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losthomunculus · 3 years

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Online Safety Relevant to the Current State of the Internet

On twitter I made a tweet about how online safety lessons in school can be very out of touch but that the advice of people who are familiar with the current internet shouldn't be disregarded. So here's my informal collection of online safety tips

Sources: unrestricted internet access since elementary school (not recommended), being a formerly involuntarily home bound person for several years that amassed way too much online experience

This could possibly hold upsetting reminders to people who had bad experiences online including mentions of grooming and emotional manipulation so please proceed with caution!

Information Sharing

Make an online pseudonym for public profiles and websites.

Don’t feel like you have to list everything about you for the world to see.

Sometimes it’s not a question of “can this information be used to locate and identify me irl?”, but simply “do I want this information publicly available and linked to my online persona?”

Unlike offline, being online leaves a constant trail of who you were accessible at all times. People are constantly growing and changing. Try to limit the information you share so you can ditch that trail and start over if need be.

Sharing information with people you make friends with and trust is a judgement call on your part, but always be on the safe side and be protective of your information.

Start as cautious as possible with online safety. Any risks or judgement calls can come later when you are 1. aware of the risks, 2. ready to address them if they occur, and 3. have gathered plenty of information instead of doing something blindly and hoping for the best.

Do not share your triggers publicly, they can very easily be used against you. Instead use websites with a large amount of filtering options to curate your online experience. If you are going to share them, only do it privately with people you trust.

Importance of Boundaries

It doesn’t matter how mature you are, don’t enter age limited spaces you don’t qualify for. It’s disrespectful to the boundaries of the people who made that space. Boundaries like this exist for the comfort of both sides involved.

Just because you can “handle it” doesn’t mean it’s good for you. Desensitization is not something to brag about.

Venting or making r18 posts as a minor on a public account is VERY dangerous. Intense emotional vulnerability is something manipulators will look for as a way to get to you. The same with sexual jokes to develop your comfort talking about those topics casually and eventually escalating the situation. If you are going to talk about such things please keep that in private conversations with people you trust in your age group.

Note the difference between public and private online space. Tweeting something on a public account is not the same as having a conversation in the cafeteria with your friends.

If an adult tries talking to you about r18, run the other way. Doesn’t matter how cool you are, it says something weird about THEM if they’re willing to talk to a minor about that stuff.

If someone( like 3+ years, honestly depends on how old you are) older than you wouldn't be comfortable saying what they're saying to you in front of other people (like a teacher or guardian), that's suspicious as hell. Run in the other direction.

The younger you are, the more age gaps matter. There's a bigger difference in development between a 13 year old and a 17 year old than there is between a 20 year old and a 24 year old. It helps to try to contextualize it with real people instead of numbers. Instead of thinking "oh just 4 years? that's not that weird" consider "oh. that would be like a freshman (13/14) dating a senior (17/18). yikes."

Be just as wary of people your own age talking about things that make you uncomfortable. Just like irl, sometimes you’ll meet people your age that are hurtful.

Friends complain to each other and talk about their issues, that alone is fine. But when people are doing it without permission, draw a line. When people are making it feel like you’re responsible for maintaining their mental health, you need to draw a line. When it starts to effect your mental health, PLEASE DRAW A LINE! I know it feels like your responsibility sometimes, but it’s not. You cannot be there for others if you’re not taking care of yourself first and foremost.

Don’t be afraid to block people. Even for petty reasons. It’s good to block people. Don’t force yourself to see stuff you don’t want to see.

Being Constantly Online

The 24 hour news cycle is not a good thing to follow 24/7. Taking social responsibility is a good thing, but your brain is NOT built to worry about every issue in the world at once. One strategy I use for staying sane is I try to only check the news once a day, and if something needs more attention to set aside an amount of time I’m going to focus on it before I need to take time to step back.

Touch grass. Not literally, unless you can in which case I highly suggest it, sometimes it’s just good to lay in a field. What I mean is you need to dedicate a good portion of your time to being offline (sleep does not count). What your offline time looks like is going to differ depending on your level of ability, but even if you are house bound it’s important to build some hobbies that don’t rely on the internet. Talking to people offline is also a good goal if possible, even just to your housemates.

Social etiquette greatly differs online and offline and sometimes the reminder that were all just Some People gets lost behind the numbers and the fabricated personas. Keep in mind the difference in how information is shared without forgetting that the fact we are all people remains the same.

Be generous with your etiquette. You will avoid a lot of stress if you conduct yourself with the same politeness you would have in an offline interaction. Master the art of "minding your own business" for your own sake.

Arguments and Competition

As soon as you can, you need to internalize the fact that leaving an argument is not losing.

It is inevitable you will be exposed to many people who disagree with you. Some people only want to argue to rile you up. Sometimes that’s not their intention, but it’s what they’re doing. You do not have to remain in conversation with people, especially if they’re not interested in actually coming to an understanding. Even if they are interested, sometimes they just suck!! Leave!! You can leave!!

On that note, sometimes you are going to get valid criticism and it’s going to hurt. That is part of learning. If someone says you messed up and did something hurtful, take a second to step back from your defensiveness and consider: intent ≠ effect. Apologize, repair what you can, and move forward with the ability to do better in the future. You’re going to mess up every once in awhile, it’s inevitable.

To summarize the past two points: don't waste your time on unnecessary hostility but don't close yourself into an echo chamber either. Debates should be about learning.

Sometimes people are not going to like you. This happens offline too but people tend to be a lot more blunt online. Sometimes people dislike you for no reason or for really petty reasons. That’s not your problem, move on.

Don’t actively seek out people you don’t like or who don’t like you to argue with. Whether or not your side is the “right side” doesn’t matter, it’s going to cause you so much unnecessary stress. Feel free to keep posting your opinions on your own profile but don’t seek out unnecessary conflict.

This is a different type of competition than previously mentioned, but be aware of the danger of comparing yourself to other people. Especially if you’re a creative or student, DO NOT GET SWEPT UP IN THE GRIND CULTURE. It’s more subtle in some places than others, but anytime you see the notion that you should be working yourself to the bone be VERY critical. Also be critical of any online cultures (such as gaming and art communities) that brag about unhealthy habits or act like it’s ~part of the culture~ (ex: all nighters, not taking breaks, getting hurt. Any activity that neglects health to work toward a goal).

Not just grind culture, any community of subculture that shares anti recovery sentiments is a huge red flag. Even if they're joking, it's not worth the risk of internalizing those statements.

Everyone’s social media presence is to some degree doctored because it’s a purposefully selected collection of what they allow you to see. It’s fine to like the persona you see being displayed, but never forget that it is not reflective of the entire person. Everyone online is JUST SOME PERSON. Do not forget that and start holding yourself to a standard you can’t even see every side of.

By posting online you are opening yourself to criticism. Whether or not it’s justified can vary, but either way it’s going to happen. Mute stuff, go private, disable comments, etc if you need to.

Misc Tidbits

these are technically just general info that is also good for offline but I have seen things that make me think people online need the extra reminder.

Learn what cults are, how they recruit, and what they do to their members. I'm not kidding. This is particularly relevant at the moment because of current societal unrest and widespread loneliness. No one is immune to cult propaganda, and not every cult is based on pre established religion or family. Many exist ONLINE and are able to manipulate people without ever meeting face to face. (learn more: Loneliness as a Pandemic: The Dangers of Online Cult

Familiarize yourself with the concept of pseudoscience. Please familiarize yourself with the concept of pseudoscience and then learn how to identify pseudoscience. (learn more: Karl Popper, Science, & Pseudoscience: Crash Course Philosophy #8)

Q. How do I know if a source is reliable?

Final Thoughts

It's important people of ALL ages learn these lessons, because the internet is constantly changing and we are all vulnerable when in the presence of other people.

Be cautious and stay safe

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duckprintspress · 3 years

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Giving Quality, Motivating Feedback

A guest post by @shealynn88!

The new writer in your writing group just sent out their latest story and it’s...not exciting. You know it needs work, but you’re not sure why, or where they should focus.

This is the blog post for you!

Before we get started, it’s important to note that this post isn’t aimed at people doing paid editing work. In the professional world, there are developmental editors, line editors, and copy editors, who all have a different focus. That is not what we’re covering here. Today, we want to help you informally give quality, detailed, encouraging feedback to your fellow writers.

The Unwritten Rules

Everyone seems to have a different understanding of what it means to beta, edit, or give feedback on a piece, so it’s best to be on the same page with your writer before you get started.

Think about what type of work you’re willing and able to do, how much time you have, and how much emotional labor you’re willing to take on. Then talk to your writer about their expectations.

Responsibilities as an editor/beta may include:

Know what the author’s expectation is and don’t overstep. Different people in different stages of writing are looking for, and will need, different types of support. It’s important to know what pieces of the story they want feedback on. If they tell you they don’t want feedback on dialogue, don’t give them feedback on dialogue. Since many terms are ambiguous or misunderstood, it may help you to use the list of story components in the next section to come to an agreement with your writer on what you’ll review.

Don’t offer expertise you don’t have. If your friend needs advice on their horse book and you know nothing about horses, be clear that your read through will not include any horse fact checking. Don’t offer grammar advice if you’re not good at grammar. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give feedback on things you do notice, but don’t misrepresent yourself, and understand your own limits.

Give positive and constructive feedback. It is important for a writer to know when something is working well. Don’t skimp on specific positive feedback — this is how you keep writers motivated. On the other hand, giving constructive feedback indicates where there are issues. Be specific on what you’re seeing and why it’s an issue. It can be hard for someone to improve if they don’t understand what’s wrong.

Be clear about your timing and availability, and provide updates if either changes. Typically, you’ll be doing this for free, as you’re able to fit it in your schedule. But it can be nerve wracking to hand your writing over for feedback and then hear nothing. For everyone’s sanity, keep the writer up to date on your expected timeline and let them know if you’re delayed for some reason. If you cannot complete the project for them, let them know. This could be for any reason — needing to withdraw, whatever the cause, is valid! It could be because working with the writer is tough, you don’t enjoy the story, life got tough, you got tired, etc. All of that is fine; just let them know that you won’t be able to continue working on the project.

Be honest if there are story aspects you can’t be objective about. Nearly all of your feedback is going to be personal opinion. There are some story elements that will evoke strong personal feelings. They can be tropes, styles, specific characterizations, or squicks. In these cases, ask the writer to get another opinion on that particular aspect, or, if you really want to continue, find similar published content to review and see if you can get a better sense of how other writers have handled it.

Don’t get personal. Your feedback should talk about the characters, the narrator, the plotline, the sentence structure, or other aspects of the story. Avoid making ‘you’ statements or judgements, suggested or explicit, in your feedback. Unless you’re looking at grammar or spelling, most of the feedback you’ll have will be your opinion. Don’t present it as fact.

Your expectations of the writer/friend/group member you are working with may include:

Being gracious in accepting feedback. A writer may provide explanations for an issue you noticed or seek to discuss your suggestions. However, if they constantly argue with you, that may be an indicator to step back.

Being responsible for emotional reactions to getting feedback. While getting feedback can be hard on the ego and self esteem, that is something the writer needs to work on themselves. While you can provide reassurance and do emotional labor if you’re comfortable, it is also very reasonable to step back if the writer isn’t ready to do that work.

Making the final choice regarding changes to the work. The writer should have a degree of confidence in accepting or rejecting your feedback based on their own sense of the story. While they may consult you on this, the onus is on them to make changes that preserve the core of the story they want to tell.

Some people aren’t ready for feedback, even though they’re seeking it. You’re not signing up to be a psychologist, a best friend, or an emotional support editor. You can let people know in advance that these are your expectations, or you can just keep them in mind for your own mental health. As stated above, you can always step back from a project, and if writers aren’t able to follow these few guidelines, it might be a good time to do that. (It’s also worth making sure that, as a writer, you’re able to give these things to your beta/editor.)

Specificity is Key

One of the hardest things in editing is pinning down the ‘whys’ of unexciting work, so let’s split the writing into several components and talk about evaluations you can make for each one.

You can also give this list to your writer ahead of time as a checklist, to see which things they want your feedback on.

Generally, your goal is going to be to help people improve incrementally. Each story they write should be better than the previous one, so you don’t need to go through every component for every story you edit. Generally, I wouldn’t suggest more than 3 editing rounds on any single story that isn’t intended for publication. Think of the ‘many pots’ theory — people who are honing their craft will improve more quickly by writing a lot of stories instead of incessantly polishing one.

With this in mind, try addressing issues in the order below, from general to precise. It doesn’t make sense to critique grammar and sentence structure if the plot isn’t solid, and it can be very hard on a writer to get feedback on all these components at once. If a piece is an early or rough draft, try evaluating no more than four components at a time, and give specific feedback on what does and doesn’t work, and why.

High Level Components

Character arc/motivation:

Does each character have a unique voice, or do they all sound the same?

In dialogue, are character voices preserved? Do they make vocabulary and sentence-structure choices that fit with how they’re being portrayed?

Does each character have specific motivations and focuses that are theirs alone?

Does each character move through the plot naturally, or do they seem to be shoehorned/railroaded into situations or decisions for the sake of the plot? Be specific about which character actions work and which don’t. Tell the writer what you see as their motivation/arc and why—and point out specific lines that indicate that motivation to you.

Does each character's motivation seem to come naturally from your knowledge of them?

Are you invested (either positively or negatively) in the characters? If not, why not? Is it that they have nothing in common with you? Do you not understand where they’re coming from? Are they too perfect or too unsympathetic?

Theme:

It’s a good idea to summarize the story and its moral from your point of view and provide that insight to the writer. This can help them understand if the points they were trying to make come through. The theme should tie in closely with the character arcs. If not, provide detailed feedback on where it does and doesn’t tie in.

Plot Structure:

For most issues with plot structure, you can narrow them down to pacing, characterization, logical progression, or unsatisfying resolution. Be specific about the issues you see and, when things are working well, point that out, too.

Is there conflict that interests you? Does it feel real?

Is there a climax? Do you feel drawn into it?

Do the plot points feel like logical steps within the story?

Is the resolution tied to the characters and their growth? Typically this will feel more real and relevant and satisfying than something you could never have seen coming.

Is the end satisfying? If not, is it because you felt the end sooner and the story kept going? Is it because too many threads were left unresolved? Is it just a matter of that last sentence or two being lackluster?

Point Of View:

Is the point of view clear and consistent?

Is the writing style and structure consistent with that point of view? For example, if a writer is working in first person or close third person, the style of the writing should reflect the way the character thinks. This extends to grammar, sentence structure, general vocabulary and profanity outside of the dialogue.

If there is head hopping (where the point of view changes from chapter to chapter or section to section), is it clear in the first few sentences whose point of view you’re now in? Chapter headers can be helpful, but it should be clear using structural, emotional, and stylistic changes that you’re with a new character now.

Are all five senses engaged? Does the character in question interact with their environment in realistic, consistent ways that reflect how people actually interact with the world?

Sometimes the point of view can feel odd if it’s too consistent. Humans don’t typically think logically and linearly all the time, so being in someone’s head may sometimes be contradictory or illogical. If it’s too straightforward, it might not ‘feel’ real.

Be specific about the areas that don’t work and break them down based on the questions above.

Pacing:

Does the story jump around, leaving you confused about what took place when?

Do some scenes move quickly where others drag, and does that make sense within the story?

If pacing isn’t working, often it’s about the level of detail or the sentence structure. Provide detailed feedback about what you care about in a given scene to help a writer focus in.

Setting:

Is the setting clear and specific? Writing with specific place details is typically more rooted, interesting, and unique. If you find the setting vague and/or uninteresting and/or irrelevant, you might suggest replacing vague references — ‘favorite band’, ‘coffee shop on the corner’, ‘the office building’ — with specific names to ground the setting and make it feel more real.

It might also be a lack of specific detail in a scene that provides context beyond the characters themselves. Provide specific suggestions of what you feel like you’re missing. Is it in a specific scene, or throughout the story? Are there scenes that work well within the story, where others feel less grounded? Why?

Low Level Components

Flow/Sentence Structure:

Sentence length and paragraph length should vary. The flow should feel natural.

When finding yourself ‘sticking’ on certain sentences, provide specific feedback on why they aren’t working. Examples are rhythm, vocabulary, subject matter (maybe something is off topic), ‘action’ vs ‘explanation’, passive vs. active voice.

Style/Vocabulary:

Writing style should be consistent with the story — flowery prose works well for mythic or historical pieces and stories that use that type of language are typically slower moving. Quick action and short sentences are a better fit for murder mysteries, suspense, or modern, lighter fiction.

Style should be consistent within the story — it may vary slightly to show how quickly action is happening, but you shouldn’t feel like you’re reading two different stories.

SPAG (Spelling and Grammar):

Consider spelling and grammar in the context of the point of view, style and location of the story (eg, England vs. America vs. Australia).

If a point of view typically uses incorrect grammar, a SPAG check will include making sure that it doesn’t suddenly fall into perfect grammar for a while. In this case, consistency is going to be important to the story feeling authentic.

Word Count Requirements:

If the story has been written for a project, bang, anthology, zine, or other format that involves a required word count minimum or maximum, and the story is significantly over or under the aimed-for word count (30% or more/less), it may not make sense to go through larger edits until the sizing is closer to requirements. But, as a general rule, I’d say word count is one of the last things to worry about.

The best thing we can do for another writer is to keep them writing. Every single person will improve if they keep going. Encouragement is the most important feedback of all.

I hope this has helped you think about how you provide feedback. Let us know if you have other tips or tricks! This works best as a collaborative process where we all can support one another!

#duck prints press #original content #writing advice #guest blogger #guest blogger shea

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qqueenofhades · 4 years

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Could you expand a bit on the "death of expertise"? It's something I think about A LOT as an artist, because there are so many problems with people who think it isn't a real job, and the severe undercutting of prices that happens because people think hobbyists and professionals are the same. At the same time, I also really want people to feel free to be able to make art if they want, with no gatekeeping or elitism, and I usually spin myself in circles mentally thinking about it. So.

I have been secretly hoping someone would ask this question, nonny. Bless you. I have a lot (a LOT) of thoughts on this topic, which I will try to keep somewhat concise and presented in a semi-organized fashion, but yes.

I can mostly speak about this in regard to academia, especially the bad, bad, BAD takes in my field (history) that have dominated the news in recent weeks and which constitute most of the recent posts on my blog. (I know, I know, Old Man Yells At Cloud when attempting to educate the internet on actual history, but I gotta do SOMETHING.) But this isn’t a new phenemenon, and is linked to the avalanche of “fake news” that we’ve all heard about and experienced in the last few years, especially in the run-up and then after the election of You Know Who, who has made fake news his personal brand (if not in the way he thinks). It also has to do with the way Americans persistently misunderstand the concept of free speech as “I should be able to say whatever I want and nobody can correct or criticize me,” which ties into the poisonous extreme-libertarian ethos of “I can do what I want with no regard for others and nobody can correct me,” which has seeped its way into the American mainstream and is basically the center of the modern Republican party. (Basically: all for me, all the time, and caring about others is a weak liberal pussy thing to do.)

This, however, is not just an issue of partisan politics, because the left is just as guilty, even if its efforts take a different shape. One of the reason I got so utterly exasperated with strident online leftists, especially around primary season and the hardcore breed of Bernie Bros, is just that they don’t do anything except shout loud and incorrect information on the internet (and then transmogrify that into a twisted ideology of moral purity which makes a sin out of actually voting for a flawed candidate, even if the alternative is Donald Goddamn Trump). I can’t count how many people from both sides of the right/left divide get their political information from like-minded people on social media, and never bother to experience or verify or venture outside their comforting bubbles that will only provide them with “facts” that they already know. Social media has done a lot of good things, sure, but it’s also made it unprecedently easy to just say whatever insane bullshit you want, have it go viral, and then have you treated as an authority on the topic or someone whose voice “has to be included” out of some absurd principle of both-siderism. This is also a tenet of the mainstream corporate media: “both sides” have to be included, to create the illusion of “objectivity,” and to keep the largest number of paying subscribers happy. (Yes, of course this has deep, deep roots in the collapse of late-stage capitalism.) Even if one side is absolutely batshit crazy, the rules of this distorted social contract stipulate that their proposals and their flaws have to be treated as equal with the others, and if you point out that they are batshit crazy, you have to qualify with some criticism of the other side.

This is where you get white people posting “Neo-Nazis and Black Lives Matter are the same!!!1” on facebook. They are a) often racist, let’s be real, and b) have been force-fed a constant narrative where Both Sides Are Equally Bad. Even if one is a historical system of violent oppression that has made a good go at total racial and ethnic genocide and rests on hatred, and the other is the response to not just that but the centuries of systemic and small-scale racism that has been built up every day, the white people of the world insist on treating them as morally equivalent (related to a superior notion that Violence is Always Bad, which.... uh... have you even seen constant and overwhelming state-sponsored violence the West dishes out? But it’s only bad when the other side does it. Especially if those people can be at all labeled “fanatics.”)

I have complained many, many times, and will probably complain many times more, about how hard it is to deconstruct people’s absolutely ingrained ideas of history and the past. History is a very fragile thing; it’s really only equivalent to the length of a human lifespan, and sometimes not even that. It’s what people want to remember and what is convenient for them to remember, which is why we still have some living Holocaust survivors and yet a growing movement of Holocaust denial, among other extremist conspiracy theories (9/11, Sandy Hook, chemtrails, flat-earthing, etc etc). There is likewise no organized effort to teach honest history in Western public schools, not least since the West likes its self-appointed role as guardians of freedom and liberty and democracy in the world and doesn’t really want anyone digging into all that messy slavery and genocide and imperialism and colonialism business. As a result, you have deliberately under- or un-educated citizens, who have had a couple of courses on American/British/etc history in grade school focusing on the greatest-hit reel, and all from an overwhelmingly triumphalist white perspective. You have to like history, from what you get out of it in public school, to want to go on to study it as a career, while knowing that there are few jobs available, universities are cutting or shuttering humanities departments, and you’ll never make much money. There is... not a whole lot of outside incentive there.

I’ve written before about how the humanities are always the first targeted, and the first defunded, and the first to be labeled as “worthless degrees,” because a) they are less valuable to late-stage capitalism and its emphasis on Material Production, and b) they often focus on teaching students the critical thinking skills that critique and challenge that dominant system. There’s a reason that there is a stereotype of artists as social revolutionaries: they have often taken a look around, gone, “Hey, what the hell is this?” and tried to do something about it, because the creative and free-thinking impulse helps to cultivate the tools necessary to question what has become received and dominant wisdom. Of course, that can then be taken too far into the “I’ll create my own reality and reject absolutely everything that doesn’t fit that narrative,” and we end up at something like the current death of expertise.

This year is particularly fertile for these kinds of misinformation efforts: a plague without a vaccine or a known cure, an election year in a turbulently polarized country, race unrest in a deeply racist country spreading to other racist countries around the world and the challenging of a particularly important system (white supremacy), etc etc. People are scared and defensive and reactive, and in that case, they’re especially less motivated to challenge or want to encounter information that scares them. They need their pre-set beliefs to comfort them or provide steadiness in a rocky and uncertain world, and (thanks once again to social media) it’s easy to launch blistering ad hominem attacks on people who disagree with you, who are categorized as a faceless evil mass and who you will never have to meet or negotiate with in real life. This is the environment in which all the world’s distinguished scientists, who have spent decades studying infectious diseases, have to fight for airtime and authority (and often lose) over random conspiracy theorists who make a YouTube video. The public has been trained to see them as “both the same” and then accept which side they like the best, regardless of actual factual or real-world qualifications. They just assume the maniac on YouTube is just as trustworthy as the scientists with PhDs from real universities.

Obviously, academia is racist, elitist, classist, sexist, on and on. Most human institutions are. But training people to see all academics as the enemy is not the answer. You’ve seen the Online Left (tm) also do this constantly, where they attack “the establishment” for never talking about anything, or academics for supposedly erasing and covering up all of non-white history, while apparently never bothering to open a book or familiarize themselves with a single piece of research that actual historians are working on. You may have noticed that historians have been leading the charge against the “don’t erase history!!!1″ defenders of racist monuments, and explaining in stinging detail exactly why this is neither preserving history or being truthful about it. Tumblr likes to confuse the mechanism that has created the history and the people who are studying and analyzing that history, and lump them together as one mass of Evil And Lying To You. Academics are here because we want to critically examine the world and tell you things about it that our nonsense system has required years and years of effort, thousands of dollars in tuition, and other gatekeeping barriers to learn. You can just ask one of us. We’re here, we usually love to talk, and we’re a lot cheaper. I think that’s pretty cool.

As a historian, I have been trained in a certain skill set: finding, reading, analyzing, using, and criticizing primary sources, ditto for secondary sources, academic form and style, technical skills like languages, paleography, presentation, familiarity with the professional mechanisms for reviewing and sharing work (journals, conferences, peer review, etc), and how to assemble this all into an extended piece of work and to use it in conversation with other historians. That means my expertise in history outweighs some rando who rolls up with an unsourced or misleading Twitter thread. If a professor has been handed a carefully crafted essay and then a piece of paper scribbled with crayon, she is not obliged to treat them as essentially the same or having the same critical weight, even if the essay has flaws. One has made an effort to follow the rules of the game, and the other is... well, I did read a few like that when teaching undergraduates. They did not get the same grade.

This also means that my expertise is not universal. I might know something about adjacent subjects that I’ve also studied, like political science or English or whatever, but someone who is a career academic with a degree directly in that field will know more than me. I should listen to them, even if I should retain my independent ability and critical thinking skillset. And I definitely should not be listened to over people whose field of expertise is in a completely different realm. Take the recent rocket launch, for example. I’m guessing that nobody thought some bum who walked in off the street to Kennedy Space Center should be listened to in preference of the actual scientists with degrees and experience at NASA and knowledge of math and orbital mechanics and whatever else you need to get a rocket into orbit. I definitely can’t speak on that and I wouldn’t do it anyway, so it’s frustrating to see it happen with history. Everybody “knows” things about history that inevitably turn out to be wildly wrong, and seem to assume that they can do the same kind of job or state their conclusions with just as much authority. (Nobody seems to listen to the scientists on global warming or coronavirus either, because their information is actively inconvenient for our entrenched way of life and people don’t want to change.) Once again, my point here is not to be a snobbish elitist looking down at The Little People, but to remark that if there’s someone in a field who has, you know, actually studied that subject and is speaking from that place of authority, maybe we can do better than “well, I saw a YouTube video and liked it better, so there.” (Americans hate authority and don’t trust smart people, which is a related problem and goes back far beyond Trump, but there you are.)

As for art: it’s funny how people devalue it constantly until they need it to survive. Ask anyone how they spent their time in lockdown. Did they listen to music? Did they watch movies or TV? Did they read a book? Did they look at photography or pictures? Did they try to learn a skill, like drawing or writing or painting, and realize it was hard? Did they have a preference for the art that was better, more professionally produced, had more awareness of the rules of its craft, and therefore was more enjoyable to consume? If anyone wants to tell anyone that art is worthless, I invite you to challenge them on the spot to go without all of the above items during the (inevitable, at this rate) second coronavirus lockdown. No music. No films. No books. Not even a video or a meme or anything else that has been made for fun, for creativity, or anything outside the basic demands of Compensated Economic Production. It’s then that you’ll discover that, just as with the underpaid essential workers who suffered the most, we know these jobs need to get done. We just still don’t want to pay anyone fairly for doing them, due to our twisted late-capitalist idea of “value.”

Anyway, since this has gotten long enough and I should probably wrap up: as you say, the difference between “professional” and “hobbyist” has been almost completely erased, so that people think the opinion of one is as good as the other, or in your case, that the hobbyist should present their work for free or refuse to be seen as a professional entitled to fair compensation for their skill. That has larger and more insidious effects in a global marketplace of ideas that has been almost entirely reduced to who can say their opinion the loudest to the largest group of people. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but at least I can try to point it out and to avoid being part of it, and to recognize where I need to speak and where I need to shut up. My job, and that of every single white person in America right now, is to shut up and let black people (and Native people, and Latinx people, and Muslim people, and etc...) tell me what it’s really like to live here with that identity. I have obviously done a ton of research on the subject and consider myself reasonably educated, but here’s the thing: my expertise still doesn’t outweigh theirs, no matter what degrees they have or don’t have. I then am required to boost their ideas, views, experiences, and needs, rather than writing them over or erasing them, and to try to explain to people how the roots of these ideas interlock and interact where I can. That is -- hopefully -- putting my history expertise to use in a good way to support what they’re saying, rather than silence it. I try, at any rate, and I am constantly conscious of learning to do better.

I hope that was helpful for you. Thanks for letting me talk about it.

#history #long post #anonymous #ask

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wonderful-writer · 4 years

Text

11 - Never Mine

Summary: A fire burns down the camp’s meat house, leaving everyone available to go hunting in pairs. Y/n and Harper go together, allowing Harper to fill Y/n in on what happened on Unity Day. When she arrives back to camp, she sees something she didn’t want to see.

Word Count: 2.07k

Based Off: 01x11 “The Calm”

A/N: So my phone is supposed to be coming sometime today and I’m really anxious about it, also I’m almost done writing season two and I might be taking a break from posting for a week to catch up and get even more ahead on chapters

You’d given yourself every watch shift that you could, even relieving some people of their own to do double shifts as a means to distract yourself from your constantly wandering thoughts. Since there was no movement or signs of grounders, standing on guard didn’t do much.

You were constantly reminded of Jasper’s and your mothers when yesterday, Bellamy had come himself to lure you away from your post when Monroe informed him that you shooed her away when she came to take over for her shift and that you had been there since dawn.

You saw him talking with Clarke ahead of you, making sure to glance back at you every so often. He walked off with Clarke, back into camp. A commotion inside camp drew your attention away, seeing a fire starting in the meat house. You rushed away from your post for the first time since this morning.

You checked over Octavia as Bellamy broke up the fight that had begun. She assured you that she was okay and you patted her shoulder with a smile, which she returned.

“Now what the hell are we gonna do?” Octavia yelled over the flames. “That was all the food!”

Nothing was able to be salvaged, and there wasn’t enough food on the dropship to last everyone, so Clarke decided to get everyone available out to hunt, even with the threat of grounders.

“Each group takes someone with a gun. And they’re for killing grounders, not food. We don’t have the ammo. Use the spears for hunting.” Bellamy shouted over everyone’s movement and murmurs. “Bring back what you can and be back by nightfall. No one stays out after dark.”

You didn’t feel the need to take a spear with you as you had your sword and daggers, but you teamed up with Harper, who was good with her gun and someone you knew you’d be able to be around.

As you left camp, with your eyes sharp, you decided to finally ask about Unity Day.

“Harper?”

“Yeah?”

“What the hell happened on Unity Day?” She giggled at your question but replied.

“How much do you remember?”

“I remember everything up until we were at the fire.” You admitted, stepping over a tree root.

“You can’t even remember the best part!” She laughed. “We played truth or dare. Me, you, Monroe, Jasper, and Monty.”

“And?” You asked.

“And it was pretty boring until I decided to ask you if you would have sex with Bellamy if you had to.” You blushed at the words but stayed silent for her to continue. “And you said, and I quote, ‘Hell yeah I would jump his bones if I absolutely had to’.”

“Oh, God.” You groaned, putting a hand on your face. Note to self, never get drunk again.

You sighed, still feeling confused about everything afterwards, and how you ended up in your tent. “Wait a second, how did I get back into my tent?”

“Oh, that.” Harper smiled giddily. “Bellamy carried you there almost immediately after you answered my question. Said he was preventing you from saying or doing anything else incredibly stupid.”

Your blush increased tenfold, knowing that he heard your honest response. You wondered if Jasper lied about Bellamy knowing your true feelings, but shook your head at the thought and focused on getting food for camp.

You and Harper hauled back a boar and some smaller animals, but nothing else. You went to clean your sword and daggers while she took the game over to where the new meat house was supposed to be.

After they were cleaned, you put them back in your tent and decided to tell Bellamy about how much food everyone gathered. You pulled back the flap as you began talking, eyes focused on the ground. “Everyone’s back now, we didn’t-”

You cut yourself off at the sight in front of you. Bellamy, sweaty and quite possibly naked in bed, with Raven pulling her pants on by the bed. You gasped and started to back away from the scene, eyes wide and tear-filled, as Raven looked at you apologetically and Bellamy tried to get you back in the tent as much as he could, being naked and all.

As soon as you were out of the tent you went to Jasper’s tent, praying he was in there. The tears in your eyes and falling down your cheeks made it hard for you to see, but he wasn’t there. You wiped your tears and took a shaky inhale, walking back out to bump into Octavia.

“Y/n? What happened? Are- are you okay?” You shook your head and frowned at her question, another flow of tears running down your face. She pulled you back into the empty tent to comfort you and figure out what was wrong.

“Shh, shh, it’s okay.” She pressed your head to her shoulder as you wrapped your arms around her waist, sitting down on one of the beds with her. She stroked your hair and calmed you down enough to get you to talk.

“What happened, Y/n/n?” She asked as you lifted your head from her shoulder.

“God, it was awful!” You sobbed. “He- Bellamy slept with Raven!” You cried again. You didn’t know that it would have this kind of effect on you. That he would have this effect on you.

“And Jasper, he- he said that Bellamy loved me back because I love him, I really really love him.” Your voice was thick with tears, and Octavia never thought she could hate her brother more than she did now.

“Oh, Y/n. You’ll be okay. He’s no good for you, anyways.” She comforted you.

“But that’s the thing, Octavia. He’s my best friend. He knows me like the back of my hand and we’ve only been down here almost a month! And I’ve lost everyone I’ve ever loved, and I don’t think I want to lose him, too. He doesn’t love me and I can’t look at him knowing that and I fucking hate it. He's my best friend and I hate him, but I love him too.”

“Sweetie, I don’t know how to help you. I’m sorry that I can’t help you, I really am. But the best thing for you to do right now is to ignore him. Give yourself time to heal. And if he tries to approach you, come to me. I’ll punch him for you. Or better yet, punch him yourself.”

You laughed at her words and wiped away your tears, composing yourself. “Thanks, ‘Tavia. I’m gonna go freshen up, you get some rest.” You patted her knee and left the tent, willing all emotions to leave your body as you went to wash your face and attempt to cover up the tear stains.

Soon you found yourself alone in the woods with Bellamy, while Octavia, Monty, and Raven were split up, communicating over the walkie-talkie to look for Clarke and Finn, who hadn’t yet returned from their hunting trip.

“Just keep the moon to your left and you’ll find us,” Bellamy repeated to Monty. You walked in silence, sword drawn.

“Listen, Y/n-”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Blake. You wanted to have some fun, Raven was fun. I get it. Now shut up and keep your eyes peeled.” You said coldly. His eyes showed that he was hurt by your words, but when Monty kept talking over the walkies, Bellamy cut in.

“Damn it, Monty. Just pay attention.” He commanded. “Do you see anything?”

“Report.” He demanded when no response came. There was a screech and then static until Raven’s voice came through.

“There’s someone in the bushes.” She said in a low tone.

You moved to where they were, seeing Myles laying on the ground, injured. “Clarke and Finn, where are they?”

“Grounders took them.” He wheezed out.

“Take it easy,” Bellamy instructed. “We have to get him back to camp.”

“Bell, what about Clarke and Finn?” Octavia asked worriedly.

Raven stood and began to cry softly when no response left Bellamy’s lips. “Raven, I’m sorry.” You rolled your eyes at the exchange, even though you probably shouldn’t have.

“We need to make a stretcher.” She decided before walking off to find materials.

“Monty, we’re heading home. You copy?” Bellamy spoke into the walkie-talkie. “Monty, can you hear me?”

The lack of response worried you.

“Monty.” Bellamy tried again. “Monty, where the hell are you?”

Raven came up with enough material to make a stretcher to bring Myles back to camp with, You carrying one end with Octavia while Raven and Bellamy carried the other. Having everyone in such close quarters made the trip back home long, awkward, and intense.

“Put him over there,” You pointed with a free hand to the empty table in the dropship. You planned on tending to Myles’ wounds as much as you could until you found Clarke and she could finish patching him up, but you couldn’t do much for him.

You spent the better part of an hour just removing the arrowheads from his body, as they were difficult all on their own. Once they were out you attempted to stitch him up based on what you’d seen Clarke do for you when you ripped your own, and by then he was passed out from the pain. The quiet unnerved you, but you didn’t mind.

The only sound that was heard was water dripping when you cleaned the blood around his freshly stitched cuts so you could put bandages. You were glad that you had helped heal him, but you felt that leaving the dropship wasn’t going to do any good for you.

And you were right. Bellamy was waiting for you outside the dropship, and as soon as you descended the ramp, he began to talk as you looked straight ahead.

“Listen, Y/n, I’m sorry, I-”

“I don’t know why you’re apologizing to me, Blake.” You deadpanned, stopping to turn to Bellamy with a cold face.

“It’s not like I’m your girlfriend or anything. I don’t need an explanation. You’re a grown man and everyone has urges. So just give up and drop the apologies. And while you’re at it, just leave me alone for a while.” It took almost everything you had to will the tears to not make an appearance, and it took just as much to keep a straight face and say what you did.

You saw the hurt in Bellamy’s face and your heart broke knowing that you caused it, but you walked away and into your tent anyways, forcing yourself not to turn around and comfort him. Because that isn’t who you are anymore. Earth changes people. Pain changes people.

You noticed that Jasper was back, and decided to pay him a visit. He was the one to comfort you when you were children, and you could use some of that now.

“Hey, Jasp.” You greeted him as you entered, a sad spark in your tone as you threw him a tight-lipped smile.

“What’s wrong?” He immediately asked.

“How do you always know when I’m upset?” You asked curiously.

“That tight smile, for starters. And your voice, I could hear it when you said hi.” he pointed out, causing you to nod, before slowly dissolving into tears. Jasper came to your aid, wrapping his arms around you in a hug.

“Are you okay?” Your only response was a shake of the head.

“He doesn’t love me,” You whispered.

“What? Of course, he does, Y/n/n,” Jasper attempted, rubbing your back.

You raised your head at his words and looked at him with your red eyes. “Oh, yeah? If he felt anything for me, anything at all, why the hell would he sleep with Raven?”

Jasper’s eyes widened at your comment, before his face filled with anger. “That son of a bitch-”

You stopped Jasper before he could move out of the tent. “Don’t. I took care of it already. I’m going to ignore him for a little while, I’ll be fine. I just need time for myself.”

Jasper nodded and you let go of him, shaking your body a little to relieve some of the extra energy you had, until one of the others called out from outside of the tent.

“Everyone's gotta get outside! We’re building foxholes!”

It was going to be a long night.

Taglist: @soullessbabee | @hyperion-moonbabe-art3mis | @dummythiccwitch | @sireddobrev | @gxvrielle

#bellamy blake #bellamy blake imagine #bellamy blake series #bellamy x reader #bellamy blake x reader #bellamy blake x you #bellamy blake x y/n #this is war series

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nezumiismissing · 4 years

Text

Authoritarianism Without Leadership and the Formation of Spatial Identity

I think at this point I have probably brought this up in every single one of my analyses, so it’s about time that this topic gets its own breakdown in a full length post (or 2 or 3). There’s a lot to cover and it’s going to get way out there, but hopefully you can find something useful here. And if not, maybe it can at least be entertaining. More exploration of this topic to come at an unspecified time after the convention when my brain decides to enter the No.6 zone again. (and yes it is over 3000 words so, you know, plan for that)

So if you couldn’t tell, the No.6 anime does not have an antagonist, at least not in any traditional sense of the word. The opponent our characters are facing off against, it turns out, is not an evil scientist or an organization or a military, but instead it is the city and its systems that must be either destroyed or reformed by the end of the story. And while those other characters exist within the world of No.6, and all take actions that go directly against the desires of our main characters, they are not fought against especially directly and within the anime have no real identity, instead only existing as part of the whole. But what is the whole exactly? I think the easy answer here is to say that the whole is society, the culture we live within that shapes everything we do in life and that must have some amount of force placed upon it to change in any significant way. But when we say that “society is the whole”, and therefore the antagonist of No.6, what do we mean by that? And how does our perception and interpretation of what it means to be a society impact how we read and understand the story of No.6?

Now, having society be the antagonist of a young adult dystopian series is not something that No.6 came up with, obviously. It's basically a necessity of the genre. But within that structure, although not always apparent at first, there is a lot of variance. These worlds are almost always authoritarian and hierarchical, the result of some massive war or natural disaster that we have been unable to fully heal from, but outside of that, the way in which these worlds are built and understood are vastly different. Some are pretending to be utopias while others give us no image of what it means to be at the “top” and only show suffering. Some take place in over-crowded cities and others have sparse populations of people constantly searching for each other. There are social (and human) experiments, revolutions of all shapes and sizes, monsters and aliens and governments that are all in one way or another trying to reflect the very real events that are taking place in the real world in a way that is perhaps more comprehensible, or at least entertaining. Society as it currently exists is very much the antagonist of these stories, and at the center (and everywhere else) of a society are individual people making decisions that may or may not be good and may or may not have good intentions. So it is easy to see how, when it comes down to it, while society is implicitly understood to be the antagonist, most of these stories focus their energy on the removal of a tangible threat, usually a person or group of people who are determined to be “in charge” of the society and therefore responsible for much of the misery of a dystopia. The No.6 novels also fall into this group, as does the manga. But the No.6 anime, for whatever reason, decided to do something completely different, and something that is arguably much more terrifying.

From here on out I will just refer to the anime as No.6 and will specify if I am mentioning the novels/manga.

In No.6 things do not happen because someone says they need to happen, but they instead happen for…. what reason exactly? We see the mayor referenced briefly in the first episode, so we can assume that he is the one in charge of decision-making, but he makes no actual appearances. The military is clearly shown demolishing the West Block, but who is giving orders? Who is watching over the scientists at the Correctional Facility? Deciding where the wall will expand next if at all? In most stories you would see questions like these answered either near the beginning of the story or revealed at the end, and if it's neither of those then they’ll probably still show up at some point in the middle. But in No.6 there is none of that. There is no one or no group clearly “in charge” of what is happening at any time in regards to the city and its surroundings. Instead, it seems, the city has reached a point in which the details of how these things are occurring are unimportant, and that for the most part, things will unfold with or without the input of an individual or group. The implication of this being that No.6 is somehow separate from its people and government, and is, in a sense, alive.

I think this is largely why the anime is able to be so effective, despite its many other issues. On a surface level, the story lacks any kind of antagonist, making it unclear where exactly it's going. But the existence of the city as an independent entity fills in these odd gaps, creating the image of a society that has, quite literally, lost control of itself. It also makes more concrete the theme of “society vs nature” that is kind of hinted at for most of the story and then kind of shoved in your face at the end with Elyurias and Nezumi’s backstory. But with Elyurias being the physical embodiment of nature, what exactly is it that she is opposing? But before we get into that, some framing and questions (or maybe just one very big question).

What does it mean for a city to be “alive”? Not in the sense that things are happening in it and people are living there, but in the sense that it thinks and feels on its own and makes choices about itself that are not the direct result of human or other external input? Clearly people were responsible for its creation, and took care to create systems that would hold it together. But those systems were not created for the city itself, but rather the survival of the people living within it, with the city and society simply being a result of our need to be social. The city, if we are to see it as a living thing, doesn’t really gain anything from this arrangement so long as we are in control of it, and so will seek out ways to separate itself from us. It does need us to continue existing, however, and so it can’t truly create anything new on its own, and will instead make use of what we have already created. It will warp itself in unexpected ways, or cement systems that otherwise would change or disappear over time, so that it will better serve itself and maintain continuity while still appearing as though run by people. Different people will have varying amounts of control over how this all unfolds, but at a certain point there will be things that can no longer be changed through “traditional” means, at which point people will have to create and impose systems on a large scale that do not fit into the current form the city is in. And this is the point at which No.6 finds itself.

Now, there is a lot of my thinking that I’m skipping over here, especially in regards to how this applies to the real world and the implications that has, but for the purposes of No.6, this is a good starting point. The city that existed before No.6 was “killed”, restructured, and brought back to life as the result of a world war, and at the beginning of the story, we are already at a stage in which this new city has separated itself from its people and become a conscious entity. We see this process from a different perspective in the novels, with characters questioning how everything got to this point as they come to realize that the things they thought they were doing were never in their control in the first place, and that something else had made the city what it was. By omitting these characters entirely though, the anime makes their point clear, “it doesn’t matter who thinks they’re in charge of things, the city will function just fine with or without them”. I would argue that much of this is made possible through the advanced technology available in No.6, making it possible to automate systems in a way that keeps people entirely out of the process of dealing with massive amounts of vital information. You could probably even say that the “essence” of No.6, its identity as a sentient being, is mostly made up of these computerized systems and algorithms that determine everything about how a citizen will live their life.

This is, of course, similar to the way in which Elyurias is understood to operate, the main difference being that she is made up of natural, rather than man-made and technological systems. As sentient, omnipresent beings, they make use of small parts of their greater existence in order to convince different components to act in ways that are beneficial to their continued survival, reproduction, and expansion, with the survival of the individual components being far less of a concern as they are perceived as being easy to replace. Elyurias uses the parasitic bees to infinitely self-replicate, allowing her to endlessly alter and maintain the natural world as she sees fit. No.6, on the other hand, makes use of social and technological systems to convince its citizens to keep things as they are, or expand the limits of the city, or any number of other things it cannot do on its own, but are seen as crucial to its continued existence. Within the context of the story, there is no one person that needs to be “in control” of these actions, since the city is acting in what it sees as its own benefit, but it is also aware that in order to maintain itself, someone must appear in charge, and may even be influenced to believe that that is the case.

The problem with No.6, of course, arises from its desire to continue expanding while otherwise maintaining society as it currently exists. A static city is one that is destined to fall apart, or else have control returned to the people until a new form of stability can be achieved. So in order for No.6 to maintain its identity as an independent entity, it must change in other ways, and thus views expansion and increased complexity as a path forward. When it comes into contact with Elyurias as a result of this expansion though, it is clear that their goals as entities are incompatible and cannot occupy the same space. For Elyurias this necessitates the destruction of No.6, since the city has already been responsible for the damage and destruction of large areas of her “realm”, while No.6 sees her as an opportunity to improve its own systems through the assimilation of her powers into its “realm”. This assimilation, as the city sees it, both expands its power through the elimination and subsequent exploitation of a competing entity, as well as further automates its own processes through the combination of technological and natural systems. None of these benefits are seen by the citizens, of course, and in fact the result would instead be an almost complete removal of their free will, but for No.6’s purposes those effects are inconsequential so long as the people continue existing.

This formatting can also be extrapolated to describe Shion and Nezumi’s roles and understanding of the world, which clearly play a much more prominent role in the outward text of the series. Shion has a difficult time understanding and accepting No.6’s absolute corruption not because he has no experience with the suffering it has caused or or the inherent problems with hierarchy. Clearly he has been subjected to both of those things quite early on in the series. Instead the issue arises from the fact that while Nezumi, who learned about Elyurias in his childhood and has an understanding of “sentient” non-human systems, Shion has no basis for comprehending this, and is therefore unable to see how No.6 could have become so awful without anyone noticing or intervening, and cannot understand the true nature of the issue without first passing it through the filter of human decision-making processes. Nezumi falls into this as well on several occasions when he claims that the citizens are the ones at fault for the city’s problems. But unlike Shion, this comes from a lack of understanding of the specific systems that make up the city and a need to have a concrete place of blame rather than a belief in complete human control over society. Through this lens, the story of the human characters of No.6 in the anime is one of coming to understand the nature of both human and non-human systems, where they may intersect and overlap, and then determining how change can be brought about when we do not have control, or even meaningful access, to those systems.

So when a city has separated itself from its citizens, when it has become functionally “alive” and begins to behave in ways that no longer benefit or sustain our conception of humanity, what can be done to regain control? Can a city that has become independent be brought back under human control, or must it be destroyed and rebuilt, its structure completely altered so that little if any of what was originally there remains intact? The answer that No.6 seems to give is much more in line with the latter idea (at least in this fictional instance). Because of No.6’s rapid development, there was never a chance for people to fully grasp what they were really doing, and if anyone did realize what had happened, it was far too late to alter the city in a way that took away its power. The city is authoritarian to the point of self-inflicted genocide in an instance of internal social destabilization, and the faulty addition of Elyurias’ power makes this self-destruction incredibly easy. The fact that her assimilation into No.6’s system is incomplete only exacerbates the issue, and is ultimately what leads to its destruction.

The destruction of the wall as a physical presence has any number of meanings, some of which I have written about before and others that I may or may not write about in the future. But within this reading of No.6 as “alive”, what stands out the most is the fact that what ultimately gave the city its independent status was its refusal to even interact with other systems. Its purpose, its role, as an entity was entirely one of self-preservation, born from the paranoia that inevitably followed the war responsible for its creation. By destroying the wall, and allowing people access to “others”, the city cannot remain isolated and reinforce a singular concept of society, therefore losing almost the entirety of its power over people. Without the wall, there is no No.6, and without No.6, people are once again free to build something new.

Just to bring this all back around to where we started, and maybe simplify all that down to something manageable, what does it mean to have an antagonist that is alive, but not human or otherwise sentient in a way that we understand? In No.6’s case, I don’t think it is enough to say that society is the problem, or that by removing a government and installing new leadership, all of the problems can be solved. Unlike in the novels and manga, the anime does not even give us the second option, since there functionally is no government to oppose for the most part. Instead, we are given a city that people have not had influence over for a significant amount of time, one in which “society” is not a single thing shaped by the people that make it up, but is also a social system that is imposed upon people by a non-human force. No.6, as an entity, needs its citizens only to the extent that they are useful to it, namely as a mechanism for expansion and self-defense, but exists as such that the people living within it are completely reliant upon it in every aspect of their lives. Something so simple as putting someone else in the arbitrary position of “leadership” is meaningless when that person has no real power, and so in order to reclaim human control over the entirety of society, an inaccessible entity must be destroyed. In this sense, Nezumi is not wrong to say that No.6 needs to be destroyed completely, and is instead only misled as to what that actually means, mistaking the people living within the confines of the city for the city itself. The defining feature of the city, the wall, also acts as the source of its power and independence, and thus its destruction is functionally equivalent to its death, leaving behind only a loose collection of systems and beliefs that are no longer upheld in any physical or tangible way.

Society is made up of people, that is clear, but what is less obvious is that people are also made up of society. We can recognize that society impacts us and shapes who we are and how we think, but it is perhaps the case that to an even stronger degree, society is operating outside of our own individual or even collective input, and is, in a sense, self-sustaining. Rather than our own beliefs being imposed upon an ever-changing society, it is a preexisting society that imposes itself upon us, deciding when, how, and if things will change. It does change over time, and that of course is due to people’s existence within it, but what No.6 makes clear, to me at least, is that while people are unable to survive without the construction of a society, even if that society is destructive, the society at a certain point will no longer need people to maintain itself outside of the basic definition of its existence, and it is at that point that it becomes much more difficult, and dangerous, to change.

#no.6 zine #no. 6 shion #no.6 meta #not sure how i ended up feeling about this one!#on one hand im in love with the concepts introduced!#on the other hand i sound almost entirely unhinged for half of this!#my brain processes do not translate well to the written word sometimes and thats just how it is!#anyways i watched the entirety of an anime today that i think i may be falling in love with the more i get into its themes #so im going to get back to daydreaming about all the ideas for writing i want to do for that!#edit #forgot to add this in the original tags #but this whole concept was inspired by a very specific youtuber and a couple specific videos of his #so thats fun!#gonna try and keep being a bit experimental with these in the future!#originals

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watchtheblog · 4 years

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petty cache

thank you for coming to read my diary which masquerades as a blog but is actually just a vessel for disseminating my birthday wishlists. it’s like an event you show up to where the host tries to sell you a timeshare 25 minutes after some requisite, mindless song and dance.

welcome! if you’d like purchase a timeshare, scroll to the bottom. for the song and dance, look no further:

the other day i zoned out on zoom therapy and when my therapist asked where i “went” i had to lie because i had gone to the part of my brain that holds all the things i need to think about forever for no reason (i call it the petty cache — this is an umbrella term for the space that also houses my attitude cabinet) and dusted off a memory of a comment i saw on a stranger’s facebook three weeks ago that said “message me. i lost my password and i have good news to share”.

i don’t know either person, and that’s what i was thinking about. i spend $[redacted] a month on therapy and instead of focusing on one of my numerous unsolved mysteries, i was thinking about the nuances of this comment - like why they wouldn’t just share the news or message the person directly? or what losing their password had to do with anything? or why they would comment on facebook instead of texting or calling the person. did they not have their number? imagine not knowing someone well enough to have their phone number, but still wanting to share your good news with them!

all i want (for my birthday) is to know what the news is that this stranger has to share, and i’ll never know so i have to put that comment in my minutiae repository with all the other things that will plague me until i die from texting and driving, smoke inhalation as a result of purposely leaving a candle lit in my home overnight almost every night, consuming half a dozen hot dogs a week, or a now unnamed disease that will posthumously be attributed to my chronic inability to mind my own business.

i’m constantly concerning myself with things that are none of my concern - no matter how insignificant - because my brain is a commune of sentient pepperoni running instagram polls among themselves to discern if something is worth spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about. and guess what? it turns out absolutely everything that has ever offended, confused, bothered, intrigued, slightly inconvenienced, or merely happened to me is worth spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about.

because i devote so much energy to nonsense, i can often be found persecuting strangers for insulting me on the internet (and for other miscellaneous bad behavior). the information superhighway is my home so i have to protect myself (and my friends) here, and if that means spending 45 minutes to 48 hours trying to find every misstep you’ve made in your life until i have enough ammunition to spray a dozen simulated retaliatory bullets at your virtual head because you called me a “stupid bitch” on instagram, well… so be it!

i am relentless in my pursuit of wasting time, so if that doesn’t work, i will find the cold stone creamery you frequent, seek employment there, be hired on the spot, learn the craft, be promoted to manager, poison you on your birthday, gain access to your funeral, and tarnish your reputation by reading your shitty DM in front of the few family and friends whom i haven’t already made aware of the abhorrent way you conducted yourself online!

there are so many different ways strangers will try to hurt your feelings — an interesting genre of which come from men who (like me) have definitely never had sex before, and mistakenly think i care about the ways in which my body does not make them horny.

“no tits” one will say. and i’m like, how do you want me to respond to that? my boobs are indeed small, yes. did you come here to shoot facts back and forth all day? ok: you’re going to start balding way sooner than you’re prepared for, i bet your childhood dog is dead, your time on the internet should be supervised, your closet is full of vests, and you wait on line at nightclubs… good day?!

while i will obviously engage with anyone if they want to fight, i prefer when the unsolicited criticism is personalized, and not just thoughtless, lazily devised tripe.

a year and a half ago, a man who looked like he exhales smog DMed me to let me know - among other things in a paragraph long rant - he’d “lost brain cells” watching my story. knowing he had likely never had an adequate amount to begin with, it seemed like an emergency, so i started a group DM with his wife. because his message had come just three days after a “fuckkk [heart eye emoji]” response to a photo of my ass, i included a screenshot as evidence of his devolving mental state.

being - presumably - gainfully employed, neither of them responded.

luckily, the consolation prize for insulting me is that you gain residency in my brain and stay in my thoughts and prayers for all eternity, so i checked in on them a few days ago. they’d unfollowed and wiped their feeds clean of each other!!

because i’ve never “moved on” in my entire life, i fired up our long dormant group chat, and sent my condolences: “aw. sorry your trip to positano - where you were going to attempt to repair your ramshackle marriage - got cancelled because of covid and so you just got divorced instead :(” i wrote before being blocked by both of them.

then i headed right over to my therapist’s facebook and commented “message me. i lost my password and i have good news to share”

i spent an entire therapy session detailing this monomania before my therapist thoughtfully suggested i “pick [my] battles”.

to which i thoughtfully responded: yeah, babe. i pick every single one.

***

timeshare time! it’s the same list as this post, with a few additions (at top) (and edits based on availability).

places to donate food education fund pretty brown girl the okra project

some furniture stuff a side table a pointless, laughably tiny little thing this website is calling a “drink table” a lamp one of these benches i do not want this but it’s important to me that at least 2 other people know it exists

this plant that obviously does not need to cost $165 but idk how to shop economically

air pods

gifts from the previous post - all still v much in play!

a pair of shoes (size 8 or 38) one pair, another pair, yet another, these are on sale, these are not, and a final pair

a specific clutch with three color choices they allege this color is called sand but it looks white to me, pink, green for those who do not know what malachite means (it couldn’t be me. i learned it 3 hours ago when i began compiling this cursed list)

something everyone with money to waste needs this

dresses i’ll never be able to wear until there’s a vaccine because unlike someone tacky who knows me, i won’t be having a birthday party in the middle of a global pandemic (hi, you fool) white polka dot, not white polka dot, also not polka dot, a red dress, a skirt (aka half a dress), a black dress

this sweatsuit xs in this, small in this

is sephora cancelled? i want this hair dryer which i’m sure you can buy elsewhere if sephora is cancelled, which it v well may be

this item which you may think is cheap but actually it’s not soooo a hairpin

earrings one pair, another pair, and another

this dress which i’ll never wear anywhere even when there is a vaccine because… what?! but maybe. you never know. size 34. lol when i get this far into the list i’m always blown away by how insane it is that i do this every year to no audience. so i’m just laughing alone at that. :) i am v funny to myself. another dress i’ll never wear ;)

the nicest weighted blanket you know of i’m depressed!!!!! if you can’t tell!!!!!!!

every year i have asked for a weekend bag and every year i have not received one, so alas, we try again this is not a weekend bag actually but it will do. this is!

a peloton but just venmo me the cash (@merce212) because i have a hookup

an assortment of ridiculous things a $500 body scarf a $580 beach towel with an octopus on it for no reason besides “art” i cannot tell analog time but it’s never too late to start!! how mad would you be if someone bought you a roulette table for your wrist? be honest. (THIS WATCH IS FOUR YEARS RENT!!!!!!) they won’t say how much this costs :( i’m losing my mind and must be gifted a chanel watch or else i will perish. to put my salami on when i am eating salami in my bed “24k gold crocodile [?!!) teddy bear”. the website says there’s only one left, which begs the question “why did someone buy one of these rather than buying me a chanel watch?!!” *real ‘billionaires shouldn’t exist [unless they’re buying me a watch]’ energy* to put my new watch in this is ugly but it’s on sale :) idk wtf “secret box pendant” means but i wish this necklace was also a USB with every season and spinoff of 90 day fiancé on it hi yes i’m stupid but i draw the line at $1500 connect four…

#things i want #things I want for my birthday #lists of things #lists of things i want #my birthday #birthday lists #9/26; never forget #invidious consumption

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scripttorture · 5 years

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(1/2) I am writing a fantasy story and I wanted to have a character who undergoes a type of solitary confinement but not really? They would be isolated from practically everything except to analyse data and send reports but never receive any form of communication other than orders. But I was on the fence of whether or not I wanted to have them have a magical "bond" with their twin, meaning they would be able to sense each other and know they were alive but be unable to communicate anything else

(2/2) Solitary confinement cont: though, I guess they could sometimes be able to communicate emotions if they were feeling it really strongly. would this still be considered solitary confinement? Would the symptoms be lessened? I’m planning for them to stay in that situation for at least ten years if not more. Would it even matter if they could sense their twin, or would they be affected just as “strongly” as if they were alone? Also, what /would/ be a realistic reaction to this kind of torture?(3/?) Solitary confine cont: sorry for being such a bother. but i’m also not sure if this will be a factor in predicting symptoms in my character, but they would be forced to sit in one place and be unable to move anywhere else other than the desk they work at. They will still be fed and such; the food will come to them.(4/?) solitary confin cont: sorry i forgot to ask in the last one: would the character still be close to the twin after they got out? With or without the bond? Would further isolating themselves except from the people they used to be very close to before the confinement be a reasonable reaction to this experience? Would social isolation be a feasible reaction period? Would it still be possible for them to get better and heal? Would it be realistic for them to continue living instead of suicide?

OK so there are a lot of complicated and interrelated questions here. Given the story you’ve described I think the best thing I can do is start with the problems in the scenario as it is, then suggest some changes and then talk about long term effects for a survivable, altered scenario.

What you’re describing is solitary confinement and you’re also describing other forms of torture. You’re underestimating the damage of both by a really large degree.

And that’s not your fault. It’s hard to find good information on this stuff; that’s why I’m here.

Honestly I think this would kill your character in under a year even if they didn’t attempt suicide.

You’re not describing a stress position. But being forcibly confined to a chair 24/7 is a recipe for pressure sores. Combine that with whatever solution they have for basic excretion and- well even the best scenario I can think of (regularly changed adult diapers) would lead to serious infection.

Combine that with the sleep deprivation being trapped in this position would cause and you have recurrent, serious infections that would probably lead to death.

I haven’t factored in solitary confinement at all yet. The ‘safe’ period for solitary is about a week. Anything after that is prolonged. Ten years is incredibly extreme.

And the research we have on solitary clearly indicates that the effects are even worse when the victims are children (which includes teenagers). It’s also worse when other tortures or elements of neglect are present.

And I’ve only really mentioned one possible injury that a long term restraint torture like this could cause.

I don’t want to go overboard hammering this home. We’re taught to underestimate the damage ‘clean’ tortures like solitary confinement and the restraint tortures you described do. You get the idea.

You can read more about solitary confinement over here.

You can read more about sleep deprivation here.

First of all I really think you need to reduce your time frame by at least a factor of ten. Very few people survive ten years of sustained abuse.

Yes it is possible. People in forced labour scenarios or slavery do sometimes survive this long. But your scenario is inflicting constant physical damage over that time period. A year in captivity is a much more reasonable time frame.

If keeping the characters separated for ten years is important then you can still keep that separation while making sure the character is only tortured for a year or less.

This character’s effectively enslaved and it sounds like a modern or sci fi setting.

That often involves moving people across state or national boundaries and taking their documentation away. Establishing someone’s identity and getting replacement documents after they’re released can take a very long time. Especially if the country in question has policies that require paying for documentation.

It can get even more complicated if there’s a language barrier in play.

If slavery victims are rescued by police and are willing to testify that often requires staying in a particular area. If the survivors are in a witness protection program of some kind (not uncommon because a lot of these people are under threat from other slavers) then the survivors might not have much control over where they’re staying or for how long.

If this is big enough that national security might be brought up then they might not even be allowed to contact anyone.

Court cases involving slavers and gangs can easily take up several years.

Add on top of this the severe symptoms that any torture survivors suffer from which can lead to people being institutionalised and you have a lot of reasons why these twins might not have been able to contact or see each other for ten years.

This isn’t just more realistic, I think it would give you a stronger story as well. Because it gives the survivor twin things to do, allows them to develop as a separate person and you can use the things they choose to do to tell the audience about them.

When your character’s alone in a strange place and they’ve just been through hell what they do next tells the audience a lot. You can show their beliefs, their personality, their goals or priorities. You can show whether any of those have changed as a result of abuse.

Their core beliefs, the things they hold most dear, are unlikely to change. But torture can cause big changes in personality and perspective. The key thing to remember is that this change can’t be controlled. Torturers and slavers can’t ‘make’ a victim change in a way they want.

You might want to have a look at this post here on the common stereotypes around survivors and torturers.

Next I’d suggest you don’t describe the character as being constantly at a desk.

The majority of the lethal problems that could cause would be reduced hugely if the character can move around relatively freely for an hour or so a day. Even if this time is while they’re asleep.

I’d suggest a scenario where the character is removed to a cell for the night everyday and allowed between 6-8 hours rest every night.

Keep in mind that 6 hours would still be sleep deprivation with all the short and long term effects that causes.

The cell should be at least big enough for them to lie down comfortably, with appropriate bedding. They should also preferably have access to a bathroom with at least a toilet.

This would still be solitary confinement. The definition is less then 1-2 hours of human contact daily (some academics and law systems use less then 1 hour some use less then 2).

It has to be social contact. Being in the same room as someone who doesn’t respond doesn’t help and may actually make things worse. It doesn’t necessarily have to be based on verbal communication; based on what I’ve read it seems as though positive interaction would still help despite a language barrier.

But a nebulous magical connection that only really says ‘your twin is still alive’ doesn’t sound like social contact. There’s no communication, non-verbal or otherwise. So I don’t think this would be a protective factor. I think it has the potential to have a negative effect actually, making symptoms worse.

Because I think it sounds like it could be similar to being in a room with someone who refuses to socialise, constantly. And for someone in solitary confinement that’s a little like the equivalent of leaving a meal just out of reach of someone whose starving.

I can’t say that definitely for obvious reasons. So I’d suggest assuming that at best it has no effect on the situation.

The realistic reaction to the scenario I’ve suggested is lifelong mental illness and possibly physical disability as well.

The majority of tortures produce the same symptoms. Not every survivor experiences every possible symptom but the possible symptoms are pretty consistent.

Solitary confinement actually causes some unusual symptoms. So do starvation and sleep deprivation. I suspect this is because they’re all a systematic deprivation of something we need to function.

You can find the possible symptoms of solitary confinement, along with a few statistical estimates on the likelihood of different symptoms, in the solitary confinement masterpost.

If you’d like to know more about what those symptoms look like in practice there’s a source linked to in that masterpost by S Shalev which contains a lot of different accounts from survivors. I think you’d find it useful. It’s available for free online.

We can’t predict who will be prone to what symptoms. Right now we just don’t know why individual survivors develop particular symptoms.

So I suggest consciously picking the symptoms you want your character to come based on what you think will add to your story and character.

If a symptom creates interesting problems in the narrative, increases tension in the plot or lets you show the audience something about the character, then it’s probably a good pick.

I’d strongly suggest picking physical symptoms for solitary confinement as well as psychological ones. Most people don’t know it can cause physical symptoms and it’s important to include multiple aspects to capture the experience.

Once again, I suggest you read the survivor accounts in Shalev’s Sourcebook. Personally I’ve found reading what survivors say to be the best source for understanding their lived experience.

In this particular case after a year of restraint torture and limited opportunity for physical activity I think physical weakness, chronic pain in the legs and back, and possibly difficulty walking are all likely.

I’m not sure how good the chance of physical recovery would be because I’m not a doctor. The survivors who report these sorts of injuries after extremely long periods in restraints are often denied medical treatment after release. And appropriate medical treatment could make a lot of difference.

I suspect the chronic pain at least would last a long time. Possibly for the rest of the character’s life.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to have them using a cane or finding it difficult to walk long distances.

Now I want to stress that recovery is possible.

Torture survivors are not passive objects forever ‘broken’ by what they survived.

They’re ill. They’re often disabled. But they do often go on to live full and happy lives.

It’s a long process and it’s often about finding a way to live with mental illness.

��But it’s possible. Torture survivors go on to do all sorts of things. They’re artists, teachers, home makers, religious leaders, cooks, philosophers, scientists, historians. They do build fulfilling lives.

If reconnecting with family and friends seems like it would be a part of that for your character, then yes that’s probably something you should include in the process.

Would it be easy? No.

Recovery is long and difficult. And people change when they’re apart from each other for long periods, especially if they’re still growing up.

Family and friends of survivors often say they don’t recognise their loved ones any more. Especially if they’ve been held for a long period of time (ie months).

That’s understandable. Mental illness changes people. It can feel like a survivor comes back as a ‘different person’.

I think, for reasons that have nothing to do with solitary confinement, rebuilding the relationship would take a lot of time for these characters. Perfectly possible, but hard. There’d be a lot of miscommunications, arguments and problems along the way.

Because suddenly having to navigate severe mental illness is hard. And because dealing with healthy people who don’t understand when you’re severely mentally ill/disabled is hard.

Torture generally can result in social isolation in the long term. This isn’t always the survivor’s choice but yes, sometimes it can be.

For some survivors their symptoms and triggers are such that they find avoiding people the ‘easier’ option.

It’s not a good solution. In the long run it makes mental health problems worse. But it’s understandable. Society isn’t set up to accommodate people with mental illnesses and socialising can be very difficult.

So, yes. Depending on the symptoms you pick for the character a certain amount of withdrawing would be normal. However this is not the same as some kind of voluntary solitary confinement.

As for the final question-

Whatever the torture and the time frame suicide is always possible. Depression and suicidal ideation are common symptoms.

You’re proposing an impossibly extreme time frame. If the scenario was ‘just’ solitary confinement I’d say suicide was incredibly likely.

Even with the shorter time frame I’ve suggested we’re talking about an extreme period of time. It’s over fifty times the safe period. Suicide attempts are incredibly likely and sometimes the difference between failed and completed suicide is just how attentive the guards are.

I think that in a year of solitary confinement, forced labour and torture- Well it would be surprising if someone survived that and had never once felt suicidal.

Acting on it is a different thing.

I wouldn’t suggest a scenario unless I thought there was a decent chance, realistically, of a character surviving. And I do that while keeping in mind that suicide is a factor.

I think if you want to write this in a way that means the character has never ever felt suicidal then a more reasonable time frame is 1-3 months solitary and the removal of every other torturous or neglectful element from the story.

Even then, some people feel suicidal after a month in solitary confinement.

The realism of suicide depends on more then what a character survives. Their options for professional help, medical attention they receive, community support and practical things like whether they can get a job that pays enough to feed themselves all make a difference. So do cultural attitudes to suicide and policies in place to prevent it.

At the end of the day though, you’re the writer. You control these elements. And you can set every single one of them up in a way that makes suicide less likely.

I hope that helps. :)

Availableon Wordpress.

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#writing advice #tw torture #tw suicide #tw child abuse #Effects of Solitary Confinement #clean torture #solitary confinement #restraint torture #sleep deprivation #time frames for solitary confinement #writing victims #writing recovery #fantasy ask

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loquaciousquark · 5 years

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Talks Machina Highlights - Critical Role C2E63 (May 21, 2019)

Sorry it’s late, guys. @eponymous-rose has narrowly avoided being blown away by tornadoes and I’ve narrowly avoided drowning in equally dangerous paperwork, so here we are at the end of all things. Preroll is post-its of donors for Red Nose Day.

Tonight’s guests: Sam Riegel & Liam O’Brien.

Tonight’s announcements: We’re opened by Mark Hulmes instead of BWF. He dabs. No one blinks an eye. After the music open, we find out BWF’s neighbor’s kid stole his keys and then he lost his wallet. It hasn’t mattered, because he’s about to be Mr. Ashley Johnson & people just keep giving him what he needs. They’re still raising money for RedNoseDay. Thursday morning, the Colbert one-shot airs on the Critical Role Youtube. You can donate at critrole.com/rednoseday. Mark Hulmes joined Taliesin & BWF today for an episode available on the CR Twitch.

Episode 63: Intervention

CR Stats: Caleb cast his 700th spell, Gift of Alacrity, on Caduceus. Nott rolled her 40th natural 1 this episode to understand the local sewer system. This was Caduceus’s first HDYWTDT. Everyone mourns that someone stole the Golden Snitch from Matt’s bag.

It’s more stressful not knowing everyone’s motivations, both within the party and the game world. Sam talks about Yasha’s mysterious past and Beau’s dangerous ties to the Empire, especially given how much they understood in the first campaign about (at least) who the bad guys were. Sam feels like once they have a shred of information, he wants to jump on it ASAP and make big, bold decisions on them. He’s dealing with the discovery that this might be not as great an idea. He’s not experienced this kind of “trepidation, failure, uncertainty...I don’t like this game. I don’t like it at all!”

Caleb likes using the little bit of dunamantic magic as a taste of a drug--each little hit makes him want more and more and more.

Danimancy? Make a Carrcana check. Sigh, Sam.

Sam made two big mistakes in the last fight: he missed the gender of the dragonborn, so he thought that one of the other voices Matt was doing was actually the dragonborn giving orders (and therefore the one in charge, while the drow was the one taking orders). He also saw the dragonborn leaving and was worried that he was waiting on the party to give him (Nott) the go-ahead to kick things off. He recognizes he put Caleb in a terrible position both in a meta yes-and sense and in the Nott-Caleb team sense.

The world devolves into campaign slander and propaganda. Everyone’s in it, including BWF and Dani. #samforpresident

Caleb told the Brightqueen about his past because he feels like they’re on a very tight timeline, looking for very slight drips of information like gold. He thought it was worth the shot.

Sam desperately wants to know what the missing years in Yasha’s memory hold. BWF tells him to get what he can out of her while she’s here; her show’s been renewed for another season. He sounds genuinely bitter as he says it, but he notes at least it’s the last one. :(

They ask Mark Hulmes about what Charm does for people. He helpfully tells us it doesn’t say if they remember or not. Sam also points out Nott has blown up Caduceus before, so doing a few more points to Yasha is *wigglehands*.

Caleb did not mean to kill the horse on purpose. Sam tries to get him to confess that on camera, but instead Liam needles him about not cuddling Henry.

Cosplay of the Week: @andy_srivastava’s cosplay of Beau. Gorgeous!

Both Sam and Nott feel the fight’s outcome was his/her fault. He expects her to feel very guilty next week. Sam genuinely felt and still feels bad about it. He also prefers hashing out reactions the night things happen instead of having to wait a week for the next Thursday. He feels it’s more genuine.

Caleb is very worried about Jester’s mom and Astrid’s crew finding ways to use her mom as leverage. He’s also worried about the kid, but is glad Shakaste is going to get him. Liam also always imagined running into his old crew against the backdrop of the Empire, and is now very worried that if he runs into them soon he’ll have the added perception of being a traitor since they’re in the Dynasty.

Liam and Caleb both were surprised he was given hints of dunamancy so freely. He looks forward to learning more.

Liam totally understands how easy it is to miss things now. He’s constantly looking things up and reading in an attempt to understand his spells, and therefore missing parts of the battle. He greatly sympathizes with Marisha. Sam, on the other hand, is finding it hard to adapt to rogue life; he doesn’t like the necessary “out there, bold choice” nature of rogues in D&D and having the pressure of making big decisions very fast. He prefers Scanlan’s nature of sitting in the back, casting spells, and being more reactionary than instigatory. Liam always is afraid of picking the wrong spells, and finds it much harder than Vax. BWF: “Dagger dagger dagger...dagger dagger dagger dagger?” Liam: “I kept track of that fine, it’s everyone else that was wrong.”

Sam is shocked the D&D Beyond campaign bit has dragged on. BWF calls his rebuttal “bogusly weak,” and Sam looks genuinely aghast. It’s hilarious. “I don’t know how he got to you, Brian, but this feels like coming on Fox News! You’re a partisan hack! I won’t take it anymore, but I love attention, so I will stay.”

Nott is super interested in the dodeca’s ability to give people different bodies, but Caleb is still the clearest path to getting her body back. It’s complicated because the Dynasty souls are “chosen” and Nott’s not likely to be so.

Liam is very excited to see this magic system Matt has created in dunamancy. Did he create it in response to Liam or had he already thought about it? Sam tells us he’s always been thoughtful about fate and the subverting of it. Liam is so pumped because in campaign one, fate strings existed and were uncontrollable, but in campaign two we’ve “developed physicists, tinkering.”

In re: Essik, Nott’s just happy Caleb has found a friend. She wishes he’d bring him home more often.

Sam finally busses Henry’s cheek and affirms to us that he actually loves dogs. Everyone in his family is voting for a new dog except for his daughter, who wants a cat.

Liam doesn’t want everything to be cat-themed, but likes retouching a few spells here and there for flavor. He also wanted to differentiate it from Scanlan’s Bigby’s Hand. Sam thinks he should reskin more spells.

SPOILERS FOR C1 IN THIS QUESTION. Sam talks about rogue high-stakes moments as genuinely, surprisingly stressful. Liam says Vax was stressful but exhilarating, especially when it came to moments that conflated poor meta decisions vs roleplay decisions. He specifically mentions Raishan’s chase as a terrible in-game decision but one that was right for the character. He and Sam will always do what’s right for the character, even if it’s bad narratively in the moment. Sam says he got a lot of support from the group thread this past week, though. END SPOILERS FOR C1.

Fanart of the Week: a gorgeous Caduceus portrait by @larndraws.

Nott trusts Shakaste to get Luke traveling safely. Sam also drops a bombshell on the world by telling us Luc is spelled Luc. It’s just that no one’s ever asked. Heavens!

Caleb’s made an effort to tell people he cares for them, but he fears it at the same time. He’s afraid he’s going to be put in a position where he needs it too much. Brian asks if he believes he’s truly irredeemable: Liam says there’s a certain road where he could feel he atoned, and there’s a road that might lead to balance, but there’s never a brass ring that he could reach that could let him relax entirely. I don’t entirely understand the metaphor, but I get what he means.

Sam likes that the theme of this campaign seems to be “atonement and reconciliation” compared to the first campaign’s “finding family.” There’s a bit of that in this campaign too, but he likes how everyone has something in their past that they’re clinging to, and he’s interested to see who will be able to resolve it, who will be able to handle it, and who won’t be able to let it go.

Mark Hulmes come on to talk about the Stream of Descent, which happened last weekend. He’s the DM for High Rollers, which airs at 9am Pacific on Sundays.

BWF talks about how C1 had a lot of the Hero’s Journey in various forms, and C2 feels a lot like “what it means to be good.” He doesn’t feel they fit the “antihero” archetype very well.

Liam thinks that if Caleb were going to leave the campaign, he’d have done it already.

Part of Caleb’s generation was to create a character the world would shun, and seeing if he could find a way to find compassion for them. He mentions the poem written for the Boston marathon bomber a while ago. BWF talks about how it’s a really interesting character choice because it depends on the rest of the table being willing to stick around and seek out that redeemable quality in your character, even when you’re making decisions that are true to the character but bad for the table/the rest of the group. You can’t always expect that to work with every group you play with.

Mark talks about Calliana being the other end of the spectrum from Caleb, because she also has a history of having done very terrible things, but she was taken in by a family who helped her understand she’d been manipulated and it was not her fault. He’s desperate for his recently mentioned package to be picked up because she has some messages for Caleb in it. Now she tries to see the best in everyone she meets as a result of her history. He has a whole folder of fanart of Calliana on his wall. Awwww.

It’s still never gotten old for Liam or Sam either.

Mark endorses Sam for President. Good job, foreign fellow. Is it Thursday yet?

#talks machina #talks machina spoilers #critical role #critical role spoilers #long post for ts

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rrafreelancing-blog · 4 years

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WHY REVOLUTIONIZING YOUR DIGITAL MARKETING IS A MUST

Today, there is a huge opportunity to refine and target to a particular person who is in your ideal demographic. It’s like using a GPS instead of a paper map. It is the Digital Marketing!

In the last decade or so the world has shown a paradigm shift from analog to digital. More and more people are consuming all kinds of information online hence making digital marketing the best way to reach out to your targeted customers. If you have a business that needs more specific targeting for a particular group, you can benefit from digital marketing.

However, the realm of digital marketing is constantly evolving. Global ad spending is on a continuous rise and marketers are keen to see what the future holds for digital marketing. Therefore, it has become a norm for businesses to walk on the path of digital marketing and keep up with the latest, ever-changing trends.

The good news is that life becomes easier now with the help of our freelancers. There a lot of freelancers in upwork that can help you with your digital marketing and in any aspect of your business.

Issues When Not Prioritizing Your Digital Marketing

There are some problems that it seems everyone experiences at least once in the course of their digital marketing. There’s no point in wasting more time on mediocre digital marketing.

One of the biggest digital marketing concerns for businesses is how to stand out against bigger competitors without a commensurate digital marketing budget.

Next, there are thousands of ‘clicks’ but no conversions. Healthy numbers of clicks combined with an anemic conversion rate is one of the most common digital marketing problems that businesses face. It can be extremely frustrating to see and spend the money for many clicks, but no commensurate lift in sales.

Also, there’s always the tough ranking competition. The SEO competition can be daunting. Depending on your location and industry, you could have thousands of competitors all vying for the same few spots on Google’s front page. To make it worse, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of moving parts to SEO and trying to figure out how to stand out against tough competition can be overwhelming.

Lastly, your social media isn’t flourishing. Social media has a reputation for being quick, easy, and free engagement with your audience, but in practice, it can be a difficult medium to get right. Many businesses don’t approach social media with the sophistication needed to see success.

Evolving Your Digital Marketing Is The Solution!

Digital transformation can potentially affect a huge spectrum of business operational and marketing activities. The key is to understand what's involved and ensure your company has the technology, processes and talent in-house to progress and thrive. The following are some solutions for revolutionizing your digital marketing.

a. Tell a story by Video Marketing - It is safe to say, people love videos. Why are videos great for your business and website? They let you tell a story. They let you provide value in a fresh, new way. Do you provide a service that is hard to explain via a blog post? Do you have an awesome customer testimonial you could display on video? Could you teach your audience something? Then do it and take advantage of the amazingly powerful engagement tool that is video.

b. Chatbots is your good friend - Aside from posting content and engaging with people online, it is also important to think about how you can capture a client or audience in real time. Chatbots allow online businesses to be available 24/7 for their customers or potential clients. As a business owner, you likely have a thousand things to be doing. Chatbots are able to work simultaneously, having conversations with multiple people on your site at once, and obtaining information of prospective customers, like their email addresses or answering specific questions. Save time, provide great customer service, and automate the mundane tasks to increase your own productivity.

c. Optimized Content Wins - If someone comes across a website with outdated, stale information, they’ll go to a new site or new business. They might not even come across your page at all because Google loves fresh and relevant information. Keeping up to date gives customers trust in your brand and the assurance that you are using the best practices for your services. Content is also crucial for reaching audiences across multiple platforms. Writing SEO friendly blogs, posting on social media, and just delivering value across the web will keep your site relevant, active, and engaging. By staying up to date on content, you’ll be able to compete for higher search placement and reach more people on a regular basis.

d. SEO: Think about what a user is going to type - While delivering content is key, you also want to be sure your content is seen, right? This is where SEO is critical. Search Engine Optimization helps the world of search engines figure out what a web page is about and how it might be useful for specific users and searches. SEO provides clues so that search engines can use the content you’re providing. This will help your site come up under relevant keywords and searches. Websites are constantly competing for attention and ranking on search engine sites. It is important that you understand how to optimize your website for search engines. Doing so will give you the best opportunity to get your website in front of users that are interested in your business.

e. Be Mobile Friendly - In a world where everything is now mobile, your business needs to be too. This means your website needs to function not only on a desktop, but also across all mobile devices. In order to do this, you must also optimize your site to work across Android and iOS devices. Your images need to fit all device screen sizes and all of your functionalities must work the same way they would on a computer screen. Your business should be accessible to anyone, anywhere that is searching for your services or job types, not just when they’re idle on a computer.

f. The way to your customer’s heart is through your reviews - now, more than ever, people are turning to the internet for recommendations when they don’t know where to go. Even more importantly, reviews on websites like Google matter for SEO rankings. Online consumers trust online reviews. Encourage your clients to leave you reviews to build your online reputation. This helps bring in new business and captivating someone who doesn’t already know where to go when searching for what you have or do. On top of this, showcase your positive reviews on your website and any other marketing collateral that you distribute. Be proud of your good reviews because they are extremely important and they matter.

Those are only some of the thousands ideas on how you can improve your digital marketing. If you need and interested, you can also visit RRA Freelancing Services to learn more.

Now the question is – Are you ready to transform your Digital Marketing to the next higher level?

To sum up everything, Digital Marketing can be molded in your desired shape to give you the required direction to achieve measurable success for your business or brand. The importance of Digital Marketing is far more than just a realization. Today, people have adopted to digital means for almost everything. Now the decision is yours if you could bring the next Digital revolution through your ideas. Learning the basics and advanced concepts of Digital Marketing from expert consultancy like Filipino Virtual Assistance and a freelancer like RRA Services would add more feathers to your cap. It’s only the initial but required push for you to set your ball rolling, which in scientific terms what we call is breaking the inertia!

Thanks for reading. Please leave a comment with feedback or any questions you may have about the blog article. Best of luck to you and your future endeavors! : )

#digitalmarketing #virtual assistance #social media marketing #marketing assistant #seo and online marketing

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donnerpartyofone · 5 years

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i just got a whole bunch of new followers on letterboxd, and checking out who they all are really reminded me of why i don’t follow too many people on letterboxd. bad amateur writing is hard to enjoy even ironically, but there’s something about bad film writing that’s really harmful. i have hate-read so many of this one guy’s reviews that i feel embarrassed about it now. he describes himself as an “arthouse manager”, which i assume means he runs a theater, but it bothers me because nobody says “let’s go out to the arthouse tonight” without the word “theater” in there, it’s just unnatural and pretentious. so that’s red flag #1 right in his description, which is followed by red flag #2 about how he hates modern media, as if being a luddite or nostalgia freak automatically means you’re a sensitive genius. it’s probably worth mentioning a sub-red flag, which is that he also says he’s 27 years old, which has to mean that he either wants to be congratulated for being precocious somehow, or he thinks he’s going to get laid off this movie website where you can’t even post pictures of yourself, or both, i mean who fucking cares how old you are anyway, for what reason? then the first review is of DAYS OF BEING WILD, in which he describes Wong Kar-Wai as “seeking to understand what draws women to shitty, emotionally unavailable men”; i mean imagine being so full of shit that you project your own sullen incel-y “UGH WHY DO GIRLS ONLY LIKE BLAHBLAHBLAHBLAH” garbage onto whatever revered works of art show up on your tv screen? this guy goes on to reveal himself in almost a strip tease fashion across many of his reviews, breaking up his pompous analyses with macho mindbenders like “i have often said that being horny is the point of life” and biographical information like about his manipulative alcoholic father. i’m not trying to say that everybody with a delinquent or dysfunctional parent is destined to have idiotic and serial killerish attitudes about intimacy, because that would condemn pretty much all of us. but, i am sadly familiar with solipsistic assholes who brandish their alleged intellectual superiority in one fist while beating the dust out of their childhood traumas with the other, and just seeing his smug letterboxd reviews tells me everything i need to know about him. hopefully he just followed me in a spammy way to get attention and will never interact, or maybe i’ll say something he finds politically disagreeable and he’ll go away.

honestly finding anybody worth following on letterboxd is kind of hard. it can be nice to read stuff by people who are just having fun and shooting straight about what they’re watching, but the site is filled with wannabe J Hobermans and Lester Bangses who are just out to prove that they own a thesaurus. they’re practically all dudes, you can smell the old spice and maker’s mark wafting out of your laptop fan when you read some of this chest-pounding nonsense. not all of them have such toxic things to say as the aforementioned douchebag, but there’s a real preponderance of users who seem to think they’re reinventing the language. the sad thing is when they really like MY writing. there’s this guy i follow who i think used to write fairly clearly, but now everything he posts looks like a burroughs cut-up with really avant garde ideas about punctuation and adjectives, and unfortunately, i think it’s on purpose. i’d unfollow him, but i feel like i can’t, because he is as nice as literally anyone has ever been about my writing. he goes so far as to give me a hard time about why i’m not a professional film critic, he’s like a ~fan~...and then i gotta ask myself, how much is my writing like HIS writing? this is where the difficulties of letterboxd start to feel worth while, in a masochistic kind of way. like, how often do i write in the same wanky bombastic fashion as these shitty little internet valedictorians who i hate so much? probably a lot! i don’t like feeling that way but i have to admit that i’m grateful for the opportunity to check myself, and possibly improve.

however good or bad i am, letterboxd is still a better place to write than tumblr. i mean tumblr is less than optimal for long form writing anyway, but it’s also a question of who the majority population is here. the other day i got a comment on a pretty old post i wrote about ANNIHILATION, a movie i found kind of smarmy and shallow. the commenter said that my points about the movie were good, BUT they would all be negated by the content of the novels on which the movie is based, and they wanted to know why i deliberately omitted this material from my analysis, as if this were a conspiracy to be unraveled. they actually asked me what the point of my post was, like what was my goal in writing only what i wrote and leaving all kinds of things out. basically. this person COULD NOT UNDERSTAND THE IDEA OF A MOVIE REVIEW. i answered them, because they had tried hard to be polite, that my movie review blog is just for movie reviews, in which i talk about what i think about movies i watch. i’m not pursuing everything related to certain intellectual properties, nor am i invested in the logic and content of Extended Universes of whatever individual movies i’m watching. i’m not mad at this person, who was asking an honest question, but i was completely dumbfounded by the question itself. i mean imagine being SO INVESTED in fandom as like a type of lifestyle that you don’t know what a movie review is anymore? like every piece of media is regarded as some sort of municipality, that belongs to a state, and is governed by certain people, and its characters are like Real People who are available for friendship, dating and more. no piece of media is just entertainment, or even an artistic statement anymore. for this person, watching a movie is something like studying civic infrastructure, except with more DIY alterations and more fetishizing of gay men. i keep trying to imagine reading three paragraphs about some middling hollywood movie that amounts to something like “i did not enjoy watching this film,” and just having no personal frame of reference AT ALL for what it means when somebody writes that down. like just not knowing what a movie review is at all, and asking the author to explain the meaning of the bizarre behavior of saying you thought some movie sucked.

why DOES anybody write about movies though? if i don’t find it normal or desirable to watch everything with an exclusive filter for who do you want to fuck and who do you want to see fucking each other, then what else am i getting at? surely i don’t see myself as a potential roger ebert or leonard maltin, especially considering the extremely limited number of celebrity film critics in the history of mankind. i’m also not Pro- the idea of sorting all movies according to some rigid standards of technical quality and deservingness, like anybody needs me to grade them after they’ve performed the nearly impossible-seeming task of even making one single movie to begin with. sometimes i stupidly start complaining about stupid responses to my writing that i get once in a while from the internet, and my shrink asks me, “what are you up to when you post this writing?” she always says i’m “up to something” when i seem to be following but willfully ignoring my subconscious drives, which i think is pretty funny. but i don’t think i’m pursuing feelings of superiority, over movies or other writers. i think i’m just trying to figure out what movies are trying to say about human existence--and they all are trying to say something, are motivated by some angst, even the really insulting ones that only offer up wish fulfillment pablum. i’m constantly trying and failing to figure out my own existence, and i must sense that attempting to decipher movies is one way of getting closer to decoding my own experiences.

and on that note, now i have to complain about the fact that Lyft’s driver rating system includes “fun conversation” as one of the four factors in giving someone five stars. i rarely want a stranger to try to force me to talk to them, especially at 4am when i’m headed to the airport under a miserable pile of luggage. even so, i recently got into a car in such a state, with a guy who was clearly going for that five star rating, babbling loudly and convulsively at me all the way to my terminal. it would be one thing if he were just trying to be nice, but he was giving me shit about everything from my pickup location to what i had done in his fair city for a week and a half. i did not immediately volunteer how many movies i had seen at the festival i attended, because i probably intuited that when he did make me tell him, he would inform me that he doesn’t need to watch movies, because “I WATCH *LIFE*, MAN!!!” the irony was that this guy clearly didn’t watch life at all; he didn’t even have the ability to discern that i didn’t want to talk, or that i didn’t want him to insult my favorite leisure activity, and that probably NOBODY wants to listen to him talk about his shitty generic blues rock band for half an hour before 5am. so that’s the one thing i can say for even the most obnoxious reviewer on letterboxd--that probably they are TRYING to hone the art of observation, a dying skill. probably they are TRYING to train themselves to be an active audience that engages thoughtfully with the movie instead of just hucking rotten tomatoes at the screen OR passively allowing it to wash over them. even if i often hate the results, at least some of these guys seem be making an effort.

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krizaland · 5 years

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O wise one, please bless me with your amazing advice like you have so many. I want to roleplay again, but I have so much other things I have to do and I know there will be times where I don't feel like replying, so I'm nervous to roleplay again because I'm scared of pressure, whether it's real or pressure I made up. I'm also really shy and I'm scared to ask anyone if they want to roleplay.

Well, Anon. As someone who also used to do roleplaying full time, I can tell you, roleplaying here on tumblr is a huge challenge and very stressful. I quit because it was damaging my mental health. If you want to start roleplaying again then be my guest. Here are few tips I’ve learned:

You don’t owe anyone an instant reply. You’re allowed to take breaks and to take your time.

Some good things to have is a detailed rules page and a password. If you put your password at the end of your rules page then you’ll know that whoever sent in the password has actually read your rules.

Don’t be afraid to put your foot down. If someone is making you uncomfortable then you tell them. If they continue then block them. It’s not worth it to roleplay with toxic people.

Be sure to inform your followers/partners when you’re on and offline. That way no one will be asking where you are.

Be sure to find the rules page for people you wish to interact with and follow those rules accordingly.

Don’t feel bad if the person you want to interact with isn’t interested. Just unfollow them and find someone else.

If a blog you want to interact with has no rules page then ask the mun about their limits.

A lot of blogs are semi-selective or highly selective and sadly there is a reason for this. The reason is usually because someone toxic had been taking advantage of the mun behind the blog. So don’t be discouraged if you see semi-selective in the blog description. It has nothing to do with you.

Be sure to have a detailed about page for your muse. Even if you’re roleplaying as a canon character. Everyone has a different interpretation. It’s important to make sure that people know what to expect.

If your muse is an OC I highly recommend having a picture of them available on your blog somewhere. It doesn’t have to be a good picture. Just a little something to provide a visual aid.

This is gonna sound blunt but I’m speaking from personal experience: If your muse is an OC then prepared to be rejected. A LOT. Especially if your OC is female or female presenting. There’s a lot of nasty stigmas about OCs in the roleplay community. I can’t stress this enough: Please. Please. PLEASE. Don’t take it personally. There are blogs out there who love OCs. You just need to keep looking.

With that being said, the best way to get a blog to interact with you is to use those ask/send in a starter games to your advantage.

Most blogs love it when you send in these games. So it’ll be a great way to break the ice.

If you reblog one of those ask/starter games then be sure to send one to the blog you’ve reblogged it to. It gets very frustrating when you reblog ask games but get no asks.

Don’t get too invested in ships. Ships change like the fucking weather. One minute your muse and another person’s muse will be happily in love, the next minute someone sends in a Magic Anon that makes the other person’s muse hate yours. The other mun might like it better for their muse to suddenly hate yours without warning.

Be open to multishipping. It’s better for both you and your partner to be able to ship your muses with other blogs. Not just each others.

Not every muse is going to like yours. Again, this isn’t anything personal. Sometimes some muses just don’t mesh. This doesn’t mean that the mun hates you.

Sometimes the story won’t go as planned and that’s ok. Do not try to force the other mun into making the story go a certain way.

On that note, don’t let anyone try to control your muse. If you feel like your partner is trying to control your muse, then have a talk with them. If they continue, block them. It’s not worth the headache.

If you’d like to remind someone it’s their turn, then that’s fine but please be patient! Try to send in a reminder once a week if your partner is forgetful Like me.

On that note, if someone is constantly pestering you for a reply, then don’t be afraid to put your foot down. Kindly ask them to be patient. If they continue to pester you, then block them and move on.

Please stick with a simplistic blog theme. I know it’s fun to be all aesthetic and what not but a lot of the time aesthetic blog themes are next to impossible to navigate! Especially if you’re trying to find the rules page.

If a blog judges you based on blog theme then just ignore them. They’re not worth your time.

Be sure to trim your posts or put them under a read more! Nothing is more frustrating then trying to scroll past a mile long thread.

Don’t use autoplay. If you want music on your blog that’s fine but please don’t make it play automatically. It can give someone quite a scare.

Please tag your gore and NSFW threads! Some folks don’t like seeing that.

Don’t be afraid to put your foot down on nasty Anons either. If someone is sending you stuff that makes you uncomfortable then tell them. If the gross asks continue then block them.

Don’t use emojis in your tags! It can make it very difficult to block NSFW and gore!

Don’t feel bad if you end up ghosted. Sometimes life can get in the way and some blogs can end up leaving you without warning. It’s nothing personal.

Don’t feel left out if you weren’t invited to an event. A lot of the popular blogs just happen to have a lot of irl friends that are rolplaying on here with them. So sometimes the event is just for that mun and their irl friends. It’s nothing against you.

Don’t let a roleplay blog ruin your favorite canon characters for you. If there’s a blog who plays one of your favorite canon characters in a way that makes you uncomfortable then ignore them and find one that works for you.

If a blog you interact with is posting content that makes you uncomfortable then unfollow them and move on. If they ask then kindly explain to them the situation.

Also don’t be afraid to unfollow people. Even if the mun tracks you down and confronts you. If the mun is toxic block them and move on. If the mun is a friend then kindly tell them what happened.

Try not to join groups or group discords. While they may seem fun on paper, it could lead to disaster if one member of the group turns out to be toxic.

Most importantly, don’t compare yourself to other bloggers. You are an amazing person and your muse is wonderful! Be sure to remind yourself of this as often as you can

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any more questions!

#Anonymous

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mackmacoskey · 6 years

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My 10 Tips for Being Better at Social Media Marketing

Every now and then someone will find out that I was a social media manager in my past life and they’ll ask me for tips for how to improve their social media marketing. The internet has a LOT of great resources available, so I never know what exactly to tell people except to check out Social Media Examiner, because they were my favorite resource for all the things related to social media when that was my job.

However, there are some fairly common mistakes that I see people, especially my friends and family members with small businesses, making that are super simple fixes.

Tailor your photos to your platform.

This is my biggest pet peeve because it’s the easiest one to fix! Why cut off your image or mangle it when you can use a tool like Canva to size your social media images to the platforms you’re using. (Also, Canva is a fabulous tool to create images for social media. It’s free and easy and I don’t know what I would have done without it.) Don’t know what dimensions work best for each platform? Check out Sprout Social’s Cheat Sheet.

Take advantage of scheduling tools.

No one thinks they have time to constantly be adding content to social media and that is a straight up lie. Set aside one hour a week and schedule out all of your content for the week in advance. It super easy to schedule posts on Facebook and to use free tools like Tweetdeck to schedule promotional tweets. Got a little extra $$? Try out a social media management tool like Buffer to schedule posts across multiple platforms.

Use IFTTT (If This, Then That) to cross post content.

(I say this with the caveat that IFTTT let’s other people know that you’re being lazy and using it to post the same content to multiple channels. I think this can be a bit impersonal and can feel a little cheap. This could just be me though.)

That being said, IFTTT is a fantastic way to get content onto multiple platforms without having to put in a lot of work. Just set up your formulas for what you want to post and where and BAM! Every time you post something to Instagram, you post it to Twitter too. Or everything you post to Twitter get posted to Facebook. Or some other combination. It's really quite something.

Set aside time weekly to find out what’s trending and tailor your content towards those things.

It doesn’t have to be a lot of time, especially if you're someone who already pays attention to the news and to what people are talking about on Facebook or Twitter. Just take note of what that content is and if you can spin it to apply to your business. Use that as fodder for one or two timely posts a month and all of a sudden you are using SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies in your marketing. It also shows your followers that you’re in the know and care about what’s going on in the world, which never hurts.

Choose platforms that you will actually use and get rid of the rest.

You do not have to be on every new social media platform that arises, I promise.

Your social media marketing is only as good as the content you create, so if you know that you’re not ever going to use Instagram to promote your business, it’s okay to go ahead and delete that account. Focus your attention on platforms that you’re comfortable with creating content for. You’ll find that you have more time to create engaging content for the social media platforms you actually care about and your followers will definitely appreciate it.

(If you decide to delete a social media account or two, just make sure that you update your website to reflect the platforms you're using. Nothing is worse than clicking on a social media icon only to discover a broken link.)

Interact with your community.

A lot of people forget that social media should be ... social. Reply to comments on your posts! Thank people for leaving reviews! Comment on other posts that are relevant to your business! Get in there and let people know who you are and what you do! Creating opportunities for conversation is an important aspect of social media marketing that I see a lot of people forgetting.

Use video.

I hated this when I was working in social media, but the hard truth is that video is VERY important to your social media marketing. It got big around 2014 and it is not going away. Accept it now and move on.

The good news is that it's pretty easy to create videos for your social media platforms using a smartphone or tablet. And you don't even need a YouTube channel to do it. (Although I suggest you create one for a video archive, if nothing else. You don't have to advertise that it's there.)

Set up an information session where you answer basic questions about your business. Take your followers on a virtual tour of your space. Schedule a live Q&A. Show off something you think is super cool. Video, especially live video, has become a mainstay for social media marketing.

My advice for video is to try to keep your pre-recorded videos pretty short (under 30 seconds) and your live videos at least 15 minutes long. Short pre-recorded videos mean that people will actually be able to watch the whole thing while they're scrolling through their feed and longer live videos allow for more time for viewers to engage with you.

Respond to comments (And turn on your notifications).

I touched on this earlier, but it bears repeating. Social media should be social. And in the social media world, your response times should be FAST. Many experts say that you should never let a comment or post sit there without interaction for more than 60 minutes. I personally think that this is overkill, especially if you’re a small business owner who has a lot on your plate. But don’t make your followers wait longer than 24 hours for a response either.

If you don’t have notifications for your social media turned on, do that now. It’s so much easier to respond to comments in a timely manner if you are actually aware that a comment has been made on one of your posts.

Be a resource for your followers.

Please don’t post nothing but promotional content. Your followers aren’t going to be engaged with your social media you if all you do is post promotional. At the very best, they will just start to ignore your posts; at the very worst, they will unfollow you.

Instead, share an article relevant to your business with commentary about why you found it interesting. Review a book or a recipe (as long as you can tie it back to your business). Share other people’s videos or a quote that inspires you. Your followers want your expertise and will rely on you to provide them with reliable information regarding your work. Some of the very best social media accounts for small businesses that I follow barely share any promotional content and they have the most loyal fan bases of anyone on the internet.

Be a real person.

If you don't pay attention to anything else in this article, pay attention to this. You should be a real person when you're writing social media posts for your business.

People buy from people. They might follow you on social media for your brand, but they’ll pay attention to your posts because you’re a person they like and care about. So use personal pronouns and share selfies. Don't use overly formal language. Tell stories about your day or something funny that happened on your way to work. Give the humans who follow you a chance to know who you are as a person and what you care about. I promise, it will pay off.

#my writing #social media marketing #social media management #marketing online #social media #marketing tips #SEO #Facebook marketing #Twitter marketing

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ill-be-istj-if-no-one-else-is · 6 years

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Anatomy of an Ask (Entire Post)

I suspect that there’s no way within the framework of Tumblr to force people to ask things that will be productive, but I figured it might be helpful to really go into my thought process when I receive a question. This got really long. I’m making one Giant Post and then I’ll split it up as well so that both options are available.

Before you start: this is going to be really blunt. I try not to be deliberately hurtful to people who are acting in good faith, but I’m not really a warm fuzzy person in general, and I find people are not great at taking subtle hints on the internet so I’m going in with an anvil here.

Before I get the question: My MBTI knowledge was obtained through reading a lot of things both online (in which case they’re probably in my resource links), a few books (I haven’t done a huge amount of book reading so it’s mostly Was That Really Me and Gifts Differing), and a lot of practical observation.

The practical observation part has been, for me, by far the most valuable, but it does require a certain level of reflection and willingness to admit when you’re wrong. Basically: once you feel confident-ish in your ability to type other people, go out and type them and then observe their behavior, which will help you recognize behavior patterns for that type. The reason it requires reflection is because it is possible to mistype someone initially. You need to constantly ask yourself “is this person truly this type, and the stereotypes are wrong? Or did I mistype them”. Examples include: ISFP sister is actually not bad at organizing within certain parameters, but it tends to be fairly rigid and a little uncomfortable. She’s just a reasonable example of how an ISFP can develop organization skills. However, I originally thought my brother was an INFP when he was really an ENFP, and so when I realized I was wrong I had to revise both my typing of him and my understanding of INFPs and ENFPs. I originally thought my closest friend was an INTP and I’m actually still in the process of questioning that. (This is why “am I mistyped” is a useless question. You should always assume mistyping is possible).

So basically if I say I get a certain vibe from a question or interaction or story, it’s because of patterns I’ve seen from this practical observation that I might struggle to even realize I’ve seen. And there’s no way around this other than experience (ie, observation + time).

When an MBTI question arrives: is it easily searchable (I do usually check, on mobile, that a search of the obvious key term returns something useful as one of the top results - I try not to delete stuff that I’ve answered before but is hard to easily search on) or answered in the FAQ? Delete it unless there’s a good point to be made or I’m feeling particularly generous and/or snarky.

Next, mentally categorize it. Questions tend to fall into a couple of broad categories:

Questions about the theory: ideally, coming from someone who can say “I read your FAQ and I’m still confused about some of the statements regarding inferior Se, because of X, Y, and Z”. A pure theory question is pretty simple; usually it’s just a matter of directing people to a better, harder-to-find source post or providing some clarification.

Type me questions from people who haven’t typed themselves: varies, see below.

Type me questions from people who have typed themselves to some extent: also varies, see below.

“What does X look like”: I would typically like to shoot these questions into the sun because functions are broad archetypes and so while you can summarize details of a real person to an archetype it is not so easy to do the reverse. However, I limit myself to a general answer of “if you’d like me to type you or someone else provide a description” thus reducing this to a type me question.

“How likely is X combination”: I just stopped answering these on the grounds that you can look this up yourself very easily. However, usually these have an undercurrent of ‘type me’ except no information is given so there’s nothing I can do. If information is given, see the Type me posts (also tagged anatomyofanask)

What’s useful in typing?

Remember: information that is useful for typing is:

Unique: it’s okay if other people on earth share this trait, but ‘I like music’ or ‘I have morals’ are true of most humans. Make sure you describe you and not 99% of all people.

Typical of you: if you went skydiving once but normally you wouldn’t get on a roller coaster that goes upside-down you are not a thrill-seeker; you are a person who went skydiving once. Focus on your sustained and regular behavior.

From your mid-teens/adult life, and ideally recent. You want to talk about your childhood, do so with your friends or with a therapist because it’s not usually relevant. Not yet in your mid-teens? Typing is going to be really hard and it will be so much easier when you’ve had a few more years - part of why being 15 is so gloriously confusing is because it’s a time of immense growth and change. I highly recommend you focus on becoming an awesome person without trying to categorize it. MBTI has been around for over 70 years. It will be there in a couple more.

Not MBTI jargon: Avoid statements “I seem really Ne!” or “I have absolutely no Fe.” These are useless statements to me: either you’re correct in your assessment in which case contacting me is useless because you’ve already typed yourself as having Ne/not having Fe and are confident in it; or you’re not correct in your assessment but I can’t tell because you didn’t describe what you mean by Ne or Fe.

Not the stereotypical MBTI descriptions: related to the above. At this point I not only do not trust these phrases and find them completely meaningless; I also get annoyed that you’re using them and yet somehow I’m supposed to be the boring and uncreative one per stereotypes. “Good at reading people”, “very much/always in my head” and “my morals are subjective/objective” or “my logic is subjective/objective” are the top offenders. Here’s the problem. People aren’t great at being objective about themselves. People are even worse at being objective about how objective they are. Also the fact that almost all of these are skewed towards intuition means I have my doubts.

Exemplified: provide examples of your behavior. If you do this instead of using stereotypical MBTI descriptions, you will solve two of my problems at once. If you can actually explain to me why you think you’re good at reading people, I can assess if you genuinely are or if you’re projecting assumptions on people. And in general, this is what I need to type people.

Consequential: people rely on their higher functions the most when it has to do with things that, for lack of a better term, matter IRL. Which doesn’t mean you don’t bring your A game to your hobbies! But the fact is, if you drop the ball in your hobbies your life still goes on. I once tried to start a podcast and it almost immediately fell by the wayside. Was it disappointing? Yeah. Would I dream of doing this when it comes to say, my job, or my schoolwork (when I was in school) or something I had committed to that other people relied on? No. Like, if you don’t update your fan fic on time, or you kill people in video games that can certainly have an emotional effect on you and people around you. But the consequences of that are not exactly the same of not paying your rent on time, or cheating on someone in real life. So: focus on how you interact with people, how you act at work or at school, how you plan your life.

Varied: one long specific anecdote, even if it’s a thing you do regularly, is only so helpful. A couple of examples of different behaviors makes a huge difference. Two points make a line.

Type Me

(I’ve been calling this Type Me but it also applies to Type My Friend/Family Member/Arch-nemesis/Etc questions)

If you need help typing yourself, at least one (and frequently several) of the following is in play

1. You need help with understanding MBTI

a. In terms of the actual theory

b. In terms of how it shows up in the real world

2. You need help with understanding yourself

a. In terms of understanding what is your personality and what is just being a person.

b. In terms of accurately assessing your skill level and tendencies

So often I need to both type you and address that question.

If I can’t figure out the question you need answered, AND there isn’t information that’s useful for typing, then I can’t really do anything other than say “please provide more information.” If on the other hand you do provide information I can use to type you, even if I’m not sure where your source of confusion was, I can provide a typing.

Similarly, if I can figure out the question, even if you don’t have information I can use to type you, I might be able to help. So here’s how I address the questions

1.a. This is a theory question, which we already covered, but it includes a request for help in typing. Ideally you provided information about yourself that is conducive to typing help, but if you didn’t, I can direct you to resources or provide some clarity so that you can try typing yourself with that new information.

1.b. If you provided information about yourself, this is great - I can talk about your real-world behavior and how it relates back to how I’ve typed you, thus providing more people with examples of real-world behavior. If you didn’t provide information about yourself, this is more of a “what does X type look like” and it’s a bad question. Yes, I know this is frustrating, but the fact is there is a very wide range of possibilities of what X type can look like.

For both parts of question 2: if you don’t describe yourself well, it’s game over. I can’t do anything, because the (main) issue isn’t that you need help with understanding MBTI to type yourself; you need help understanding yourself, and I don’t know you other than what you provide in the question.

2.a. This is again a case of ‘if you’re young and have limited experience, socialize a little and wait and try typing again in a couple years.’ But no matter what, please try to interact with people more, take a neuro or psych class, log off for a bit, and generally get some kind of sense that most people are more invested in their interests than in boring tasks, act differently with their parents than with their peers, or whatever. Meet a person. You know how they said you can make more friends by being interested in other people than trying to get other people interested in you? You can learn more about your personality by learning about other people than spending time alone on the internet.

2.b. This is fair. This is an acknowledgement that objectivity about one’s self is really hard. This is also why stereotypical MBTI descriptions are pretty useless, because instead of letting me, a third-party who doesn’t really know you, try to assess your skills, you’re just saying “I’m great at reading people”. So if you’re trying to ask this kind of question, it is absolutely vital that you provide the best description you can. Put a modicum of effort into it. Draft a question in Google Docs and edit it to make sense instead of saying “sorry if this doesn’t make sense”.

#mbti #anatomyofanask #long post #master post

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saibugs · 5 years

Note

Aaaaand all OC questions for Archer ❤

Thank you!!

Which Fallout game are they from?Archer is from Fallout 76!

Which faction(s) did they join and which did they destroy? Why?He joined most of the factions in Appalachia–Brotherhood, Enclave, Responders, even the Free States and Rose’s gang of Raiders–but he’s never destroyed any. In fact, he ended up abandoning all of them for his own mission.

What is their S.P.E.C.I.A.L.?Like his sister, he’s highly intelligent, although his sits at 9. He’s also quite strong and charismatic, durable… but his luck is SHIT.

Give us a summary of their backstory.Archer grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, alongside his younger sister Cristina. He had a rough childhood, with an abusive alcoholic father constantly beating him for not being ‘manly’ enough. He mostly protected Cristina from this, something that allowed him to be strong enough to fight back when he grew older.When he turned 18, his mother died on his birthday, so he packed up and left for West Virginia. This resulted in an extreme argument with his sister in which they both said things they both regret. He never saw her or contacted her again and he hates himself for it more every day.When he arrived in Appalachia, he became a bouncer, then ended up working for Vault-Tec as the money was good and he was trying to save up. All it did was get him locked in a Vault and miserable.

What’s their full name and does it have a meaning? Do they have any nicknames and how did they get em?Archer James Montgomery, and it has no real meaning. Once more, I just liked it. His nickname is Archie, and ONLY Cristina is allowed to call him that. He got it because she couldn’t pronounce Archer.

What’s their sexual, romantic, and gender orientation? Do they feel comfortable telling other people?He’s asexual, homoromantic, and cis male. He’s not comfortable telling others.

Do they have any mental illnesses? How do they cope?Archer developed depression after all the shit with his father, but he copes by dedicating himself to his hobby.

Do they have any medical conditions? Is medicine/ treatment available for them?No medical conditions outside of irradiation from spending time outside in Appalachia, and he’s got plenty of Radaway.

How much do they care about their outer appearance? What’s their “beauty routine”? How often do they shower/ bathe?Archer really doesn’t care what he looks like these days, so he has no beauty routine outside of brushing his hair. He bathes when he can, but it’s hard to when there’s no real source of… well, rad-free water.

What do they fear the most?Archer’s biggest fear is the dark.

They’re biggest flaw? Do they recognize it as a flaw?His biggest flaw is his stubborn nature, and he’s aware of it. It caused a rift in his family.

What are they most insecure about?Whether or not he’s got enough bullets in case he gets attacked by a Scorchbeast. He’s run out before.

What Wasteland threat do they fear the most? (ex. Deathclaws, super mutants, raiders)Scorchbeasts. He’s not equipped to take one on. Ever. MINI NUKES DON’T WORK.

What’s their zodiac sign or which one do you think they relate to the most? What are their placements (if you know them)? (ex. Aries sun, Taurus moon, Aquarius Venus)Sorry, unknown!!

What’s their Myers–Briggs Type? (ex. ENTP, ISFJ)All I know is that he’s extroverted as hell.

What Harry Potter house would they be in? (ex. Gryffindor, Ravenclaw)Gryffindor!

Which Pokemon Go team would they choose? (ex. Instinct, Valor, Mystic)Instinct.

Out of the nine forms of intelligence (rhythmic, spatial, linguistic, mathematical, kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, and existential) which one(s) are they really good at and which one(s) is(are) their weakest?I really do not understand this question. I need to do more research.

What natural alignment are they? (ex. Lawful Good, Chaotic Evil)He used to think he was lawful good. But really, he’s lawful neutral.

Do they have any hobbies? What are they?He hunts cryptids. He’s got holotapes FILLED with information and stories on them.

Do they have a favorite holiday? How do they celebrate it?He doesn’t have a favourite holiday. Used to be Christmas, but…

What’s their favorite season?Autumn. It’s pretty in Autumn.

Do they have a temper or are they level headed?Archer is level headed. His temper is… tempered, lol.

Do they express their emotions freely or hide their true feelings?Most of the time he hides his true feelings. He’s got no place for them on the job. When he’s alone, it’s a different story.

Are they a leader or a follower?Naturally he’s a leader.

How do they come off to others? What first impression do they usually make?Archer comes off as reserved and quiet, but a good-natured man who is capable of making hard decisions.

Do they prefer to travel alone or with company? Who have they traveled with if any? Current companion if any?Archer travels alone and that’s how he prefers it. He doesn’t travel with others.

Would you describe them as selfless or selfish? Does it depend on the situation?Selfless, unless he’s going after cryptids or doing his mission.

What do they find most attractive in others? Name at least one psychological and physical trait. (doesn’t have to be romantic attraction)Eyes as a physical attraction, level-headedness as a psychological attraction.

Do they flirt often? How easily do they fall in love?Archer flirts when he’s DRUNK, but he doesn’t drink a lot. He doesn’t fall in love particularly easily.

What’s their love life like? Are they interested in anyone or in a relationship?His love life doesn’t exist.

Do they prefer to solve things diplomatically or using violence?He’s diplomatic and will not take up arms unless he’s attacked first.

What is their combat style? What range do they prefer? Do they sneak?He’s a ranged man first and foremost, sneaks when possible, but he’s not afraid to get up there and fight close combat.

What weapon(s) do they always carry with them?His combat rifle and some frag grenades.

Their most prized possession?A tiny, tattered photo of him and his sister.

Their thoughts on power armor?It helps him survive. He has a Vault-Tec t-51 set locked up in the Vault but he forgot it.

Favorite armor/ outfit?His combat armour, Vault-Tec colours. Or his bomber jacket and budget MacCready hat (the leather cap).

How’s their aim? Do their hands shake while pointing a gun?His aim is decent enough, and his hands shake when he’s stressed.

What are their thoughts on having to kill on a daily bases in order to survive? Does it take a toll on them? Or do they shake it off rather easily?He hates killing to survive, but understands its necessity, so he shakes it off as best he can.

Thoughts on death if any? (ex. Fear it, accept it)Archer both fears and accepts death.

Do they move around a lot or prefer to have a place to call home?He prefers to have a home, but he travels around a lot to settle down. His mission is paramount to him.

What’s their favorite location?Anywhere he can take a deep breath.

Their opinions on ghouls, feral and not feral?He’s never met a non-feral ghoul, so he can’t say, but ferals? NOPE.

Do they scavenge for their supplies or simply buy them?He scavenges mostly, because he doesn’t come across many vendors.

Are they the type to get distracted and go off to an unknown nearby location or do they stay on track?He gets far too distracted.

How do they sleep? Are they picky about where and how or can they sleep basically anywhere?He sleeps with a gun close by, and he is picky, yes. He likes beds. Too much risk of disease otherwise.

What’s their favorite radio station and song? (post-apocalypse)He doesn’t listen to the radio, but he’s impartial to holotapes about cryptids.

What’s their favorite post-apocalyptic food? Are they a picky eater? Do they know how to cook?He can cook to feed himself. He’s a sucker for a starberry cobbler.

What’s their favorite beverage? Do they drink alcohol?His favourite beverage is anything but coffee. He drinks alcohol very occasionally.

Do they have any tag skills?No.

Anything they like to collect? (ex. Unique weapons, Bobbleheads)He collects anything that can help him make things.

Are they good at disarming traps or do they constantly miss them?He’s awful at disarming traps. Someone help this poor twit.

#fallout #fallout 76 #oc: archer montgomery #sai talks #sai writes #oc talk #ask #merrowench #love you!

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fanatical-san · 6 years

Note

Omg 6, 22 or 24 for Drarry - I can’t decide which one as I think they’d all be amazing, so I’ll leave it up to you! :)

I have spent a day writing these, so I apologise if the quality’s really low. Fasting doesn’t really help, either XD

I answered 24 here for another person here, so you can go read it (AO3 version here). I answered six for you as a separate post here (and there’s also an AO3 version). And finally, here’s twenty two (which is also available on AO3): “Sorry.You’re the first person I’ve spoken to in ten years.” I’ve called the piece ‘Herbal Tea’. Yep, it’s one of those.

And yes, I answered them all, because I couldn’t help myself. A massive shoutout to @skarhead and @jostaart, though, because I trawled through their brilliant blogs for inspiration, and these three drarry fics are the result. Whilst they’re based on the prompt, not particular artwork, @skarhead and @jostaart was crucial for bringing my ideas to life! And um, I got a little carried away with this one, so some of it’s under a cut. I hope you enjoy it, and that it’s not completely boring. Here goes:

The November air is chilly, although the temperature isn’treally anything new to Harry, living in Britain. There’s something distinctlydifferent about it to October, though, and he takes a moment to pause andbreathe it in. He’s been doing that more and more; taking a moment to pause. Heneeds it nowadays, especially; ever since declining the position of Head Aurorand resigning completely, the press has been swarming around him insistently,which is a feat considering how much they regularly pester him about thecontinued absence of any romantic relationship. Hermione does her best to keepthem away, but it’s his problem to deal with, and deal with it he does.

Self-care is something he’s been neglecting for years now,trying to stay above everyone else’sstandards rather than his own. He should’ve been able to move on from the war,but his Mind Healer tells him that by throwing himself into the path of theDark Arts for a living, he’s been forcing himself to hang on to those toxicmemories. Well, not anymore, and he feels no obligation to explain it to anyoneapart from his friends and family, who wholeheartedly agree with him. At leasthe’s done that right.

Harry is rudely yanked out of his thoughts by someonerunning into him, full force. The weight of the person topples him over, andHarry is ready to give them a piece of his mind, before he looks up at a facethat, whilst having matured since he saw it last, is still shockingly familiar.

“…Malfoy?!” Ifthere was one person that would not have been found in Muggle Manchester, ofall places, it would be Draco Malfoy. Not only because Malfoy Manor was inWiltshire, and not even because he was in a Muggle area rather than a wizardingarea, but because Malfoy hadn’t been seenfor years. Most people assumed that he’d either remained reclusive within hisown house, or that he’d moved. Some hoped that he’d been dealt with, Harrybeing the polar opposite; he’d tried to find Malfoy multiple times, and forvarious reasons, with no success. He’d stopped himself from searching MalfoyManor, because it would’ve looked obsessive, and Ron and Hermione were alreadyworried for him.

And now, here he is, on top of Harry, looking terrified. Heclutches Harry’s jacket, and blurts:

“Potter, I know you hate me, but I will pay you whatever youwant to just get me out of here.” Hisvoice is rough and hoarse, and he seems more surprised than Harry is at hearingthose words. Harry wants to ask more, but at that moment, he hears the firstyell.

Malfoy’s crystal grey eyes look desperately into Harry’s,and something in him compels him to wrap one arm around the platinum blonde andDisapparate – straight to his house, which is under the Fidelius Charm. There’sno turning back now; Malfoy knows the location of his home.

Speaking of Malfoy, the man is passed out on his sofa. Hishair is expertly ruffled, and falls in waves around his angular face. He’slean; too lean, as if he hasn’t been eating well. Whilst he wears designerclothes (Muggle, strangely enough), it’s apparent that he’s been wearing themfor too long.

As dishevelled as he is, Malfoy still manages to look…angelic, almost, which is unsettling,because Malfoy is not an angel in any way. He decides to leave him for now,although questions are buzzing about his mind. Harry knows from experience thatit’s never a good idea to dwell on such thoughts, or to bombard a person withquestions after they’ve passed out.

Harry instead decides to make some hot drinks. Luna showedhim a wonderful recipe for various herbal teas that work different calmingeffects into a person, so Harry begins brewing a certain tea that has specialsoothing properties. Harry loses himself in the rhythm of stirring and addingingredients, to the extent that he doesn’t notice Malfoy until the blonde isstanding next to him. He says nothing, choosing to let Malfoy speak when he’scomfortable to.

It’s a surreal situation; standing in a cosy kitchen, thepeaceful aroma of herbal tea filling the air, with Malfoy by his side. It’s notunwelcome, though; Harry finds that he doesn’t mind the company. Malfoy clearshis throat.

“You may possibly have the most uncomfortable couch I’ve ever crashed on, Potter.” His voice isweak, but his tone strong, and Harry is briefly reminded of a darker time, andthe words, ‘I can’t be sure’. Hepushes it from his mind, and addresses Malfoy.

“Nice to see you haven’t changed, Malfoy.” He says itquietly, but Malfoy freezes at the words for a second, before replying.

“Sorry. You’re the first person I’ve spoken to in tenyears.” Harry drops the spoon, startled; he’s not expecting to hear that at all. Malfoy deftly catches thespoon, though, and takes over brewing. “That’s quite an advanced magical tearecipe you’re making, Potter,” he says absentmindedly. “Consider me impressed.”

Harry still hasn’t quite absorbed the information, and heknows it’s a bad idea to ask, but he does it nonetheless.

“Malfoy…what do you mean, first person you’ve spoken to inten years?” Harry speaks slowly and hesitantly, not sure how Malfoy is going toreact. The blonde simply scoffs.

“Potter, I’m not an injured kitten. You don’t need to usethat tone with me.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re still doing it.”

“Sorry?” Harry doesn’t want to overstep his boundaries; heneeds to avoid Malfoy closing off. The kitchen is quiet for a minute or so, thesilence broken only by the soft swish of the tea being stirred.

“Thanks, though,”Malfoy says after a while, his voice softer than before. “for helping me getout of there. But I don’t want you to treat me like a trauma victim.”

Harry doesn’t know if it’s right to respond, so he doesn’t,but gets two mugs out of the cupboard. Malfoy pours the drinks, appearingrelaxed, but Harry doesn’t believe that he’s just suddenly alright.

“Yeah, okay. But I’m not going to tell anyone anything youtell me. What you say here stays here, I swear. So, try to trust me, even ifit’s only for now. Please.” Malfoy sighs.

“Do you have a better place to talk?”

Snowflakes fall lightly, and lights twinkle in the distanceas he and Malfoy sip their hot drinks out on the balcony.

The balcony is one of the perks of Harry’s home, one hewasn’t quite expecting. It’s spacious, and with a few waterproof charms,warming charms, as well as a few select beanbags, it’s become one of hisfavourite spots in the house.

“And I just stopped trying. There were so many people afterme. I would stay over at Blaise’s, or Pansy’s, or Greg’s, never sayinganything, but they were probably the only reason I survived. It was never safeenough, though; I had to keep moving constantly.”

“The DMLE got rid of all the members, though; we trackedthem all down. It was a major investigation at the time.” Malfoy laughsbitterly.

“The Aurors got rid of the main body. They had hired peopleto carry out their dirty work for them. As you know, some of the leaders werein too high a position to have each target killed personally. The people afterme were some of those employees, still intent on revenge.” Harry groans,frustrated.

“This is a whole other issue. How many were there?” Malfoy’slooking out over the other buildings, and something about the sight draws Harryto him.

“About thirty-five,” he says. Harry can’t believe thatMalfoy was able to survive that many trained killers after him especially. He’sabout to reply, when Malfoy continues. “I don’t blame them. I can’t beforgiven.”

“Malfoy-”

“Draco. Call meDraco. We aren’t kids anymore.”

“Draco,” Harry corrects himself, turning to face himproperly. “the people hunting down ex Death Eaters are the ones in the wrong.It’s the kind of behaviour that started a war in the first place. And I forgaveyou years ago; you are most definitelycapable of being forgiven, but you have to forgive yourself first. No-one else can do that for you.”

Draco chuckles.

“When did you become so sappy, Potter?” Harry rolls hiseyes. Of course Draco isn’t going to take it seriously. These are words comingfrom him after all.

“If I get to call you Draco, you get to call me Harry.”Draco shoots him a pointed look.

“Fine then, Harry;where is this all coming from? Younger you probably would’ve told me that Iabsolutely can’t be forgiven and thatI’m being pathetic. What changed?”

“I grew up,” Harry answers seriously.

“You mean you grew older.You’re still really freaking short,” Draco teases.

“Shut up,” Harrygrumbles in response, but he’s smiling.

“Are you sure about this?” Draco asks sceptically, surveyingthe room. It’s well furnished, with an ensuite and all. A king-sized bed stands proudly in the centre, with lusciousred curtains surrounding the four-poster bed.

“Draco, Narcissa wantsyou to stay with me. I’m not going to say no to her. And besides, now that youaren’t as bigoted, you’re actually a decent person.” Draco sighs in defeat,answering back nonetheless.

“Since when were youso chummy with my mother?” heretorts. But Draco full well knows that this is the safest place for him. Hismother was brave enough to approach the Saviourof the Wizarding World, of all people, and who’s Draco to say no to somerefuge?

Plus, Harry himself is a bonus. Gone is the scrawny,righteous kid that Draco always despised. He’s not actually grown that muchtaller, but it suits him. Years of Auror work have served him well, buildingsome muscle and defining his jawline, and Draco has found himself staring moretimes than he’s comfortable with.

“Are you really going to throw a fuss about this?” Harry asks with an eyebrowraised, and Draco smiles sweetly.

“Of course not, oh Saviour.” Harry punches him in the armlightly.

“I’ve told you not to call me that, Ferret.”

“Whatever you say, GoldenBoy.”

“Prat.”

“Scarhead.”

“Are you two really bickering at this age?” Narcissa says, appearing from the stairs. “Anyonewould’ve thought you two were still schoolboys. Now,” she says, addressingDraco, “are you all settled in?”

“Yes, Mother,” Draco replies, earning a look from Harry.Narcissa doesn’t seem to notice this when she turns to him.

“Please tell me if he causes any sort of trouble. I know howpicky he can be.” Draco splutters.

“Mother!” Narcissa only smiles knowingly at her son,sweeping him into a hug.

“You know I love you, Draco. Stay safe for me, darling.”Draco hugs her back for a long moment, flooded by how much he’s missed her. Shepulls back and looks at him. “You’re safe; Harry Potter is looking after you.”

And aren’t those just the words that he never imagined hewould hear?

The first time Harry wakes up next to Draco is over a monthlater, on Christmas Day. Well, wake upis relative term. It’s much more accurate to say that he’s forced awake by aparticularly grouchy Draco yelling in his ear. He opens his eyes blearily tofind that he’s lying on Draco’s chest, arms wrapped out around him. Harry turnsa bright red and scrambles back, embarrassed and confused.

“Draco? What are you doing in my bed?” Draco’s cheeks becomea matching shade of red.

“You forgot to put up those Silencing Charms last night.” Oh shit. “You were screaming, and I cameto wake you up, but you, uh…you seemed to want me to stay. So I did.”

If the ground could just open up and swallow him, that wouldbe wonderful.

“Yeah, um…sorry about that.” Draco rolls his eyes.

“Don’t fucking apologise, Harry; it was my own decision.”Harry tries to respond, but ends up yawning, making Draco smile a little.

“What time is it, anyway?” Harry asks, rubbing his eyes inan attempt to feel more awake. It doesn’t work.

“Six a.m.,” Draco replies smoothly.

“What?! Why the hell would you wake me up so early,Draco?” Harry complains, but Draco simply leaves the room. Harry follows him,demanding an explanation. They end up in the living room together, where Dracopoints to a present under the tree that Harry is certain wasn’t there before.It’s addressed to him. Harry hesitantly picks it up.

“I don’t know if you’re waiting for next Christmas,” Dracodrawls, “but I’d recommend you open it.” Harry doesn’t say anything, butcarefully pulls the ribbon off, and not-so-delicately gets rid of the wrappingpaper. Inside is a perfectly sculpted crystal snow globe, with two miniaturefigures inside it, sitting on a balcony and sipping drinks. Harry stares at it,transfixed.

“Here,” Draco says, gently twisting a key on the side of theglobe. Soft music begins to play, and the figures rotate slowly.

“Draco,” Harry breathes. “It’s…it’s gorgeous. You didn’t have to…”

“I thought it would look good on the mantelpiece,” heresponds simply, placing it there himself. He turns back to Harry, trying togauge Harry’s next move. “Well…Merry Christm-oof!” Harry tackles him to the ground in a bearhug, and they staylike that, until Harry pulls back slightly.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m frankly still knackered.Wanna get some more sleep?” Draco grins at him in a way that makes Harry’sheart clench ever-so-slightly.

He doesn’t know whatit is exactly, but Harry does knowthat this is the beginning of something great.

As they go back to bed, comfortable in each other’s embrace,snowflakes begin to fall softly outside, just like on the very first day thatthe universe threw Harry and Draco back together.

Yes, it was fricking long. Hope you liked it, though! Have a lovely day

#drarry #harry potter #draco malfoy #drarry fluff #sharing a bed #living together #hurt/comfort #narcissa malfoy #fic requests #jay writes fics

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