#doodles sell baby!!! and mama loves money!!

[stinkybrowndogs]

Why r people mad about labradoodles?

Hrrrmmm ok so. Bear with me 🐻

I would categorize this as very niche drama. Withen the world of Dog People, doodles are a bit of a hot button topic. Many poodle breeders and fanciers are very Anti-doodle because often doodles are coming from breeding programs that are not up to the same "ethical" (for lack of a better term) standards that many reputable breed clubs hold. This can be anything from lack of health testing parent dogs, not breeding to a physical standard or for physical/tempramental balance (classic back yard breeder stuffs). On top of that, the doodle fad has created many offshoots of the original lab/poodle combo, including but not limited to goldendoodles (golden retriever x poodle), aussiedoodle (australian shepherd x poodle), and bernadoodles (bernese mountain dog x poodle).

Honestly though, i see far more doodle breeders these days who do genuinely love what the "breed" has become and are bringing the higher standard of care that should be expected in the dog breeding world.

In theory, doodles could be produced responsibly, but i dont know that any respectable poodle breeder would volunteer their dogs for such projects, mostly due to the stigma surrounding doodles. I expect that it will be pretty difficult to find more responsible poodle and lab breeders to jump back on board the doodle train, but i dont think its impossible either. I dont see anything wrong with people being enthusiastic and wanting to do better by their dogs.

All that being said, dog people r fucking nuts which is why ppl r frothing at the mouth but honestly. Honestly. At the end of the day.

Its just fucking dogs ppl

[isleofair]

3 things (:

1. I read on the wiki that one of Nathan’s dreams is to build a happy family with a lover!!?? Do you agree with this being canon (in your opinion) and if so how would you interpret it? (Maybe just Keith and the dogs or something else entirely?) I personally can see it, Nathan is such a thoughtful and aware person, even her interactions with the younger heroes alone just sells the idea for me.

2. What's a personal habit (or habits) you think Keith and Nathan have generally? (exampe: nail biting, pen clicking, doodling on important papers)

3. Love your stuff! Just dropping in to say hi! (I don’t rlly used my tumblr but why not start again!)

OMG hiii!!! 😍💚💚💚

I'm honestly honored you'd ask my opinion! 😅 Like... Maybe I have finally achieved that level of obsession with characters that gives off a vague aura of "my thoughts about them are somehow interesting"? 🤔😂🥰

But brace yourself, because this is now that "you have asked me about my hyperfixation and thus triggered an unskippable cutscene" post, lol 😅

I do think that is as canon as anything that's not directly in the show can be, yeah! (By which I mean "I hold it to be true because the authors wanted me to know about it and put it in an official product, but if someone wanted to argue that it's not really canon because it's not in the show, I'd go, 'eh, fair enough'".) My interpretation is a bit complex: I absolutely do think Nathan wants a lover and a happy family. (Like you say, she's so thoughtful, and she loves love, and supporting other people.) Now, does that 'family' imply kids? Nathan seems to love children (the same source says she wants to increase company profits to donate more money to kids), but... I think she might do so in a slightly, how to put it, more theoretical / slightly less hands-on way? I'm basing this on how she interacts with baby Sam in episode 1x09. When handed a baby, her first instinct is to go "no no no that's not for me"; she only holds him when Bunny says they need a woman because Sam is calling for "mama", so it's more of an identity-affirming thing than an I-really-like-babies thing. OTOH, she is quite nurturing, and she doesn't look too uncomfortable once she does hold Sam. But, OTOOH, she treats Rose and Kid as her peers; in spite of them being teens and her (probably) being in her 30s, she acts more like an older sister than like a parent or even an aunt to them. So I think the "happy family" thing is mostly about... you know. Having someone you share an unconditional love with; someone you can go home to. Which doesn't seem to be something she has from her parents any more. 🙁 (But she does seem to get along well with her younger sister, which, well, see the thing about Rose and Kid). And I absolutely think that is Keith and the dogs for her, yes!!! They seem to want so many of the same things, and they get along so easily and so well (as soon as they get over their slight communication bump), and they obviously like spending time together in all contexts. (It's probably one of those "Oh. Wait. I already have that family I wanted, and it's this adorable weirdo and his fluffy boys" kind of things.) ❤️💜 (I could see both of them maybe wanting to have kids in the future; but I also don't see Keith ever retiring unless he has to, and Nathan probably wouldn't want to stop being his Buddy, and they're both ridiculously busy. So my personal idea is they just keep helping and supporting kids everywhere forever, including mentoring more and more younger heroes, but they never have their own children... Although that might be me projecting, because I'm very much an "I don't want kids EVER" kind of person. 😅)

Oooh. I don't usually naturally come up with such minute headcanons on my own, but now that you've asked... 🤔 I think Keith might be someone who grounds himself by touching stuff? Like, petting his dogs, holding objects, something like that. (Possibly the kind of person who, when holding hands with someone, would keep stroking his thumb along the other person's hand without quite realizing he's doing it.) As for Nathan, I could see her maybe biting her lip or the end of a pen or something when she's frustrated, or maybe also when she's trying to focus. (Or her nails, too, but only if she can do so without ruining her manicure, lol.)

🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺 Thank you so much again!!! Love to see you around here, as well 💚💚💚 And... Look, I gave you that freaking novel of an answer at point 1, but I realized as I typed it that my thesis statement on that matter already exists, and it's essentially my fic Sunday, lol 😅 So I'll shamelessly plug it for your further reading (just because you already said you'd like to read more of my stuff 💖), even though it says pretty much the same things I wrote here 😘

Thank you so much for this ask, I absolutely adore talking about FireSky (obviously, lol 😅) and I love every chance to do so! We can chat about them any time you'd like! 🥰🥰🥰

[merrock]

CHARACTER INFORMATION

face claim: Haley Lu Richardson

full name: Stevie May Lane

nickname(s) / goes by: Stevie, Ms.Lane, Mama

pronouns & gender: cis woman and she/her

sexuality: heterosexual

birth date: August 14th, 1995

birth place: Waco, Texas

arrival to merrock: definitely not a local. Has just arrived maybe a week or two ago. Beginning of November.

housing: small house in the suburbs

occupation: Sixth grade English teacher

work place: Merrock Junior High

family: ten year old son, named Elijah. Mom and step father back in Texas; cousin, Josh

relationship status: Single

PERSONALITY

Stevie is sunshine personified. She’s seen around town with her sketchbook. Always willing to help, if she has the time. The coveralls that fit over her hips, doodles on her converse and bandanas in her hair showcase just how her style is. She would do anything for her son, and if that means be snarky, you bet the Mama bear will come out. She would give up her own world to make sure her son has everything in his. Stevie is selfless, and considerate. She’s also a bit aloof and doesn’t always see the perspective from all angles thus making her a bit focused on the wrong things sometimes.

WRITTEN BY: Kay (she/her), est.

BACKGROUND / BIO

triggering / sensitive content: pregnancy, bullying

Stevie May Lane was born in San Antonio, Texas on a beautiful and hot summer day. Stevie grew up in Waco, Texas. A small city in between Dallas and San Antonio. She grew up in an easy household. Her mother being a stay-at-home mom, and her father was a lawyer. She was a good kid in school, gravitating more towards the artsy kids. She liked getting her hands dirty. Being able to sculpt, or draw, or paint was her favorite pastime. Stevie was about 16 when she found papers in her mothers drawers, claiming that her father was not her real father and that he adopted her. That had immediately put a divide in their relationship. She became someone who’d stay out all night, getting high with some friends. When she was just about to graduate high school, Stevie found herself pregnant at eighteen. Her family wasn’t the most supportive when it came to Elijah, her beautiful baby boy. But she fell in love. Stevie moved out, trying to make ends meet by selling some of her artwork online. She did quite okay for a 19 year old. She tried her best going to college with a newborn, but it was almost impossible. Online classes, and night classes where she could have friends watch her child became the norm. Graduating from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, she became a middle school teacher. Elijah being the sole reason for her to continue pursuing a degree, and job. He is the one person in her life that she would do anything for. And that meant giving him doing everything in her power to make him happy. Thus, moving.

She was able to take the bullying from all the people in the small town but after finding out from the local gossip mill in Waco that her son was getting bullied, she decided it was time to leave her hometown full of gossip and rude looks. She had heard about Merrock through her cousin, Josh, and decided “what the hell.” She had no idea what was in store for her in the Northeast, but she figured she’d might as well try. With the little money she was able to save over the years, with having a child, she was able to rent out a small house in the suburbs. She took over a position in the junior high until the end of the year, and has looked into getting Elijah into the elementary school, and even baseball or flag football camps. As a 28 year old mom, she’s starting over. Now they’ve officially arrived, excited and nervous for their new adventure with her child’s hand in hers, to the doorsteps of Merrock, Maine.

[ozsaill]

Cruising and social media: what works?

Swing a cat in an anchorage and you’ll hit a boat with an active online presence. When we were in the planning phase of our cruising adventures (the early 2000s), blogging was nascent; only a few recorded their travels. Hungry for information and inspiration, I hung on every word and saved posts for reference; it helped keep the dream alive for years. Now there aren’t just blogs, but a range of social media outlets. What to do? How to decide? I chatted with a couple of our coaching clients about what they do for a broader perspective. Erin is boat mama to three boys, her family cruising the Caribbean since February; JD and Jen have built their family life around living aboard in San Francisco.

Erin & Dave from Sailing to Roam, on the bow of their boat in St Lucia

Connect with your motivation

This blog began in July 2007, a few months after we bought Totem. I sought to capture memories of our family’s transition to life afloat and to keep our family updated after we left: motivations widely shared among cruisers. It’s evolved over time in terms of motivation and channels; now Totem’s blog/ Facebook / instagram indirectly supports our family as a part of the puzzle for our coaching and Jamie’s work as a sailmaker, and I have the privilege to help inspire others in to live more adventurously by sharing our experiences.

JD, Jen, and Ruby of Tight Little Tribe

For Erin, for JD & Jen, the options were greater when they started (YouTube! Instagram! Facebook! Pinterest! More!) but their motivations are similar. Erin wanted to share their adventures with others and started a blog but “found myself wishing the blog was on Facebook, so that’s what I’ve tried to create, a Facebook page with mini blog posts for busy people.” It’s great, bite-sized information mirrored on her Instagram. Jen and JD came from slightly different places: Jen, blogging helped retain details of their baby girl Ruby’s alternative life afloat. JD, on the other hand, has told stories through video. “From a young age back in Kentucky my friends and I would write scripts, plan scenes, grab the camcorder and make ridiculously cliché 80’s style movies and music videos.” Together, they share a joyful look at life on the water.

What we all share? This form of content creation brings benefits, so that the effort we put in is a fair exchange for our time.

Choosing channels

For boaty folks looking to share their adventures, the focus swings to extremes. For Erin and many others, the more succinct mode for Facebook and Instagram allow active, engaging presence with less effort. Facebook Pages are well suited for the “mini blog” post Erin masters, and Instagram wins for ease of posting… as long as you can get your phone online, anyway.

The cruising blog is still around (hello, reader!) but more work and slower growth. Erin put it this way: “I’d also spoken to several people who had a successful blog (in terms of followers and website visits) but also said it was a lot of work for minimal monetary return.” I can attest to that! For me, it’s an outlet with more complicated rewards: a way to process feelings and hindsight perspective on experiences, a way to connect with and support others.

At the far end of the spectrum of effort-per-upload is YouTube. JD shared that he typically spent around 30 hours per video while making a series of videos that ranged from around 8 to 11 minutes each. That’s about 3 hours of editing per one minute of video – and he has experience with editing! Quality videos don’t make themselves. This is exactly what’s kept us out of the YouTube ring to date.

Twitter and Pinterest deserve a mention as part of the mix for Totem, although neither channel is particularly well fed/watered. But they’re useful as traffic drivers, and I appreciate there are some who only engage with us that way. Low effort for engagement return makes maintaining a presence worthwhile.

Key benefits

We all share similar goals to record our experiences in a kind of digital scrapbook, for ourselves and others. Community engagement is also echoed by many families. Per Jen, “I love feeling like I am part of something bigger, with a group of amazing human beings each working towards adventurous goals.”

Erin points out that they’ve been able to meet other families nearby because she keeps their social media presence current. I believe that making yourself findable is really important for cruising families, to help kid boats connect with each other. REALLY important! The point of Happy Boat Kids, Happy Boat is to provide ideas on why/how to do this.

Erin has also garnered a number sponsors: it’s not income per se but has enabled her family to add some nice kit while waving money. She points out this comes with the responsibility to keep brands happy with what she posts, adds some work, and of course, succeeds when you have an honest voice instead of a pitch.

Some hope to generate income. It’s possible, but this is a long road through a crowded space that demands a lot of work and is probably going to net you less than selling doodles of stick figures on Fiverr. Few are successful, but those that are like our (awesome, earned it, work hard for it) friends on SV Delos have a combination of success factors that are hard to replicate.

Going remote

Many cruising grounds are in cell tower range and connectivity isn’t a problem. But for those going more remote (relying on satellite or radio), it’s more complicated.

Blogs and twitter are the easiest, as they can be readily updated from a simple text email and thus are doable over radio or satellite connection. Data-intensive social media channels are problematic. There are ways to get to Facebook (that’s another post!), but scheduling posts in advance is easier. Scheduled publishing is the option for YouTubers as well, uploading before going remote. Instagram posts can’t be scheduled, at least not without violating T&Cs – not worthile. It requires a phone back in internet-land to post; get a trusted friend involved, or fuhgeddaboudit.

Other ways to mitigate days offline is through connecting channels to repost. A blog posted through our Iridium GO is automatically posted to our Facebook Page, and every post to the Page is re-posted on Twitter. It’s a blunt tool approach to use the channels, very much not optimal, but better than nothing when data is limited. IFTTT (if this then that) recipes are a great way to work out the right daisy chain of reposts.

Comoros: many helpers for dinghy landing, not so many cell towers

Growing a following

At a base level, this isn’t rocket science. Provide quality content people enjoy and want to share; post routinely; engage with others. This organic method is what most do, and in a perfect world it’s all you need and optimize by being active. Wild card exposure to a bigger audience lifts awareness: Erin found an interview with a local paper evolved into a piece in the Daily Mail that gave her an early hit. Totem’s Facebook Page grew by multiples overnight in 2013 after a NY Times columnist mention; this month’s Today show interview didn’t hurt either. Giving interviews for other bloggers or magazines and recording podcasts help find new, relevant followers too. And then, there are those who leverage the boob effect. Good on ’em, it’s not for us though!

What about paying for a boost? I’ve seen this work with an Instagram Growth Service; effort involved in finding and attracting other instagrammers to follow you is relatively time consuming and data intensive (when you’re sipping data like a cruiser!). While that may offer a jumpstart, on the other hand, I don’t know anyone who has found Facebook boosting to actually work… incremental exposure for no bump in followers. Participating in groups that support each other’s posts in a given channel have the benefit of both community and a boost.

No pressure – really!

In a discussion thread among a couple of dozen boat families, many shared that they simply aren’t interested, or have other priorities, or prefer share differently. I love what one person said: “For those that don’t blog, the experiences and memories and stories are just as real and fantastic as those that do. How do you normally process and share? Online? Then do that. Via conversation? Then do that! Art? Do that!” A resounding YES! The explosion in social media has created pressure to engage that shouldn’t exist; there should be no guilt in opting out.

Trading when you don’t share a language: unforgettable whether it was on Facebook or not

I also chatted this morning with a fellow boat mama here in the Pacific Northwest. Beth shares her family’s travels on Facebook and intends to explore video, but recognizes “…keeping a balance of living without a camera is important to me too. Family time is what it’s all about, right?” Jen and JD admitted there are times when JD feels like filming “and I just want to be in the moment without a camera… which can lead to some marital strife when we aren’t on the same page at the same time.” A simple blog post can balloon into hours after arriving at final content and image editing. YouTube is even more extreme: “I can also go on editing binges where I get home from work,” shared JD, “and after Ruby goes to bed, I will edit till the wee hours. This can go on for days on end until I finish a project.” It’s a lot of work, worth a hard look before embarking and taking time away from other aspects of your life.

Privacy

Jen commented that she didn’t want to have Ruby ever be upset about her online presence as she gets older, something a lot of parents grapple with. Kids growing up today are test driving the online childhood with outcomes unknown. My friend Charlotte has a fantastic article about why she chose to retire her daughter from her social sharing at age 5 (she admits, an arbitrary number). “If I write about and document every memorable, (and non-memorable) moment of her life, I feel as if I will mute her own interpretation of her childhood.” We want our kids to own their definition of self, and childhood memories, not be captive to how we framed them… we want them to be happy and proud, and they’re the only ones who can really do this. As our kids have grown, I’m able ask their permission to use a particular photo or have them choose from a selection to know it’s one they’d like.

For the most part, this hasn’t been a concern, although there was one afternoon in South Carolina where a series of three unexpected visitors knocked on the hull after seeing our location online. I really love meeting people who are interested in our way of life and it was all good, just a teensy bit unnerving!

Totem crew – early days, a gift of the blogging record to look back and see

Cruising and social media: what works? It’s different and evolving. This blog too may evolve (it at least needs a refresh, any website jockeys around?). We’d love to try video, but life is too full to expand for that effort. What do I wish I could tell my 2007 self? That this little family record would have a wonderful future, and to just stick with it.

With extra big thanks to Erin (Sailing to Roam: blog, insta, facebook) and JD & Jen (Tight Little Tribe: blog, insta, youtube) for their openness and honesty in talking about social media use and goals. Check them out!

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