchi to my blog to remind people I do indeed jack off to anime have no mistake about it.

#blocklist #moontouched-moogle #thefeelofavideogame #nentindo #inkerton-kun #steven-universe-official #dream-cassette #thathomestar #mr-cappadocia #leopirate #takashi0 #shitpost-senpai #maoh #shameshack #the-cringe-channel #the-eagle-atarian

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skyshipper · 3 years

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blog tag

I was tagged by the very sweet @the-blind-assassin-12 (who has the cutest dog in the world in case anyone is wondering). 💛

1. Why did you choose your url?

Oh man, I fucking HATE coming up with blog names because everything I come up with is usually taken. I started this blog several years ago to celebrate my love of Nick & June from the Handmaid’s Tale. I hadn’t been on tumblr in quite a few years and that ship brought me back to fandom land. I chose “sky” because when I’m on tumblr I feel like my head is in the clouds and “shipper” because I was here to post about a specific ship. Idk, I don’t love it and it’s not even a good concept but it’s staying forever because I loathe coming up with new blog names. I also get really confused on my own dash when people change their urls?? Lol, I’m a visual person. So anyway, that’s it. That’s the name. It kinda sucks but here we are.

2. Any side blogs?

Yep, but I pretty much abandoned it. I’ve found that one blog is more than enough to manage for me. I originally created it when I wanted to post stuff for shows outside of The Handmaid’s Tale. Then I decided that was silly and I should post whatever the hell I feel like. It’s very easy on social media to get caught up in likes, followers, reblogs, etc.....but ultimately I’m here for me. I know 95% of the people who follow this blog came here for content for another show, but they don’t have to stay and that’s fine. I’m just out here doing my own thing, curating a list of shit I’m into at the moment. If you’re into it too, then cool! If not, that is also cool.

3. How long have you been on tumblr?

I’ve come and gone many times. I think I had a blog around 2014 for a show/fandom that shall not be named, which I rage deleted in a fit one day. Then I had a lurker blog for a few years. I think I’ve had this one for maybe 2-3 years??? I don’t think I logged in for the majority of 2020, because the pandemic rollercoaster took an emotional toll on me just like everyone else. I’ve made a conscious decision this year to only spend my free time & social media time on things that are making me feel happy, not anxious, frustrated or sad. Din Djarin brought me back here but I’ve stayed for Pedro Pascal. Pedro makes everyone happy, bless his beautiful soul. ❤️

4. Do you have a queue tag?

Nope. I tried queuing posts for a while but I just found it to be too much work. Now I just reblog/like stuff on the spot.

5. Why did you start your blog in the first place?

To celebrate my love of Nick & June from The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m not really into the show anymore because the writing is total shit, but season one (when they were working off of Margaret Atwood’s novel) is still a masterpiece.

6. Why did you choose your icon/pfp?

Because Javier Peña is hot as fuck, that’s why. Listen, I have a hard time picking an icon and get irrationally attached to it when I do. There are so many great Pedro pictures and characters to choose from. I still think of going back to my original Pedro icon from that Vanity Fair photoshoot because it’s one of my absolute favorite pictures of him and I still love it so much. I’ve been messing around in Photoshop trying to make a cool background for it and have failed miserably to create anything I like thus far. So for now, Javi is staying.

7. Why did you choose your header?

Once again, because Javier Peña is hot as fuck, that’s why. I never held a handgun in my life, but ohhhhh, so sexy when fictional characters I love do it. Same with the cigarette smoking. Good lord just thinking about this is making me feel things. 😅

8. What’s your post with the most notes?

This weapons set I made for Din. I’m still shocked that happened because that is BY FAR the most notes I’ve ever received on a post and it will probably never happen again. I peaked too soon, haha! I just got Photoshop in February or March of this year after making mediocre gifs with a series of phone apps for years. That was maybe the second or third set I ever made in Photoshop, so I was kind of stunned it took off like that. What can I say, everyone finds Din’s weapons as sexy as I do, I guess. I do sometimes look at it and wish I would have made better quality gifs but I was, and still am, learning. Now when I look at I try and use it as a reminder that my gifs are slowly improving (at least I hope so anyway) and that makes me happy. I still get notes on that post daily which both surprises me and makes my heart all warm and fuzzy.

9. How many mutuals do you have?

I’m not really sure because I never went through and counted??? Maybe 30ish?

10. How many followers do you have?

1363, at least 1200 of which came here for Nick & June. I hope all of you like Pedro Pascal & Star Wars because I’m going to be stuck in this mode for a long time!! 🤡

11. How many people do you follow?

157

12. Have you ever made a shitpost?

No, not that I can remember anyway. Tumblr & fandom in general are way more fun for me when I spend time focusing on good things. Life (this past year especially) is hard enough. I just want to bask in the glow of Pedro’s beautiful heart and face, live in the fantasy worlds of Star Wars, read smutty things from amazing writers, and enjoy beautiful gifs & edits from content creators. All of these things bring me joy and that’s why I’m here. This is a positive vibes only space for me.

13. How often do you use Tumblr each day?

Too much??? I like to keep my work tabs open on my computer and then peak at pretty things throughout the day as a little reward when I get stuff done. Sometimes that leads to unexpected breaks (like reading fanfiction at 11am on a Tuesday) but I’m not sad. I work for myself so there is no one to get mad at me, just a pile of work that keeps growing because I’m screwing around.

14. Did you have a fight/argument with another blog once?

Nah. I’m here for pretty things, wonderful writing and nice people. If someone is an asshole I just block them, problem solved. Which has only happened to me once that I can recall and it was years ago. I try to only follow people that cultivate a space for kindness and positivity as well, that way there is nothing to argue about......just mutual pining over lovely things.

15. How do you feel about ��you need to reblog this” posts?

Ugh, love/hate relationship. I definitely understand why people who create things want as many people to see it as possible. It takes a long time to create gifs/edits/write stories so I see the value in reblogs and user tags as a way to boost posts to get your stuff out there in front of as many eyes as possible. Personally, I feel like people should reblog things only when and if they want to do it. I never want anyone to reblog my creations because they feel like they have to do that. I want them to reblog it because it made them happy and/or they liked something I created. Believe it or not, I notice when a follower of mine is a person that usually only “likes” my posts and then suddenly reblogs something with the nicest tags about a post saying it’s pretty, they love it, etc. For me, that’s extremely rewarding because something I made resonated with that person. I also believe that if you’re creating things only for reblogs or likes then you’re focused on the endgame and competition (getting the most notes, etc.) which is never a good headspace to be in for creating things. I know that can be hard because social media creates anxiety, depression and imposter syndrome, but the amount of notes on a post really and truly does not always equate to the best content. So much of it is timing, or a post getting boosted by bigger blogs so more people see it. I try to create things for myself first and foremost and if I am doing that and enjoying myself in the process, who cares how many people see it/like it/reblog it? At the end of the day I want to like what I create and feel like I’m improving my Photoshop knowledge & skills. That’s why I’m here and that’s what I try to stay focused on all the time.

16. Do you like tag games?

Yeah, I do. Except the music questions. Why are there so many music/song questions? I’m the kind of person that lets someone else pick the music most of the time. I also listen to a genre to fit the mood I’m in rather than a specific artist 95% of the time, so I find those song questions really difficult. I also like tag games because I really love to learn more about other people here. I’m really flattered when someone tags me in something because it means they want to get to know me better and since I’m both introverted and shy I always find that really nice. 🥺

17. Do you like ask games?

Yes!! I always want to do those but if I’m being honest, I’m shy and anxious so I always feel like no one will send me any asks if I do it. Lol, that is peak anxiety my friends. Let’s just say I’m working up to doing one someday. I absolutely love reading them when others do them.

18. Which of your mutuals do you think is Tumblr famous?

Certainly @javier-pena ......I mean, those Din Djarin’s hottest moments and Javier Peña’s hottest moments are straight up iconic. Also @sirtadcooper whose icons/headers are absolutely amazing, instantly recognizable and rightfully used by so many people because they are fucking awesome!

19. Do you have a crush on a mutual?

Oh yeah, so many. I have creator crushes on tons of people that are not mutuals too. Jfc, there are so many lovely people here creating amazing things. I will say that @sirtadcooper is honestly one of the sweetest, kindest people I have met in this fandom and one of the most amazing content creators here. A true beacon of original content that I admire greatly. I love that I can pick out her work so easily and that she has a clear style. I aspire to get to that point with my creations some day. @javier-pena makes the mostly insanely crispy gifs and has been very kind about helping me with gif questions in my obsession quest to constantly learn how to become better. I think her gifs are magic at this point because I just don’t understand how they look that consistently amazing all of the fucking time?? Idk, I’m just glad she shares them with us. @trashcora makes some really amazing gifs that I just don’t even know where to begin. Sometimes I look at stuff like this of hers and wonder if people really appreciate the amount of time it takes to create things like that?? Same goes for @millenniumsfalcon where I just can’t even begin to think about how to create gifs that complex and beautiful. I don’t even know what to say, I’m just going to continue to admire these creations from my little corner of the web. As for writers, I absolutely adore anything @frannyzooey writes. I mean, I’m suddenly living for Dave York porn and I’ve never even watched that film??? I’m convinced anything she writes is pure gold. TMTC is one of the best pieces of fanfiction I’ve ever read. I must confess I’ve only read about 3% of the amazing fanfiction in the Pedro/Mandalorian fandom because I get stuck on Masterlists like hers that are so consistently fucking amazing. That and most of my free hours are spent clowning around in Photoshop. I can’t wait to read more stuff from so many other people here. I promise I have a list much longer than I have time for, but I’m getting there!

Tagging: @keeper0fthestars , @teamnick , & @filthybookworm if you would like to. 😊💛

#tag games #about me #jfc i'm a wordy motherfucker #i'm also the queen of typos so sorry for any grammatical errors or missing words #this is probably way more than you bargained for but there it is #and now back to my regularly scheduled work day

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filipeteimuraz · 6 years

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Setup Google Analytics in 3 Steps – The Beginner’s Guide

I remember the first site I ever worked on — a blog I built in college.

After getting the site live, I heard I needed Google Analytics so I set it up.

A few days went by. Nothing really happened.

Then… all of sudden… I received my first visitor! Holy cow, someone actually looked at something I built! A complete stranger!

Turns out, it was a false alarm. Google Analytics recorded one of the visits I made to my own site. I felt a little silly after I realized that.

But a few days later, I did start receiving real traffic. I’ll never forget the feeling that came from having built something other people cared about. I quickly started a daily ritual of checking Google Analytics every morning during breakfast.

Watching traffic come to your site is downright addicting.

Google Analytics tells you how many people are coming to your site, where they’re coming from, and what they look at while they’re on your site.

All for free.

That’s right, it’s completely free. Google built a ridiculously high-quality piece of software and makes it available to everyone. There aren’t any catches or downsides either.

Well, maybe there is one downside.

Google Analytics can get complicated. It has a ton of depth, countless reports, and a bunch of advanced features for expert marketers.

But we can skip all that.

Even if you never use the advanced stuff in Google Analytics, there’s a ton of value in a few basic reports. It’s also really easy to set up. Once you create your account and install Google Analytics on your site, you’ll get the majority of its value right out of the box without having to do any fancy customization.

There are three basic steps: getting your tracking code, installing that code on your site, and confirming that it’s all working. Let’s go through each.

Step 1: Get Your Google Analytics Tracking Code

Again, Google Analytics is completely free and anyone can set up an account.

I’m going to walk you through the process of creating your account, setting up a few basic things in Google Analytics, and show you where to find your Google Analytics tracking code (the Global Site Tag).

First, go to this URL.

Google will ask you to sign into a Google Account. If you have a Gmail or G Suite account, that’ll get you in. If not, you can create a Google Account easily.

Once you’ve started the Google Analytics sign up process, Google will ask for some basic info about your site.

Right after you finish creating your account, you’ll be taken to your Google Analytics tracking code:

The Global Site Tag is what you’re looking for. That’s the code that will run all the tracking stuff on your site as soon as it’s installed.

Also take note of the Tracking ID. Some website builders or WordPress plugins will send data to Google Analytics for you once they have your tracking ID. If you’re asked for the Tracking ID, you now know where to find it.

There’s nothing else you need to configure in your account at this point, you’re ready to move on to the next step.

Step 2: Install Your Google Analytics Tracking Code on Your Site

Now that you have your Google Analytics tracking code, it’s time to get it on your site.

At a high level, the install is simple. Your Google Analytics Global Site Tag needs to fire on every page of your website when the page loads. As the page loads, it records data from that visitor and then sends it to your Google Analytics account and appears in your reports.

There are a couple of ways to get installed on all your site pages. The way you’ll use depends on how your site is built.

WordPress Sites

For WordPress, there are a couple of ways to install Google Analytics.

The absolute easiest way is to install a Google Analytics plugin on your WordPress site. I’ve listed all of my favorite Google Analytics plugins here.

After you install the plugin, go to the plugin settings and look for the place to add your Tracking ID.

Another option is to check your WordPress theme settings. A lot of WordPress themes have the option to add header scripts. This is a place for you to copy and paste any code snippet into the header of your site. Those code snippet will load on every page. It’s in easy way to install marketing tools like Google Analytics on your site. If your WordPress theme has this option, copy and paste your Google Analytics Global Site Tag into that box. Then you’re done.

This is the way that I usually prefer to install Google Analytics. It’s super easy and it allows me to keep the total number of WordPress plugins down.

If you have trouble finding this setting or your theme doesn’t have it, the plugin option is still a great way to go.

Ecommerce Sites

If you are using an ecommerce tool to run your site, dig around in your site settings. Most of the ecommerce site tools have integrations with Google Analytics.

Usually, they just need to know your Tracking ID and you’ll start seeing data in your reports.

Shopify does ask that you copy and paste your tracking code into its settings. This article also breaks down a few more steps to verify that your Shopify theme is using Google Analytics. Shopify is our recommended ecommerce platform and you should switch to Shopify if you’re not on it already.

All Other Sites

Most site builders like Squarespace and Wix have Google Analytics integrations. Search your site settings for a way to add your Tracking ID or copy your Global Site Tag into your site.

If you’ve built your site by hand, you could install Google Analytics yourself. Your goal is to copy and paste your Global Site Tag into the <head> section on every page of your site. If you’re not sure how to do this, reach out to a developer to help you install it.

What about that Google Tag Manager thing? Should I use it?

Short answer: don’t worry about it. Install Google Analytics without it.

Tag managers became popular to help teams manage their websites. For a growing business, managing all the scripts on different website becomes a real headache. There are dozens of marketing and engineering scripts along with countless sites and subdomains to manage. It’s pretty easy for scripts to get out of hand.

Tag managers came around to manage… well… tags (scripts). Instead of installing scripts directly on your site, you install a single tag manager. Then you put all your scripts in your tag manager. Your tag manager loads the scripts every time someone comes to your site.

There are several major advantages to this:

You can control who has the ability to edit scripts at your company and who doesn’t. The user permissions are very advanced in these tools.

It’s a lot easier to keep all your scripts updated and current. Once a year, someone on your team can go through them all, update old scripts, and remove unnecessary ones.

It gives non-engineers the ability to make changes to your sites without having to bother the engineering team. Marketers don’t have to pester the engineering team to get a new marketing tool installed on the site.

A bunch of advanced features add a lot of extra control over your scripts that you don’t normally have, like being able to pick which pages the script fires on.

Google released its own Google Tag Manager a while back and it quickly became the industry standard.

If you’re part of a larger company, you should install all your marketing tool scripts with Google Tag Manager, including Google Analytics. It’ll prevent a bunch of fires later.

However, most site owners aren’t working at a large company. They’re building their own site or running a small business. If that’s you, I recommend you skip Google Tag Manager for several reasons:

When it’s you or a small team, there’s no need to manage user permissions super strictly.

You won’t be using that many marketing tools anyway.

It’s a whole other tool that you’d have to learn. You have enough on your plate.

So skip it and install Google Analytics directly on your site.

Step 3: Confirm Google Analytics Is Set Up Correctly

The majority of data in Google Analytics only appears in your reports 24 hours after it happens. This means that if you’re looking at data for today, it’s not accurate. It takes time for Google to process all the data coming in and get it ready for your reports.

So if you install Google Analytics, visit a bunch of pages on your site, then check your Google Analytics reports right away, you might not see anything in your reports. Give it 24 hours for the data to come in.

Google Analytics does have some Real-Time reports that show you data as it’s coming in. These reports don’t have nearly as much depth as the normal reports but you don’t have to wait 24 hours to see what’s happening.

The Real-Time reports are perfect for confirming that you’ve set up Google Analytics properly.

They’re under “Real-Time” in the left sidebar. The Overview report looks like this:

A great way to make sure your Google Analytics tracking code has been installed correctly is to open up the Real-Time Overview report in one browser tab and then click through a bunch of pages on your site in another tab. If the install was done correctly, you should be able to see the pages you’re visiting pop up in the report.

Once all the data is coming in, you’re good to go. You’ve finished setting up Google Analytics and can start checking it during breakfast every morning like I do.

http://www.quicksprout.com/setup-google-analytics/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/02/setup-google-analytics-in-3-steps.html

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limejuicer1862 · 6 years

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Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.

The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

Gabriel Rosenstock,

according to Wikipedia,

(born 1949) is an Irish writer who works chiefly in the Irish language. A member of Aosdána, he is poet, playwright, haikuist, tankaist, essayist, and author/translator of over 180 books, mostly in Irish. Born in Kilfinane, County Limerick, he currently resides in Dublin.

Rosenstock’s father George was a doctor and writer from Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, who served as a German army doctor in World War II. His mother was a nurse from County Galway. Gabriel was the third of six children and the first born in Ireland. He was educated locally in Kilfinane, then in Mount Sackville, Co Dublin; exhibiting an early interest in anarchism he was expelled from Gormanston College, Co. Meath and exiled to Rockwell College, Co. Tipperary; then on to University College Cork.

His son Tristan Rosenstock is a member of the traditional Irish quintet Téada, and impressionist/actor Mario Rosenstock is his nephew.

Rosenstock worked for some time on the television series Anois is Arís on RTÉ, then on the weekly newspaper Anois. Until his retirement he worked with An Gúm, the publications branch of Foras na Gaeilge, the North-South body which promotes the Irish language.

Although he has worked in prose, drama and translation, Rosenstock is primarily known as a poet. He has written or translated over 180 books.

He has edited and contributed to books of haiku in Irish, English, Scots and Japanese. He is a prolific translator into Irish of international poetry (among others Ko Un, Seamus Heaney, K. Satchidanandan, Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammad Iqbal, Hilde Domin, Peter Huchel), plays (Beckett, Frisch, Yeats) and songs (Bob Dylan, Kate Bush, The Pogues, Leonard Cohen, Bob Marley, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell). He also has singable Irish translations of Lieder and other art songs.[1]

He appears in the anthology Best European Fiction 2012, edited by Aleksandar Hemon, with a preface by Nicole Krauss (Dalkey Archive Press).[2] He gave the keynote address to Haiku Canada in 2015.

His being named as Lineage Holder of Celtic Buddhism inspired the latest title in a rich output of haiku collections: Antlered Stag of Dawn (Onslaught Press, Oxford, 2015), haiku in Irish and English with translations into Japanese and Scots Lallans.

He also writes for children, in prose and verse. Haiku Más É Do Thoil É! (An Gúm) won the Children’s Books Judges’ Special Prize in 2015.

Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Rosenstock#Biography

http://roghaghabriel.blogspot.ie/ http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=gabriel+rosenstock

The Interview

Q. 1. When and why did you start writing poetry?

I think the Muse came a-courting a long, long time ago, in an age before Gutenberg, an age before papyrus, when the poet was what he always is – though the role is suppressed today – a shaman.

She keeps coming – trying to possess me fully – but she knows I’m elusive, elusive as she is. We are both Spirit, pretending to be flesh, to be real. It’s a divine play, a sport, a leela as they say in India. I also write and translate for children – mainly in Irish, or Gaelic, and this is also leelai, pure and simple!

Ireland and India have so much in common. The writings of Myles Dillon and Michael Dames are good starting points for anyone interested in exploring that connection.

Ireland herself takes her name from a tripartite goddess and I dedicated a year to her in a bilingual book inspired by the devotional poetry of India, bhakti:

https://www.overdrive.com/media/796797/bliain-an-bhande-year-of-the-goddess

I mentioned the poet-shaman. There are very few courses in Creative Writing today that teach you how to be a shaman: it can’t be taught! So they teach form iinstead, how to write a sonnet or a villanelle – five tercets and a quatrain, is it? Enjambment anybody? Poets daringly continue a phrase after a line break and expect applause.

Irish poets learn your trade, sing whatever is well made. Yeats (whom I love) has a lot to answer for. Learn your trade! Poets today are tradeswomen and tradesmen for the most part. All form, no spirit, no melody that breaks the heart.

No heart. So, the great challenge today, in my book, is to reconnect with Spirit. Otherwise, forget it.

The only way to write is to write – and read, of course. Trust the inner ear – not what the manuals tell you – trust the heart, trust language. It’s not a lifeless tool in your hands, you silly tradesman. It’s alive, it’s divine. May your poetry be a sacrifice to her!

Having said all that, I occasionally teach haiku. The way I teach haiku is simply to present the works of the grandmasters of haiku, hoping that their spirit will ”catch’ and inflame the acolyte. Many believe that Basho was the grandmaster of haibun – prose speckled with haiku – and that the greatest of the haiku masters was Buson. I cobbled together new versions of Buson, in Irish and English, a volume which also contains versions in Scots by John McDonald:

https://www.amazon.com/Moon-Over-Tagoto-Selected-Haiku-ebook/dp/B00WUXQZ54

We need more multilingual books of poetry, tanka and haiku. We need to free ourselves from the dying clutches of the Anglosphere and listen to real poetry in languages which still cherish the divine music of the spheres: one can hear that sacred music in the voice of Scots-Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean, even when he reads his masterpiece Hallaig in English translation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzewXmgVzL4

*** ***

Haiku Enlightenment and Haiku, the Gentle Art of Disappearing are two introductions to haiku and I hope that their titles reflect the spiritual basis of haiku, something which many haikuists ignore at their peril, I regret to say; for young readers (say, 8-12 years) there’s a book called Fluttering their Way into My Head:

https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1782010882/evertype-20

True haiku – Zen-haiku – is egoless and spontaneous and allows for ambiguity – the reader must make sense of it by drawing on her own experiences, dreams, memories and so on – and yet it’s happening in the Now (if there’s such a thing as the Now).. I’m fully aware of promoting a book such as Fluttering their Way into My Head and speaking at the same time about ego-lessness! But, you see, I don’t identify with ‘my’ books as ‘mine’. They are about as ‘mine’ as is the moon over Tagoto.

Q. 2.Ted Hughes would be glad you extol the shamanic. Who introduced you to the shamanic in poetry?

Does one need an introduction? I hold shamanism to be a vital part of my literary and cultural heritage.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/cg1/index.htm

I can identify with the world of Carmina Gadelica whilst the world of Philp Larkin is alien to me.

Interesting that you should mention Hughes. I advise aspiring poets to wean themselves from the dominance of English-language literature, especially when it expresses itself in WASPish terms. I know many American poets, some of whom I’ve met at literary festivals, others with whom I have a friendly e-mail acquaintance. Many of them seem straitjacketed by the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant way of walking, talking, eating, drinking, dressing – and writing! I translated a volume of poems, Cuerpo en llamas, by the late Chicano poet Francisco X. Alarcon into Irish and invited him to Ireland for the launch. He turned out to be a shaman-poet. The genuine article. We recorded the book on a cassette (built-in obsolescence?) and the opening invocation was in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, the language of his grandmother. I had come across Aztec poetry before, via anthologies by the likes of Jerome Rothenberg, but didn’t realize until then that Nahuatl was a living language.

During his brief stay in Ireland, Francisco gave me an Aztec name, Xolotl. I wrote a long poem of that title – in a kind of shamanic frenzy – and put it away, out of sight. Years later I looked at it again and it’s the longest poem in my selected poems translated from the Irish, The Flea Market in Valparaiso. Here’s a link to the book and a review:

https://www.cic.ie/en/books/published-books/margadh-na-miol-in-valparaiso

I’ll let the review speak for itself. Expounding further on the role of the shaman poet is best left to others. But, I’ll say this much, Paul: artificial intelligence or AI has ‘advanced’ to such an extent that robots are now writing poetry – it would almost make you join the Luddites or inspire you to form your local branch of Anarcho-Primitivists!. I think we should be reading more of John Zerzan and Paul Cudenec to fully realize what kind of world we are creating for our grandchildren. Everybody says we can’t go back, we can’t stop the march of progress. Rubbish! Of course we can go back; I don’t like military metaphors but surely a wise general knows when to retreat?

Do we want poetry written by robots? Maybe it’s just science imitating life – so much poetry, especially in English, is artificial anyway. Futurologists talk of various possible disasters down the line – caused by our relentless ‘advancement’ such as shortage of energy supplies, of food and water, melting icecaps and so on and so forth. Overfishing will result in a shortage of fish. Nobody speaks of a shortage of poetry – it wouldn’t be disastrous enough, seemingly, nor would it bother mankind very much if we speeded up the death of languages, currently estimated at one language disappearing every fortnight. It’s the survival of the fittest, isn’t it?! Is it? Is that who we are, what we are?

So what if Irish dies, if Scottish Gaelic or Nahuatl dies, if Welsh dies, if Manx dies – again! If Beauty dies, so what? Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream? Well, some of us are not willing to accept such a fatalistic scenario. The World Poetry Movement, for one, has sounded the alarm. Poets are not ‘joiners’ by nature but when the future of civilization is at stake, perhaps it’s time for all poets to become focused. Jack Hirschman, poet and social activist, describes the vision of the World Poetry Movement thus:

https://www.wpm2011.org/

‘an end to war world-wide, and the creation of a world government that shares and distributes the wealth of the world generously and sensitively in the process of creating an equality that is nothing but the word Love in the eyes of everyone because it also recognizes E V E RY human being as a brother or sister. With no need of any wall separating an ‘I’ from a ‘You’, a ‘He’ from a ‘She’ …

This is a wise vision. Quixotic? Utopian? So what. We need to rekindle hope, we as citizens, we as poets.

I was fortunate enough in this my 69th year on earth, fortunate indeed to have a near-death experience. After recovering from multi-organ failure, I became conscious of the love that poured in streams at my bedside from my wife Eithne, my daughters Heilean, Saffron and Eabha, my son Tristan and conscious, as well, of the wave of reciprocated love that streamed from me to them. I was conscious, too, of the love and concern that came from friends, relations and fellow scribes.

Hirschman, above, is speaking of Love, the ultimate reality. Left-wing theorists should speak more often to us of love; it would help their cause. The author of The Wretched of the Earth tells us that his criticism of the colonizer is inspired by love, not hate.

For a long while I could not read or write. Then I asked one of my daughters would she kindly order me a copy of Palgrave’s Treasury: you see, English-language poetry was my first love, before I ‘discovered’ Irish and its potential,just as the author of Decolonising the Mind decided that African literature need not be in the language of the colonizer, French, English or Portuguese. His own outlawed language, Gikuyu, was best suited to express what he wanted to reveal. I also asked my daughter to bring me anything by my favourite author, Isaac Bashevis Singer? So, Mr Rosenstock, are you Jewish then? I used to think that my empathy for Singer’s work meant exactly that, but no, I’m not Jewish. It is the ancient art of storytelling, brought to perfection in his short stories, that makes me alive not to Jewishness as such but to humanity, in all its guises. And what of my attraction to Irish culture and to Indian philosophies, particularly Advaita and bhakti? Well, I once heard Ganesh playing Napoleon Crossing the Rhine on the uilleann pipes:

http://forums.chiffandfipple.com/viewtopic.php?t=44223

I jest. But I did have an out-of-body experience listening to piper Eoin Duignan in a pub in Dingle. Look, I don’t feel particularly Indian, German, Irish or Jewish – live Irish music and the ancient sounds of the Irish language can lift one and link one deeply to the universal spirit, the rich complexity that is the world of the senses, too; a deepening of a sense of place; a feeling for history. English carries imperial baggage with it. The scales fell from my eyes once I understood that through Irish, the literary medium of my choice, I could see and experience the world differently. Lucky Poet is a memoir by Scottish poet Hugh Mac Diarmid. It touches on some of these issues.

A year or so ago I came across an editorial in Poetry Ireland Review that mentioned at least half a dozen English poets.(I couldn’t figure out why. Was this a special edition of the review dedicated to new voices in English poetry? No.) We are still ‘looking across the pond’, i.e. to England. There is ample evidence, if you look for it, that many Anglophone Irish writers are suffering from a kind of literary Stockholm syndrome, that phenomenon described in 1973 as an extraordinary love and regard of the captured for the captor.

As an Anarchist, as an Advaitist and as an Irish-language poet, I value freedom and independence. It is the life blood of art. It may set you on a collision course against the Establishment but unless you are a Daoist poet content with herb-picking on a mountain, such a collision seems inevitable.

Q. 3. What is your daily writing routine?

I write or translate from about 10.a.m until 8pm. I suppose, ‘poet-shaman-translator’ is an accurate enough label to describe my activity. I don’t distinguish between so-called original writing, such as poetry, and translation (which I prefer to call ‘transcreation’). I see the practice of these arts as coming from the same pool of universal creative intelligence. John Minford, Emeritus Professor of Chinese, Australian National University, said something that caught my attention in Words Without Borders (Dec 7, 2018): ‘Hermits of ancient days practiced Taoist yodeling, a form of music that emulated the music of the spheres. Translation itself, the transformation of ideas and words, whereby self and the other merge into one, can be a form of Taoist practice . . .’ So, others may have ‘a daily writing routine’ as you call it I have something resembling a Taoist or Zen-Buddhist practice… maybe ‘practice’ is enough; it’s a more honest description than defining it as Taoist or Zen. It would be slightly ridiculous to call me a Taoist or anything else. I’ve admitted to being both an Anarchist and an Advaitist but really, all labels are rubbish. To paraphrase the essence of the Tao in The Taoist Way, a beautiful lecture by Alan Watts, ‘The Tao that can be labelled is not the Tao.

youtube

I translate a vast array of material for a multicultural blog: http://roghaghabriel.blogspot.ie/ I’m something of a technical dodo and must thank Aonghus O hAlmhain, blogmeister, for his work and patience. In recent years, my ‘practice’ has focused quite a lot on ekphrastic tanka and photo-haiku. The Culturium is a blog which is devoted to the arts as ‘practice’ in the meditative sense of the word: https://www.theculturium.com/?s=gabriel+rosenstock I have unsubscribed to various sites recently but two that remain are The Culturium and Poetry Chaikhana. A poet-friend, Cathal O Searcaigh, who writes mainly in Irish, gave me a volume of poems by a shaman-Taoist poet of the late Tan’g Dynasty, Li He. I began to write Taoist-flavoured poems in Irish and English, Conversations with Li He. When I get out of hospital (I’ve been hospitalized since September 2018) I’d love to continue with this project. I see a fellow-shaman in O Searcaigh and have translated him into English quite often over the years, most recently in a book called Out of the Wilderness: https://www.amazon.com/Out-Wilderness-Cathal-Searcaigh/dp/0995622523 It is not easy – in fact it is impossible – to convey the shamanic power of MacLean and O Searcaigh in English:

youtube

He is a lovely, lively conversationalist, as you can hear above. He and MacLean recite their poetry as though conscious of the fact that poetry was originally chant, the ecstatic chant – the trance – of the shaman. Alan Titley, in a discussion following the interview, joined by Frank Sewell and Art Hughes, speaks of Cathal’s work as an ‘act of reclamation’. Poetry lost its heart when it ditched chant, when the poet could no longer perform the role of shaman. Can we reclaim poetry? In the discussion, academic Art Hughes also talks about the disaster of the ‘printed page.’ Frank Sewell finds ‘strange echoes of home’ in Cathal’s references to the East. And Hughes talks about synthesis and the vision of Unity known to mystic of all traditions. It’s what Jack Hirschman alluded to previously when we touched on the World Poetry Movement. Is Jack a mystic?! We’re all closeted mystics if you ask me . . .

Q. 4. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

What’s young?! I was in my late teens when I read Speaking of Shiva, an anthology of bhakti verse edited by AK Ramanujan. I haven’t properly revisited the titles that ravished my youth. That bhakti anthology opened my heart to the Universe.

I longed to write something in the bhakti or neo-bhakti style and when the conditions were right, it turned out to be a volume in English, Uttering Her Name, addressed to a Muse-Goddess directly: my first faltering attempts at using e-mail. English was the only language we had in common. She was a poet from Venezuela whom I met at a Kurt Schwitters festival in Germany. She was on her way to have darshan of Mother Meera. I didn’t formerly ask her, ‘Excuse me, I wonder would you kindly play the role of Muse-Goddess as I have some urgent bhakti poems to compose.’ I just went ahead and wrote them, 200 in all, eventually whittled down to half that size. It took a long time to find a publisher:

https://www.amazon.com/Uttering-Her-Name-Gabriel-Rosenstock/dp/190705619X

I don’t think Uttering Her Name would have come about without the influence of the Ramanujan anthology.

Was it he who said that he inhabited that no-man’s-land which is the hyphen in ‘Anglo-Indian!’? He wrote a very poignant poem about revisiting his home and calling out ‘Mother’ but, of course, she wasn’t there. I would have liked to have known him. Very much. He was a distinguished folklorist, among other things and also wrote in Kannada, one of India’s important literary languages.

I was fortunate to hear songs in Irish as a child – not at home, mind you – and the best of them are unforgettable. One could call the best of our songs folk poetry of the highest order, superior in texture and melody to much of the poetry of our time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch? behv=8JjiLoD0ldc

Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh’s voice in the opening track is very expressive, very tender and yet there’s a glorious defiance as an undercurrent to the song that says, ‘Try out your ethnic cleansing on us, again and again, your genocidal madness; we are a people of poetry and song, imperishable song.’

The second track is in Scottish Gaelic. The songs of Gaeldom are a link to a people’s struggle, songs of love (‘profane’ and divine), exile, loneliness, companionship, laments and lullabies, songs that sing the thirst for freedom. The words are music in themselves – when sung, they wrench the heart.

Q. 5. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

The most intimate form of reading is that which one does as a poet-translator. I have translated or transcreated many poets from India and all of them speak very highly of K. Satchidanandan from Kerala. He is closely involved in many festivals and last year, in Calicut, the theme was ‘No Democracy without Dissent’

https://issuu.com/gabrielrosenstock/docs/satchi_rich_text.rtf

The poet-shaman-translator in me experienced various degrees of ecstasy when transcreating the poems of the Korean genius Ko Un:

https://www.amazon.com/Ko-Rogha-Dánta-Gabriel-Rosenstock-ebook/dp/B01FRAYDX2

My love for Cathal O Searcaigh and his poetry is well known. All three are outside of the Anglosphere, if such a thing is possible. Apart from those three, the site Words without Borders can be interesting. I’m grateful to English as a global language which introduces literature in translation to us all. I like ‘aboriginal’ poetry – the more aboriginal the better.The late Michael Davitt, with whom I co-founded the journal INNTI, has a line which says, ‘Ma bheireann carbhat orm, tachtfaidh se me’ – ‘if a cravat (or tie) catches hold of me, it will choke me.’ This is Irish aboriginalism alive and kicking! It says NO to the WASP and again NO. No thanks.

Q. 6. What would you say to who asked you “How do you become a writer?”

Write

Q. 7. Tell me about any writing projects you’re involved in at the moment.

Current writing projects: some writers are superstitious about current projects, as though they can only breathe a sigh of relief when the book is actually printed and published. Others like to trumpet their work in progress or publish extracts here and there.

Insanely prolific as I am, I usually have a number of irons in the fire. Do you know the origin of the phrase? It alludes to a blacksmith working on several pieces of iron at the same time. I remember being in a blacksmith’s forge as a child. A magical place. Lots of superstitions associated with iron, nails, horseshoes and so on. In Tibet they speak of ‘sky iron’ and I wrote a poem once inspired by that lore when I discovered that certain Tibetan singing bowls contain material from this ‘sky iron’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbFmtpeh9so

I posted the poem on a few YouTube sites that featured singing bowls. Scroll down a bit and you’ll find it, in Irish and English. That’s a rather roundabout way of saying I’m not going to reveal current projects. To be frank, I have a number of completed projects and I’d much prefer to see them published before embarking on fresh material, such as a volume of bilingual poems, in Irish and English, already mentioned, poems addressed to the Daoist poet-shaman Li He.

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Gabriel Rosenstock Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

0 notes

dawnparker · 6 years

Text

You’re Thinking About the ROI of Sponsorships All Wrong. Here’s the Reality.

Sponsorships can be an extremely beneficial initiative for your company, but let’s face it, it’s a scary thing.

Whether you’re sponsoring an event, webinar, podcast, content, or something else – there’s an element of unknown when it comes to the return on investment (ROI).

And that’s usually enough to stop people from jumping into them.

However, if you keep a few things in mind, and set yourself up properly, sponsorships could potentially be one of the best things you do in the next year.

There are numerous misconceptions about the ROI of sponsorships, and I’m going to break those down for you.

Before we do that, though, I want to share some of my and our organization’s first-hand experience with return on investment from various sponsorships.

Our Experience with Sponsorship ROI

For the last 3 years, IMPACT has been an INBOUND sponsor. If you’re not familiar with INBOUND, it’s the annual conference held by HubSpot in Boston (and it’s awesome!).

But I’m not going to lie, for me, the first year was a bit scary.

We made a big investment to be there, both in actual booth cost and in “man-power” to staff the booth.

Me at our INBOUND 2016 Booth

Going into the sponsorship, we had high hopes of generating a ton of leads and knew our booth had to be unique. (You can check out some details on that in my previous article.)

The plan was to walk away from INBOUND with at least 200 leads and close a solid chunk of those within a week of the event.

That first year we actually walked away with closer to 150 leads (still not bad), but closing the business was a much longer process.

Some deals closed more immediately and others, more long-term. For instance, one of the unexpected returns led to a lead getting in touch with us a year after seeing us at INBOUND.

A YEAR!!! That’s nuts!

Ultimately, we were able to attribute enough revenue from the event over the long-term to conclude it was a success, but it definitely wasn’t the immediate increase to our bottom line we had hoped for.

That’s a potential reality of sponsorships – the real value may not be felt right away.

Which is why it’s important to create a unique offer and experience for your sponsorship.

By utilizing the Website Throwdown at our booth over the last few years, it’s created some buzz and helped to draw more folks to us – just because they’re curious as to what’s going on.

IMPACT Customer Success Managers, Nick, Marc, and Melanie at Our INBOUND 2018 Booth

And it’s something that obviously sticks because that lead remembered us.

That being said, let’s dig into what a “typical” ROI looks like and then what your return could really look like.

What You Think Sponsorship ROI Should Look Like

First – there’s no such thing as a “typical” ROI. Let’s get that out of the way

There is what companies expect to see, which is more often than not monetary value based on how much they spent initially.

If someone is going to be spending thousands of dollars to get in front of your audience, they absolutely are expecting business from it. It’d be silly to think otherwise.

So, what type of return is expected cash-wise?

According to Eventbrite, many brands want to see a “2:1, 3:1 or even 4:1” return on their event sponsorship investment.

That means, if you’re an even host, you really have to have a great experience and drive traffic to them.

If the booth price/value is $12,000, sponsors will be looking to generate $24,000 minimum in business just to be happy.

Not even be ecstatic, just content — and that’s not the business most brands are in, now is it?

There are a bunch of ways to ensure your sponsorship is successful, and I’ll give you some tips at the end of this article, but the big one that worked extremely well for us – was to do something different.

If you’re just standing at your booth waiting to do demos or get business cards for a raffle, you may have a hard time generating ROI.

Think of something exciting and unique that you can do to draw a crowd – that makes more attendees feel like they need to be at your booth over others.

It’s also important to keep in mind that ROI may not be the same for all types of sponsorships. If you’re sponsoring a podcast or article, traffic and awareness may be more important to you than the immediate monetary return.

With all of that in your head, I want to dig into what other ways you can see ROI that have nothing to do with money. We’ve seen these ourselves after sponsoring INBOUND.

What Sponsorship ROI Really Looks Like

For me, sponsorship ROI can be broken down into 3 main buckets.

Brand uplift or awareness, lead generation, and sales (obviously).

1. Brand Uplift and Awareness

Brand awareness is how many people are aware of your company or logo; Making sure you’re improving awareness, and how people view your brand can be great, and ultimately draw in leads.

When you choose the right sponsor, with a large platform and a relevant audience, you have the opportunity to spread awareness of your brand to all those individuals.

Not only is it good exposure, but you’re also associated with a large platform that is already respected and known. This speaks well for your credibility.

Even if you don’t have conversations at or directly following your sponsorship, many people will recognize your brand from the event or tradeshow floor.

Think about that lead I mentioned that popped up a year after seeing us at INBOUND. They didn’t convert or even visit back then; they just saw the logo in Club INBOUND.

That’s pretty crazy!

You can also get increased brand awareness and brand uplift out of a media sponsorship, such as a podcast – as your name is getting featured to a ton of listeners whom may or may not be able to immediately go to your website to convert.

2. Lead Generation

Sponsoring an event, or anything really is a great way to not only increase your brand awareness but get some new leads in your funnel that may not have otherwise found you.

The leads you can get, if you’ve selected the right type of sponsor partner will likely be high quality, extremely relevant, and hopefully ready to buy.

For us at IMPACT, the bulk of the leads we talk to on the floor of Club INBOUND are some of the more qualified leads we talk to.

There are definitely others that are just learning about us, but many people have real pain they need to solve for.

Tom DiScipio, IMPACT’s CRO and Partner, said, “We’ve found that a vast majority of people that make the substantial financial and time commitment to be at an event like INBOUND (or any event for that matter) are typically more committed to learning, and therefore are more educated – and more educated buyers are more qualified buyers, regardless of where they are in their buying journey.”

Those are pretty high remarks about the value of our sponsorship, and that’s partly due to how amazing the team for INBOUND is.

They help make sure that our booth is set up for success, and that we’re positioned in the best light possible – shout out to Doug Stone!

Pro tip: If you’re sponsoring a podcast, article, or webinar, providing the company with a tracking URL and special discount code will help entice users to convert – and give you something to track in regards to ROI. If you’re attending an event, having an event specific landing page for them to fill out works in the same way.

There are also other types of leads that most companies don’t even think about:

Potential Team Members

Many audiences have folks that are looking for their next career opportunity, and by sponsoring and getting your brand out there, you could potentially find your next rockstar employee.

Partnerships

Another lead type rarely considered are the draws for potential business partnerships. When you’re a sponsor, you meet and speak to a lot of people who could open other doors for your organization.

Perhaps you’ll find someone who wants to co-brand some content or even team up on referrals, advocacy, or a partner program. There are so many opportunities.

Co-Marketing

Finding the right co-marketing relationship isn’t an easy task, but we usually get at least 5-10 co-marketing requests while on the floor of INBOUND and has definitely helped us start some new friendships.

If you consider all of those types of leads, the ways you could actually generate ROI are pretty vast!

3. Sales

As great as the other benefits are, at the end of the day, you want to see monetary return on your sponsorship. That’s a given.

But the one thing to always keep in mind is the revenue you can actually realize is ultimately up to your sales team.

The responsibility of the event, podcast, or media you sponsor is to simply serve you up the most relevant, quality leads they can for your investment.

Your team needs to be prepped to actually close them.

It’s a great idea for all of your sales folks to understand the “thing” you’re sponsoring, so they can have contextual information to use during their conversations.

If it was an event like INBOUND, find out what their favorite session was. Podcast? Ask them how long they’ve been a subscriber and why they listen.

When they can contextually talk to the leads that come through, it makes the lead understand that you care – and can strengthen the relationship that will ultimately lead to the sale.

And your ROI

How to Track Your Sponsorship ROI Easily

Understanding exactly what you expect to get out of a sponsorship initiative is critical, and that also sounds like common sense.

But common sense isn’t always common.

This is where understanding your sales funnel and acquisition process is especially important.

Now, brace yourself. I’m going to go through some simple math coming up – and don’t roll your eyes, I know you just did.

Stay with me, I promise it’ll be worth it.

If each customer spends $100 with you, and the sponsorship costs $1,000, you know you need 10 sales to break even. Assuming you close leads at a 50% rate, that means 20 leads from your sponsorship.

So, to get your 2x minimum ROI, you’ll look to generate 40 leads from the sponsor initiative to close 20 customers and generate $2,000.

Simple.

Now you know what the goal should be, and you can work with who is managing your sponsorship to ensure you get that return on investment. From there, to better track your efforts, make sure you have ways to actually log your leads from the sponsorship.

Optimized landing pages are great ways to gather leads at a booth, versus grabbing business cards. If the event offers RFID scanning or badge scanning and lead retrieval, such as atEvent, your life will be even easier since you can scan the lead in seconds – with little to no effort.

As mentioned above, for non-traditional sponsorships such as podcasts or webinars, providing a tracking URL, custom promo code, and dedicated landing page will help ensure you capture all of the great leads you’re getting in front of.

Tips for Generating Sponsorship ROI

There are a few things that we’ve seen to be successful to help get that ROI you’re looking for.

Having a “no-brainer” offer that will make leads immediately want to sign up is extremely important. Obviously, this shouldn’t break the bank or your budget, but a solid discount or special package can seriously boost your sign-ups and ROI.

After all, while the brand you’re sponsoring is going to get the leads in front of you – it’s still your job to convert them.

Another great way to generate the ROI you’re looking for is to make the offer time sensitive. Have the offer expire by the end of the event you’re at, or by the end of the month if you want to give some buffer.

Media sponsorships are a bit tougher to put time constraints on, as users may find a podcast or article weeks after it was published – so experiment to see what works best for you!

While it may not immediately generate ROI, gamifying your booth/experience could have a big effect on the return. Neil Patel talks about gamification in his article, as well as other ways to measure event ROI.

Consider partnering with a few other sponsors to start a scavenger hunt, throw a party, or try a photo contest – all with the attendees submitting their information to you (and other sponsors) so you can follow up and nurture them.

If You’re Thinking of Selling Sponsorships …

1. Understand your sponsors intimately. What is the cost of activating a lead? How much does the product actually cost the user?

This information is so critical for you to track, as you’ll understand how many leads you need to drive to a given sponsor for them to be able to generate the ROI they want.

2. Directly ask your sponsors what the ROI they’re expecting is.

You may be surprised and find they’re simply sponsoring for brand lift and awareness – at that point, ANY leads they generate are “brownie points” for you! More often than not, the sponsor wants to see a 2-4x ROI as I mentioned above.

That means you have clear expectations to work towards and ensure they’ve had a remarkable experience and get the return on investment they want to generate

Conclusion

Sponsorships can be an incredibly valuable tool in your arsenal with the right planning and expectation setting. They definitely take work and a good amount of strategy to stand out from the crowd, but in our experience, it’s been fun and rewarding.

If you have questions on sponsorships, want to brainstorm, or are looking to sponsor IMPACT Live or one of our media offerings – let’s chat!

Read more: impactbnd.com

The post You’re Thinking About the ROI of Sponsorships All Wrong. Here’s the Reality. appeared first on Content HOW.

0 notes

dorothydelgadillo · 6 years

Text

You’re Thinking About the ROI of Sponsorships All Wrong. Here’s the Reality.

Sponsorships can be an extremely beneficial initiative for your company, but let’s face it, it’s a scary thing.

Whether you’re sponsoring an event, webinar, podcast, content, or something else - there’s an element of unknown when it comes to the return on investment (ROI).

And that’s usually enough to stop people from jumping into them.

However, if you keep a few things in mind, and set yourself up properly, sponsorships could potentially be one of the best things you do in the next year.

There are numerous misconceptions about the ROI of sponsorships, and I’m going to break those down for you.

Before we do that, though, I want to share some of my and our organization’s first-hand experience with return on investment from various sponsorships.

Our Experience with Sponsorship ROI

For the last 3 years, IMPACT has been an INBOUND sponsor. If you’re not familiar with INBOUND, it’s the annual conference held by HubSpot in Boston (and it’s awesome!).

But I’m not going to lie, for me, the first year was a bit scary.

We made a big investment to be there, both in actual booth cost and in “man-power” to staff the booth.

Me at our INBOUND 2016 Booth

Going into the sponsorship, we had high hopes of generating a ton of leads and knew our booth had to be unique. (You can check out some details on that in my previous article.)

The plan was to walk away from INBOUND with at least 200 leads and close a solid chunk of those within a week of the event.

That first year we actually walked away with closer to 150 leads (still not bad), but closing the business was a much longer process.

Some deals closed more immediately and others, more long-term. For instance, one of the unexpected returns led to a lead getting in touch with us a year after seeing us at INBOUND.

A YEAR!!! That’s nuts!

That’s a potential reality of sponsorships - the real value may not be felt right away.

Which is why it’s important to create a unique offer and experience for your sponsorship.

By utilizing the Website Throwdown at our booth over the last few years, it’s created some buzz and helped to draw more folks to us - just because they’re curious as to what’s going on.

IMPACT Customer Success Managers, Nick, Marc, and Melanie at Our INBOUND 2018 Booth

And it’s something that obviously sticks because that lead remembered us.

That being said, let’s dig into what a “typical” ROI looks like and then what your return could really look like.

What You Think Sponsorship ROI Should Look Like

First - there’s no such thing as a “typical” ROI. Let’s get that out of the way ;)

There is what companies expect to see, which is more often than not monetary value based on how much they spent initially.

If someone is going to be spending thousands of dollars to get in front of your audience, they absolutely are expecting business from it. It’d be silly to think otherwise.

So, what type of return is expected cash-wise?

According to Eventbrite, many brands want to see a “2:1, 3:1 or even 4:1” return on their event sponsorship investment.

That means, if you’re an even host, you really have to have a great experience and drive traffic to them.

If the booth price/value is $12,000, sponsors will be looking to generate $24,000 minimum in business just to be happy.

Not even be ecstatic, just content -- and that’s not the business most brands are in, now is it?

There are a bunch of ways to ensure your sponsorship is successful, and I’ll give you some tips at the end of this article, but the big one that worked extremely well for us - was to do something different.

If you’re just standing at your booth waiting to do demos or get business cards for a raffle, you may have a hard time generating ROI.

Think of something exciting and unique that you can do to draw a crowd - that makes more attendees feel like they need to be at your booth over others.

With all of that in your head, I want to dig into what other ways you can see ROI that have nothing to do with money. We’ve seen these ourselves after sponsoring INBOUND.

What Sponsorship ROI Really Looks Like

For me, sponsorship ROI can be broken down into 3 main buckets.

Brand uplift or awareness, lead generation, and sales (obviously).

1. Brand Uplift and Awareness

Brand awareness is how many people are aware of your company or logo; Making sure you’re improving awareness, and how people view your brand can be great, and ultimately draw in leads.

When you choose the right sponsor, with a large platform and a relevant audience, you have the opportunity to spread awareness of your brand to all those individuals.

Not only is it good exposure, but you’re also associated with a large platform that is already respected and known. This speaks well for your credibility.

Even if you don’t have conversations at or directly following your sponsorship, many people will recognize your brand from the event or tradeshow floor.

Think about that lead I mentioned that popped up a year after seeing us at INBOUND. They didn’t convert or even visit back then; they just saw the logo in Club INBOUND.

That’s pretty crazy!

You can also get increased brand awareness and brand uplift out of a media sponsorship, such as a podcast - as your name is getting featured to a ton of listeners whom may or may not be able to immediately go to your website to convert.

2. Lead Generation

Sponsoring an event, or anything really is a great way to not only increase your brand awareness but get some new leads in your funnel that may not have otherwise found you.

The leads you can get, if you’ve selected the right type of sponsor partner will likely be high quality, extremely relevant, and hopefully ready to buy.

For us at IMPACT, the bulk of the leads we talk to on the floor of Club INBOUND are some of the more qualified leads we talk to.

There are definitely others that are just learning about us, but many people have real pain they need to solve for.

Tom DiScipio, IMPACT’s CRO and Partner, said, “We’ve found that a vast majority of people that make the substantial financial and time commitment to be at an event like INBOUND (or any event for that matter) are typically more committed to learning, and therefore are more educated - and more educated buyers are more qualified buyers, regardless of where they are in their buying journey.”

Those are pretty high remarks about the value of our sponsorship, and that’s partly due to how amazing the team for INBOUND is.

They help make sure that our booth is set up for success, and that we’re positioned in the best light possible - shout out to Doug Stone!

Pro tip: If you’re sponsoring a podcast, article, or webinar, providing the company with a tracking URL and special discount code will help entice users to convert - and give you something to track in regards to ROI. If you’re attending an event, having an event specific landing page for them to fill out works in the same way.

There are also other types of leads that most companies don’t even think about:

Potential Team Members

Many audiences have folks that are looking for their next career opportunity, and by sponsoring and getting your brand out there, you could potentially find your next rockstar employee.

Partnerships

Another lead type rarely considered are the draws for potential business partnerships. When you’re a sponsor, you meet and speak to a lot of people who could open other doors for your organization.

Perhaps you’ll find someone who wants to co-brand some content or even team up on referrals, advocacy, or a partner program. There are so many opportunities.

Co-Marketing

If you consider all of those types of leads, the ways you could actually generate ROI are pretty vast!

3. Sales

As great as the other benefits are, at the end of the day, you want to see monetary return on your sponsorship. That’s a given.

But the one thing to always keep in mind is the revenue you can actually realize is ultimately up to your sales team.

The responsibility of the event, podcast, or media you sponsor is to simply serve you up the most relevant, quality leads they can for your investment.

Your team needs to be prepped to actually close them.

It’s a great idea for all of your sales folks to understand the “thing” you’re sponsoring, so they can have contextual information to use during their conversations.

If it was an event like INBOUND, find out what their favorite session was. Podcast? Ask them how long they’ve been a subscriber and why they listen.

When they can contextually talk to the leads that come through, it makes the lead understand that you care - and can strengthen the relationship that will ultimately lead to the sale.

And your ROI ;)

How to Track Your Sponsorship ROI Easily

Understanding exactly what you expect to get out of a sponsorship initiative is critical, and that also sounds like common sense.

But common sense isn’t always common.

This is where understanding your sales funnel and acquisition process is especially important.

Now, brace yourself. I’m going to go through some simple math coming up - and don’t roll your eyes, I know you just did.

Stay with me, I promise it’ll be worth it.

If each customer spends $100 with you, and the sponsorship costs $1,000, you know you need 10 sales to break even. Assuming you close leads at a 50% rate, that means 20 leads from your sponsorship.

So, to get your 2x minimum ROI, you’ll look to generate 40 leads from the sponsor initiative to close 20 customers and generate $2,000.

Simple.

Tips for Generating Sponsorship ROI

There are a few things that we’ve seen to be successful to help get that ROI you’re looking for.

After all, while the brand you’re sponsoring is going to get the leads in front of you - it’s still your job to convert them.

Media sponsorships are a bit tougher to put time constraints on, as users may find a podcast or article weeks after it was published - so experiment to see what works best for you!

Consider partnering with a few other sponsors to start a scavenger hunt, throw a party, or try a photo contest - all with the attendees submitting their information to you (and other sponsors) so you can follow up and nurture them.

If You’re Thinking of Selling Sponsorships ...

1. Understand your sponsors intimately. What is the cost of activating a lead? How much does the product actually cost the user?

This information is so critical for you to track, as you’ll understand how many leads you need to drive to a given sponsor for them to be able to generate the ROI they want.

2. Directly ask your sponsors what the ROI they’re expecting is.

You may be surprised and find they’re simply sponsoring for brand lift and awareness - at that point, ANY leads they generate are “brownie points” for you! More often than not, the sponsor wants to see a 2-4x ROI as I mentioned above.

That means you have clear expectations to work towards and ensure they’ve had a remarkable experience and get the return on investment they want to generate

Conclusion

If you have questions on sponsorships, want to brainstorm, or are looking to sponsor IMPACT Live or one of our media offerings - let's chat!

from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/the-real-roi-of-sponsorships

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hottytoddynews · 7 years

Link

Meg Sinervo and Michelle Rounsaville

My Michelle’s opened in 2010 and has been providing Oxford residents with classic, homestyle comfort food ever since. Whether catering an event, providing take-home casseroles for families, or dishing out a mouthwatering lunch buffet during the week, owner Michelle Rounsaville has dedicated herself to serving the people of Oxford. Now, with the addition of a new culinary scene newcomer, catering coordinator Meg Sinervo, this locally owned eatery is set for continued growth and innovation.

What began as a catering company has continued to evolve, just as Rounsaville’s vision for the business grows. The lunch buffet was a key addition that has turned My Michelle’s into a sit-down eatery and a midday social hotspot, with a plethora of options on a regularly changing menu that emphasizes fresh, seasonal ingredients.

“The menu always changes, and we keep it different,” Rounsaville said. “The thing I hated about the restaurant industry was the monotony of the menus and how it’s the same thing every day. This was a way to keep it fresh and fun and not get bored with it while making sure we never detract from what we were already doing.”

To get a feel for what I was writing about, I had to check the buffet out for myself. In an attempt to sample a wide variety of dishes, I loaded my plate up with just about everything on the buffet and placed it on the scale at the counter. It weighed in at 1.5 pounds, and it was all gone in less than 15 minutes. Each item on the plate was as fresh and flavorful as the next, and all I wanted to do was go home and take a nap. Instead, I went back to work to write about my experience at My Michelle’s.

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My Michelle's Lunch

1 of 4

The Next Best Thing to Mom’s Kitchen

From its inception, My Michelle’s has focused on making meals that taste like they came right out of Mom’s kitchen. “We do everything we can to ensure it’s all fresh, using scratch-made recipes with fresh vegetables and seasonal ingredients,” said Chef Trey Bridgers “We use local ingredients whenever we can and make full use of them rather than discarding leftovers.”

Adding lunchtime service has allowed the chefs to tweak and fine-tune their recipes, gather feedback and engage in open dialogue with customers, Sinervo notes. “It gives us a creative outlet and a chance to try things out on the lunch buffet that we may also use for catering in the future. Our customers are very open and honest about their opinions, and they know we listen to them, so their feedback helps a lot.”

Sinervo, an Oxford native who has known Rounsaville her entire life, started working at My Michelle’s after her senior year in college. After learning on the job for a year, Sinervo attended culinary school in Austin, Texas, and returned to Oxford in 2016. Her timing was perfect—Rounsaville was searching for a new assistant at the time and offered the job to Sinervo, who now manages catering events, the front of the house and more.

Rounsaville said she was looking for “another me” and found one in Sinervo. “It was a natural transition because I knew we already did things similarly,” Rounsaville said.

“Between the two of us, we have more lists than humanly possible, but that’s how you have to do catering. There are a lot of logistics and moving parts involved; for everything to come together, you’ve got to be organized.”

“The two women’s lifelong friendship made them natural collaborators, Rounsaville adds. “I’ve known Meg my whole life. Someone who cares about you outside of work will naturally care about you at work as well, so bringing her in was a no-brainer.” Sinervo, in turn, thinks of Rounsaville as a trusted mentor and knows her likes and dislikes. “I spend so much time watching what she’s doing and how she does it and asking her why she does what she does,” Sinervo says. “So when I’m setting up an event, I know, ‘This is how Michelle would do it.’”

New additions to the business have certainly expanded My Michelle’s reach, but catering remains a core service. Knowing that food can make or break an event, Rounsaville and her staff work tirelessly to tailor the menu to the client’s wants and needs.

“It’s the most rewarding part of what we do,” she said. “My favorite part is the initial conversation when we get to ask, ‘What do you like? What’s your favorite food?’ We don’t care if it’s something as silly as peanut butter and jelly. We want to know because we can work to implement those flavors into the menu. It allows us to be creative while matching the food to the client’s personality and helping them to fulfill their vision for the event. There’s no better feeling than to see a happy bride, groom, graduate or parent.”

Rounsaville credits much of her company’s success to her talented and hardworking staff.

“My Michelle’s wouldn’t exist without my squad,” she said. “It takes Trey running the kitchen like a well-oiled machine, while Meg manages our staff and makes sure everything is in place and going where it needs to be, and then you’ve got me running around like a crazy person all day.”

Chef Trey

Oxford is a town that loves to eat, and new restaurants keep opening, but Rounsaville thrives on the challenge. “I’m a very competitive person, and it keeps me on my toes. I’ve been here long enough to see restaurants come and go, and I don’t want us to go anywhere. When a new place opens up, instead of being worried, we channel that into freshening up our look and our menus.” Meanwhile, Oxonians know they can count on My Michelle’s for high quality, consistency and personal service with every meal. Rounsaville, after all, is one of them. “She’s just a likable person,” said loyal customer Ashley Luke. “All of the local Oxford people love to support her and her business. She’s done a wonderful job, and she knows what she’s doing, that’s for sure.”

And Rounsaville plans to keep on doing it. “I feel like we’re a one-stop shop,” she said. “If you come in for lunch, you can grab a casserole for dinner or a quick snack. We have working moms that bring their kids in, and they’ll grab some items for their kids’ lunch and then maybe they’ll place a catering order for the weekend. Minus some straight-up groceries, you can get pretty much anything you need from us.”

My Michelle’s is open for lunch on Monday-Friday from 11 a.m.-2 p.m., the salad bar runs until 5 p.m., and the shop is open for casserole sales until 6 p.m. For catering information, click here.

Steven Gagliano is the managing editor of HottyToddy.com. He can be reached at [email protected].

The post My Michelle’s Makes Customers Feel Like Family appeared first on HottyToddy.com.

#hottytoddy #olemiss #oxfordms #oxford ms #mississippi #university of mississippi #the grove

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emperor-nasch · 7 years

Text

On Why I Left the YGO Fandom

I was going to put this under a cut, but read more’s never do what they’re supposed to do on my page, so I’m forced to leave it as-is if I want to post it at all. Apologies in advance because it’s a very, veeeery long post and contains abusive experience and behaviors. And the url of my abuser (I left his accomplice out because she’s a fucking whiny bitch and would manage to yet again verbally attack me for once again putting this fat fuck’s name out there as an abuser).

Also, please don’t reblog. If you have something to say, reply or ask/im me.

So, as promised, I finally got my thoughts collected and I guess?? Somewhat organized?? On what’s been plaguing me for several months now. I know I’m basically beating a dead horse because, by now, I should be over this (because god forbid something happen to me that actually affected me long-term, I’m just being dramatic for attention, right?) but this is something I feel needs to be addressed, for my own peace of mind. So, no better time than the present I suppose.

It’s probably far from obvious, but I’ve been part of the ygo fandom for a decent while - 2011-ish? I watched the original as a kid, but was reintroduced by my now-ex through the abridged series. Along the way I’ve been blessed to meet some fantastic people, no doubt. People I wish didn’t have to see this kind of bullshit coming from me. But some of those people turned out to be…anything but fantastic.

I’m tired of not naming names, out of fear of being accused yet again of starting a witch hunt (since apparently that’s something people reaaaallly like to do these days whenever you have a problem with a nasty creep they consider their best bud and refuse to hear your side of the story) but it’s to the point where I really don’t care what happens. I’m not popular in the fandom, so it isn’t like what I say matters.

There are two-faced, evil people in this fandom and all I wanted (and still want) to do is protect others from ending up in the same situations that I found myself in.

I’m the victim of two long years of mental/emotional abuse and manipulation. My abuser is someone a lot of people probably know of, if not know well, especially those of you from the Chicago area part of the fandom. He does (or did, idk now that it’s airing Wednesdays) livestreams of new episodes. He is an enormous, loud-mouthed pervert and not-yet-convicted pedophile. He enjoys reading, writing, defending, and sharing child porn. He is narcissistic, so deeply in love with pleasuring himself (both literally and figuratively) and taking nobody’s wants and needs into consideration but his own. He is a chronic gaslighter. He fetishizes wlw and objectifies women in general (like any typical misogynistic slob). He think no means yes, and “stay away from me, I don’t want to talk to you” means “please keep trying to contact me, I actually do want to talk, I��m just being silly uwu.” He is someone whose actions have been defended by people who think “he’s just dense” instead of an abuser. His actions and the actions of those who love and adore him are ignored or justified by people who are obviously as like-minded as he is. And he hides behind the ruse of being an all out card game whiz and aficionado so people will never know what he does behind closed doors.

He goes by voices/of/chaos (slashes on purpose, btw), and I know it’s going to either be a surprise or sound like a lie because of how well liked he is here.

Primarily, he’s the reason I’ve made this choice. Him and the people who, despite knowing the kind of shit he’s done to me, still refuse to acknowledge him as the abuser that he is and choose to stand by him and support his actions. The same people are people I thought - and really, truly had hoped - were my friends, people I poured my heart and soul into and let my faith rest upon. Instead, I was given that trust back and basically told to choke on it.

It started when I’d asked to be part of the ygo panel he runs at acen. I thought it would be fitting, with how passionate I was at the time about the latter spinoffs and about things in general. However, I was told flat-out that I was “not good enough” to be on HIS panel because of my biases toward certain series and dislike of others (biases and dislikes he and I shared, mind you). Basically, because I’ve never seen gx and don’t like dm, my knowledge base was not adequate to host a panel. Yet, his gf, who now hates ygo and is stongly biased about certain series (like me), who sits up there pouting, angry, drunk (she was last year, anyway) in complete and utter silence, is definitely qualified for the job. Ok. Sure. That sounds about right. He refused to see how ridiculous the situation was (he was told this by more than just me, for the record) and instead accused me of only wanting a discounted badge - “I can’t give discounted badges to just anyone” emphasis on anyone. That was a low-fucking-blow and was the single thing that made it impossible for me to ever forgive him.

Of course, that was a more recent issue. Going back to the start, our friendship started off with me being almost duped into a poly relationship without my consent or knowledge. I was told they were breaking up and that she knew about it. I was told it was ok. That she was ok with it. What I wasn’t told was that no, they weren’t breaking up, she didn’t know what he was doing, and that his plans were to date me while he dated -and lived with- her. I didn’t find out any of that until way after the fact. To top it off, he went behind her back to try to accomplish this (she was on vacation at the time). I was then blamed for their relationship problems (that existed years before me), for making her hate ygo, for ruining their relationship, and so on and so on. He made sure to tell me this constantly, telling me my name was a ‘trigger’ for her. So now I’m a homewrecking bitch for ruining their 7+ year relationship.

And despite all of this, he actually fantasized (his words exactly, I shit you not) about me and his gf bonding over our ‘hate’ towards him. Like, excuse me? Back the fuck up mate.

If I had a nickel for every time he told me how “important” I was to him, I’d have millions in the bank. But for as much as I was told I was important, I never actually believed him. Our friendship was kept a secret online. No interactions on any social media, up until the end where he got very childish and asinine about it, and then those were only meant to shut me up. I’d asked hundreds of times to at least be tagged in things, at least mentioned half as much as he talked about the other girls in his life. He never listened. I continued to be a secret.

When confronting him on my feelings (because he only ever talked about his feelings) I was always met with rage, destructive anger, denial, unnecessary profanities being hurled my way, utter disrespect. One can only take that shit for so long. Being told how you changed someone’s life for the better in one breath, then being shit on and screamed at and told you’re not good enough in the next, being kept a secret, being denied any sort of important places or duties that he bestowed upon his other girls.

In the end, I was told I was making it all up. “I don’t know where the fuck you’re getting this.” “You must be messed up in the head.” I was told I just hated him and wanted him to suffer. Everything that went wrong became my fault and my fault alone. Actions once considered ‘gross’ and ‘awful’ by someone I considered a friend were now just a result of him being dense. DENSE. Because knowingly fucking with my head, saying I’m messed up in the head, yeah that’s just the density speaking. How didn’t I think of that before??!!

This friend put herself between us, on her own accord, then acted as if I asked her to do it. She claimed she didn’t want to speak to either of us for a while. Of course that actually meant just me because she had no problem joining him for the stupid movie that came out in January or being up his ass on the chat that Sunday. Sure, the movie was pre-planned, but at least try not to make it obvious you’re only upset at me by making sure he’s in the pictures you posted.

I was told I upset her because I ‘guilt-tripped’ her with fears of abandonment. My hands were slapped for daring to upset her, but when I mentioned how bullshit it was to see her out having a good ol’ time with the fat fuck, my concerns were passed off as nothing. As always, my needs and concerns must be pushed aside for everyone else’s.

When I finally got sick and fucking tired of him, I asked him to leave me along and to not speak to me, ever again. Funny, that was followed up by half a dozen messages all lovey-dovey (and passive-aggressive, toward the end). I thought he would have stopped after I didn’t answer the first few. But his persistence (or should I say d e n s i t y ) was incredible. Each message got sappier and sappier. The last one, though, was bitter and angry, after I once again told him to leave me alone for good. “I thought talking to me would be better than talking to no one.”

A few weeks go by. I begin to tell my story. Tell what happened. I’m accused of starting a witch hunt by someone who once tried to help me. She threatened to leave the chat - which stirred the pot big time, everyone freaked out. I threatened to leave, no one gave a fuck. So, yet again, I was made out to be the big bad guy because I upset the ygo princess by talking about the guy who abused me to the point of exhaustion. I didn’t threaten him. I didn’t ask people to go out and attack him. I was simply sharing my experiences with people who genuinely wanted to know what had happened. All it took was one wailing princess to change everyone’s demeanor.

So I did what I should’ve done after this all happened in the first place - I left. Told everyone they could have their safe space back that I was accused of ruining. And ever since, I really haven’t been too emotionally invested in anything ygo.

These people took something that once felt like a niche I belonged in, and made it hostile and unwelcoming. They say the ygo fandom is a fandom full of mentally ill people who are finding solace in something wonderful. For a while, I believed that. I know better now.

For every person that is genuine in that fandom, there’s ten others who are shitty, who make other fans fucking miserable. I was abused, my spirit beaten and broken, and all I got was several kicks in the ass and everyone turning their heads away from it all. This fandom is toxic. This fandom is littered with people who manipulate and abuse and puke their social justice bullshit over something that’s supposed to be enjoyable. It’s a fandom where popular people are exempt from being called out on shitty behavior. Where if you have enough followers, enough of a fanbase, you’re immortal. I can’t change that. The only thing I can do is remove myself and go somewhere that I consider a safe space. And this fandom isn’t it.

There are…exceptions, of course. Those characters I fell in love with prior to this shit hitting the fan are characters that will forever mean the world to me. Characters who I don’t have to associate with these people. I’m pretty sure there’s only one, but one is enough. He’s been my safe space, my heaven, the one thing that for six years hasn’t changed and has always been there for me.

But the rest? Y’all can have it. I don’t want any part of it anymore. All thanks to two rotten ass people who can’t even admit to their own wrongdoings.

As a final note to those of you who I continue to follow here, I promise you aren’t the ones at fault. If anything, you’re the ones who have kept me grounded. I’m going to continue following you guys regardless of my feelings toward the fandom. Thank you for being decent human beings. I couldn’t ask any more of you.

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