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potteresque-ire · 3 years

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Not sure if this has circulated before, but here’s a link to Henry Jenkin’s reactions to 227, largely as responses to an interview he did with Sanlian Lifeweek magazine (三聯生活周刊), a publication modelled after TIME magazine and published under China Press Publishing group (中國出版集團), the largest and state-owned publisher in China. The magazine asked for Jenkin’s opinions on the fandom-related aspects of 227 back in March, 2020. Henry Jenkins, as many may already know, is among the most renowned scholars of (Western) fan culture ... if not the most renowned.

Personally, I find this article to be quite limited in perspective, because 227 had a significant non-fandom-oriented, sociopolitical component ~ and hence its scope, its chaos, its damage. IMO, 227 stopped being a fan war, stopped being about solos, cpfs, and even Gg the moment AO3 was shut down ~ the powerful Chinese state had intervened, and the incident necessarily became a political incident. That One Fic on AO3, the conflict between solos and cpfs about whether and where That Fic should exist was at most a lighter left at the scene of what would become the blaze; it wasn’t even responsible for igniting the first fire. Most i-turtles (i-fruits?) are probably aware too at this point: if fan wars are sufficient to start 227, then there wouldn’t have been a 227 ~ because 227 would have been every date of the year.

Fan culture is fundamentally transgressive, and what that means can only be defined in the context of the subculture’s “mainstream” sociopolitical and cultural environment. I therefore find the article’s attempt to transplant Western fan culture’s observations / theories / analysis / conclusions to the incident without explicitly comparing, addressing in depth the differences of the pre- and post-transplant environment to be ... prone to rejections (as organs are after transplantations!)—exclusion from being useful or valid. And this article was very short on such comparisons or address. Jenkins being a fandom expert aside (and he was careful about not treading outside his area of expertise), early “antis” of 227 presented themselves as crusaders for the freedom of speech and, by late March when this article was published, the heated debates surrounding the incident on Chinese social media had already led to embarrassment for multiple powerful state publications. It was probably a wise choice to not make another dive into the political aspects of the incident.

Being a new(-ish) turtle who joined the fandom a full half-year after 227, I’ve been backtracking, trying to really understand the incident, which remains very much beyond comprehension in many aspects. The discussions I’ve dug up that have most fascinated me have been those in non-fandom spaces, by non-fandomers / politics enthusiasts who barely knew who Gg was, who didn’t know That One Fic involved more than one idol and had zero knowledge about solos vs cpfs. In these discussions, “antis” are not referred to as “antis” because while the action of the so-called “227 coalition” was to kill Gg’s career, that wasn’t considered its ultimate goal ~ its ultimate goal was to warn whoever tried to clamp down the freedom of expression that their opposition was strong enough, populous to fight back and take away whatever, whoever those who attempted the clamp-down care the most about. In this case, “Gg fans”—I put this in quotes because eventually, no one would know who would lurk behind those pro-Gg Weibo IDs (and the anti-Gg ones as well)—were the perceived enemies of creative freedom. Gg, assumed to be the one, the symbol of what “GG fans” cared about the most, naturally became the target of the coalition.

Gg wasn’t special in that sense ~ and that was perhaps, the saddest thing I found about this incident as a Gg fan (without quotation marks); Gg could be any idol who achieved top fame at the moment, who had enough fans to make the point known. The coalition was therefore not “anti-Gg” in its ideological sense. It was anti the fan circle culture that had cemented Gg’s popularity, that had already been known to deal extremely poorly with dissent—complaints had been abound that c-ent was no longer fun for bystanders because the latter could issue no critique, not even doubt, about an idol without the fear of being reported, torn down by fans. The coalition eventually grew to include anti the many happenings, the many censorships and imprisonments in the past few years that had silenced the creative crowd in China, happenings people dared not speak about beyond a loud grumbling ...

The coalition tried to take down Gg, because they couldn’t take down the force that had shut down AO3, that was truly responsible for the silencing. They played the Hunger Games in the Weibo arena instead of challenging Who The Real Enemy Was, because some might not have given much thought about The Enemy; some might have thought the Enemy too invincible to be worth the effort; some might have got too carried away by their blood thirst, the cruel schadenfreude of shredding a beautiful, successful young man into pieces, and forgot why they were there in the first place ...

And that was only the political side of 227. 227 was also widely suspected to have a commercial component, which added another layer to the symbolism behind Gg the Idol ~ pretty much as soon as 227 happened, netizens investigated, tried to uncover the chain of capital behind Gg. With the scent of money was the memory of filth associated with it, in a country not exactly unknown for its corrupt business practices. Much like in The Book of Exodus in the Bible, the Idol is believed to be forged with gold; it is ungodly, tainted. Whether Gg the Person was identical to Gg the Idol, Gg the Symbol mattered to few. That Gg *was* a person seemed lost to many ...

I’ll have to dive into the non-fandom aspects of 227 with more rigour. As much as I'd love to leave 227 behind, every time I see Gg, I see its legacy on his face, in his smile, and perhaps, I’m not the only one ~ ADLAD cast him as Patient #5 because of 227′s effect on him. Put it another way, 227 is already modifying, writing Gg’s career trajectory ~ a trajectory that is undoubtedly under scrutiny by many who wish to duplicate his success but circumvent his pain. And every time I see a young idol—Gg, Dd, and anyone else—I wonder if the hurt of 227 can happen to them (again) because the crux of the incident has never been resolved; the oppression and silencing have remained strong as ever.

Anyway (sorry for the rant) ... what I found noteworthy about this article was the quotes the magazine highlighted in its published form (in Chinese), which weren’t highlighted by Jenkins on his own website. They reflected what the magazine would like to be the take-home messages of the interview. I’ve listed them below; all of which had Jenkins as the speaker:

[Pie Note: About Real Person Fiction (RPF) in Western fandoms]

“American fans often do have some shared norms about what is and is not appropriate to write, mostly having to do with protecting the privacy of other people in the star’s life. Writing about the star is seen as fair game; writing about their family members is not.”

---

[Pie Note: About GG being “cast” as a transgender woman in The One Fic that started the incident; gender in fandom]

“We write fan fiction as a form of speculation and exploration. For some people, it may be one of the few spaces in the culture where they can express who they are, what they are feeling, what they are desiring. And for others, it is a place of “what if” where they explore in fantasy things they would not necessarily desire in reality.”

---

[Pie Note: Whether GG should be held responsible for his fans’ behaviour]

“Under these circumstances, I would not hold a performer responsible for his fans’ behaviors but the performer is responsible for their own behavior and fans may respond negatively to performers who over-react to the existence of alternative fantasies and insult or hector their audiences.”

---

[Pie Note: About AO3 and why fans were so upset about its closure] “Keep in mind that AO3 is a particular kind of platform. Alongside Wikipedia, AO3 is one of the greatest accomplishments of participatory culture in the digital era.”

---

[Pie Note: About the “problematic” content on AO3]

“Among my findings were that fan fiction sites can be a valuable space for young people to acquire skills (and receive feedback) on their writing from more experienced writers who share these same passions ... That said, while teens have participated in fandom, a large part of those on AO3 are adults, engaging in adult conversations on adult topics.”

---

[Pie Note: About media text in the new media era]

“First, I would stress the proliferation of media texts at the current moment ... We have access to a much broader range of media content than ever before and in this context, fans play a constructive role in curating that content, helping some shows get greater visibility ... Second, these texts have become more malleable”

---

[Pie Note: About idols not producing “good” media texts]

“Rather, the question should be what are fans finding meaningful about these performers and the texts they generate. I start from the premise that human beings do not engage in meaningless activities. I may not immediately recognize why something is meaningful but my job as a scholar is to understand why cultural materials are meaningful to the people who cherish them.”

---

My understanding of this selection of quotes is this: this state publication (as others) was quite ready to forgive Gg, to put this incident behind. It could choose to not publish this interview; it could choose to leave out certain quotes, or not do the highlighting that cast both AO3 and Gg in a positive / innocent light. But it did all these things. This article furthers my impression that the state never intended 227 to blow up the way it did, and that it did—enough for stories about it to be found in non-China websites, and in English—was what I’m still trying to comprehend. 227 was, admittedly, how I was first introduced to Gg beyond Wei Wuxian. And as I got to know Gg, like Gg, my want to understand 227 only becomes stronger, perhaps because only through comprehension I feel I can find peace for the GG fan (again, without quotation marks) in me.

Maybe I should email Dr Jenkins and ask if he’s looking for a PhD candidate. 5 years of research and thinking ... maybe that’s what it’ll take.

I feel I’ve already started anyway.

#pie metas #yizhan #bjyx

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coreymichaelsmithson · 3 years

Text

The Lights of Treasure Island

For the past few years, I've been living on a barrier island named Anastasia. A sandy, sleepy, slow place, just off the coast of our nation's oldest city, Anastasia Island features tall palm trees and gorgeous beaches, along with excellent sushi and a surprisingly active arts scene. Its most splendid attraction, though, is an old lighthouse, one striped with a black and white spiral and crowned by a bright red lamphouse. It towers commandingly over the dunes, casting a long beam that can be seen from nearly anywhere in town.

I've always liked lighthouses. In days of old we set these magnificent lanterns on the edge of the sea, to guide sailors through dark and treacherous waters, to show them the way home. Lighthouses represent so many things we need: safety, comfort, reliability, navigation. But in my mind, these structures hold the magic of candles, the magic of illumination itself. When we speak of enlightenment, we may be speaking specifically of rationality and discovery, but we are also conjuring images of light prevailing over darkness. And in this way the lighthouse emerges as a powerful symbol of the spirit.

This February, for my 47th birthday, I explored the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where I saw several amazing lighthouses. Impressive as they were, I did not think they quite compared with the singular majesty of the structure that stands on Anastasia Island. After a harrowing return journey, one in which I drove with no working alternator (and sometimes without headlights or windshield wipers) through nearly 700 miles of tornadic thunderstorms, I felt the most profound relief when I finally crested the peak of the SR-312 bridge, which connects my island to the mainland, and I saw those familiar black and white stripes in the distance, signaling that I had made it home. Less than half a year later, my feelings about this special lighthouse of mine would be forever changed by a chance encounter.

Just under two months ago, I received a brief and rather unremarkable message from a stranger on Scruff, a queer dating platform that I use. One might charitably call Scruff "a social club for discerning gentlemen" ... it appeals to men who are hirsute, meaty, perpetually horny, and even a few of us freaks who defiantly straddle the line between "butch" and "nancy". Since this man's profile didn't really offer all that much information, and his one available picture wasn't particularly compelling, I promptly tucked his message away and forgot about it, and went for my customary sunset walk on the beach.

I live exactly one mile from the southern boundary of a state park, which offers a four-mile stretch of pristine dune habitat, completely undeveloped and sparsely occupied. The only man-made objects in sight are a few empty lifeguard stands, the city's sightseeing pier, a radio antennae, and our lighthouse. Dolphins gather here, their dorsal fins rising and falling between the breakers. Squadrons of pelicans fly in tight formations, gliding only a few feet above the water's surface. Terns and sea turtles nest in its sands, and I've found many shark teeth among the sea shells and ghost crab burrows. This is a special place, a holy place, and I've made a daily ritual of enjoying its cloudscapes and crepuscular glow as I explore the edge between land and sea.

After a pleasant stroll, maybe an hour or so of blissful meditation, I turned around and started heading back towards my car when I caught sight of a man who had just walked out of the water and was now drying himself off. We locked eyes.

He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. Arrestingly beautiful, the kind of handsome that stops you dead in your tracks. I just kind of gulped for a second, and then walked right up to him, with an audacity that I didn't even know I possessed, turned on every damn bulb in my Christmas tree, and murmured, "Hi!", making the word shimmer like tinsel. In a short amount of time, I learned that he was a Russian artist, born in St. Petersburg but living in Moscow. I had met him during a brief pause on his long drive from Jacksonville to Key West; he had only intended on stopping in St. Augustine long enough to explore our old Spanish fort and take a swim on our nicest beach. He possessed a keen intellect, a quick wit, and a laudable command of English. As we spoke, he kept giving me flashes of the most mischievous smile, and so when I finally asked him what he was grinning about, he revealed that he was the same man who had messaged me earlier. This came as a surprise, for I hadn't recognized him at all ... I had only been drawn in now by his gorgeous movie-star looks, the undeniable sex appeal of his dripping wet body, and some weird sense of destiny.

We talked. We talked some more. We went to dinner. And then he stayed for the better part of three days.

In my bed, we enjoyed the most astonishing kind of communion. Our nights and mornings were filled with such tenderness ... soft eyes, soft caresses, fearlessly sustained gazes, the kind of kisses that tell a hundred little stories. One by one, various secrets were brought to light. We shared toe-curling carnality, thunderous climaxes, an unalloyed and unembarrassed intimacy. We shared joy.

On our second day together, I took him to the top of Anastasia Island's lighthouse. We lingered on each landing to kiss and giggle, and our embraces grew more intense. We felt a stronger and stronger pull towards one another. I knew that this was more than just a simple infatuation. By the time we reached the lantern's round balcony, and stepped out together onto the most spectacular view of St. Augustine, I knew that I was falling in love.

I don't blame you for rolling your eyes at this. You may, in your justifiable cynicism, think it ridiculous for a man to utter such a powerful phrase within such a short time. But if you've ever known me, you've come to recognize by now my considerable capacity for love. My passions and appetites may rise to the surface with little interference, and will I admit some recklessness in how I've invested my energies, but I am no fool. I am neither naïve nor desperate. And I can say in all sincerity that what we felt then was, at least for a short while, genuine love.

From the top of the lighthouse we could see everything. The old downtown, with its mixture of colonial and Spanish Renaissance buildings. The Matanzas River, named for the 1565 massacre of shipwrecked Huguenots, separating my island from the mainland. The harbor of St. Augustine, crowded with sailboats and pleasure craft, a forest of masts. And then the sea, blue and inviting, the sea that would soon separate us. We held each other tightly and looked upon the Atlantic together, casting our dreams towards the horizon, into this vista of seemingly endless possibility and hope.

On our last night together, we took a naked midnight swim in my pool, which is lit from above by a row of blue lights. A light and warm rain fell on our heads as we twined our legs underwater, and our ardor cast a web of rippling refractive patterns on the pool's concrete bottom. He looked me in the eyes, kissed me with the utmost gentleness, and formally invited me to come stay with him in Moscow. I accepted with my new magic word, "Да."

The following morning, our parting was so sweet, and so warm. We solidified our promise to be reunited. He drove down to Key West, enjoying a music playlist I assembled for him, and then he flew up to New York for a week's visit with old friends. After he returned to Moscow, we embarked on a passionate long-distance affair via telephone and social media apps.

I plunged right away into the Russian language, practicing for hours a day, rediscovering my knack for linguistics. I bought books on the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, books on Russian verbs, flashcards, a portable dictionary. I subscribed to online learning programs, put apps on my phone, read up on the country's history. I was all in, bringing every available bit of my enthusiasm, work ethic, and inventiveness to the challenge. Every day, I would send him sweet little videos or text messages ... sharing good news, conveying small but significant events of my daily life, showing off my rapidly accelerating grasp of Russian. I sent him notes of encouragement, pictures of me looking my cutest, small but enjoyable details of my life on Anastasia Island. I sent him a short clip of the black skimmers that sliced back and forth across the thin swash of the surf, their beaks dipping into half an inch of water. I sent him pelicans, beach crabs, waves, paintings, difficult words, idioms, cute terms of venery, sunsets, clouds, kisses, evidence of my changing body. I sent him love, every day. "каждый день," I promised him, placing my hand on my heart, "каждый день." Every day.

My love deepened by the hour. I know this is going to sound so gushy and gross, but I really pushed the lighthouse metaphor pretty hard, calling myself "твой смотритель маяка" or "your lighthouse keeper". I meant this in all sincerity, without a drop of bathos or schmaltz. Our time atop the lighthouse was sacred to me. I promised him that I would keep its light burning bright.

Over time, however, things shifted. As my interest grew, his began to dwindle. He sent less and less of himself, slowly removing from our conversation his humor, his sexuality, his warmth, his trust. It was like seeing a fully assembled jigsaw puzzle get lifted into the air, and watching all the pieces falling out ... at first only a few at a time, then more and more, until there was only a jagged perimeter where there had once been a lovely picture.

The nadir came when he lost his temper with me over my visa. I was confused about the process, as the Russian consulate and other sources were providing patchy and often conflicting information, and his own explanations changed from day to day. During our last video chat, I asked one too many questions, and he snapped. He rolled his eyes, effectively called me stupid and childish, and hung up on me three times. My many attempts at reconciliation were completely rebuffed. It was both baffling and extraordinarily painful.

Two days after our fight he was in a terrible car accident, one from which he miraculously escaped unharmed. He posted on social media an impassioned paragraph about the event, and how it drew into sharp focus all the love he had in his life, how he felt that he wasn't deserving of such love, how grateful he was for his friends. Yet instead of contacting me, inviting me into this experience, or trying to repair our frayed connection, he spent his evenings logging back into Scruff, the aforementioned dating app. He continued to ignore me, choosing instead to pursue (or perhaps refresh) other opportunities. I tried in vain to reach him, to restore our bond, but was met with only the most chilling silence.

How had I been so wrong? Had my desire devolved into mere obsession, albeit one artfully disguised as love? Had my zeal somehow suffocated him? The irony for me was that this disastrous affair unfolded during a period of rapid and positive transformation. In the space of the last seven months, I'd already changed my diet, fixed my teeth, joined a gym, paid off a chunk of my debt, reorganized my home office, purchased a standing desk, resumed my daily beach walks, started seeing both a psychiatrist and a therapist. My relationship to my body was improving, I was working at a higher level of professional responsibility, gaining new clients, writing my fourth novel, and churning out the finest paintings of my career. A recent experience with ayahuasca had given me valuable insights into my adulthood. It seemed only right that this Russian should be the cherry on my sundae, a prize I had been working so hard to deserve.

And so, after admitting my own disenchantment, I surrendered. Reeling from an overwhelming feeling of loss, I wrote him a heartfelt letter in Russian, one in which I explained the hurt his indifference was causing me. I poured a lot of benevolent energy into this letter. And then I said to him the saddest word I've learned in Russian, "Прощай", which is the type of goodbye you use when you think you are not likely to see someone again. It translates, literally, into "forgive me."

Here is the letter I wrote to him, translated into English:

***

"V_____, beautiful V____:

Okay. I give up.

Your silence gave me a very clear and very painful answer. You have been entrusted with something rare and beautiful, and you have shown that you do not want it. So now it's gone.

I'm sorry my heart bored you so much. I will no longer annoy you with my desires.

The love that I offered you ... pure and strong, given without demands or jealous limitations ... does not come often.

It pains me to realize that you do not appreciate what I have tried to give you. It is even more painful to realize that I may have aggravated the situation with my zeal. But the distance that you put between us is your choice, and I must respect that.

It seems that the epiphany you experienced in the car accident, the moment you thought of all the love in your life, did not include my love for you. Your priorities are yours, and I accept that. But you almost died yesterday, V_____. And instead of choosing to bond with a man who cares about you so much, your focus shifted to Scruff. Your indifference is so obvious now. Please do not say anything ugly or cruel in response. There is already enough sorrow on my island. I feel both grief and embarrassment, but not anger. I've always wanted the best for you, and it's still true.

I sincerely wish you a long and happy journey. I hope you enjoy many successes and find many pleasures. I hope you stay healthy. I hope the man you choose deserves your best gifts. I hope you find a better lighthouse. I must direct my light now to those who are really looking for it. So now I must tell you the saddest word that I have learned in your language.

Goodbye."

***

Please allow me now to rewind a few years, and tell a correlative story.

In the autumn of 2019, during a period of intense sadness and frustration, I fled from Anastasia Island and drove impulsively across the state to the Gulf Coast. I didn't have a clear destination, I didn't pack enough clothes or supplies, and I was so blinded with tears and unexpressed rage that I didn't know where I was, or even care much about where I might land. While getting lost somewhere in the vicinity of St. Petersburg, I glanced at a map, dragged my finger along the squiggly coastline, saw the name Treasure Island, and thought, "That's gotta be the place."

I don't know what I was expecting to find there. Something about the name sounded so exciting, so exotic. And as the evening wore on, my anticipation grew. I thought, in my desperation, that everything would be all right once I got to Treasure Island. Over the next few hours, I convinced myself that I'd finally feel good again in such a place, that my pain and confusion would certainly evaporate once I reached this safe haven. I'd check into a nice hotel room, preferably one with 300 thread-count sheets and a coffee maker, and I'd dream about pirate ships and gold doubloons, and when I opened my eyes and yawned and stretched against the sun-dappled pillows my life would basically feel like a commercial for some bougie brand of almond milk. When I arrived, however, I was deeply disappointed to see another narrow stretch of high-rise hotels, littered beaches, rank seaweed, and greyish-brown water. I found the cheapest hotel room around, one of the few remaining vacancies on the shore, and there I found neither crisp bedsheets nor good coffee. The view from my balcony, however, was utterly amazing: I could see not only a broad curving swath of the beach, but also a glow of distant resort hotels, some of them reflected in the waves. It was strangely romantic, seeing these twinkling lights ... red, gold, green, blue ... and their silent conversation with the stars, a dialogue of jewels above the warm churning waters of the Gulf. But it wasn't the salvation I had been hoping for.

When I got up the next morning, I was still facing the same problems, the same irritations, the same heavy sorrows. Treasure Island would not, could not, rescue me from myself. So I drove back home to my own island, back to my lighthouse, and was relieved to discover that it was in fact even more stirring than I had remembered. During my absence Anastasia Island had become a magical and restorative place, quite different than the one I had left only days before.

What I should have learned back then, but have only come to realize now, was this: I didn't need to travel to a distant island of treasure and twinkling stars, for my own island already had plenty of both. I didn't need to seek the incandescence of a handsome man to light my way, as my own inner flame was at last beginning to shine without the shutters of inhibition or profligacy.

I am now recalling my disappointment with Treasure Island, while concurrently considering my grief over the Russian. At first, I wanted to hate him for his carelessness, for how he squandered my gifts. But I don't hate him. Not really. There's no need to wring my hands any further over his callousness. I don't even mourn his absence anymore. My mood has shifted today, and I no longer choose to see this abortive liaison as being so devastating. For I know, deep down, that the failure here was not really mine. I am not a loser for investing myself unreservedly in someone who could not fully appreciate me, nor I am not the weaker man for feeling injured. I will not be permanently depleted for having offered all that kindness to an undeserving recipient, as my wellspring of love remains inexhaustible.

I tried to share my lighthouse with the Russian. But he did not recognize how special it really was, and he declined to follow its beacon to a rewarding harbor. And thus, our romance was destroyed, and his memory became just another broken boat littering the shallows.

I have seen so many ruins in my years: bad relationships, lousy jobs, soured opportunities. My life story reads like a ledger of dashed hopes. It seems sometimes that both the island I occupy and the more elusive island I am eternally seeking are surrounded by shipwrecks. Yet the lighthouse of my spirit still stands, sturdier and stronger than ever. The waves may batter its bricks, salt may scour its surfaces, it may occasionally groan under its own weight ... but it will not crumble, it will not fail, and even in the darkest of hours this lamp of mine will continue to shine: bright, focused, undiminished.

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markwatkinsconsumerguide · 3 years

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Consumer Guide / No.111 / American musician, Barbara Markay, with Mark Watkins.

MW : Why decide (initially) to switch from making classical music to pop?

BM : It happened during my first year at Juilliard College toward the end of the school year. It was in their new building at Lincoln Center, and I was practicing the piano in one of their practice rooms on the 5th floor, which had windows and a beautiful view of the streets below and the whole Lincoln Center area. I was taking a little break, and was looking out the window and thought to myself that I should be down there experiencing life and meeting interesting people, instead of practicing piano all day long! I had gotten into the Juilliard prep department / pre-college division when I was 10 years old, and had been a classical pianist for a long time. Maybe it was time for a change!

After that day in the practice room, I started to think about this more and more, especially every time I got a practice room with a “window on the world” so to speak. I started to think about all those people walking around on the streets, and who among them was actually going to be interested in listening to classical music. I thought that I might be wasting my musical talent on my present studies as a pianist and composer, and that I was much more interested in talking to people and finding out what they were thinking and why they said and did the things they did.

I became more and more interested in writing lyrics, which turned into my first pop songs. I realized that I could communicate the music I had inside me via pop music better than just performing classical music, because I could write about the whole new exciting culture of the times with no narrow, preordained musical style restrictions, or older musical rules. I could write and say whatever I wanted to! It was a brand new world for me! And so much fun! I still appreciated and loved classical music, and graduated from Juilliard college at the end of the four years, but I was now writing these funny, risqué, pop songs, just piano and voice, and everyone I played them for loved it!

We had academic studies as well as music classes as part of our program, and one of these classes was English literature, which I suddenly was great at. I don’t know where this understanding of human beings came from, or my love for reading English literature, but one day my English teacher, Beatrice Taub (who also taught at Columbia University), asked me after class if I really really was sure, that being a classical pianist and composer was really what I wanted to do with my life, because I was exceptionally good at literature. She suggested that I might take some extension classes at Columbia University to explore it further, maybe transferring to Columbia eventually.

It was then that I realized that these songs I was writing were going to be a better career path for me because they involved both writing and music, and I got that encouragement to continue with pop music. There was also another class I took that the music students would take together with the actors, that also was encouraging me to continue to write pop music.

Some of the people in my class were destined to be really famous actors, and one of them was Robin Williams. I felt more at ease in this class because they were mostly all actors, and had broader interests than the music students, I felt. Robin asked me one day to play some more of my songs for him, because he wanted to do a show out of them. He said he just loved the humor and the music I had put to the songs. He said he wanted to do some kind of a musical review with it. He was very funny even then. Just a natural comic, but also a great actor. Nothing came of it at that time, but my songs were eventually made into many musical reviews years later.

That was the beginning of my pop musical career.

Christopher Reeve, Kevin Spacey, Christine Baranski (1974), Kelsey Grammer, Kevin Kline, Patty LuPone, William Hurt, and more, were all actors who were part of the new acting department at the new Juilliard building at Lincoln Center. Eventually, years later, they would put in a classical guitar department, and a jazz department, which would have been unheard of before the new building came into being. Before these new times, Juilliard considered classical guitar to be “folk” music, and jazz wasn’t even on their radar. I guess someone was thinking like me, and these other forms of music needed to be heard and expressed as well as traditional classical music. So I think it was in the 1980s they got Sharon Isbin (fabulous classical guitarist) to head up the new guitar department, and Wynton Marsalis to head up the new jazz department to get these new genres started at the new Juilliard.

So much for my very formative Juilliard years!

These early songs were part of my piano & voice comedy act that was very popular at the time. A lot of people compared me to being a musical Joan Rivers. ‘It’s All Rite’ was part of this set of songs. I went to the UK on vacation soon after graduating college, and met Lee Allen, a music promoter with Carousel Artists (I think that was the name of his company) who booked me on a college tour of England and Ireland. Eventually, I put a small group together and performed everywhere. I played at the New University of Ulster, Belfast, and I opened for 10CC at, I believe, Kings College in London, and played many other colleges as well. What a great time I had, and everyone really liked the songs, including the risqué ones! And I just loved England! But then it became time to return to the states.

MW : Where does your music fit in terms of categorisation / the music scene?

BM : It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that I started writing more serious pop songs, not the early comedy stuff anymore. That was just after I had put out ‘It's All Rite’, the 12” dance, salsa single version of the song, and it was such a huge international hit. After that, I got interested in metaphysics - the invisible world so to speak - and more philosophical and spiritual matters. I found my first and very great meditation teacher, Anne Elizabeth Cooper, in New York City, and studied metaphysics with her for two years. It absolutely changed my life! I developed a totally different point of view of everything! I started writing songs more along these lines, and also songs about how people relate to each other on deeper levels. I needed to grow as a writer and artist, so this new path I took expanded my views of life and consciousness level.

Some of my early pop albums like Change To Come and Heart Like A Song contain some of my favorite and most prized songs, like ‘Still Need You’, ‘Change To Come’, ‘I Am The River’ and ‘Fallen Angel’ from the Change To Come album. And from the Heart Like A Song album, my favorites are, ‘In The Silence’, ‘You Are What You Believe’, ‘Hands Of The Artist’ and ‘All That I Am’. You can tell by just the titles how I had shifted focus and had finally grounded myself in more meaningful songs that brought in a brand new audience.

After those two albums. I continued expanding to world beat grooves with the Shambhala Dance album, which won best dance/dub/club album of the year (New Age Reporter finalist 2005 Lifestyle music award!). ‘Atlantis’, the first cut on the album, got great reviews and lots of airplay, even today it’s still being played. It’s been called “a meditation through movement”, and, “an exotic voyage of mysterious flamenco, Asian and middle eastern melodies, full of powerful world beat grooves beautifully blended together to create an atmosphere of intense, vital emotions both sensual and meditative at the same time” (Wind and Wire magazine, April 2005, Bill Binkelman).

I continued exploring different styles with a meditation album, Heaven And Earth, which is a continuous 50 minute meditation. I got and still get a lot of plays in the yoga studios and meditation classes with this one and the Shambhala Dance album. But you can see how my shift to more metaphysical and spiritual music has carried me into these different, but related styles. I even composed a musical rendition of the ancient, venerated prayer, ‘The Great Invocation’, given to humanity by ascended Tibetan master Djwhal Khul. I have shifted styles as I matured and explored a more expanded and deeper understanding of what I wanted to express musically.

MW : How are you using social media to stream / promote your music on platforms such as Spotify, iTunes etc?.

BM : It’s great! You can see all of the albums and singles I’ve done on Spotify, iTunes, and the other streaming services right away. So can all the other artists who put content out there. Everyone had to switch to streaming for the great international exposure. There’s nothing like it!

MW : Two of your early records were banned. Did you set out to challenge the mainstream with titles ‘It’s All Rite To F*ck All Nite…’ and ‘Give Your Dick To Me’?

BM : I was never really “banned”. What happened is that I produced the first 12” dance single version of ‘It’s All Rite’, and took it to all the record labels, which were mostly all in New York at the time. Everyone absolutely loved the record! Everyone absolutely wanted a few copies for themselves and their friends. But nobody had the balls to put it out into the market!!!! They were all afraid of repercussions, censorship, and their reputations! So I decided that I would put it out myself, something nobody had done at the time! I thought the record needed to be heard. I found a pressing plant in New Jersey, who were fine with pressing it up, then I went to an art store and got some “press type” and designed my own album cover. I got a friend of mine to take a picture of me, and voila! I had an album ready to go. I had no monies to promote the record, only just enough to record it and press it up. I figured that if I could get it heard by some people, maybe I could get some interest in it and maybe sell a few copies.

At that time, in New York and across the whole country, there were record pools, which were organizations of DJ’s who played the music in the dance clubs. I sent a 12” record (CD’s hadn’t been invented yet) to a list of record pools around the country, and to my surprise, I got a great response. Everyone wanted a copy to play. It was a salsa dance groove, something kinda new for mainstream clubs at the time, but the song was funny and danceable so everyone liked it and wanted to hear it. This was a time when you couldn’t get any airplay without a record label behind you. It was payola all the way. But what I could get was club play, and these DJ’s kept asking me for more and more records. And now people were asking the DJ’s where they could buy the record. So I had to get a distributor to put the records into record stores.

By this time, the record was being played in most all the clubs in the United States, but with no place to buy it. My first thought was to go to Sam Goody, one of the biggest record stores in New York at the time, and see if they would sell the record. They said yes, showing me a copy of some dance/club charts they had in the store that said that the record was #1 on the charts!!!!! I had no idea about these separate dance/club listings and was really excited that it was already charting. But there were about five dance charts around at this time, and ‘It’s All Rite’ was #1 on all of them! It stayed #1 for about five or six months in a row! It was a sensation! This started in about May of 1978, or 1979, I think, and ran thru September. Sam Goody gave me the very hard to get whole window display of my record, so did Colony records, another big record store in New York City at the time, and the rest is history! Other record stores followed.

Soon I realized that I needed a bigger distributor, so I contacted several in all the sections of the US, like the South, the Midwest, North Central, East Coast, West Coast, etc. They kept asking me for more and more records. I couldn’t figure out where the records were going. So one day I called my local one stop guy in Long Island City, and he said they were all going overseas. I asked where overseas, and he said, “Everywhere! Especially Holland.” Apparently, 12 miles off the coast of Holland was a ship that had a radio station broadcasting from it, and they could play anything that they wanted. My record was the number one request! Nobody could do anything about it to stop them, because they were in international waters. 12 miles out!!!

Since this was my first big hit, I was inexperienced as to what I needed to do next. It wasn’t too much later, about December of that year, I got a call from WEA International in Holland (Warner Brothers, Electra & Atlantic records all together) who said they wanted to license my record. It sounded great to me, so I took the deal. They published it in Europe, South America, England, Japan, Asia, etc. and promoted it in all the clubs. And I finally got legitimate airplay on it, because on the “B” side I had recorded the “clean” version, called ‘It’s All Rite To Truck All Nite’. Lots and lots of airplay everywhere! Finally!

It became #16 on the Billboard pop charts in the Benelux countries, and #2 on the charts in Paris, Michael Jackson being #1 at the time. WEA asked me for another single to put out, and I gave them, ‘Give Your Dick To Me’, and that was also very successful. I did the same thing with the “clean” “B” side, ‘Give Your Flesh To Me’.

So the bottom line is that if you have a record that everyone wants to hear, nothing will stop it from being heard. The people decided they wanted to hear ‘It’s All Rite’, and it squeezed itself through the cracks to be a big hit. Also, it started a new trend in music of what could be heard and played. Several DJ’s told me that I had really done something BIG with that song. They said it changed the music business forever! It opened the door for new things to come into the market, and then the people could judge for themselves whether they liked it.

Now getting back to your original question about being censored/banned, I really didn’t have any criticism for doing the record. People just wanted to get a copy of it and enjoy it. And I didn’t set out to “challenge” the system. I was simply expressing my views on what people were really thinking, and I did it via a danceable, funny, comedy record. I was just having fun!

Now, a lot of people took it seriously, literally, and that’s ok. Everyone has their own interpretation of things. That is what Art is for. To make people think. And that is what, ‘It’s All Rite’, did. It made people think, laugh, dance, party, and feel good! Remember, this was a time when Lenny Bruce had set a new standard, Joan Rivers was on the scene, along with Richard Pryor, George Carlin, etc. By the time I came along I took it all for granted that I would be able to put this record out. I wrote it when I was 19 years old and still in college, so that’s what you write when you’re that age. I didn’t care at all what people would think about me or this song!

Nobody I was aware of wrote anything negative about this “outrageous” song. One of the many reviews I got for my act (when I was performing all my funny songs with piano & voice around town in the late 1970s) was from Michael’s Thing, an LGBT magazine, New York City’s #1 weekly entertainment magazine and “going out guide” with reviews, comics, of all the performances, Art in the city, new and noteworthy etc. which said about my act, “…...she (Barbara) makes you laugh while she stabs you in the back!” I got nothing but praise for putting this song out! The LGBT community loved what I had done and fully supported me, along with great reviews from the Village Voice, and a nice write up from Billboard magazine by Roman Kozak. I also played at Huey’s Bar, a gay men’s bar, on Hudson street (west side of New York city near the Hudson river) for several months, through that whole summer, just piano and voice. It was a big hit!

MW : Tell me about your involvement with Carly Simon’s Coming Around Again album?

BM : I was doing synthesizer programming for a few of the songs on the album. The arranger I was working with was doing some arrangements for her new album, and I got to do some of the synth programming. It was lots of fun to be involved and to go to the recording sessions.

MW : …and the Michael Jackson (BAD) video…. also include any thoughts on Jackson’s charisma, ability (song & dance)….

BM : I never got to meet Michael Jackson, but I did get to meet Martin Scorsese who was really really interesting! He was asked to produce the video for the song. He came up to the office one day to discuss what kind of extra scored music was needed for the BAD video, music before the song started, and after the song was through. He was very intense, a real thinking kind of guy, and someone who knew what he wanted. He also has a great sense of humor! He impressed me as someone who really knows people. Meeting Scorcese was actually more exciting for me than meeting Jackson as he’s a real character!!! A mature adult!

MW : You’ve worked with Bruce Willis as a backing singer. Tell me about those times … also include your views on his abilities as an actor turned singer…

BM : Bruce Willis is a really great actor, and can play almost any part. That includes as a blues singer. The show we did was as his backup singers (along with two friends of mine) for the opening of the new Hard Rock Café in Austin, Texas. It was a very long day, full of rehearsals on stage with the band, and waiting for Bruce to arrive. As we tested mikes and stage positions, we could see a huge crowd starting to form in order to get a good view of the coming show. The press was there, and reported close to 100,000 people waiting to see this opening.

Bruce eventually got there, extremely exhausted. By the time the show started it was dark out, and everyone was excited. Then came the big moment when Bruce Willis came on stage, and everyone went wild! The band started to play and he started to sing. I was shocked by how well he could sing, and put over a song. It was a real “performance”.

He may not have all the technique of a “professional” singer, but what he has is better. He can make you get into the song, feel the song, …it’s not really the voice but the performance that’s spectacular. So close up to me. I could really see why he’s considered one of the great actors of our time. Acting, singing and performing are all connected. And he puts it all together beautifully.

MW : Describe a typical weekend….before lockdown and during…

BM : Well, I used to love to go to the ocean and watch the sunset a lot, then meet my friends for dinner in one of the great restaurants by the beach or in town. Before lockdown there were great movies to see, not just at home (these days) but at the real movie houses. Plenty of them around in the “old” days. During lockdown everyone has to stream movies at home. At least streaming is safe!

I also used to like to work out at the gym, but you can’t do that yet, so I’m hoping that sometime in the near future that will become viable again. Sometimes it’s fun just to take a ride up pacific coast highway and breathe in the sea air and see the beautiful scenery. You can still always do that.

There are lots of farmers markets around town, so I always go on the weekends to shop for fresh, whole, organic fruits and veggies! That’s always fun, and sometimes I go with my friends too.

Eating good, fresh, organic foods is my entire “Health Plan”! You are what you eat! So far, so good! And I can do this all year long. And during this lockdown, we just all wear masks. It’s fun being at the farmers markets and seeing all the chefs from all the great restaurants in town shopping for their weekly recipes with those big shopping carts they push thru the market. They buy whole boxes of produce and everything else sold there.

MW : What is your favourite…Carly Simon single?

BM : I think that would be ‘Mockingbird’, especially the 2015 remaster. James Taylor sounds great on this, and the two of them together just fit together perfectly. This remaster is from Songs From The Trees (a musical memoir collection). I’m glad they did this, because this is a classic! You can hear all the instruments clearly, the voices are very present, and the whole thing is a pleasure to listen to. Musical tastes change, but the classics will remain with us from “gentler” times.

MW : AND your favourite… Bruce Willis film?

BM : (I can’t choose just one!)

The Whole Nine Yards : hysterically funny!!! I laugh every time. The Fifth Element is a real classic! I see it again every time it’s on TV. Bruce Willis is fantastic in that “deadpan” character he plays. And the score by French composer Eric Serra is superb. Hip, powerful, rhythmic, smooth, jagged, everything needed to match the screen scene.

But the music stands alone if you just listen to the score by itself without the movie. I think they sold a lot of the music score. The Sixth Sense - so powerful, and metaphysical! It’s right up my alley! And Bruce Willis has a knack for finding well written screenplays! That’s a big key to the success of the movies he’s in.

And since they’re so well written, he has an opportunity to really show off his talent and get into those great parts.

MW : AND your favourite… Michael Jackson album?

BM : I think I like the Thriller album the best. I love the songs, especially, ‘Beat It’, ‘Thriller’, and ‘Human Nature’. And it was so well produced by Quincy Jones, with pounding gritty grooves, and great songs.

MW : List, in order of preference, your Top 10 singles & albums of all-time…

BM : (I have the original CD’s of this music, and still call them CD’s, but I’m sure this music is all streaming/downloads by now!)

1. Famous Blue Raincoat: songs by Leonard Cohen, studio album by singer Jennifer Warnes: exquisite, perfect singing of songs with her crystal clear voice! What a superb collaboration this was! I wish they had made more albums together like this one! A true classic! When I first heard it I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! Songs so well written, songs with a real message, and so well sung and produced.

2. I also love Leonard Cohen’s, ‘Hallelujah’, sung by anyone! It gives me chills every time! Powerful and hauntingly beautiful! The best cover of it that I love is K.D. Lang’s version. (I think it was on her album, Hymns Of The 49th Parallel, 2004).

3. Bach: Sonatas & Partitas: violinist: Itzhak Perlman: The sub-title of this 2 CD set put out by EMI classics says it all: “Great Recordings of the Century”, which is aptly titled!!! I can listen to this album at any time, and it will put me into a deep trance. I can’t stop listening.

Itzhak Perlman is an absolute master of the violin, and these solo compositions are not only some of Bach’s finest works, but Perlman’s rendition of them is flawless. He understands what the composer was trying to accomplish, and every time I listen to this it feels like he is showing us the true soul of humanity! The longing, the passion, the “reaching to the Light”! The thing about this kind of classical music is its very high vibration! I think it does make you smarter!

4. Then we have Jorge Aragao and his live album entitled Ao Vivo (which means “live”). Another album I have listened to for years. He’s a Brazilian singer/songwriter, and the songs are all sung in Brazilian Portuguese. But don’t let that stop you from listening. It’s exciting, passionate and very well recorded. It has the whole flavor of Brazil in it! Recorded in 1999.

The last song is a great rendition of ‘Ave Maria’. A true classic! (I took a great vacation to Brazil for a month once in the mid-2000s and this album is the real deal! The Brazilians absolutely Love him!)

5. Edith Piaf: 30e Anniversaire 2 cd set (probably on all the streaming services by now). All the songs are beautifully recorded, written, produced and her voice is extraordinary and present. It gives you the whole culture and passion of the French. It always puts me at a French café with friends and great great food! If you’ve never heard Edith Piaf, it’s well worth a listen.

There was a wonderful movie on her life called La Vie en Rose which I also recommend to get the whole feeling of this music. And I listen to this music often, especially when I’m feeling like there’s no culture west of New York City! She saves the day every time!

6. John Lennon: Imagine: I think everyone knows this is a classic! It’s a positive message!

7. The Eagles: Hotel California the whole album, but especially the title song, ‘Hotel California’: It never gets old!

8. Bach: English Suites performed by pianist Andras Schiff: he’s a Bach specialist, and has a great insight into what Bach intended with this great recording: Part of my regular listening.

9. Buena Vista Social Club: it really gives you the heart and soul of Cuba. I think the reason this album was such a hit when it was first put out is the huge amount of heart, passion, and honesty it evokes. You can feel it’s the real deal. Nothing fake here!

10. And last but not least, two albums that were put out by Putumayo a while back, called Brasileiro and Samba Bossa Nova. They are compilations of several Brazilian artists and styles, including bossa nova, folk, light samba, and I think some other styles too, beautifully put together. They are calming, gentle, rhythmic and haunting, and a great way to wake up in the morning. So many positive vibes! So musical and unpretentious!

MW : Where / what was the best meal you’ve ever enjoyed and what was the company like?

BM : Well, all I can remember is that it was in a Paris restaurant, and I was taken there by a record company executive to discuss publishing my music through a Paris company. I remember she told me that the closer you get to Paris from anywhere in the world, the better the food gets!!!

And I wasn’t disappointed!

The meal was some kind of spectacular steak, mousse au chocolate for desert, and fine red wine throughout the meal. Cheeses for dessert! (that was more dessert after the dessert!) And it was the atmosphere and vibe, not just of the restaurant, but of Paris, and the French people and their culture that I found so fabulous! I love the French and they loved me back!!!!

MW : What can we anticipate coming from you later on in 2021?

BM : I’m currently thinking about something along the lines of my previous Shambhala Dance and Heaven And Earth albums. Worldbeat and with a sleek groove.

It takes time to compose something like that.

It will be announced on my website when it’s done. www.barbaramarkay.com and I will put it out on the streaming services / downloads as usual.

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icewindandboringhorror · 4 years

Photo

Another set of responding to asks lol.. As usual I have them numbered and will also write out the ask in the text, especially since the screencaps are all blurry and taken at various times/compiled together badly and probably hard to read ghghhggh..... answers under the read more ~

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1. "Hi I don't mean to bother you at all, but I was wondering where you get your rocking horse shoes? (I think thats what they're called) I've been looking everywhere and I can't seem to find any :(( "

I don’t entirely remember, since I got them like 6 or 7 years ago.. I think maybe at some point that place ‘bodyline’ or something had some cheap ones? But I don’t see them on the site anymore, they were like $50 or $60. Now when I google it I can only find these insane like $600 ones from vivian westwood or whoever, or ones that are platform shoes but not necessarily the same type. Maybe you could find some on aliexpress or ebay or something? Usually you have to use weirdly specific search terms and look for a while, but you can often find stuff like that on those sites. Sorry I couldn’t be of more help!!!

2. "I've been sick for over a month and my doctor tested me - everything came back fine. After some discussion it appears that my ptsd symptoms came back and the stress on my body is making me fatigued, sick and dizzy. I don't want to say that this could be similar to you situation, but if you have a therapist or someone to talk to about any stresses/your sickness, it might help relieve the pressure a bit. Good luck, I'm so sorry you feel so unwell"

Thank you for sharing! Yeah, I think stress definitely plays a part in why I feel sick so often. Currently I’m not still having the same problem I was having a few months ago when you sent this, so that’s good at least!!

3. “Hi! Do you plan to ever have more sculptures for sale? Or would you do commissions? I haven't seen any in a while but wanted to buy one! :-O”

I have plenty that I want to sell, I guess it’s just hard for me to get set up. Since so much of the reason I procrastinate selling stuff is because I hate the stress of deciding on a price, I’ve thought for a while now that maybe I can just auction them (so I just set a base price, but people bid whatever they feel is fair and I don’t have to decide myself). But I’m just not sure of a good way to do that.. Ebay has auctions, but I don’t want random strangers buying them, I’d rather stick to just the pool of people who follow my art blog and are already familiar with my sculptures or etc. I could do them on here ?? (like, ‘reply to this post to bid, bids close 8am EST, whoever said the highest number sends the money through paypal and then I send the sculpture’ sort of thing???) But I’m not sure if it’s legal to sell stuff through tumblr, or if there could be any other problems with doing it so ‘unofficially’ like that.. I don’t know, I have a vague idea, I’m just having trouble deciding the best way to set up something! I do want to sell some soon though, if I live through the pandemic and anything ever goes back to normal, of course (I wouldn’t want to be having to leave the house to ship stuff in the mail right now).

As for commissions, I have actually done sculpture commissions for friends a few times, so I feel confident-ish that I’d be able to do something like that, but I also wouldn’t want to get overwhelmed since it takes a lot of work. Custom sculptures may also be more expensive, and again.. I always feel guilty and strange about pricing. I’ve thought about doing very limited sculpture commissions though (like, maybe just one at a time, first come first serve or something..?). If it seems like there’s actual interest in that sort of thing, I could definitely consider doing it in the future!

4. " *picks up that smol blue kid and throws them across the room* "

ghgh .. the smallness is an advantage... they could just skitter back down your arm like a tiny squirrel the second you tried to pick them up.. Ythrili survival strategy is to be too small to catch in the first place

(also forgive every sketch in this post, my screen that you can draw on broke, so I’m either drawing stuff in ms paint with a mouse, or drawing stuff on paper and coloring it in firealpaca also with a mouse ghghh.. not going to look Good)

5. "it sounds like you feel pressure to only post good content on the internet, and so you end up psyching yourself out of posting at all. Am I on the right track? "

Not necessarily, like I mentioned in the tags I think it’s more just that everything is complicated by my brain. I can’t just do something effortlessly. Whether it’s for an audience or not, I get caught up on every little detail and adding so much complexity to everything that all tasks take me longer than they take other people lol. I think I just tend to take everything very seriously??

Like for example, I’m often accused of ‘turning things into a discussion’ when someone was just intending to make an off-handed remark, because if someone is bringing up a topic to discuss, I end up engaging with it 100% and putting full effort into it, and it’s hard for me to be ‘’casual’’ about pretty much anything (so if someone was like ‘My day yesterday was a bit weird’ I wouldn’t be able to just respond ‘aw man, that sucks’, I would just be like ‘Weird how? what happened? what made it weird? Are you okay now? Are things still weird? Have you found a solution?’ etc. etc.). I was also bad at essays/open answer questions in school (despite usually being great at the class otherwise), because no matter how hard I tried to filter my speech and cut things out, I was always far too long-winded and would get almost too engaged with the topic and lose the clear cut thought organization and focus that you’re supposed to have I guess. Even like, playing video games or something that’s supposed to be relaxing, I can’t just ‘jump into them’ and do whatever, usually any game I play (large ones at least, small 25 minute point and click adventure games don’t count of course), I have 7 - 10 pages of notes, do hours of research, look up most of the main spoilers, plan out and organize exactly how I’m going to play it and this and that, etc. lol...

So, that personality trait carries over into posting things online as well, I can’t just type something out quickly and hit ‘post’ without a second thought. Social media is hard for me because you’re supposed to use it casually, but I spend a long time re-reading drafted posts, thinking about them, etc. etc., and end up never actually getting around to posting anything. It’s not that I’m perfectionist about it and want it to be ‘good’ or appear a certain way, it’s just that my mind becomes preoccupied with things I guess. I’m a natural information gatherer, part of my natural way of processing things is to learn everything possible before acting, and I want to make sure I’ve fully thought about everything always, and know as much as I can (so I wouldn’t want to publicly say something without giving it a lot of consideration first, or post a picture without really thinking about if I want to post it, what my reasons behind posting it are (like if I’m posting something just for a validation of a certain aspect of myself VS. genuinely because I like it, etc.), if a few months from now I’ll still like that I posted it, etc. lol.. even with like silly cat photos or something, I have to analyze it and be like ‘hmm.. will I still stand by this picture in 4 months? why am I posting it publicly vs, just keeping it privately to myself on my computer? what’s important about it?’ etc. etc. ghgjhgjh.. like.. shut up lol.)

ANYWAY, yeah, I don’t know if it’s about wanting online content to be “good”, as much as it’s just like... I take everything way too seriously and am detail-oriented, contemplative, and analytical to a fault, which means it just takes me 10x longer to do basic ‘’simple’’ things that it would for other people. Though I can still be quite quick-thinking and decisive (I don’t often waver back and forth between things too long), it’s usually because I have years of thinking about the same exact things behind me, so I already am very clear on my opinions on stuff, to a point. But when it’s new things I’m less familiar with (like playing a new game, or posting regularly online), I’m still in a phase where I guess I have to give it a lot of thought. I just process things in a different way than other people I guess? Or have some inherent inability to be brief/concise/careless? If you’ve ever read any of my worldbuilding posts (where I usually start off wanting to explain one thing but then have to derail into 400 other misc. details and explanations and it ends up being a novel), then maybe it’s more evident what I mean, where it’s just like... my natural manner of speaking is Too Much.. I guess? Even this answer is winding and rambly, and I feel like other people could have answered this ask in only a few sentences lol..

If any of that makes sense? I don’t know how to describe how I am lol.. I just know it's hard to me to use social media in this ~~casual effortless~~ way most people seem to, since my brain is just inherently incapable of anything ‘’casual’’ or ‘’effortless’’ lol.. T u T ;;

6. " Hi! I hope this isn't weird to say, I'm designing a race for my DND campaign and some of the aesthetics are a little bit inspired by some of your costumes and makeup designs. You're awesome and your art is awesome so thanks : ) "

Thanks so much, I appreciate it! It’s always cool to hear I can inspire people~

(I usually don’t include many compliments in these ask compilation posts, but I always try to include a few, just to let people know that even if I don’t respond to all of them I do see them, and appreciate it!)

7. ???

I ended up cropping out this ask and not answering because some of the content was questionable (the reason WHY/how they wanted to make the character) in a way that I didn’t feel like getting into a long thing about, but part of it was relevant to making OCs in my world, so I will just make a quick comment:

I do state that this is a closed world, so I don’t want anyone making OCs of my species or etc. at least not at this point. Once my game is finished (if ever lol), or I write a few books or something, then I feel it would be understandable if people like, made up a background story for their player character and thus maybe could have some form of OC in my world and etc.. So I may be more relaxed on this in the future as I create content that people naturally would want to engage with , but for now, I’m still a very tiny creator with a closed world and it just doesn’t feel the same as like.. making an oc based on some thing in a big TV series or something. My worldbuliding and etc. is still very personal to me. Unless we’re directly collaborating on things (like mentioned here (link) a bit), or you’re a personal friend of mine who’s gotten involved in the world with my own guidance (meaning I could tell you lore things you’d need to know to make it accurate, etc.), then I don’t feel it’s appropriate for strangers to do at this point.

Especially since I don’t even have enough world info out for people to be able to reference (most species have half-complete guides, I’ve only ever talked about like, one continent, etc.). There are so many necessary details which I have only in my head and have never typed out, so again, idk, it’d just be weird. I’m not okay with it until I have a lot more lore published, and maybe a few actual works out there that people can reference/stories/games/basis for OCs to exist in the first place. If that makes sense?

8. "Hey, is it ok to use your outfit posts as inspiration for a dnd character? I love them so much, you have such a unique way of combining crazy patterns and fabrics into something that gives off a good vibe”

Yes, that would be fine! Thank you for asking, and I appreciate the compliments~ Hopefully I can get back to posting that sort of thing more often lol.. I’ve gotten WAY off my routine and haven’t done many outfits lately.. aaa

9. "hi Luca! i just wanted to say i really love all of your costumes and fashions and dress ups, its all so cool and pretty and interesting. i actually wanna dress up for fun for myself, and now that i know about the bins i think i'll try to convince my mom to take me to similar places for cheap clothing pieces, since my mom is worried about how much all this costume stuff costs. anyway, please keep posting your cool and beautiful stuff! "

Thank you so much! I wish you luck with your costumes! Yeah, I think there’s a common idea in a lot of fashion communities (like with makeup, costumes, etc.) that you have to always have high quality things to look nice, and even if sometimes you can do more with a little extra money, really you can make anything look good with what you have if you just combine it right. As I’ve always been quite low income, being into fashion and stuff has be discouraging at times, that I couldn’t afford certain materials or items, but you just have to find a niche where what you’re able to do works. For example, a lot of even ‘cheap’ lolita style clothings are too expensive for me (like $30 - $50 for a dress??? then the more pricey ones can be over $100???) lol.. BUT, then stuff like mori kei, cult party kei, fantasy costumes, etc. you can do with nearly any fabric you can find, and it’s still just as fun and creative. Most of the outfits I take pictures of probably cost me no more than $1 - $10 for every single item combined. Obviously it depends on location - I have better access now that I live near a place like the bins, which I understand there may not be similar resources in small towns or etc. But even with generic thrift stores (which may not be as cheap as the bins), you can still find pretty good alternatives to all the money it costs to buy things brand new. There’s still some stuff I legit just can’t do because I don’t have access to the materials, but for the most part I can manage everything I’d like with $3 eye-shadows and 15 cent tattered curtain fabrics lol. You can still do really cool stuff on a pretty nonexistent budget!

10. “do you have any tips on growing your hair long? is it expensive to up keep? i wanna grow mine out but it grows so slow!”

Well, I know nothing about hair and am not a hair stylist or etc. so I really don’t have any tips lol?? And I think hair maintenance depends a lot on the type of hair you have, not everyone’s is the same. I assume we must have similar hair (my natural hair is thick kind of coarse very dark brown/black hair, which is a bit wavy in some parts but mostly straight, but most of my hair currently (aside from the overgrown roots at the top) is altered because of damage from bleaching and etc., it’s more brittle. so that’s what I’ll be referencing) if you’re asking me this instead of someone else, but just know that whatever I say may not apply to you.

Anyway, I really don’t do anything to my hair to make it grow or etc., it’s just that I’ve gone a long time without cutting it lol. I used to cut it all the time or change styles, and now I’ve kind of just left it for 5 or 6 years or so. Because of my mental illness I have trouble maintaining personal care and etc., so I do sometimes go a week or more without washing it, even though I’m trying to work that into my schedule more (luckily I don’t have stinky head, I’ve heard some people’s scalp oils and stuff can smell weird if left for too long, I have the privilege of being able to like.. skip on hygiene a lot without it severely impacting my ability to do things or etc. since it’s usually not obvious if I haven’t bathed in a week or two).

My cat also EATS HUMAN HAIR for some reason, so I have to keep it up all the time, so that when I shed it doesn’t actually just fall loose onto the ground lol. Literally all I do to my hair is just keep it in two braids at all times and wash it with normal shampoo and conditioner occasionally, when I can. I really only think it’s gotten long because I’ve been leaving it alone and not messing with it, not really because of anything I’ve done (like I don’t use fancy products on it or etc.) And because of that, no, it’s not really expensive! It absolutely WOULD be if I were like..a normal functioning person and I regularly bleached it and dyed it and put products on it and styled it and used shampoo and conditioner every 1-3 days on it and etc. lol.. But I guess because I don’t do anything to it to maintain it, I’m not spending money on hairspray or dye or shampoo or etc. I used to bleach it a lot and straighten it and use hairspray and stuff on it, and it seems healthier (at least on the new top parts) now that I’m just ... ignoring it basically lol. But I don’t really know what to do to make it grow faster! I’m bad at self-care, and even if I do costumes and stuff, I really am not into beauty and hair and nails and makeup and stuff, so I’m probably the wrong person to ask hghjhb.. My upkeep routine is just... eat and sleep. wash face with water daily.. do extra stuff if you can manage to despite your functioning issues, etc. I’m definitely not a Beauty Advice person, I barely brush my hair even once a week lol

11. "Maybe you should reduce the number of races if it's too overwhelming? A world can still be immersive with only a few races in it."

(sidenote - Not to be nitpicky, but I make a specific point that the groups of fantasy creatures I create are species, not ‘’races’’, even though it is a commonly used term in fantasy worldbuilding, I think it’s inaccurate/weird )

I know I don’t have to make so many different groups, but, I guess I just really want it to be a broad setting. Part of the point in creating Nanyevimi (aside from worldbuilding just being extremely fun and a hobby greatly suited to someone with my personality traits lol) is to have an established world that I can do anything within, a framework already built where it'd be super easy to just drop a character anywhere on the map and already have an idea of what their culture, background, experiences, etc. would be based on pre-existing details about that portion of the world, etc. But I also want it to be broad, and varied, where every area kind of has it’s own dynamics going on there, so if you’re in a different place, you get a different kind of story. (like in an elven alliance city, you’d be better suited to tell an adventure story centering around complicated local politics, or city life, or etc.. whereas out in some isolated mountains in the south, it’d be more suited for a mystery story about stumbling across ancient ruins, or running into a mysterious traveler, etc.)

Which I guess doesn’t matter much, since I'm better at setting, world design, character design, planning, and details than I am at plot, so I probably won’t actually ever do anything with it (god forbid I tried to write a book or something with my utter inability to be concise/brief in any imaginable way). I can craft settings/characters/history/world-details all day endlessly, never losing inspiration or etc, but my weak point is actually telling stories within those settings and formulating a solid plan, organizing plot structures long term and etc.. Setting up everything for something to happen/creating a place where many interesting premises could occur is fine, but then actually thinking of how those things should OCCUR, or how the set up should play out, is where I get kind of lost. I guess the ideal at some point would be to have people working with me, helping when writing stories in my world/outlining games/etc, to add more cohesion/structure and reign in the unfocused stream of ideas, but that’s very unlikely since I don’t have any close friends that are good at organizing or plotting either, etc. BUT anyway, even if I can’t ever manage to do anything with it, the whole “having a setting I can use for anything I want if anything ever comes up, which is already established and thus makes it much easier to formulate ideas because all the background work is already done for myself” thing is at least a nice goal.. in concept...theoretically lol..

And, it’s not really too overwhelming, I think the overwhelming part is actually just formatting and producing those ideas in a consumable form. It’s not hard for me to keep track of 20 different groups and make backgrounds and every imaginable detail for them, but it IS hard to actually take all that information that exists in my head, type it out as a worldbuilding post, format and organize it, draw pictures to go with it, etc. If I could just post long stream of consciousness style 300,000 word long posts with no paragraph breaks, 4000 typos, barely any punctuation, etc., then I’d have A LOT more world-building info publicly available (since that’s what all the initial documents on my computer look like lol), but that’s just so inaccessible it’d be pointless to have public in the first place. The hard part isn’t really coming up with or managing the information, it’s just... organizing it all, and finding a way to share it.

12. "oh PLEASE tell me what boing peach beverage the elf looks like"

a quick sketch of them.. mysterious peach (and other produce) salesman

13. "fun question: what are ur fashion pet-peeves?"

Well, basically none because I hate when people are rigid over Fashion Rules or etc. Like, people who take pictures of others in public because they “look weird” , or who constantly trash on what people are allowed to wear, what patterns can be mixed with others, etc. etc. I get that some stuff can look kind of bad sometimes, and it’s not that I think nobody is allowed to criticize fashion trends or etc. (especially if they’re legitimately problematic, like of course someone wearing a homophobic t-shirt or doing blackface should be criticized), but I mean just like... that sort of trivial bitter criticism that doesn’t do anything but make people feel bad about the way they look or make them afraid to dress in ways they feel comfortable. Like taking a picture of someone and posting it online to make fun of them because they wore socks with sandals, or bullying 14 year olds who just started doing makeup and haven’t totally gotten their look sorted out yet, etc. etc. (ESPECIALLY since this can often intersect with classism, racism, etc. if you really examine what people mock as 'ugly' or 'unacceptable' styles, it's often stuff like men wearing dresses/makeup, women not shaving, clothing associated with poverty (like wearing “”cheap”” clothes), physical traits commonly associated with poc, making fun of people who look a certain way likely due to mental illness (like fidgeting, dirty mismatched clothing, carrying stuffed animals or comfort items in public etc.), etc. etc.

I find costumes and makeup and outfits to be a very cool and fun way to express myself. So when people are complete freaks about it and set out to just relentlessly make others feel bad for no good reason, it’s like... obnoxious... How can you take something with so much potential and limit it and close others off and turn it into this rigid hateful thing, when it should be something that everyone is able to be passionate about and appreciate?? Outside appearance isn't everything, but it's a tool of expression for so many people and can relate to who they are as a person, people should never feel uncomfortable to be who they are or look how they look just because some dumbass rich person writing for a style magazine has the gall to declare some random thing to be 'Unfashionable' despite not having a genuinely creative bone in their body, or some bigot thinks that certain things are ‘ugly’ or ‘unprofessional’ due to their own mental associations, etc.

But anyway, I guess if I had to choose a few things that I just think look kind of odd to me personally/are generally off-putting...

--- the overdrawing lips thing when you can see the persons actual lip-line and it almost looks like they have two mouths or something? (if not done intentionally for costume makeup). It can look a little strange to me sometimes, like an optical illusion where you see multiple mouth lines at once?? idk like this?

--- freckles that are just round circles and really heavy and don’t look realistic (though again, I also realize this could just be the person’s first time drawing them on or something and I’m not mocking for lack of skill, etc. I just mean that it’s a little strange to look at, not actually BAD though) (and it can also be intentional, like for a cartoony costume look) ---- People adopting cutesy/childlike fashion and clothing and sexualizing it or using it as part of their sex/kink stuff.. I just feel like anything associated with children should not be sexualized..? If the first thing someone thinks when seeing children's school uniforms or frilly little girl’s doll dresses or whatever is that it could be a Hot Thing then hhh... like why is your brain making those connections lol.. People can dress how they want for whatever reasons they want, but that’s always personally creeped me out a little. Similar to our culture’s obsession with looking young being ‘hot’ (like a grown man wanting someone who’s a legal adult but still “looks 16″ or etc.), where it’s like.. okay, I guess yeah outwardly you can make that choice, and maybe aren’t directly causing harm, but.. the underlying tones of it and etc. still make it very unsettling to witness lol... ---- anything appropriated obviously, as well as fetishization or bastardization of cultures, like t-shirts with Japanese writing on them Just For Aesthetic, or taking certain culturally or religiously significant symbols or etc. and adopting them as ‘just a silly fashion’ thing when you’re actually being disrespectful, etc. ---- those shorts or whatever that go up extremely high on the hipbones always look a little weird to me lol, like they give a person funny proportions,

(you may have to right click open image in new window and zoom to see the text, but it’s like.. the blank space makes it look kind of weird to me? Like there’s too much where there’s just nothing going on? idk. That’s just my personal preference though, obviously I tend to lean towards busy designs lol)

That’s all I can think of though, like I said, I’m really not picky or judgy about fashion since I think people should be able to do whatever they want for the most part. I’m not like a “omg stripes should NEVER be worn with plaid!!” type person or something lol.

14. "Hey Luca! I love when you post about your world. Do you have a favorite species you've made up so far? Also, I hope you're holding up well during the crisis!"

AAaa thanks! I’m okay mostly. It’s distressing since because of my particular mental illness I already have constant paranoia and obsessions about health, so of course hearing about so much illness can be really triggering constantly and I’m preoccupied in never-ending anxiety spirals about mortality and etc. etc. etc. , but situationally, I’m just very thankful that nobody in my household has gotten sick yet and I desperately wish that will continue to be the case. *** *** ***

(ignore the *** *** *** , this is a text version of a physical compulsion (a hand movement) that I have to do when I mention certain topics lol.. the little man in my brain that controls my obsessive compulsive disorder says I must do certain things after saying or thinking certain things,, You Know How It Is )

And I really love worldbuilding questions, so thank you so much!!!!! Hghgh maybe it seems weird to favor any over the others, but of course I really like the Avirre'thel. Conceptually, I think their origin story and connection to ancient elves and their abilities and etc. put them in a really unique position in the broader world (some of the only truly immortal people to exist, the only people who can still decipher ancient elven texts in a way that makes sense, etc. etc.). Since Nanyevimi (my world) is really just a setting being built so that in the future I can set things within it (games, short stories, etc.), I think I'm drawn to the aspects of it that have the most potential to make interesting characters, and there are definitely a lot of pre-established dynamics with the Avirre'thel/in Navyete (their home country) as a whole that would make it an good place to set certain things, or a good group for a main character to be from, etc.

I do really like the Jhevona as a species overall too, even if I haven't developed them as much, they also kind of stand out as having some fairly unique features that put them in an interesting position in the world (being one of the most magically capable groups that exists but that also having downsides (health issues and infertility from magic exposure, etc.), how the necessity to keep control over their magic influences their culture, being some of the only natural shape-shifters, etc.). Within that, I REALLY love the Thastanri (a subspecies of Jhevona), like their connection to dreams, the Imkasyn, being one of the last few peoples in contact with real dragons, etc. etc. There are a lot of complex things going on in their area, so there’d be a lot of potential to tell a variety of stories or have interesting characters from that group.

AND, though it's supposed to be Unknown in the world so I won't talk about it just in case I ever write a book one day or something and need to preserve at least a FEW mysteries that I don't just outright explain in worldbuilding posts, Jhevona do have the most interesting origins of any species in my opinion. There are some things from before the timeline break sort of thing (where all recorded history was seemingly wiped and everyone had a big memory loss about 50,000 yrs ago) that people aren't aware of anymore... but Jhevona used to have a cool backstory and quite interesting function in society prior to that. There are some remnants in the genetics of the species and how their magic works (at least for certain groups) that kind of hint at how ancient Jhevona used to look and what they used to do, even though in the modern day things are very different.

15. "Top 10 songs you've been listening to lately?"

I don’t have a top 10 since I listen to everything for different reasons, and don’t have as deep a relationship with music the way some people do (like I don’t really have a favorite band or group I have a connection with that’s “gotten me through hard times”, or music I cry to/any songs that are specifically personally emotionally meaningful to me, etc., etc.), but here’s a quick playlist of a few favorite-ish things I’ve had in my head a lot recently -

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPmQ4SZdFFHNkgKo7nAiEMgVvLcycX5Qc

the last song on the list specifically I’ve been replaying a lot for some reason, I guess since it’s good background music as there’s no words. Particularly the part that starts around like 38 seconds in, something about that melody reminds me of something distant, in a dreamlike way. The past few days I mostly alternate between that song, Outstanding, and And The Beat Goes On lol

16. " Do you ever sell sculptures? I really like that little fawn!"

Yeah, I hope to eventually! Like I mentioned in question number three, if I can set up some sort of way to do auctions or etc, then maybe I can sell that one!

17 & 18 : '"aaa yay!! i missed your outfits!!!" / "can I just say love ur outfits! They're so cool and inspire me to draw my ocs with new outfits > o < and I love your cat too, please give him a big ol pat!"

Thank you!!!! more compliments posted just to show I appreciate them lol, even if I don’t publicly respond to every one~ And, the Boyes appreciate the pats.. here is them.. big babbeys...

#it bothers me still that I didn't take all the screenshots the same way and there's different colors of nu #mbers and etc. lol.... but some of those are from 4 months ago or more and I had already deleted the original ask #from my inbox so I can't go rescreencap it to match the others..#this is the issue inherent in taking so long to answer things that I just respond in large batches lol #replies #okay also I know it's been months but... one of you has to like this post or at least show you read/interacted with my #response somehow because I cannot spend like 4-5 hours typing stuff for others if nobody will read it ghghg #( i know i make it take longer by being rambly and etc. but.. still...)#I'm sorry they sat in my inbox a long time and etc. but... also..... my pwecious time and effort #i hope at least one of the people I'm responding to sees that i did indeed reply to them lol

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bewitching-elizabeth-olsen · 5 years

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Press: Elizabeth Olsen Opens Up for Who What Wear's September Cover

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Gallery Links:

Studio Photoshoots > 2019 > Session 006

Studio Photoshoots > 2019 > Session 006 – Behind the Scenes

WHAT WHEN WEAR: A loose linen blouse. An untouched plate of madeleines. An empty French bistro in the Valley on a Tuesday at 4 p.m. These are the poised circumstances under which I spend an afternoon attempting to better understand one of Hollywood’s most discreet young celebrities: Elizabeth Olsen.

The 30-year-old actress’s identity doesn’t seem like it would lend itself to much mystery. Since 2014, Olsen has starred as the Scarlet Witch in Marvel’s superhero movie franchise—one of the most-watched film series in entertainment history. (This summer’s Avengers: Endgame quickly became the second-highest-grossing movie of all time.) It’s a role she’ll reprise later with WandaVision, a Disney+ spin-off series about her superhero character coming spring 2021. In the meantime, Olsen executive produces and stars in Sorry for Your Loss, a drama series following Olsen as Leigh, a young widow struggling to deal with the sudden loss of her husband. (The show airs on Facebook Watch, and its second season premieres October 1.) By any objective measure, business is booming for Olsen, the younger sibling of Ashley and Mary-Kate, who long ago reached a level of fame so behemoth they no longer need a last name. The Olsens are as much American royalty as the Kennedys or the Rockefellers. I should know everything about Elizabeth Olsen.

And yet, as soon as she walks through the door of Petit Trois (the setting she chose for our interview) and introduces herself to me, it sinks in how little I do know. “I’m Lizzie,” she says with a jumpy half-hug, half-handshake—though the awkwardness is entirely my fault. I’m caught off guard that the young starlet lives just outside of L.A., around the corner from where she grew up (I would have pegged her for more of a hip Eastside girl), and I never knew she went by the cozy nickname. “Thanks for coming to the Valley,” she says, smiling.

Following behind two heavy-hitting child stars turned esoteric fashion moguls, Olsen, who decided at a young age to pursue a career in acting (and obtained a degree in it from NYU), had prodigious shoes to fill. Her on-screen breakout, a critically lauded lead in the 2011 Sundance hit Martha Marcy May Marlene, suggested that Olsen would be taking a cleverly divergent route from her older sisters—one of a risk-taking indie cinema darling. Some of her filmography still reflects that identity—roles in quirky small-budget dramedies like 2012’s Liberal Arts and 2017’s Ingrid Goes West.

Maybe that’s why, even after all the Marvel movies, which are about as commercial as they come, I still see her in that light. Or maybe it’s Olsen’s enigmatic personal life, almost laissez-faire approach to style (“A combination of suburban mom meets little boy,” is how she describes it), and overall serenity of manner that create the sort of intrigue that independent film girls tend to have.

Her current project, Sorry for Your Loss, certainly has some of that indie energy, simply because Facebook Watch is still a new and unknown content platform. Olsen admits that selling the show to Facebook felt like a scary move in the beginning since most audiences don’t know that watching TV on Facebook is a thing at all. Moving into season two, she’s still figuring out the best way to spread the word to audiences. “There is no precedent, and that can be really challenging,” Olsen emphasizes. Still, there are major pluses to the marriage of television and social media, especially for a show that addresses a topic as personal and underrepresented as grief. “The show living on Facebook has been interesting because of the dialogue people get to have about their own experiences with grief and loss on the platform,” Olsen says.

The actress is looking forward to audiences’ feedback on season two, which finds Leigh “taking big swings, making big mistakes, and trying to figure out the balance.” As Olsen says, “Grief isn’t something that you ever just shut a door on or move forward from. It’s very cyclical.”

Olsen, however, will not be participating in these conversations with fans herself, because—ironically—she’s not on Facebook. She didn’t have a trace of social media presence until 2017. She finally downloaded Instagram shortly after the release of Ingrid Goes West, in which she pulls off playing a very convincing L.A. influencer. In contrast to millennial celebrities who use social media to speak about everything from beauty products to social justice, Olsen doesn’t feel the obligation to be any sort of influencer, politically or otherwise. “If I like blending into a wall, screaming from a stage isn’t something that would help me enjoy my life,” she says. “Sometimes I just don’t want to be part of a conversation because I don’t want anyone looking my way.”

As it turns out, privacy and stability inform everything about Olsen’s life—from how she dresses to the roles she chooses—more than any desire to seem “cool.” She lives in suburbia with her fiancé, musician Robbie Arnett, where she enjoys cooking, eating, and dabbling in interior design. “I love food more than I love anything that has to do with clothes,” she says, starkly contrasting her stylish sisters. (Though the actress is more of a beauty girl—she currently serves as a global ambassador for Bobbi Brown Cosmetics.) Categorizing herself as an “obsessive, detailed perfectionist” beset with a heavy dose of social anxiety, Olsen prefers poring over moldings and wood stains than obsessing over how her body looks in a dress and which angle she should pose in.

Transforming into a character—wearing costumes, acting on camera—puts the performer right at home, but photoshoots and red carpets, which give her no role to disappear into, are a source of great distress. “I don’t like standing out in a crowd,” she tells me just after ordering the dainty plate of madeleines. Our server also named raspberry tarts and pains au chocolat on her list of available pastries, but down to her desserts, off-screen Olsen likes to keep it simple.

“At 30, I feel like I’m finally getting to an age that was meant for my personality,” the actress says with no ounce of irony. “Just domesticated. A homebody.” I introduce her to the term JOMO: the joy of missing out. “Yeah… that,” she confirms. “I never feel bad about not leaving my house.”

Quietude feels inherent to Olsen’s personality, but it’s also something she learned from her family. She tells me her parents have had the same group of 10 friends their whole lives; so have her older sisters. Like other famously private Hollywood families (the Coppolas, the Fondas), the Olsens justifiably keep their circles tiny and exclusive to those with whom they have history—those they can trust. “I don’t have too many friends that I’ve met through work,” Olsen says. “I care about privacy. I don’t have a desire for people to speak about me.” Bottom line: Lizzie Olsen is not particularly interested in fame.

Ultimately, no matter how superhuman she appears on the big screen, Olsen values a fairly normal life: She wants her pastries from Petit Trois, where everybody knows her; she wants her white button-downs and her stable paychecks from Facebook and Marvel (most of which she’s been tucking away in savings to prepare for a family, she says). “Maybe I think about things too rationally, but my career goals are longevity and stamina,” Olsen tells me. “Working steadily, feeling challenged, and just kind of hunkering down for a bit.” One day, that paycheck might come from a less visible job; Olsen says that later in life she’d like to go back to school for a degree in architecture, interior design, or landscaping. “I’m interested in the new science of irrigation and water conservation in California,” she shares. “I could be someone who’s lived multiple lives, multiple careers.”

Before heading out, Olsen packs the six madeleines, which have all gone untouched, in a to-go box for later, when she’s home, to savor in her quiet, happy place. “The next career could be a lot more private,” she says. “Maybe. We shall see.”

Press: Elizabeth Olsen Opens Up for Who What Wear’s September Cover was originally published on Elizabeth Olsen Source • Your source for everything Elizabeth Olsen

#Elizabeth Olsen #Avengers #Scarlet Witch #Avengers Infinity War #Avengers Age of Ultron #Captain America Civil War #Kodachrome #Ingrid Goes West #Godzilla #Sorry For Your loss

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abkdkzine · 6 years

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A Guide to Making Portfolios

Contributor applications are open, but I noticed that there’s a few people who may be confused or don’t know what certain parts of our guidelines mean. So, here’s a simple guide showing how to make a neat portfolio that obeys our instructions and requirements!

(I kind of refrained from making a bunch of lighthearted jokes or comments though, so I might’ve missed my chance on showing just how dorky I can get, haha!)

I’ll be covering both art portfolios and writing portfolios in this guide, but I also hope this helps out anyone who might need this sort of information in the future because this information doesn’t apply to just our zine! With that said, I’ll start with the very basics: getting to know cloud storage and sharing services, or in this case, Google!

Technically speaking, portfolios are basically any and all of the platforms you post your content into (like Tumblr, Instagram, DeviantArt, etc.). But, when you’re applying for something that requires you to show your works in a professional manner (such as in fanzines or IRL jobs), knowing how to organise your works can help you out in the long run!

Google is such a versatile platform which allows everyone to have access to all (if not almost all) of their organisational and work-related products! As such, if you have a Gmail account, you should also have this wonderful privilege. One of their products, Google Drive, lets you store your files and organise them any way you want them! There’s a little box icon on the top right of the browser which will reveal all of the products you can use too, so if you don’t know what they are, it’s a good idea to explore a bit on your own time.

Through Google Drive, you’ll be creating a folder which will serve as the place your files will be uploaded into. Keep in mind though that Google is not the only platform that offers cloud services! Dropbox is an example of another popular platform among others.

In this example, I’ll be referring to our zine’s contributor applications. Make a new folder in your Google Drive by clicking on that big ol’ “New” button, and use that button again to upload 3-8 of your works for our zine’s applications. Or, drag and drop files. It’s surprisingly fun to do and watch!

Be sure that your folder’s privacy settings is open! Just activate the folder’s shareable link (as in anyone with the link can have access to it), and it’ll let us look at all of your examples without trouble!

But, why do you want us to do this, you might ask?

Like I mentioned earlier, knowing how to organise your things helps you out in the long run! But in our case, if an applicant chooses to send us a form with a portfolio that doesn’t quite follow our requirements (such as putting an entire gallery or website with all their works)...

Well, it’s going to be an inconvenience to the moderators because there are going to be a lot of applications to go through within a limited time frame. We simply won’t have the time to look for your best works in a portfolio showcasing all of your pieces. We set a maximum limit of 8 examples for portfolios for that reason!

Any added works will not be considered in the examples, and any applications with galleries or websites sent to us as their portfolios will have a VERY low chance of being considered at all.

Instead, make that neat little folder shown previously and individually add the files you want to share! It won’t take up a lot of your time, I promise. That way, you can make sure you’ve chosen your most quality works, and we can review your application in a timely manner! This method is the most preferred way for us to receive portfolios.

Writers, if you are unfamiliar with Google Drive, this process can apply to you as well. Make a new folder, label it appropriately, and upload your files! Word documents can be transferred instantly, so fear not for your formatting – you’re in good hands. However, if you are concerned about it, I suggest that you take a look at Google Docs. You can copy and paste your works there instead, either all three written examples in one document or three separate documents in the folder.

Realistically, not following the rules sets a bad impression on the people reviewing your portfolio. We want to see your best work, and we want you to feel confident in your examples! If you show us that you can’t follow simple and easy tasks such as organising your works, then we’ll get the impression that you’ll do the same elsewhere. Regard this as though you are preparing for an actual job interview because this helps with your reputation as well.

So, what can I do to ensure my chances to be considered?

This is a section that is more for art than it is for writings; but here’s a general consensus for what kind of submissions or examples are expected and what is not expected!

A bad portfolio consists of little variety among the shown examples. If your examples are mostly made of your subjects in several different angles, that’s alright, but if there’s a lack of principles of art (such as rhythm, movement, proportion, variety, etc.) then the portfolio wouldn’t really be very interesting to the judges. Sketches, while some look nice, aren’t good examples because zines require complete pieces!

For written stories, the worst possible examples out of so much more that you can present in a portfolio are: bad understanding of characterisation (out-of-character factor), mediocre understanding of grammar (or unedited versions), and uninteresting.

A good portfolio shows a clear understanding of the elements and principles of art. There’s variety among the pieces which shows creativity and thought. Properties like different colour schemes, addition of environments, angles, and etc. are things that make portfolios interesting to look at.

For writing, having a good grasp of grammar, understanding of characters, and personal style are good indicators that your writing is well done and given some thought! In other words, it allows the readers to feel engaged with, which in turn makes it more interesting.

But, most of all:

Your pieces have to be related to the zine’s theme! It’s different for every zine, of course, but generally, application reviewers look to see if the applicant is genuine about liking the concept(s) behind their projects, and that the applicant can portray or illustrate the subjects of the zine well with the skills presented among the examples.

Wanderlust revolves exclusively around BakuDeku, and so, seeing examples with both of them featured in your works will guarantee you, one-hundred percent, a spot for consideration.

Sounds good to me! But, can you clarify what to avoid?

As previously suggested, guidelines are made to make sure the reviewing process goes as smoothly as possible for the moderators or judges. I’ll be using our own guidelines for this example as well!

Since many zines like to request for a number of linked examples in their forms for their portfolios, we understand that it might be a force of habit or something that some people may consider easy to do. But, I’ll say this once again: we require prospective contributors to create their portfolios through a shared folder (lots of cloud services exist!) because it saves us, the moderators, a lot of time from copying and pasting every single link!

When you show us your social media links, don’t do it like this:

Tumblr: @ariririsu

Twitter: @ariririsu

Give us the actual links to your platforms! This also saves us a lot of time instead of typing it down. We would be ever so grateful and happy if you do this.

Keep your examples up to date! We don’t want to see what you could do back then. We want to see what you can offer us now. It’s like selling a bunch of pastries at a bake sale, but you’re selling us pastries made two years ago. Your most recent works gives us the most accurate and best representation of your skills.

Once again, incomplete sketches or written drafts are no-no’s. If you want to know what I’m talking about when I mentioned the principles and elements of art, here’s a neat little roster that breaks down what makes compositions in artworks more three-dimensional and interesting.

Going over the specified number of examples will not affect your chances of being accepted in the zine. So, if you add two or three more works in your portfolio, rest assured that we will not even look at them. For the same reason I mentioned beforehand: there is going to be a lot of applicants, and we want to get the reviewing process done as soon as possible to maintain our schedule. Less mess, less stress.

Some Pieces of Advice:

Have some confidence in your works! If you feel super shy and you’re still building up that confidence, the judges would be more than happy to supply you with feedback if you ask for it. Their feedback will not be destructive, but it will be meant to help you improve your skills. Take whatever advice they give you and at least put them into consideration too!

Zines and other huge projects like these take a lot of your time. One thing that I’ve seen people commonly do is that they miscalculate the amount of time and commitment they can put into these projects, and they often have to leave them. Doing so will negatively affect your reputation. So, when you’re not sure if you can dedicate a lot of time to the zine, we highly suggest that you don’t apply to keep the game fair to others who want to be in the zine as well.

Communication is VERY important in these projects. Never ever disappear on the projects without saying something because it’s going to cause the moderators to have to find ways to contact you and be very worried if something happened to cause the sudden disappearance. Like the previous point, doing so will negatively affect your reputation.

Just so you know, you’ve got time to make your portfolios if you don’t have enough examples! You can literally apply at the last minute and it would still count!

Again, be sure that your Google Drive folder’s settings are shared to those who has the link!

And with that, I hope I was able to make a nice guide which emphasises certain rules in our own zine guidelines as well as how to make a good portfolio! I’m not sure if there are other guides like these around, but I hope I got a bunch of general zine rules correct.

We look forward to seeing your applications! Our zine applications close on January 12, and we can’t wait to see what you have in store for us!

#bkdk #bakudeku #katsudeku #zines #anime zine #wanderlust bkdk zine #bkdk zine #update #contributor apps #mod ari speaks #mod maj speaks #guide

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dragonofdarknesschaos · 5 years

Text

Look at Me Twirling my CVS Receipt!!

DelaneyArt said:

Me again.

Here. If you wanna get yourself involved even more than you already are. This is what Sky said to me recently. And I’ve agreed to her terms. Me and her are MUTUAL I never said we were friends.

Transcription if the image does not load:

From Skyrawathi, 12/24/2018

Okay so I have read your letters. I understand what you mean. I am just not sure if you are honest with your apologizing and with willing to end this war. I mean it is hard now for me to trust you because I am afraid that you will start insulting me again soon. I hope I am wronf. [sic] Maybe I just need some time. I guess we both need to calm down. Especially it is Christmas now. Emotions are hard to handle. I am also sick of this situation already. But if what you say is true and you want to be honest with me, ans [sic] you don’t want use [sic] anymore to be enemies then it is so cool

I could show you how you can develop your art, where you can find inspiration and how to use them to create sth original. You really don’t need my art that much and you don’t need to redraw them. I mean it is so cool if we could inspire each other, but you have to start first creating something original. And yeah, you can because as you have mentioned that comic Possessive of yours, you prove with this that you can be creative and inspiring for other artists. Just lets calm down because I never intended to be your enemy, I never wanted to. But you see how far this conflict went and it is stupid? Don’t you think?

I understand that sometimes it is hard for everyone to come up with sth new and we lack new ideas. Every artist suffer this so it is nothing to be ashamed of. I can show you how to fix that so you will always have awesome ideas in head.

But first you definately [sic] have to credit me. And if you want to make a redraw of my work then you should write in post that this pic is study of Skyrawathi’s art. And it is nth wrong because lots of artists study others. Me either. I always mention the source of the pic that I used as reference.

So yeah, we can definately [sic] end this war and come to agreement. But just please, do what I ask. Credit me when you use my art, and if you can be that cool to ask me for permission before you do a redraw then that would be really awesome of you. Then you will never ever deal with reporting because your hands will be clean.

In return to show you that I am not evil, I can help you with improvement. I can show you how to turn your inspirations into original ideas and how to draw chamiko so well that you will never ever need someone’s pic as a base.

Does it sound ok for you?

Now, from what I’ve gathered from the first paragraph of this email along with mentions to prior emails in the same chain as alluded to in the PSA post, D decided that before Christmas–a time when everyone wants to relax and spend time with their families, friends, and loved ones; the season of comfort and joy–was an excellent time to send insulting emails and threats to her most inspiring idol, just for reporting D’s facebook page. I cannot imagine what was said, but the way Sky is reacting leads me to believe that the insults were so volatile that they may never see the light of day again. Sky might have even feared for her well being and that is why she is offering to help. If this is how D treats someone she claims to hold in such high respect and idolize, then I cannot imagine how she treats anyone below such a pedestal.

Actually, I can. For telling the admin of a closed Xiaolin facebook group that D was plagiarizing other artists, which resulted in D getting kicked from the group, I was called “a crazy bitch” back in September of 2018. I have not once insulted D, yet she continues to berate me and harass me on multiple social media sites for warning others about her. I’ll speak more on this later.

Back to the email. To summarize what Sky is saying:

Sky is tired of this war; it’s stupid and she wants it to stop

Sky doesn’t know if she can forgive D

D’s actions have repeatedly shown that she cannot be trusted

Sky is willing to help D improve so that she can get better and not need to copy other’s art

In order to get to that point, Sky asked D for four things:

give Sky credit on the art that D has already posted

start crediting and sourcing the artists whose work D “studies” or “copies to learn from”

ask Sky (and any other artists) for permission before doing a redraw of their respective artwork

create something original

At no point does Sky say they are friends or “mutuals.”

At no point in this email does Sky say that D and her are mutual in anything, but I would infer there is a mutual understanding that D must do better. None of this excuses D’s harassing and abusive behavior.

Alright, if D wants to work on herself and get better let’s see how she is doing on her end of the deal with crediting and sourcing artists. I’d give links to D’s OPs, but she has me blocked.

“Version inspired from [Sky’s real name] aka Skyrawathi”

Ah yes, I always love getting doxed when one of my fans credit me without linking back to my original work! Please don’t do this. Only villains do this.

Three instances of “Inspired from Skyrawathis version”

Again, no link? Not even going to mention the title of the piece? Sky has HUNDREDS of pictures! How am I going to know which one D is copying? How will I know where to find Sky’s original works if you DON’T LINK TO THEM???? I am but a lazy potato!

“Inspired from Skyrawathi Chamiko Great Wall Kiss”

Better, but still no link.

“Inspired from Skyrawathi “Together in Snowflakes” ”

Getting fancy with the formatting here, but WHERE IS THE LINK??????

“Original design and concept”

Ah, finally! Something original, just as requested! Although… Chase’s pose looks kinda familiar. So does that horse. I wonder…

Chase’s pose is Dashi’s character art from the Xiaolin Dragons Kickstarter art dump part one.

Oh, and Kimiko’s pose and horse are literally the second result for “mulan horse” on Google images. But, tell me again how D has changed and is crediting artists and making original drawings without reference?

If you want to credit people, please use MLA format for your citing. Or if that’s too hard to remember, here’s a handy formula:

[Artist’s username]. “[Title of Piece].” [Publishing platform or publication e.g. Tumblr, Deviant Art, Instagram, Time Magazine etc.], [date published], [source URL].

@Skyrawathi. “Together in snowflakes.” Deviant Art, December 24, 2017, https://www.deviantart.com/skyrawathi/art/Together-in-snowflakes-721748400

Here’s a more casual way to credit someone if that’s too formal for you, with links bolded:

Couldn’t get enough of @Skyrawathi‘s “Together in snowflakes” so I had to redraw it (with permission)!

Here’s an original image I made using these references: Chase’s pose (Grand Master Dashi), Kimiko and Horse.

The point is to LINK BACK TO THE ORIGINAL ARTIST. Simply mentioning them as plain text does not work. LINK TO YOUR REFERENCES. I should not have to do an internet search to find what you are referencing. The citing I did here took less than two minutes. If someone cannot take two minutes or less to show such a basic level of respect then there is no hope.

As for the matter of being “mutuals,” I am sorry for jumping to “friends,” but that is usually what “mutuals” means on Tumblr; “two people, usually friends, that follow each other’s blogs.” Not all mutuals are friends and not all friends are mutuals. I jumped the gun a bit based on personal meaning assigned to that word. However that doesn’t explain this:

Facebook status post from D that reads:

[Sky’s real name] (aka Skyrawathi) is an amazing Chamiko artist and I am truly inspired by her work. I should’ve credited her in the beginning, I didn’t think I had to but I will from now on out of respect for her work. I hope to improve my art as much as I can and strive to get my skills to her level, even though I know I have my own set of skills and will still continue to be inspired from her work and in general in the future, but I hope to not have to rely on a reference to draw. I appreciate us coming to an agreement and I hope we can be mutual in all of this. Thank you Skyrawathi, and it’s a dream come true to be able to become friends with the person who has inspired my work all this time. I will work on making original Chamiko art that is 100% from me (heart emoji)

Once again, don’t put someone’s real name with their URL. It can be construed as doxing. Do not do that. It’s highly disrespectful gesture towards someone one claims to hold in such high regard, but as has already been established, D lacks this basic understanding of respect.

I have been doing art for almost three decades. I know people who have been doing it two and three times longer than I. We all use reference. Do not set yourself up for failure by saying you “hope to not have to rely on a reference to draw,” because that is never going to happen. This goes for everyone. Using reference is not a crutch. Reference is a tool for when you do not know how to draw something. Young artists use a lot of references because they do not have the knowledge or experience of drawing a hand 500 times, or a head 1,000 times, or a leg 250 times! There is no shame in that perceived lack. Getting around it is just practice. Find photographs–either free and open stock or your own–and draw what you see. D has a great eye and very nice photos on her Instagram before it was taken down! She could learn a lot by doing studies from her own photos like this. But Sky’s art, my art, everyone else’s art is NOT anyone’s reference! It took me a while to understand that, but I’m lucky in that I didn’t get myself into any trouble with that misunderstanding. The best way around that misunderstanding, should it occur, is to first, apologize to the artist you referenced; second ask what they would like done with the artwork you made. If they want it taken down–remove it from all platforms. Do not reupload it anywhere. If they say it’s fine, just credit them, then credit them as I explained above with LINKS. “Crediting” the original artists as plain text shows that D has not changed as she claims to, or is only trying to placate her audience to believe she is telling the truth about her change.

Continuing with that lack of change, here is the text I bolded:

“I hope we can be MUTUAL … it’s a dream come true to be able to become FRIENDS…”

What is the truth, Delaney? Friends or Mutuals? Since D is so unreliable in her narrative, let’s hear Sky’s take:

Transcription of DMs:

Sky: Sorry, that I will bother you with Delaney but she has just written to me. She said that there is some drama on Tumblr. Said that she never called me and her friends and I approved it because I am hell no friend to her. And she also asked me what kind of problems people still have with her…xD and I was a bit like WTF. But I told her again that she has done so much harm to so many ppl that she cannot expect from anyone to just simply forget.

[…]

She actually left me in peace and I am happy about it. And even if she writed sth [sic] then I just ignore her, because I don’t want to have anything to do with her. But I just checked this letter about Chaos. Anyway I would very much appreciated if she wasn’t mentioning me and using my person as a ladder for her business.

This is what I also told her. She can’t expect from us to be ok with her. Nobody will start liking her just because she said sorry.

Once again, I repeat, Sky is NOT D’s friend. Sky wants nothing to do with D. Sky does not even want D to mention her at all, ever. So all that artwork I have screen capped from D’s blog should not even be posted, because–per Sky’s wishes–D cannot credit Sky without mentioning her, inevitably associating the two together. As such, D cannot have any of the artwork she copied from Sky posted without violating the wishes of someone she claims to highly respect. Furthermore, posting the artwork she claims to be “original” while still copying well known and iconic material without due credit or sourcing shows that D has not changed, or even attempted to change. All this drama has bungled things for D so much that no one is wiling to talk to or work with her. Thus, all of the terms Sky set up to help D have been violated. If D wants to claim she has changed she needs to SHOW she has changed without words, through actions.

That means that instead of finding my three month old post about her and replying “lol” on multiple occasions has to STOP. Replying to my posts about her misdeeds has to STOP. Messaging people who give notes to those posts about her has to STOP. Directly messaging people who give her original posts notes asking them to follow her has to STOP. Harassing everyone and anyone who slightly disagrees with her has to STOP. All of this:

D replied to your post: You’re so wrong. And if anyone is toxic in this, it’s you for not letting this go. You re jealous of me. Period. That’s why you can’t seem to let it go. I have apologized and redeemed myself. If you people can’t get over that, that’s on you.

D IM: You have issues if you can’t seem to let this go. Me and sky are mutual now. Not that I have to explain anything to you. I have redeemed myself and apologised to everyone. Still you people make posts about me, trying to diminish my following but it’s never gonna happen. Thanks for the publicity again

D asked me: Please get a life, It’s pathetic

D replied to your post: Again, me. Clearly. Let it go like Elsa.

HAS TO STOP.

I have made three (3) posts about D including this one (excluding reblogs). In total D has left harassing messages to me 7-10 times. Not once has she apologized for harassing me on dA, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, or Twitter. Not once has she shown me any sign of changing her ways. All we have asked for is BASIC RESPECT. At every turn D promises to start respecting us and change her ways, then laughs in our faces for even thinking we were worthy of Her respect and attention.

Respect is an interesting thing. You have to give it to get it. Even a three year old understands this. Until D shows the capacity at this basic level to show respect and common courtesy to her peers, superiors, and kohai no one is going to interact with her; she will continue to be treated as nothing more than a joke.

You want to learn how to draw using reference? I have a rough tutorial for that.

You want to learn how to use and learn from your studies? I got something for that too!

You want some references? Try Senshi-Stock’s official app or what’s left of Tumblr. AnatomicalArt has thousands of references and tutorials, and with all of this on Tumblr, crediting your sources is easier than ever!

Or, you know, take some selfies and not have to credit anyone. ;D

TL;DR

D: you’re wrong; I never said Sky and I were friends; we’re MUTUAL! D: here are some terms Sky made that I agreed to–

Sky’s terms:

Give Sky credit on the work D has already copied

D must credit and source all other artists she copies

D must ask permission to copy anyone in the future

D must create something original

If all these terms are met, Sky will help teach D how to use reference correctly so D can draw better.

Receipts showing the following:

6 instances of D not properly crediting Sky

D claiming something to be original without citing referenced materials

Mini guide on how to properly cite an artist or reference:

LINK TO THE ORIGINAL POST AND ARTIST PROFILE!!

Seriously, it’s not that hard!?

Facebook status from D calling Sky both “a mutual” and “a friend.” [what is the truth.gif]

DMs from Sky saying as follows:

Sky is not D’s friend!

Sky wants nothing to do with D

Sky wants D to stop mentioning her altogether

Sky cutting ties like this means that D cannot mention Sky to credit her on reposts of the copied art.

>violates term 1

D has few other artworks to post, so she cannot credit other artists.

>fails term 2

Everyone is so hurt by D that she has been completely shut out and will be hard pressed to find anyone to give her permission in the future.

>fails term 3

D’s attempt to create something “original” resulted in copying and not sourcing more artwork

>fails term 4, 3, and 2

Please stop harassing me. Look at all these receipts! Learn some basic respect before coming back.

Have a few tutorials and resources.

#submission #long post #Chamiko #PSA #RaiKim #delaneyart

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sapphicscholar · 6 years

Link

A/N: Don’t hate Lucy! Eventually this will all help Alex find her way out of the closet from behind all those leather jackets...

Chapter Text:

“You okay?” Kara whispered, catching sight of Cat’s clenched jaw.

“Just dandy,” Cat muttered. “The man-child one row up and to the left doesn’t even have the common courtesy to try to hide the fact that he’s taking my photo, and I’ll be stuck with him on this godforsaken airplane for the next few hours while we fly out to bumblefuck nowhere.”

Even though Cat had kept her voice quiet, Kara leaned in to reply; they were in no need of a second scandal. “Switch seats with me. I’ll block his view.”

“What?”

“You can have the window.”

“But you said looking out at the view from up here was your favorite part of flying.”

Blushing, Kara remembered having to clarify that she meant on a plane, though Cat had seemed even more confused at the clarification. “There’ll be plenty of flights in our future.”

Eventually Cat conceded and moved in a seat, smiling gleefully at the look of disappointment that flashed across the would-be paparazzo’s face when Kara leaned forward and blocked his shot.

“Plus, we’re stopping in Chicago first, so you can ease into the Midwest,” Kara teased.

“Ah yes, with that travesty they call pizza.”

Kara snorted loudly. “Sorry, didn’t know you’d be so passionate about the matter. If I remember correctly, I thought you said something about pizza not being healthy enough to qualify as food.”

“If I’m going to indulge, it may as well be good,” Cat huffed. “I might have made California my home, but I started out in the Northeast, which means I know the difference.”

“How’s this for a trade? You smile big for the reporters and eat the deep dish pizza, and I promise to take you for amazing food at Alex’s favorite food truck.”

“You want me to eat food cooked and served from the back of a truck?” Cat looked downright incredulous.

“C’mon, you’ll look like one of the people.”

“I hate this.”

“Don’t let them hear you,” Kara whispered, her tone lilting and far too cheery.

---

Back at campaign headquarters, Alex basked in the relative calm after the storm of activity that weekend and the rush that always came with last minute changes—in this case, keeping James back at campaign headquarters to stay on top of the press for the first week before joining Cat and the team when they flew down South. Alex had gotten confirmation from Kara that everyone arrived at the airport on time, then a string of emojis before she had to switch her phone to airplane mode for takeoff. With Vasquez and Winn gone and James tied up with interviewers all day, Lucy had been in and out of her office a few times, so it was no surprise when she came back again with two coffees in hand.

“Before you get your coffee…”

“What?” Alex whined. “You don’t get to taunt me with caffeine and then take it away.”

“Kara and I were talking…” Well, really Lucy had been talking at Kara, but it still counted.

“About?”

“You.”

“Rude.”

“How long has it been since you went out on a date?”

“I don’t know,” Alex answered reflexively. In fact, she was fairly certain it had been over two years, save for a fake date or two to gather intel. “It doesn’t matter. I’m busy with work.”

“We’re all busy, Alex. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t indulge in a bit of self-care.”

“How is a date self-care? It takes work and energy and time that I don’t have.”

“Well, yes,” Lucy conceded, dropping into one of the chairs now that it seemed like this could be a very long conversation. “But it also has rewards, you know.”

“I’ve yet to experience those rewards,” Alex huffed, reaching for the coffee cup. She’d gone out with guys that seemed nice enough, but somehow by the second or third date, they were just as exhausting as the terrible ones and left her craving the solitude of her own bed in her own apartment without the expectations of someone else weighing down on her at all times.

Lucy held it just out of reach. “Just let me set you up on one date. If you don’t like him, fine. But you need to try.”

“If I say yes, do I get my coffee?”

“Yes.”

“Then yes.”

Lucy handed over the cup. “Don’t forget, I’m a lawyer, so I’ll totally hold you to it.”

“Don’t forget, I’m trained in several forms of martial arts and know how to use dozens of weapons.”

“Is there an end to that threat?”

“I prefer to let your imagination run wild,” Alex shot back with a wicked smirk.

“Yeah, yeah. Just be nice to the man.”

“Wait, you already know who you’re setting me up with?” Alex’s interest was piqued, even if she didn’t really want to go on the date at all. Lucy nodded. “Who?”

“Why? So you can stalk him and find out everything there is to know about him and decide you hate him before you’ve even met?”

“It sounds perfectly logical to me.”

“No.”

“I hate you.”

“I’ll text you details when I have them!” Lucy called over her shoulder, already texting Vasquez and Kara the good news.

Grumbling to herself, Alex flicked on the television in her office, figuring she could catch up on the news as an easy way to pass the time on a relatively slow day. Cat’s responses had been getting decent traction so far, and the social media team had been working nonstop to keep the best articles about Cat front and center. She tuned in just in time to hear someone giving a brief recap of the weekend’s events and was pleased to find that it wasn’t nearly so damning an account as the same newscaster had given just two days earlier.

Kicking her feet up on the desk, she listened as they went through the other candidates, checking off who had visited Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina and detailing what they’d done there. Four candidates—two of the Democrats, one of the Republicans, and some third party candidate who’d barely even made the news—had dropped out of the race, even in the midst of the scandal, which boded well for them. General Lane and Senator Crane had spoken together at some anti-immigration rally. Alex scratched a note to herself about a potential Lane-Crane ticket down the line. They’d sound like they emerged straight from the pages of a Doctor Suess book, though a decidedly devious one if they stuck to their platform. Siobhan had gone to an EMILY’S List event. Alex made a note to ask Kara to make sure the organization was still firmly backing Cat; she wasn’t overly concerned, given that they had already made an official endorsement for the Grant campaign, but it was good to keep everything in line.

As the 10 o’clock news rolled into the 11 o’clock news, Alex got up and stretched, intent on wandering around the office to see who else was in, maybe scare some of the interns and new researchers who might have been slacking off in Cat’s absence.

Before she could leave, she caught sight of Max Lord’s face swimming into view and had to repress her instinct to gag. Turning up the volume, Alex listened to a new newscaster introduce him with glowing accolades as though his business had somehow saved an already thriving state.

“Thanks for that, Cindy, though it’s people like you that keep this city accountable.” Alex’s lip curled up in distaste at the smarmy way he smiled at her. “I’m here today under circumstances that I don’t think any of us could have expected: the wake of the scandal surrounding Cat Grant—a woman near and dear to so many of us in California.”

“It certainly took us by surprise!” the woman—Cindy, Alex remembered—interjected. Alex scoffed at the idea that she was surprised; the news outlets had more notice than anyone else.

“I spent this past weekend watching coverage and sorting through everything that was released for myself. I wouldn’t want to rely on secondhand coverage—no matter how great it might be.” Alex found herself grabbing a pen just to have something that wouldn’t cost a fortune to replace to throw at the wall. “As much as I have supported Cat—both as a governor and as a personal friend—I find the things we’re learning about her campaign and her business to be, if I might speak frankly, quite troubling.”

“They did seem to rock the boat—really upset the image she’s cultivated for herself over the years.”

“An image founded in action!” Alex yelled at the screen as though they could hear her.

“And so, it is with a heavy heart and a firm sense of duty toward my country that I am announcing my candidacy for President of the United States of America.”

“Lucy!” Alex roared, listening as the sound of stiletto heels came clicking down the hallway. When she got into Alex’s office, Alex just gestured at the screen, where a rolling banner now announced Max’s candidacy.

She’d missed whatever Max had said next, but caught Cindy looking slightly curious, if a bit confused. “And you’re running as a Democrat?”

“I know, in what world does a libertarian run as a Democrat?” Max laughed. “Then again, ask anyone and they’ll tell you a California Republican is still more liberal than a Texas Democrat.” Cindy laughed along with him that time. “But in all seriousness, I think the Republican Party has for too long held a monopoly on certain ideas. As anyone can see from the kind of work I do in my labs or the organizations I’ve donated to over the years, I lean left and strive toward progress and change in so many significant ways, even if I think that the government shouldn’t always be the ones driving that change.”

“Well, that sure does come as a surprise. Should we expect to see you out on the campaign trail yourself now?”

“I’ll be out with everyone at the Iowa Democratic Fundraising Dinner this week, and I’m sure you’ll start to see my name popping up in coverage soon enough.”

“What the fuck?” Lucy’s jaw hung open as she watched the news shift over to commercials—specifically to a commercial for Max’s campaign funded by a new super PAC, “Businesses for Progress.”

“Dirk,” Alex growled, putting together the mysterious phone call with a promise for an 11 o’clock timeslot, the ambiguous promise about “having a guy” that Kara had overheard after the donor meeting. “That fucker.”

Before Alex could do anything rash, Lucy put a hand on her arm. “Okay, let’s think this through. Honestly, will he get any of the voters Cat would have gotten?”

“He might,” Alex admitted. “On Wall Street and business issues she ran a bit closer to the centrists, but he might claim those votes, or at least some of their big donors, especially if he runs the kind of dirty campaign I suspect he will.”

“Do you think Cat knows yet?”

“They’re still up in the air for another half hour.” Alex pulled out her phone and sent articles along with a few lengthy messages to Kara so that they’d get the news before some reporter asked about it and put a surprised Cat in the spotlight, leaving her looking uninformed. “God, so much for a quiet week.”

“Look, it’s not another scandal. It sucks, but he’ll be bound by the same kind of rules Cat is, which puts them on an even playing field.”

“Except it doesn’t,” Alex said bitterly. “He’s a white man without the burden of a scandal weighing on him already.”

“Let’s see how he does in Iowa before we panic.”

---

Kara yawned and rolled out her shoulders as she waited for her phone to restart while they stood away from the crowds beside the baggage claim carousel. Watching as little red notification numbers popped up, she was shocked to see dozens of texts and emails from campaign headquarters. She skimmed through them quickly, growing increasingly incredulous.

“Um, Cat?”

“Hmm?”

“We have a problem.”

“Did those emails leak?” Cat hissed.

“No! No, not that big of a problem—it’s just a new candidate.”

“Oh,” Cat let out a sigh of relief. “That’s fine. They’ll have already missed the first debate, so they’re coming in at a disadvantage.”

“Um, well, that’s the thing. He’s already well-funded…by Dirk.” She kept Alex’s profanity-riddled messages to herself, though she managed to find the confirmation that he was funding Max’s super PAC among the obscenities.

Cat’s eyes flashed up at Kara, and she swore she saw red. “Excuse me.”

“Max Lord is running for president now. He’s saying he didn’t want to, but he was persuaded to join because you had too much baggage now with the scandal and all.”

After a moment of two of stunned silence, Cat found herself laughing—a small chuckle at first that grew into something larger and almost uncontrollable. “I just…of course he is.”

“Are you okay?”

“Just swell, Kiera. My conniving ex-donor is funding a campaign for my ex-boyfriend to run against me for the role I’ve been preparing for my entire adult life.”

“Your ex-boyfriend?” Kara tamped down on the surge of jealousy she felt coursing through her veins. She tried to convince herself that it was just righteous indignation; Cat could clearly do better than Max. She ignored the small voice yelling that she would have been better for Cat by a landslide.

“We all make mistakes.”

“Well yours is going to be at the fundraising dinner in Des Moines this Thursday.”

“Fabulous.”

“Let’s get out of the airport so we can talk freely, okay?”

“Fine,” Cat huffed.

---

After a strategy session in the hotel room with Kara, James, and Alex via Skype, Cat felt slightly better. Kara had spent the ride back reading through Max’s campaign website at a pace that had to have set some kind of world record and had already identified several weak points in the barebones policies he had laid out, while James focused on how they could adjust Cat’s public image to position her as the stronger candidate not only opposite Justin but opposite Max now too, on the off chance that his campaign took off. And Alex had spent her time digging up as much dirt on Max as she could find, though Cat asked her to hold off on personal life research unless it became necessary. There was no doubt in her mind that Alex was already doing the research, but at least she could keep her hands clean for now.

“Ready to have some of that famous deep dish pizza you love so much?” Kara teased, trying to lighten the mood.

“Can’t wait,” Cat deadpanned.

On the ride down to Gino’s East, Cat listened as Kara and Michael, the head of their Illinois headquarters, hit her with facts about how they’d been polling out there and what topics to talk about (as well as the ones to avoid). Kara held up the phone with James on speaker to contribute as well.

“The scandal hit, but it wasn’t as big of a story here as it was in other places,” Michael informed Cat. “At least in Chicago, you’re still polling ahead of Justin, who’s kept his second-place standing.”

“And Chicago is already a deep blue pocket in a pretty blue state,” Kara chimed in, “so you won’t have to worry too much.”

“I scheduled a photo op at the Chicago Southside NAACP offices,” James reminded Cat, his voice crackling slightly through the speaker.

“Make sure to hit home on your points about education, especially making sure public schools in low-income neighborhoods are receiving adequate funding.” Kara handed over a half-page of bullet points their team had put together with statistics about funding disparities between schools that catered to primarily white neighborhoods and others in communities populated by first- and second-generation immigrants and people of color.

Michael cut in again. “And talk about police oversight—make some of the points you made at the debate even stronger and clearer. Your meetings with Black Lives Matter coordinators went over well, but you can’t let a meeting be the only thing you do.” Cat nodded along. “I know you haven’t really gone on the attack yet outside of the debate, but Justin’s poor record on just about everything related to race is what’s keeping you above him here. It might not play as well outside of the city, but while you’re here, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to hit him on that a little.”

“Now that he’s made some statement about my record on women’s rights when he has absolutely no room to judge, I think it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world,” Cat admitted.

“Plus, that fundraising dinner is when things start getting a bit more heated anyway.” Kara caught Cat’s expression of surprise, though she hid it quickly. If Cat expected her to be just as naïve as she was years ago about how these things worked, she had another thing coming.

“We’re just about here, ma’am,” Vasquez announced, slowing down the car. “Do you want me to do another lap around the block?”

“No, I’m ready.”

After one last moment of calm, Cat plastered a broad smile on her face just in time for Vasquez to pull open the door.

“Hello, Chicago!” she waved, feeling her smile grow more genuine at the sight of homemade “Grant for President” signs held aloft and local newspaper reporters lining the area outside Gino’s.

She signed a few posters and took a few softball interview questions on her way in, finally making it into the restaurant and taking a seat alongside a few of the members of the Chicago Board of Education who she’d arranged to meet with for lunch. They all smiled for more photos, then did a second round when their pizza was delivered.

“Is this your first time with deep dish pizza, Miss Grant?” a young reporter asked.

“It is,” Cat admitted. “But it already smells delicious!”

Cat reached out and accepted the offered plate, motioning for her dining companions to go ahead and get some as well. “And you know what? Can we order a second pizza for my campaign staff? They work so hard—they deserve some of this famous Chicago food too!”

“Well played,” Kara muttered, her voice barely a whisper in Cat’s ear.

Fighting back the surge of excitement at exactly how close Kara was, Cat nodded, then turned ever so slightly to her under the guise of asking what toppings they wanted. “Will I be mocked and memed if I eat this with a fork and knife?”

Stifling a giggle, Kara shook her head. “No, you’re fine.”

Once everyone at her table had a slice in front of them, Cat cut into hers and popped a bite into her mouth before giving some quote about how they might make a deep dish fan out of her yet. “I should bring my son here. You know how much food teenage boys eat. Maybe one of these could actually keep him full for more than an hour,” Cat joked, smiling at how well her comments seemed to be going over.

With the pleasantries out of the way, Cat turned back to the Board of Education members, who had brought with them a local principal and teacher who both joked about loving the chance to get away from the school cafeteria for lunch. While they ate, they talked about Cat’s platform, and she hit home hard on equitable funding and equal opportunities for all students. But then she turned the conversation over to them, asking what their experiences had been. “I can read all the articles and reports, but it’s never quite the same as getting to hear from the people who live it every day. So you tell me: what would help you?”

By the time they finished, Cat was fairly certain she could count on their support in the election, and Kara was already smiling at the great publicity they were getting from a photo James had taken of Cat laughing out loud, a half-eaten slice of pizza on the plate in front of her, looking every bit the part of the down-to-earth candidate invested in the needs of local communities.

---

Back in DC, Maggie strolled down the hallways, feeling the shift in mood from the weekend with good publicity rolling in. She’d been pleased to see Cat at the NAACP offices dropping in some of the quotes and figures she’d sent to Kara that morning. “Hey, Danvers,” she greeted with a little knock on the door.

Blinking rapidly as her eyes readjusted after looking at screens for hours on end, Alex managed a quick hello back.

“Need help with something?”

“No…just trying to get ahead of the new Lord campaign. Didn’t really expect another challenger this late in the game, especially a well-funded one.”

“Ugh, he’s such an ass.”

“He really is.”

“Oh, hey look! Something we agree on,” Maggie joked, actually earning a smile from Alex.

“Yeah, yeah. Is there something you needed?”

“I just wanted to say hey. See if you were still up for a run tomorrow morning. If you’ve got too much going on with Max, though, it’s totally fine. I get it.”

“No, I promise, if anything, this makes me want to run more. I mean, hitting things would be preferable, but running will do.”

“Sparring does tend to help more with that particular impulse,” Maggie conceded.

“You box?”

“A little. Did some wrestling back in high school after I moved.”

“One day I might just take you up on it if that’s an offer.”

“Yeah? Alright, Danvers. We’ll see what you’ve got.”

Alex laughed and shook her head. “Let’s see if you can even keep up on our run first. I’ll meet you at your place at 7—sound good?”

“Uh, sure. I can meet you somewhere if it’s easier.”

“Nah, it’s fine. It’ll be my warm up.”

“Alright, well, I guess I’ll see you then.”

---

After a moment’s indecision, Kara knocked lightly on the door to Cat’s hotel room.

“Yes?” Cat answered the door, her dress pants having been replaced by sweatpants, but her blazer and blouse still on.

“That’s a good look,” Kara teased. “Bet it would play well in the media.”

“Ah yes, just the message I want.” Cat rolled her eyes but opened the door further to allow Kara inside.

“I brought tea—thought you might want something warm after a long day out in the Chicago fall weather, which is kind of like DC deep winter…”

“Thank you.” After a pause, she added, “You really don’t need to keep doing these things.”

“Cat, it’s my job to make the campaign go well. And that means keeping you healthy and happy.”

Cat bit back any and all inappropriate comments about things that would make her happy—a long list that started with Dirk’s head on a silver platter and ended with a delightful blonde campaign manager in a less-than-professional situation.

“Ready for the drive to Davenport tomorrow?” Kara asked, curling a leg under herself as she settled down on the less uncomfortable looking of the two hotel chairs.

“Actually, I wanted to see what you thought of going to Iowa City first. It barely adds an hour to the drive.”

“Um, yeah, I guess. You need to be back in Davenport for your meeting with the manufacturing union reps tomorrow night, but I think otherwise things should be moveable. Maybe check with James first?”

Cat pulled out her phone and quickly sent a text to James confirming that things could be moved before turning back to Kara. “I know we’re doing a morning photo op at the Center on Halsted with some of the local LGBTQ groups, but I thought we might drop in for the Iowa City Coming Out Day events too.”

“Are you, uh, coming out? I mean—that’s great! And I certainly wouldn’t say no—not that it would be my choice. But, um, maybe we should check in with Alex and James to figure out how to word things in the wake of…you know, everything.”

“You’re rambling.” Kara stopped talking, quickly shutting her mouth and looking to Cat. “I’m not coming out. I’m a politician recognizing a community I have publically supported for many years. And it’s all well and good to do so in Chicago, but I thought it might have a bit more of an impact in a state that isn’t quite so blue, even if the town itself is a bit more progressive.”

“Oh,” Kara breathed out. “That sounds like a great idea.”

“I’m aware.”

Kara just rolled her eyes. “Let me get James on this—”

“No need. I think it’ll be better to have it be more of a surprise visit. It’ll seem less staged.”

“I suppose plenty of people will take pictures and post them anyway…”

“And if they don’t, I do employ a full staff of people who I assume can take a few basic photos while we’re there.”

“Right, yeah. So, should we get you some rainbow t-shirt? Glitter? Pride flags?”

“I think my planned suit will be just fine,” Cat replied, although she wasn’t able so suppress the fond smile. “I won’t stop you if you want to dress yourself in all sorts of gaudy, glittery rainbows, though.”

“It’s just a shame I left my Pride outfit back in DC.” Of course, there were more than a few ways she could go get it and be back in plenty of time, but it didn’t seem worth the risk.

“And what might this famous outfit involve?”

“Well, I do have lots of glitter and some rainbow temporary tattoos. Then I got this Wonder Woman crop top and…” Cat’s mind just about shorted out at the image, and she promptly lost track of the other things Kara was saying. Because now all she could picture was Kara Danvers and the abs she was fairly certain were hiding beneath those hideous cardigans and Loft blouses, maybe coated in glitter—an offense she might actually willingly excuse, given the right circumstances.

“Yes, well, I should really be heading to bed.”

“Oh, sorry! Lots to do tomorrow! I’ll see you in the morning.”

Cat quickly shut and locked the door behind Kara before changing the rest of the way into pajamas and groaning into the pillows. Eventually her sleeping pills managed to win out against the tempting images swirling through her imagination and the rush of blood that left her heart racing and her skin feeling heated to the touch.

#supercat sanvers 2020 #fanfic #supergirl #supercat #slow burn #sanvers #kara danvers #cat grant #max lord #alex danvers #lucy lane #maggie sawyer #political au

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margaretbeagle · 3 years

Text

Selling on Social 101: How Blume Markets and Sells to a Gen Z Audience

As the buying power of Gen Z grows, marketers at businesses of all sizes are searching for novel ways to connect with this audience and build lasting customer relationships.

It'll come as no surprise that social media platforms are of the best ways to connect with this generation — which includes today's teenagers and those in their early 20's. But marketing to Gen Zers means much more than simply posting pretty pictures and memes.

So what does it take to stand out and connect with this valuable audience in 2021?

One brand that has mastered the art of marketing to Gen Z is Blume, a fast-growing skin, body, and period care brand on a mission to break boundaries and smash taboos.

In this interview, you'll hear directly from Janice Cheng, Brand and Community Manager at Blume, and you'll learn:

How to build a brand that connects with Gen Z

How to market and sell on social media

The key to understanding Gen Z's preferences on social media

Successful strategies to use when marketing to Gen Z

This post is part of the #BufferBrandSpotlight, a Buffer Social Media series that shines a spotlight on the people that are helping build remarkable brands through social media, community building, content creation, and brand storytelling.

This series was born on Instagram stories, which means you can watch the original interview in our Highlights found on our @buffer Instagram profile.

Tell us more about you! What's Blume all about and what's your role there?

My name is Janice and I’m based in Vancouver! I’m the Brand Manager at Blume—a fast-growing skin, body, and period care brand on a mission to break boundaries and smash taboos. I joined the team back in June 2019 as the 3rd hire and EA to our founders Taran & Bunny. Now, I’ve been in this Brand role for almost 9 months.

Why do you think your Gen Z audience connects with your brand?

Gen Zers are conscious (smart) consumers and the most connected generation ever. Growing up with social media, they want transparency, community, and look for brands that align with their values. I think Blume checks off all those boxes in a really genuine way! Since day one, we’ve been more than just our products. Blume is breaking stigma by having conversations about extremely normal, yet still taboo topics, like acne, puberty, periods, and sex ed. As I’m sure most of us know, these are “issues” that carry well into adulthood, so a lot of our audience are millennials as well.

Gen Zers are conscious (smart) consumers and the most connected generation ever. Growing up with social media, they want transparency, community, and look for brands that align with their values.

We’re also a brand that cares. We launched the thestatesofsexed.com, Future World Shapers Award (created for Gen Z change-makers), and generally produce engaging and shareable content. More importantly, we prioritize using our platform to amplify the voices of our community and speak up on issues important to us; this includes climate change, the Black Lives Matter movement, and even our pandemic response. Our audience teaches us a lot, and more than anything, they’re our friends! This is all translated through our brand voice cohesively across all channels.

Tell us about a recent social media campaign. What made it so successful?

We’re only about 2.5 years old but one of my fave moments was our in-house Blume Celebrates Skin campaign (a campaign focused on being confident in our own skin is undefined and unrestricted by our physical appearances or the bumps and blemishes on our skin). We were only about five people then (half of our team now) and it was so much fun because it came from our hearts. Quickly and organically, it grabbed the attention of Allure and Daily Mail UK. Sometimes metrics are tricky with these kinds of campaigns. Say someone comes across this campaign and finds new strength and bravery in their natural skin. Although can’t quantify feelings, the reviews and customer testimonials are invaluable to our team.

Instagram post found here.

BUT! Meltdown (our best-selling acne treatment) continues to be our top community favorite and campaigns like Celebrate Skin reinforce that. Ultimately, our social media goal is to increase engagement, and this campaign accomplished that for us. We’re about to have some of our biggest campaigns this new year! So stay tuned.

Where do you find inspiration for Blume’s social media content?

Recently, a lot on TikTok (obviously), community pages like Girlboss, and also meme pages. We have an #inspo Slack channel where we share things we see on our feeds and Explore pages and what’s circulating in our own friend's groups! Pro tip: start an #inspo channel whether just for yourself or with your team.

How does Blume leverage user-generated content to connect with its Gen Z audience?

Community is core to all we do. Beyond our products, for us, it’s about adding value to Gen Z, and user-generated content (UGC) is a huge part of that. Using UGC is more impactful than using traditional models or lifestyle images because UGC is by actual people in our community—reflecting a range of real skin. It's the best way to relate to this audience!

Using UGC is more impactful than using traditional models or lifestyle images because UGC is by actual people in our community—reflecting a range of real skin.

Also, Gen Zers are so creative because producing content is second nature to them so partnerships together are so fun. I love looking through our tagged posts every week and seeing people embrace their shelfies and natural skin. We give them full creative freedom! So rather than believing what we have to say about our products, you should believe our community through UGC, their captions, reviews, and experiences.

Instagram post found here.

How does Blume embed UGC, customer testimonials, and reviews across all its marketing channels?

We have an incredible tiny team of two that keeps the rest of the team, especially marketing, up to date with all inquiries, trends, and themes of the week. For example, our Meltdown before & after shave has always been highly effective for us because a photo equals a thousand words.

In skincare, especially clean beauty care, it's really important for us to spotlight the effectiveness of the product and how our products actually work. We’ll use before/after photos and other UGC in ads, Instagram story features, and email newsletters. With permission, of course.

On a regular week, we try to post UGC and/or testimonials about 3-4x on our social media channels.

In skincare, especially clean beauty care, it's really important for us to spotlight the effectiveness of the product and how our products actually work.

What are Blume’s most successful social platforms for selling and why?

Definitely Instagram—still cracking the code for TikTok. Ultimately, Gen Zers are the trendsetters and determine what’s next. Something can come and go overnight so we have to be quick to pivot, adapt and execute. We can plan all we want but our best performing posts often tend to be non-product focused ones. If we had a Meltdown post planned on a day where the world actually needs more empathy and love, we’ll swap it for a journal prompt post or check-in.

What advice do you have for brands that want to start selling on social media?

Make a list of brands that you love and dig deep into the “why.” For Blume, the core criterion for selling on social is based on value; we focus our marketing on educational content about our products and brand, community building through UGC campaigns and partnerships, and aesthetic shareable graphics.

Also, GET. ON. TIKTOK. Whether to start your brand page or just to get in touch with Gen Z culture, it’s worthwhile I promise you. Here are three easy things you can start right away: write copy like a human (not a robot), have fun with emojis, and start following people to bring eyes to your page!

Fllow Blume on TikTok here.

For Blume, the core criterion for selling on social is based on value; we focus our marketing on educational content about our products and brand, community building through UGC campaigns and partnerships, and aesthetic shareable graphics.

How do you stay up to date on Gen Z trends?

Personally, I follow Gen Z brands that I admire, read lots of Glossy and Beauty Independent, and ask our awesome Influencer, Lead Eman, for the 411 on what’s cool and what’s not. I also used to scroll TikTok for 4 hours a day (lol) for simultaneous entertainment and market research.

What's your favorite Blume product and why?

I’d like to say Meltdown because that’s everyone's #1 and I’ve had a lot of stress acne through 2020, BUT my runner-up is definitely Hug Me, our natural deodorant. Random fact: the probiotics, our secret ingredient, has adapted to my body so well I hardly need deodorant anymore. It’s also unscented so I recommend it to EVERYONE. I might be biased but these two are also my faves because their names are so fun to play with when copywriting. 👋

Thanks for Bluming with us, Buffer friends! ❤️

We hope this interview with Janice helps you get started with or double down on your social media efforts. You can follow Blume on Instagram here!

Have any questions for Janice? Feel free to reply with your questions to the Twitter post below and Janice or someone from the Buffer team will get to them as soon as possible.

Selling on Social 101: How Blume Markets and Sells to a Gen Z Audience published first on https://improfitninja.weebly.com/

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sleemo · 7 years

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TIME Magazine: A Star of His Own Making

In person, John Boyega carries himself with an assuredness that could be mistaken for self-importance. He’s one of those actors who look as tall and sturdy in real life as they do onscreen. He fills whatever room he happens to be in with inviting, boisterous chatter, thanks, no doubt, to years of voice training on the English stage. And he’s dead certain he’s going to be a big, big movie star.

I first meet Boyega in a cramped hallway at ABC Studios in Manhattan in July. We barely manage a hurried handshake as he proceeds in Aaron Sorkin–like strides toward a nearby stage. His publicist and his sister—who also acts as his assistant and is Googling where they can find British pub food in New York—are drafting in his wake. I watch off set as Boyega sits down with the hosts of Live With Kelly and Ryan, his first of three interviews for the day. Each sit-down requires the same thing of the 25-year-old Brit: promoting his latest film, Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, about the city’s 1967 riots, and expounding on the state of race relations in neat, 30-second sound bites. Naturally, interviewers also want to ask about his other new movie, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, coming out in December.

If the challenge of figuring out how to discuss Black Lives Matter and lightsabers in the same breath weighs on him, Boyega doesn’t show it. “I see what I do in part as creating change through art,” he tells me. “Sometimes that responsibility can feel like a burden, but it’s not. It pushes you to find your purpose in the world.”

Most people know Boyega as Finn, the Stormtrooper who defects to the Rebels and helps an aspiring Jedi (Daisy Ridley) in 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Boyega is confident that he can sidestep the quagmire of franchise fame that has kept some actors from ever eclipsing their first blockbuster roles. So when I finally sit down with him for lunch, I begin by asking if he’d rather follow the Denzel Washington/Harrison Ford path to stardom—bringing the same charming swagger to every role—or if he’d prefer to go the Judi Dench/Idris Elba route of disappearing into parts. He grins at me and says, “I think to be a real star, you have to do both. I’m going to do both.”

Which might seem presumptuous if Boyega hadn’t been consistently checking off items on his superstardom to-do list. Since his breakout role two years ago, he has produced and starred in another franchise film, the upcoming Pacific Rim: Uprising (become a producer: check), played opposite Tom Hanks in the poorly reviewed The Circle (inevitable flop: check), returned to London to play a soldier with PTSD at the Old Vic (reaffirm acting chops onstage: check) and, with Detroit, become the face of an Academy Award winner’s latest gritty film (make an Oscar bid: check). And he’s working on writing and producing his own movies in hopes of leading a generation of artists who bring more diverse stories to the screen.

So, yes, John Boyega will be a big, big movie star. And he plans to get there his own way.

Boyega, the son of Nigerian parents, grew up in the working-class South London neighborhood of Peckham and began enrolling in youth theater programs when he was 9. As a teen, he was cast in a movie filming near his neighborhood, Attack the Block. The comedic horror film centers on a gang of teenagers who must defend their public-housing project from an extraterrestrial invasion. Soon after it premiered, Boyega began trying to land American movie roles, culminating in a series of grueling, secret Star Wars auditions for director J.J. Abrams, who had been a fan of his first film.

The day he found out he got the part, Boyega says, he went home to tell his parents. He bowed to them in a traditional Nigerian sign of respect to show his gratitude for the sacrifices they had made. His parents—his mother works with the disabled, while his father is a Pentecostal preacher—immigrated to England before Boyega was born. “I grew up with my dad telling me that you’re currently around church people, but soon you’re going to be in a world where people don’t believe the same things you believe in. People are going to laugh at the stuff you believe or are going to treat you a certain way,” Boyega recalls. “And just to try as much as you can to be loving to all people.”

Boyega’s casting in Star Wars put that advice to the test. The beginning of the film’s first trailer, released in 2014, showed the actor in Stormtrooper garb minus the helmet. Within minutes, he was deluged with messages on Twitter objecting to the idea of a black man at the center of a Star Wars saga. And Boyega continues to endure occasional harassment on social media. “It’s blatant racism,” he says. “I embrace all people, but I do not embrace racists. I despise racists. Do they know how dumb it is to waste brain cells on taking issue with the amount of melanin in someone’s skin?” He argues that everyone just wants to see themselves represented onscreen and that it’s time for more diverse heroes at the movies.

He pauses and then tells me, “I really want you to include this: 99% of the response was positive. Good doesn’t get credit sometimes because it’s overshadowed by the bad. People tried to boycott the movie, and we made something like a billion dollars in 12 days. That represents every person who bought a ticket. So much for your boycott.”

Disney is hoping the next Star Wars, subtitled The Last Jedi, will draw an even bigger audience when it premieres on Dec. 15. Boyega’s innocent Finn offered much of the comic relief in The Force Awakens, but the actor says the movie and his character’s story get much darker in the sequel. Finn wakes from a coma and is paired off with a new character, Rose (Kelly Marie Tran), as they embark on a dangerous mission with the droid BB-8 in tow. Rose, a lowly engineer who yearns to fight for the Resistance, believes that Finn is a war hero. “Finn’s not so sure that he’s a hero or that he really even believes in the Resistance or anything at all,” says Boyega. “So he’s off with Rose, who is a true believer, and he has to figure out whose side he’s on and navigate these conflicting emotions.”

Finn’s onscreen banter—with Rey, with Han Solo, even with BB-8—made the character a fan favorite. As a result, Boyega says he found himself with an unexpected platform. He’s used it to defend his fellow actors and challenge the entertainment industry. He spoke for Ridley when she left Instagram after an anti-gun-violence post resulted in harassment. He called out HBO’s Game of Thrones for its lack of diversity. And he defended Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya, whom he knows from the London theater circuit, when Samuel L. Jackson said an African-American actor, rather than a black English actor, should have played the lead role in the movie about American racism. “It just makes no sense for Brits and Americans to fight with each other like that,” says Boyega. “When you’re black and in a position of influence, you have a responsibility to speak out. When you’re an actor, you have a responsibility to speak out through your work.”

Detroit is an example of the latter. It is an affecting, if complicated, film. Bigelow filmed it as if she were running with a camera through a war zone. But unlike her other recent movies (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty), the battleground is a Midwestern metropolis. Boyega plays a security guard who tries to act as a liaison between white cops and black civilians amid unfolding violence at the Algiers Motel. His attempts to protect the innocent eventually make him a scapegoat for the police. “It was an even bigger opportunity than Star Wars to show what I can do,” he says. “You don’t want people going to a movie as serious as this and saying, ‘Hey, why is Finn being interrogated by the police?’”

Boyega’s performance has put him in the conversation for an Oscar. That’s a particularly important item on the superstar checklist and requires a rigorous press tour. If you ask Boyega who his role models are on that score, he’ll talk about his Star Wars co-star Ford. But when it comes to influences, Boyega is more likely to cite his peers. He brings up Issa Rae, the creator and star of HBO’s Insecure. “That’s something I hope to achieve someday, to write and develop my own original project,” he says, adding that he has always written but didn’t really understand how to tackle a screenplay until Spike Lee gave him a copy of his Do the Right Thing script, which included notes scrawled in the margins.

Boyega says he’s excited that several actors he knew from the London theater world are beginning to break into Hollywood too: Malachi Kirby was Kunta Kinte in the recent Roots remake for History, and Letitia Wright will play a warrior in the 2018 Marvel superhero movie Black Panther. “It kind of reminds me of that picture of Tupac and Jada Pinkett in high school. Everybody’s gone off now to have their moments,” says Boyega. “I think our generation, we don’t want to wait around only to be given the same stereotyped roles again and again. We want to decide our own fate.”

#interview #cast #john boyega #time magazine #finn #star wars #detroit #pacific rim

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nyfacurrent · 4 years

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COVID-19 | Connecting with Audiences in a Time of Isolation

Musicians Alexa Tarantino and Steven Feifke are livestreaming their music from their living room and raising funds for artists while doing it.

In this time of great uncertainty, artists of all disciplines are connecting with audiences in digital spaces like never before. Visual artists are giving virtual tours of their gallery shows and more are turning to selling work online (tips on how to do so via artnet News). Authors are reading chapters or poems from their books to online audiences; this example from The New York Times tells how children’s book authors Mo Willems, Gene Luen Yang, Amie Kaufman, and others are giving interactive presentations to kids who are now learning from home. Last week, Jessica Chen, founder and artistic director of J Chen Project, led 20-30 minute movement sessions via Zoom. The sessions opened up a new way of connecting and moving with others, and were designed for movers and non-movers alike.

Musicians, like jazz saxophonist Alexa Tarantino and pianist and composer Steven Feifke, have taken matters into their own hands by livestreaming shows from their living room. Tarantino and Feifke have held two concerts so far with two more upcoming on Sunday, March 29 and Sunday, April 5, with 25% of all proceeds going to NYFA. We spoke with Tarantino and Feifke to learn more about how they got started, and why these concerts matter now.

Click here for a link to all past and future concerts. All concerts take place at 8:00 PM EST.

NYFA: Can you tell us more about what inspired your first concert on Sunday, March 15, and why you chose to donate 25% of the proceeds to NYFA?

Alexa Tarantino: When all of this discussion of quarantine and lockdown started, we heard that some larger organizations in Europe were using livestream as a way to continue presenting their programs without bringing large groups of people together. After I returned from a tour, we self-quarantined for safety reasons. In an effort to still play and perform for people as much as possible, we decided to put on a livestreamed duo concert from our apartment. We knew about New York Foundation for the Arts because of various opportunities and grants that the organization offers for artists and wanted to help others in our situation.

Steven Feifke: As soon as the outbreak of COV-ID 19 started to go from bad to worse in the U.S. and many of my performance-based engagements were cancelled, I thought to myself that there had to be a way to continue to perform and reach people. Alexa and I talked about it and agreed that as a part of our series, we wanted to have a way to give back to the community and support other artists whose livelihood has been affected by the COV-ID 19 outbreak. We knew that any donations we made to NYFA would get to the people who needed it most.

NYFA: Can you speak to the losses that you and those in your community are currently experiencing as a result of COVID-19 (in terms of gigs, income, recording sessions, etc)?

AT: COVID-19 has definitely turned my work schedule upside down. All but a few of my events (domestic and international) through May have been cancelled. Some will be rescheduled at a later time, but many won’t. This is a large loss of income and also presents a challenge for bookings later in the spring and early summer, because we don’t know where things will go from here. However, this down time has been an opportunity to rest and recharge, and work on new music and projects. There is a silver lining!

SF: My professional career is mainly based around composing, arranging, and orchestrating. Although I have had several exciting performances and recordings get cancelled as a result of the outbreak of the virus, the majority of my work has not changed. I count myself lucky that I am still able to write music for upcoming albums and recording sessions, as well as teach masterclasses and private lessons out of my home studio. In fact, I am about to produce a project for Splice, and will be able to hire several musicians to record out of their home studios.

NYFA: How easy or difficult is it logistically to put on these concerts? Would you recommend the platform you used and do you know of others (beyond Facebook, YouTube, Instagram) that musicians and performers might be using?

AT: Presenting these concerts has been seamless thanks to Crowdcast. My assistant Maura discovered it and we will certainly be using it in the future! This is a platform that we decided to pay for, but we have loved the user experience so far. Concert attendees can “save their spot” for the event so we have an idea of how many will be viewing, and the program also sends a reminder email to the attendees, has a great chat/Q&A feature, donation feature, and more. We would recommend this but also have seen people present great programs on social media platforms including Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

SF: Crowdcast also archives each of our performances, so viewers are able to watch past concerts at their leisure.

NYFA: You mentioned it was your first time livestreaming a show. What was it like for you as performers, and can you describe how the experience differed from other live performances you've done?

AT: Yes this was our first time live-streaming and it was very interesting! While we can't see or hear the audience, we could definitely feel their presence through their comments and "virtual applause." Since we are performing from the comfort of our home, it does feel a little more free and like we can take our time with the presentation. There's certainly less stress since there's no soundcheck, stage lighting, equipment, contract, pack-up process, etc!

SF: Well—this was the first concert I have ever given while wearing slippers! All joking aside, there was a certain amount of comfort that I derived from playing on the piano I practice with, but I definitely missed the excitement of feeling a direct audience interaction. Our audience members did the next best thing and sent us "applause emojis" after every song, which was really nice.

NYFA: Do you think that presentations like these provide some element of comfort during such challenging times? What are your thoughts on the potential in this sort of presentation for reaching new audiences?

AT: Yes, we received great feedback from people who appreciated being able to listen to our music in their living rooms or during dinner. While it’s not the same as a live performance, I think it makes people feel less alone and reminds them of the beauty and purpose of art. We know that this idea of livestreaming performances has already spread across the world. We hope this encourages people to seek out other livestream events and we hope to be able to reach as many people as possible with our music.

SF: Personally, I am comforted by the fact that Alexa and I still have an outlet with which we can share our music and perform. I think that our friends, family, fans, and people we have become connected with through our performance careers are also glad to be able to tune in and hear us perform in this new setting. It's not the same as an in-person concert, but everyone is doing their best to adapt to life under quarantine, and I think that this sort of presentation of the music brings us all closer together. We are going to continue this series next Sunday, March 29 by celebrating Charlie Parker's centennial, and the following Sunday, April 5 with a concert featuring the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim. We hope that with each concert, we are able to reach new audiences—and hopefully see everyone at a live in-person concert soon!

-Amy Aronoff, Senior Communications Officer

If you need resources, please check our Emergency Grants page on NYFA’s website. We are updating it regularly as new funding comes in. You can find more articles on arts career topics by visiting the Business of Art section of NYFA.org. Sign up for NYFA News and receive artist resources and upcoming events straight to your inbox.

Images: Screenshots of Alexa Tarantino and Steven Feifke during their Sunday, March 22 concert.

#covid19 #emergency resources #emergencyresources #business of art #businessofart #remote #creative careers #creativecareers #announcements #instagram #artist interview #artistinterview #musicians #alexa tarantino #alexatarantino #steven feifke #stevenfeifke #amy aronoff #amyaronoff

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talesbytalz · 4 years

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Hi, Everyone …so first of all a big big thanks to each one of you for making my last blog post a huge success.

Jab bhi I wake up in the morning and see the notification that my blog stats are booming, I feel supercharged and motivated. All Thanks to my lovely audience!

I am sure you know from the statement above that when I wake up my bed tea is in the form of mobile notifications, this is something which can help you know me better!

Now see, when you are about to get into a relationship or even into a work set-up, your debut step should be to know your partner better. The sone-pe suhaga factor here would be if you know the partner inside out from their likes to passions and how they are to others?

These are some the things that would help your relation get better and eventually you would know how to behave and make decisions around them.

This is what gave me the idea of using my class#2 assignment from the DigitalDeepak internship into something, I yearn to see every time.

For me my customer or as I like to call them, my audience is my bhaagyewaan 🙂 No other way can there be to know them better.

Hence, I decided to seize this opportunity and find out more about my audience to understand them better and hence deliver content which they love and wish to see.

So, here I am chef Talz – yours truly, sharing the recipe of finding Your Customer Avatar, aur jee Haan, ye ekdum cooking-shooking style me hee hone wala hai 🙂

Are you ready? Chalo Chalte Hain ye dish prepare karne at our Kitchen aka our Laptops or the mobile, jis se Abhi you are reading this post.

BRAINSTORM

To make the best customer avatar you would first need to ask yourself the following questions?

What’s there in your ration stock?

Here you have to find out what all skills you have and what you need to buy. Here buy would refer to what all skills you need to learn more without which you cant make the recipe.

E.g. I am a content creator and say I have a mobile phone with a decent camera, but I would need to learn some SEO and marketing skills without which I cant target my audience, or maybe I have the skills but lack equipment say I would need a good mic.

which brings us to the next question

What all can I make with the ration stock?

and what all services and offerings you can provide.

E.g. If you are a singer, then singing is your skill and you can provide songs, lyrics, playback singings etc.

Who will be my consumer?

Once you know what you can offer, then the pitch is set right to know who are your target consumers. Just like you decide your recipe in the kitchen, by figuring out who will consume it based upon their likes and tastes.

So, now that all questions are answered, its time to write down the ingredient list for the Perfect Customer Avatar Recipe

INGREDIENTS:

Set of Questions – Min. 5 Max 20

Flowchart to depict the flow of questions – Optional but handy

Set of images in sync with questions – Optional

Open your website/social media

Any survey creating tool, I used Typeform

PROCESS

Chopping:

First, we need to chop out of the unnecessary questions from our survey questionnaire and add all the rest to our pan where the survey form is steeping.

Cooking :

Now that our ingredients i.e the questions are ready, we need to follow the flowchart to add all the questions sequentially making a sense and also adding curiosity in the customer’s mind to move to the next question and not quit in between.

Here, a tip would be to add a logic jump, which means any particular answer could make the rest of the questions or few of them irrelevant for the person and thus those can be skipped and save mutual time.

Here is an example of the same:

Adding Spices & Salt:

try to add some personal touch that resonates with your business or your’s and your customer’s persona, swad-anusaar. But hey don’t make it too salty or spicey! Else koi nahi samjh payega aapka agenda!

I would suggest adding your persona to the multiple-choice questions

Tadka Garnishing:

Now, its time to garnish our recipe with some tadka of Images, although this is optional, as you might be well aware with my Instagram, I love taking pictures, toh iska tadka toh banta hai!

Test & Taste:

Being a QA Engineer, I know the importance of testing before delivering, hence it’s important for you to trial test the form and also previews before making others taste your recipe. Dekho Kahin bhool chook na reh gayi ho! It’s always better to be safe than sorry!

Plating and Culinary Arts:

So, now that our dish is ready, it’s time to Publish and share the survey questionnaire to first your very close mates, as they would pilot test and tell you how did they find it.

Another tip I would add here , and i.e just like you would decorate with some culinary arts , before publishing do change the default form name and the metadata , for a good aesthetics.

I was lucky that my kind friends told me a few suggestions and bugs which I corrected. After their green flag, share it with the world on your social media or website and get your responses.

Wait For the Feedback:

Now that everything was done, I was waiting for the responses and so much in the excitement that I kept refreshing the page to see the number of responses pouring in.

Deciphering the results:

How to define your target audience?

Demographics

Now, although I should have added a multiple-choice in the cities but since my audience is from different parts of the world, I added a long text option and along with this the language they speak because we all know that a way to your audience is when you speak their lingo, they connect and relate well.

Also another interesting fact, all my audience uses mobiles to consume content 🙂

Psychographics

Questions like what do they do as soon as they wake up give me an idea on how active audience they are, and a way to add good news through a story in their morning notifications as most people said, which I got to know through the following

What time do they love to consume content and which platform are they most active, would help me a lot in scheduling my content at the right time when my audience is consuming it. Because as they say strike the iron when it’s hot!

Another thing that would help me is knowing the gender and marital status, which would help me add tips for active seekers 😉 I did not add the age column as that I can very well guess from the marital status 😉 See I am a bit smart that way 😀

And the most important aspect for me, is what platforms they are most active on and which kind of content do they enjoy the most? This was a revelation indeed!

The Ultimate Revelation

Unveiling the Ideal Customer Avatar

So Finally Ladies & Gentlemen, hold your breath cause now I know who my Ideal Customer Avatar is :

A married aspirational workaholic (because i visited each respondent’s profile)

who lives Delhi , Mumbai & Bangalore mainly in India ,

loves speaking Hindi.

Does not like to wake up to mobile notifications ,

and is mainly a content consumer than a creator

enjoys lifestyle and fitness content the most along with technology , motivation, travel and comedy as well

vlogs , blogs stories and memes are consumed the most having appealing content and videos

on watsapp, facebook, instagram and Youtube between 8pm to 10pm

loves to shop and travel which means they would acknowledge respective content ,

seeking happiness and motivation to achieve goals in life.

Phew!! can’t tell you how relieved I feel, aisa lag raha hai jaise koi khazana mil gaya ho, Kaise bayan Karu ye Khushi 🙂

Now a piece of good news was most respondents love to watch and read my content, which is such a bliss, and I don’t think I will be able to sleep tonight after this out of happiness.

But hey! , if you have not yet joined the bandwagon of Ohh-so-me-ness, then please do and let’s stay connected.

Recipe to find your ideal customer avatar Hi, Everyone ...so first of all a big big thanks to each one of you for making my last blog post a huge success.

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ncmagroup · 5 years

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A Marketing to Media Translation Dictionary For Journalists Turned Content Marketers

By Emily Gaudette

Translating is a tricky business. I took seven consecutive years of French classes, and most of the time, my teacher was a Lebanese-American woman named Hala Kim. She liked to remind us that English was her fourth tongue—after Korean, Arabic, and French. In Madame Kim’s unique blend of languages, she’d always say we needed to “be careful to listening.”

My teacher had a charming way of wording things in English because her personal vocabulary was like a complicated French-accented soup: a linguistic bouillabaisse. That’s how complex and lovely things can get when you pour in terms from multiple cultures. In the marketing world, professionals tend to glom onto useful marketing buzzwords as a shared language, and those terms can actually prove useful to professionals in adjacent industries.

As the marketing and media industries continue to look more and more alike, their lexicons overlap too. Ultimately, marketers and media employees want the same thing—engaged audience members—but we’ve all been taught to talk about attention and audience using industry-specific terms.

For all you media folks out there who are planning a switch to marketing, we’ve put together an introductory translation dictionary for you. You can also use this dictionary as a lead tool if you’re a marketing exec who wants to hire a team of Pulitzer Prize-winning writers for your brand’s blog. You’ll need to speak their language to recruit them, and veteran newspaper reporters don’t necessarily know what “map against your KPIs” means.

No matter why you’re reading this, these thirteen alphabetically listed terms should help you communicate across the divide. So let’s get started!

Call to action (CTA)

A call to action (CTA) is a bit of language in a blog post or piece of content that prompts the audience to do something specific.

The primary difference between marketing and the mainstream media (which I’ll call MSM from here on out) is that every single piece of marketing content should require specific action on the part of the reader, even if that action is just” read more”. For a brand, it’s not enough if 1,000 people read a blog post—those people need to click through to more content, subscribe to an email newsletter, or make a purchase. Content marketers never make content for content’s sake.

Meanwhile, a media company like Hearst might publish a feature article in the print edition of Esquire magazine, and the sole “point” of that article might be “make the reader feel like they really get Chris Evans.” Functionally, it’s fluff. Artistically, it’s likely reaching for the standard of a classic celebrity profile like “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”

To many, injecting a CTA into a piece of writing is to sully the art form. A CTA is what makes a piece into “sponcon,” or sponsored content. But increasingly, CTAs are looking like useful tools for the MSM. Many media companies have begun putting CTAs on their websites—the pop-up warning you that you’ve reached your third free article for the month and will soon need a paid subscription is one example. A lead form for a magazine’s free email newsletter is another.

CMP

A content marketing platform (CMP) is software for organizing the content marketing process. It looks a lot like a CMS (content management system), but a CMP is designed to help marketers do their jobs effectively. A CMS, on the other hand, serves many different kinds of professionals at once.

Most writers at media companies simply use the CMS as a place to paste in their writing. At media companies run by tech executives like Bustle Media Group, writers may routinely use a CMS for social packaging and basic SEO metadata too, but they still typically turn to platforms like Parse.ly and Chartbeat if they’re interested in their audience metrics.

Over in the marketing world, all that audience data is usually baked into a CMP. At least, it’s there if you’re using a good one. You wouldn’t buy a CMP without data reporting capability, and the really stellar options have a transparent workflow management interface.

Content campaign

A content campaign is a plan for the strategic use of content marketing around a specific goal. This one is a pretty one-to-one translation of “editorial package.” I heard colleagues say “package” and “packaging” constantly while writing for magazines and media companies, and now that I’m in marketing, everyone says “campaign.” Why? No idea. But there’s your translation.

Just like an editorial package, a content campaign is a multi-format publishing plan that might comprise social media posts, videos, gifs, email newsletters, press releases, merchandising, print media, and blog posts. It is the central effort of several content-adjacent teams to get people’s eyeballs on a particular piece of content.

Data-driven

A data-driven strategy or program refers back to data gathered from different avenues on a brand’s target audience. In the MSM, journalists who routinely parse out study findings and crunch numbers in order to report on them often self-identify as data journalists. Not every journalist is a data journalist—that’s how Nate Silver was able to create FiveThirtyEight with a central data-breakdown “gimmick.”

It may be difficult to work as a journalist in the MSM without having any knowledge of statistics, but it is completely impossible to do similar work in marketing without those skills. Though a lot of media still relies heavily on anecdotal evidence like interviews, opinions, or criticism, marketing lives and breathes data.

In the mainstream media, one celebrity’s personal experience with divorce is a compelling enough story to stand on its own. No MSM writer is going to interrupt their lede about Bradley Cooper and Irina Shayk divorcing to dig deep into the national divorce rate, but a content marketer at a dating app company probably pumps out a blog post per week on that data.

Gamification

Gamification is a psychological trick that inspires us to enter sweepstakes, pour hours into Candy Crush, and buy all our lotions at Sephora just to watch those loyalty points rack up. (Just me?) Even if you’re not a marketer, you’re probably familiar with the concept of gamification—it’s the way brands turn engagement into a game-like process that rewards active players with little incentives.

Some especially savvy media companies have played with gamification in recent years. Inverse.com’s email newsletter reward habitual readers by racking up points, which readers can spend in the media company’s webstore. The New York Times has published several stories that use interactive UX designs, and these psychologically “reward” readers for clicking around with funny animations. This gamification of a company’s own website is also a hallmark in data visualization journalism like the stories on FiveThirtyEight.

Hub and spoke

To use a hub and spoke model in content marketing is to center all pieces of content around a single enterprise project. It’s a metaphor: there’s a hub at the center of a bicycle wheel, and each spoke that supports the shape of the tire connects back to that central hub. Content marketers like to advise writers to focus on a “hub” piece—usually a long-form e-book or whitepaper—and then build supporting pieces of content around it, like spokes.

If a writer in the MSM were to write a single definitive feature story and then spend the next few weeks writing short blog posts about the same story, well, they’d be accused of being derivative. There’s a vast cavern between reporting on a beat and repeating yourself, and that’s what keeps “hub and spoke” out of the minds of most media writers. The only time you’ll see an editorial strategy of this kind in the MSM is if a newsroom is particularly attached to search traffic (as marketers are). When I worked at Inverse, a website modeled after Bryan Goldberg’s now-ubiquitous “search-driven” strategy, we called hub and spoke strategy “topic swarming.”

Ideation

Ideation just means pitching or brainstorming. Sometimes marketers use a ten-dollar word when a ten-cent word will do. (See also: “utilize” and “leverage” when you could just say “use.”)

Journalistic

To be “journalistic” in your content marketing work means that you operate “somewhat like a journalist.” You technically interview people at your company and write Q&As. You apply for press passes to trade conventions and cover them the way a journalist would cover a convention. It’s a sliding scale, though. Occasionally, “being journalistic” means you are close to a journalist as a bottle of orange Gatorade is to an orange.

Here’s the thing, though, and I say this from experience: a lot of professional writers in the MSM are just as “journalistic” as content marketers. If you cover the film industry, for instance, and you’re not at a trade publication, chances are you’re not actually breaking “stories” as often as you are publishing explainers and breaking down fan theories. That kind of writing is closer to “making content” than it is to “doing good journalism.” So in this case, marketers just found an apt word to describe a multi-industry phenomenon.

KPIs

Your key performance indicators (KPIs) are a group of measurable values that demonstrate how swiftly a marketing department is working toward its business objectives. Example: if your business objective is to increase your brand’s sales enablement program, your KPI for that goal might be “we will produce twenty-four new marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) this quarter.”

Sidenote: you might be wondering why KPIs are “key” performance indicators instead of just “performance indicators.” The answer is that marketers love to say the word “key.” You’re not just gathering coworkers in a room—you’re inviting key stakeholders. You’re not just telling an audience what a slideshow is going to involve—you’re giving them key takeaways. Don’t ask me why “key” is key—it’s just one of those marketing industry mysteries we don’t talk about, like “how did they get Henry Rollins to speak at Content Marketing World?!” and “why am I the only one in this office who washes their own coffee mug?!”

ROI

You’ll often hear marketers ask for a project or story’s demonstrated return-on-investment (ROI), which is just a fancy way of asking, “How did this do?” If you’re an MSM writer or editor, you might associate ROI with audience metrics like page clicks and social shares.

Marketers tend to have a deeper understanding of ROI because they wear more hats than the average writer at a website or magazine. At a media company, functions like social media strategy, newsletters, video, UX design, SEO, and aud dev are typically split across a team of people, but in a content marketing department, everyone does a bit of everything. That’s why all marketers are responsible for proving ROI on their work, whereas writers are often just told how their stories are doing by other teams.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of formatting online content according to parameters set by Google’s algorithm, in order to make that content appear higher on a search engine results page (SERP).

Most writers know what SEO is in a vague sense, but they’re probably not responsible for implementing a strategy. Most media companies tend to separate search data from the pitch process, drawing a line in the sand between the science and art of publishing effectively. For marketers, that line is irrelevant, because the art of content creation will always come second to the science—however, you do need both to do content marketing well.

Because of a lack of education on the subject, many writers think of SEO as simply turning their headline into a question that readers might Google. Content marketing requires a more nuanced understanding of optimization, from meta data to keywords and longtail subject authority.

Snackable

If a piece of content is “snackable,” it means it’s designed to be engaged within a single sitting. A long-form piece of writing is not snackable, but an infographic posted to social media is snackable. Because content marketers typically work in a more diverse array of media formats than writers, they come up with ways to categorize these offerings.

Again, marketers fall in love with buzzwords, but you don’t have to say “snackable” to get a job in the industry. You can just call a social graphic or an infographic or a gif whatever it is.

Thought leader

Admittedly, this is the one content marketing buzzword that creeps me out. A “thought leader” is just an industry critic, talking head, or influencer, but something about that particular phrasing reminds me of Charles Manson.

I’m not alone either. In 2017, progressive outlet The New Republic published an op-ed calling thought leadership a hollow product of income inequality in the Western world. Thought leadership in a business setting, the article argued, is sort of weaponization of TEDTalk-style presentations, and a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. “The rich have empowered a new kind of thinker—the ‘thought leader’—at the expense of the much-fretted-over ‘public intellectual,’” David Sessions wrote. “Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg ‘develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.’”

So, it’s up to you whether thought leaders are harmless LinkedIn influencers or agents of late-stage capitalism. You should just know the term if you’re working in content marketing because a lot of folks fancy themselves thought leaders.

UGC

User-generated content (UGC) refers to any online media created by the audience members following a brand. Because marketers want to inspire relationships with their audiences, even more so than the average writer, they tend to put emphasis on UGC. If a brand asks followers to tweet their own stories about a product, or take a photo at a branded event and share with a hashtag, they’re requesting UGC.

Interestingly, MSM writers like to joke about avoiding UGC—see the whole “reply guy” controversy, the “don’t @ me” mindset, or the persistent “don’t read the comments” meme. It’s all done playfully, but the punchline is that an MSM writer doesn’t really want to be bothered with feedback from random readers. Social shares are appreciated, but a modern critic or reporter doesn’t like to think of themselves as embroiled in a constant conversation with the general public. Marketers, on the other hand, are ravenously hungry for that back-and-forth.

Now, this is just a list of thirteen marketing terms that require a bit of context for the average media employee. There are hundreds of more buzzwords, disappearing from industry conversations as quickly as they arrive, but if you know this set, you can have a productive conversation with a content marketer. So go forth and network!

A Marketing to Media Translation Dictionary For Journalists Turned Content Marketers A Marketing to Media Translation Dictionary For Journalists Turned Content Marketers By Emily Gaudette Translating is a tricky business.

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emergentmediasndmarketsblog · 5 years

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Week 4 - Collaborative Consumption and Gamification

Share economies have had a predominantly positive effect on the creative industries, as collaboration plays a huge part in many sectors of the industry. When you begin to think about it, a lot of creations and technological advancements over the years may not have been possible without shared resources. The emergence of the internet had a lot to do with expanding the way that the creative arts collaborated with each other, as along with the creation of the internet came a new form of commons called the knowledge commons where “distributed computer networks allow for the generalisation of peer to peer dynamics, i.e. open contributory systems where peers are free to join in the common creation of shared knowledge resources, such as open knowledge, free software and shared designs.” (Bauwenst, M. Commons Transition. (2017). The worry before was that people who had new and innovative ideas would keep it to themselves, and not allow anyone else to benefit from their creations, however with the new knowledge commons, it began to open up the idea that knowledge, along with physical goods, are there to be shared and built on, as Kevin Kelly describes in The Inevitable, “it is obvious to you that open source software is better than polished proprietary goods, when you are certain sharing your photos and other data yields more than safeguarding them — then these assumptions will become a platform for a yet more radical embrace of the common wealth” (Kelly, K. The Inevitable (2016).

However, there is still one thing that stands in the way when it comes to share economies within the creative industry, just like any other, Copyright. Even though there are many artists/companies that put their work in the public domain and open source in order for other artists and people to use to create their own artworks, there is still a fine line that can often look blurred when it comes what you can and can’t use. The non-profit organisation Creative Commons is aiming to change this, and is one of the current industry leading innovators when it comes to working towards creating increased availability of work freely available to the public for legal use as they realise that “there’s an inherent conflict between innovative digital culture and outdated copyright laws” (Creative Commons. (2019). They currently have multiple museums who have agreed to implement the Creative Commons copyright licenses which allows their work to be available to others to use legally. There are still many creatives who feel that we still have a long way to go, “crowdsourcing, lack of proper attribution online, and the wealth of readily available images and text to use (legally or illegally) have seriously devalued the creative market” and it could cause some rather big problems to the creative industry in the future if something isn’t done soon.

References:

Commons Transition. (2017). The History and Evolution of the Commons - Commons Transition. [online] Available at: http://commonstransition.org/history-evolution-commons/ [Accessed 14 Jan. 2019].

Creative Commons. (no date). Arts & Culture - Creative Commons. [online] Available at: https://creativecommons.org/about/program-areas/arts-culture/ [Accessed 14 Jan. 2019].

Future of Everything. (no date). What's The Future of The Creative Industry? |. [online] Available at: https://www.futureofeverything.io/future-creative-industry/ [Accessed 14 Jan. 2019].

Medium. (2016). Sustainability in the Sharing Economy – 14ideas – Medium. [online] Available at: https://medium.com/@14ideas/is-the-sharing-economy-environmentally-sustainable-c3fef196d36d [Accessed 14 Jan. 2019].

Social Media has become one of the main ways that creatives promote their work and collaborate with other creatives nowadays. The great thing about Social Media is that it is versatile, and there are many to choose from to use, depending on what area of the creative industry that you are in. There is also the freedom to choose a more casual approach to promoting yourself on websites like Instagram and Twitter, or you can go down the more professional route of reaching out and collaborating through LinkedIn or Behance. Personally, I like to have a mixture of both, this way you can reach a wider audience, and grow your connections.

For many people in the creative industries, a portfolio is the most important thing, and there are plenty of websites out there that allow creatives to showcase their work, as well as discovering others who they might be interested in collaborating with. A couple of the most popular portfolio sites are Behance, Dribbble and SquareSpace.

Behance.net. (2019). Behance. [online] Available at: https://www.behance.net/ [Accessed 14 Jan. 2019].

Speaking as a photographer, I prefer to use Instagram to promote my work, as a photo based social media platform I feel that it is the best way to showcase my photographs. It is a very popular platform for most photographers, you would find it difficult to find a photographer who is not on Instagram. Because it is so popular, I find it easy to make connections and follow other photographers in my field of interest, which makes it easier to connect with them personally if I was interested in a collaboration. On the other hand, yes it is good to promote your photographs, but not so easy to promote yourself as a creative, as it doesn’t just come down to how good your photographs are, but how you are as a person and the experience you have gained. This is why I choose to also use LinkedIn, which is also popular with creatives as a way to promote yourself and let people see what experience you have and the work you have done.

Here is me using Social Media for collaboration:

References:

Behance.net. (2019). Behance. [online] Available at: https://www.behance.net/ [Accessed 14 Jan. 2019].

Digital Arts. (2017). 15 best portfolio websites for designers and artists. [online] Available at: https://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/features/creative-business/15-best-portfolio-websites-for-designers-artists/ [Accessed 14 Jan. 2019].

With gaming becoming a massive part of our lives, especially with the younger generation, it is becoming almost impossible to escape it. It has become so popular that companies are now using it to keep themselves current and to appeal to a younger audience and improves user engagement.

One example of how gamification is used in share economies is Uber. Uber was created as way for people to earn money by giving people lifts to where they need to go. They also use car sharing initiatives which gives multiple people lifts in the same car if they are going in the same general direction. Their use of gamification is pretty simple, but is extremely useful, it allows you to use the interactive GPS map to know exactly where your Uber driver is, and how long it will take until they get to your destination. These can be useful to the customer as “features such as this can take the power from the driver and place it in the hands of the rider.” (Patten, B. Moodley, (2019).

When it comes to how gamification can be used in creative collaboration, I feel that it is all in the rewards. People are more likely to continue to do something, if they are getting rewards and gratification from doing so. Take LinkedIn for example, it is a great way for people to connect with each other, however all that happens when you connect, it just adds another person to the list of ‘contacts’. There isn’t much reward to this other than seeing your connection count increase. I think a way to improve this experience for creatives, is to use gamification in the way that the finance app Fortune City does. Fortune City aims to make budgeting fun by using gamification to keep users engaged. As you continue to budget, and input you spending, the city simulation allows your city to grow. It also allows you to set goals which will keep users coming back, wanting to reach them. This could be an interesting idea that could be transferred to improving collaboration in the creative industries as allowing yourself yo set goals, and to be able to see yourself getting closer to them by using gamification would certainly be a step towards getting people to be more productive in doing so, as I think that the main issue is that people lose interest very quickly while using a website like LinkedIn to find collaborators, “If life is a game, then we can hack our lives using Gamification to motivate, drive, or trick ourselves into being more productive.” (Loayza, V. (2019).

References:

Fortunecityapp.com. (2019). Fortune City - A Gamified Finance App. [online] Available at: https://fortunecityapp.com/en/ [Accessed 14 Jan. 2019].

Loayza, V. (2018). The 10 Best Productivity Apps that use Gamification in 2018. [online] Yu-kai Chou: Gamification & Behavioral Design. Available at: https://yukaichou.com/lifestyle-gamification/the-top-ten-gamified-productivity-apps/ [Accessed 14 Jan. 2019].

Patten, B. Moodley, (2016). 5 ways Uber has used gamification to rise above its competitors - Memeburn. [online] Available at: https://memeburn.com/2016/02/5-ways-uber-has-used-gamification-to-rise-above-its-competitors/ [Accessed 14 Jan. 2019].

One of main issues at the centre of how the share community is evolving and how online sharing within Social Media and crowdsourcing is the ownership of work. Up until a few years ago, before the share economy in the creative industry became what it is now, the line was more clear cut when it came to who owned what, and who was licensed to use it. Like I mentioned earlier, that line is beginning to blur. A prime example of this, and the share economy when it comes to artists, is Richard Prince who created the exhibition New Portraits in 2014 using appropriated images that he had taken from Instagram but changed the captions. This began the debate as to who actually owns the rights to photographs that you post online, and how much far do you have to go in changing an image for it to qualify as an original image in its own right, one photographer had one of his images used, sued Prince on the grounds “that Prince’s reproduction of Graham’s photograph – a black and white image of a Rastafarian man lighting a joint – was not modified adequately to warrant being called an original work.” (Gajanan, M. (2016).

When it comes to Instagram, a majority of people who post photographs to the site, would not be happy if their images were used by an artist, and a lot of photographers, including myself often watermark our images to stop them being used without credit. Yes this ultimately goes against a share economy and limits the number of photographs that are available out there for creatives to use, but this is why there is a gap in the market for websites like Unsplash which allows people to upload photos that are available for everyone to use.

I think that online sharing, combined with crowd sourced collaboration and outsourcing will inevitably have a positive effect on the creative industry as like I mentioned above, there are already websites out there that are specifically designed for people to be able to use images freely, and there is a path that is starting to form where we could be open to more ideas like this, for example an increase in collaborative working spaces.

Looking at how this could affect my future career as a photographer, I think that although there are people out there who are happy to offer their photographs for free, for those who make it a living, giving away their photographs for free, kind of defeats the whole point of it being a living, and would not make them any money at all. Therefore the precautions that would have to be taken is to make sure that I know my rights, and make sure to watermark everything in order to prevent people thinking that they can use my photographs for free without any credit. However, looking at it in a Social Media Managers point of view, a part of my role is to come up with content for the social media channels, therefore for there to be a wider range of content of there for me to use would be beneficial.

References:

Gajanan, M. (2016). Controversial artist Richard Prince sued for copyright infringement. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jan/04/richard-prince-sued-copyright-infringement-rastafarian-instagram [Accessed 14 Jan. 2019].

Unsplash.com. (2019). Beautiful Free Images & Pictures | Unsplash. [online] Available at: https://unsplash.com/ [Accessed 14 Jan. 2019].

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