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theminecraftbee · 2 years

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alright, so, one more thing i've been thinking about during all of this, and apologies, because i normally try to keep my blog fairly discourse-free in the grand scheme of things. but.

there are hermitcraft fans who act irritatingly morally superior about this fandom. i think it's out of some impulse to try to distance yourselves from any other mcyt fandom. it needs to stop.

the worst behavior during the polls was from the hermitcraft fans.

period.

there were so many instances of hermitcraft fans accusing the other side of cheating, of hermitcraft fans making attacks on the character of their guy's opponents, i have heard what i HOPE are isolated reports of racism in the grian/quackity fight (it was genuinely impossible to keep up with the blog's notes that round without both going into a death spiral thanks to the horrible behavior of scar fans during techno/scar and also without losing track instantly of where we were due to the frankly insurmountable volume of notes, so i did not see it, but unfortunately i fully believe it). i have seen people receiving awful asks - saw people being accused of 'betraying' the hermitcraft side due to voting for quackity or techno, for example.

and for a fandom that likes to act like it's better than the other guys, well. the dsmp fans were generally very well behaved in comparison. (shoutout, for example, to quackblr - i saw maybe one or two possible instances of bad behavior, but for as intense as you all were, you all were normally mostly just retaliatory towards whatever energy was thrown at you.) it wasn't supposed "outsiders coming in" that was doing this bad behavior, either.

folks, you can't blame the dsmp when the problem is inside the house. you can't blame twitter users when you're doing it here. you can't blame the reddit when you're the ones throwing the first death threats.

get off your high horses. we're all mcyt fans. we're all having the same fun. get off your high horses. you can hardly claim we're entirely all "unproblematic" when keralis accepted a sponsorship from the wizard game and xisuma periodically gets another round of getting shouted down over something he said on xisumasays. get off your high horses. you can't claim we're the accepting, good behavior fandom, unlike those other guys, when you're the ones causing the problems.

now, as always, i'm sure this is a law of large numbers thing to some extent. as technoblade, wise as he is, said: sometimes when you get a large enough group, you're going to have a few serial killers. but for the amount that hermitblr likes to act better than Those Other Minecraft Fandoms, and those Other Fandom Websites, it wasn't those guys that made me cry.

to be clear, the majority of you have been well-behaved. but there's a persistent tendency in this fandom to act strangely morally superior to other fandoms. and, y'all? you aren't.

you just aren't.

and the sooner you acknowledge that, the less likely this is to happen again, because once you admit that yeah, we can be toxic too? that's when you can start actually looking at yourself and trying not to be.

anyway, sorry again to make this post. i don't want to be a downer, hence why, outside of the official mod statements of "chill the fuck out", i didn't make this until now. (it also helps that i wanted to wait until i was no longer furious, upset, and death spiraling.) i have seen a lot of the best of this fandom over the past two weeks! i've just also, unfortunately, seen some of the worst, and feel the need to make this statement because it's just... been eating at me.

i don't want this to continue to be a trend. i think we can do better. do so.

#discourse #hermitcraft #side note. please don't come into my inbox about this i WILL just delete it (even if you're agreeing with me)#i also don't need a 'sorry this happened' so much as a. idk. i'm making this post so maybe people realize that they're doing this at all #and stop doing it #anyway wanna reiterate: 90% of y'all were nice. the problem is everyone likes to pretend the 10% doesn't exist #and i'm just... tired of that.#so here i am! psa over

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mattdemers · 2 years

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My safari through current social media alternatives

So I figured that after a week of Twitter doomposting by other people, I'd weigh in with my thoughts on the vibes/applications of social media sites that people have migrated to. This isn't meant to be a scientific tier list, just thoughts.

Tumblr

I haven't been here in years. Things are largely the same, but there's been some UI improvements, and I've liked things like the new posting UI (still needs some work. Would prefer Markdown, but I get how zoomers aren't going to put up with that).

Aesthetically, it feels like the transition from being 18 to 22. Like, the company voice is a bit more older/sassier/"leaning into what people told it that its strengths were" and I don't know if that's good or bad. I feel that it's a bit limiting but I think Tumblr needs all the help it can get.

I've also noticed a lot more gamification, encouragement, "things that you are doing correctly that we are going to enforce" from Tumblr itself, which is probably positive.

Probably will be fine in the short term.

Cohost (Link to me)

"Tumblr, with a shit colour scheme."

I'm having trouble with Cohost mostly because I've done the least amount of exploration for new people to follow or hashtag discovery. I really like the post editor (it's Markdown, see above) but I can understand how that's going to hurt it.

It reminds me of a university/college internal website for students, aesthetically. I don't want to say "who is this for?" but there's a larger deficit when it comes to its identity as a site. Tumblr is clear what it wants to be, and who it wants to house, and Cohost was sold to me "for creators" but I have less idea how/why/beyond that.

Clicking into a tag for "league of legends" (which I guess might be a good comparison across platforms) the last post in that tag was 3 days ago.

Yeah, I'm kinda thinking Cohost is gonna be dead, or a zombie like Vero Social in a year.

Mstndn.social (Link to me)

It's hard to talk about Mastodon due to the nature of federation, so I can only zoom out and talk about "the normie experience" that I'm seeing.

I think people are using Masto as a bit of a panacea; they see a familiar Twitter-ish interface, but are lost with the tech-speak of federation and what it might mean. I've seen ambitious people start their own instances and think it's "building a new Twitter" in terms of scale expectations, but it's not. You're essentially building your own pillow fort.

The thing is, I think some people might be... hoping otherwise? Like, the stuff that's interesting me most about Masto is the Lord of the Flies scenarios happening in certain circles, where they're finding out:

How much work actually goes into moderation, and how unsexy it is

What happens when people you don't know/can't vet are joining your instance

What happens when people have a visible person they can point their grievances to

To be honest I'm not optimistic about Mastodon but I think it serves a purpose in educating people about what was convenient about Twitter. They'll go crawling back, and maybe a few people will embrace the "local" group they've now joined.

Some normies literally have never had the experience of joining a small forum and learning to love that community; this isn't that. It's more like Reddit, where one account enables you to post everywhere, but you might find a "home" subreddit.

I've been using Pinafore as a better UI for Masto and I've been enjoying it.

Other thoughts

I joined The Hive about two seconds ago, but I'm moreso just reserving a username in case it blows up. A two-person team and being on the market for multiple years before this kind of makes me wary, mostly because I think they're hungry to accept any kind of winning milestone, and that means they're going to listen to anyone if it makes them think they can keep the momentum.

Tech users largely don't know what they want, and it's going to waste the resources of a dev team in order to try to get everyone satisfied. If they're doing crowdfunding, I'm kinda also pessimistic, because man that's setting up for some "I paid for X!" complaints.

What's funny/cool is I've gotten "mattd" on all these platforms, not "mattdemers." Kinda nice to shift a little bit because I'm very insecure about saying my last name verbally and having people be able to find me. Oh well.

It's the URL of my new Substack too, where I'll be posting more things like this, if you want more. It isn't launched yet, and is under construction, but it's there if you want to move early.

#social media #cohost #hive social #tumblr #mastodon #mstdnsocial #fediverse #sociology #technology #twitterpocalypse #elon musk twitter #twitter

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froshele · 1 year

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you know i wonder about reddit sometimes. i get why the refugees are so starstruck by tumblr culture now - i think it comes down to one single massive difference, that being how normal people are on average.

this sounds shocking, but let me explain - i think people can go on tumblr just to blog. a blog could be anything. meanwhile reddit is for to be right and mean about things, and i think sometimes it gets ugly on there.

I occasionally post in the ferret subreddit or in gaming console subreddits, and you wouldn't believe the mumsnet tier cattiness people are capable of about the most mundane things. I'm the worst in the universe public enemy #1 because my mill ferret won't do anything for love nor money unless it's malt paste, which is extremely bad for him. just the most evil and misinformed man in the world. satan in a skinsuit. vile fellow, etcetera. it's all fine for Me to abuse Mine, but people are righteous heroes for warning other people about the Malt Plagues. In my comment section on my post about the fact that the animal in question has a broken foot and is improving rapidly with hydrotherapy, which is obviously the doing of someone very evil who does not love him or at all have any good short term reason to offer unhealthy food (dude won't take anything else as reinforcement and they generally stop eating when in pain, never mind wanting to try new more nutritious meals).

For every one person who tells me "good luck transitioning your guy onto better rewards after his leg heals, cool that you're doing hydrotherapy for him" and "lol yeah the steam deck is a low end linux portable and its capacities were massively overhyped in advertising - you got got same as i did, lower your expectations massively dude" theres reams more notifications of people insinuating i'm an animal abuser and getting super up in arms about their beloved game console, which they admit is too unwieldy to hold up comfortably for everyone without enormous hands, but refuse to let someone slander because it's more to them than their mother is

now, tumblr also has corners where people are shitty and defensive of whatever their thing is, but you have to understand the difference is that the median tumblr user has enough emotional intelligence to understand that opinions are like dicks, sometimes a deranged person flashes theirs at you on the metro and you keep walking

on reddit even an average person with their penis out at the urinal can expect to receive people leering over their shoulder with weird shit about everything from their intellect to their capacity to love, based entirely on what the people think this person is like from the smell of their lunch (recent 5 posts) on their clothing. redditors, particularly the ones posting during american daylight hours, are professionals at constructing foaming mouthed takedowns they think sound incredibly intelligent and morally superior against completely normal people who just went online to ask a question or take the piss. it adds up, y'all.

by comparison, on tumblr you sometimes get a silly death threat or someone pearlclutching about you putting them in grave danger with a single anonymous post, but we all know they're not all that. this place really is paradise compared to that one. let the redditors frolic and gambol lol they're like lab chimps experiencing sun and grass (people being able to be normal about things they dislike) for the first time ever

#reddit #reddit to tumblr #cultural differences

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lightns881 · 4 years

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DTeam Tumblr Demographics Survey Results (Part 1):

The Gifted Child Syndrome is Real with this One...

*Rubs hands together in preparation for some juicy data and in-depth analysis of the typical member of the DTeam Tumblr community*

Ooooooooh boy! Here we go!

I want to start of by thanking you guys for over 400 responses to the demographics survey! Y’all have no idea how much I appreciate it! We have so much to cover, so I’m going to divide up different sections of the survey into several posts to make it more digestable and do justice to each topic explored in the form! We’re going to start of with, you guessed it, personality types!

Strap yourself in because we’re about to thoroughly dissect your sub-conscious innerworkings and find out how the typical DTeam Tumblr Fan thinks! (And judging by the majority personality types, you guys will probably enjoy it)

The Delicious Data

From the 449 responses we received, this is a pie chart displaying the personality types of all respondents.

Image Description: INFP (40.5%), INTP (15.1%), INFJ (8.9%), INTJ (8.9%), ISFP (6.9%), ENFP (4.2%), ISTP (4.0%), ENTP (3.8%), ESFP (1.6%), ISFJ (1.6%), ENTJ (1.3%), ENFJ (1.3%), ISTJ (1.1%), ESTP (0.4%), ESFJ (0.2%), ESTJ (0%)

In comparison, this is a pie chart displaying the personality type percentages of the population as a whole according to the MBTI website.

Image Description: ISTP (14%), ESFJ (12%), ISTJ (12%), ISFP (9%), ESTJ (9%), ESFP (8%) ENFP (8%), ISTP (5%), INFP (4%), ESTP (4%), INTP (3%), ENTP (3%), ENFJ (2%), INTJ (2%), ENTJ (2%), INFJ (1%)

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m sensing a tiny difference here... Oh, right!

INxx’s on the Loose!

It’s funny. When I first found one of the 18+ DTeam fan servers through Tumblr, I asked everyone what their personality type was. I was pleasantly surprised when a lot of them told me they were INFPs like me!

It actually reminded me of MatPat’s (Game Theory) survey for one of his Life Is Strange theories that found the majority personality there was also INFP...

Funny enough, can you guess what the second leading personality on that survey was? The third? The fourth?

You probably guessed it right. MatPat found that out of the fans who responded, the leading majority was INFP while INTPs came in second, INFJs came in third, and INTJs came in fourth. The exact order for the personality types in DTeam Tumblr.

But why is it that some of the rarer personalities of the world are dominating DTeam Tumblr or Game Theory’s fanbase? What is it about these communities that attract the rare introverted Intuitive Perceivers (INxP) and Intuitive Judgers (INxJ) of the world like magnets?

The Gifted Kid Syndrome

To answer this question, first we have to examine our leading personalities. As we can see from the data, INFPs and INTPs make up 55.6% and INFJs and INTJs make up 17.8% of the total respondents. That’s nearly 3/4′s of the DTeam Tumblr population made up of INxx types!

Now, here’s me calling y’all out.

A lot of you probably relate to the quiet kid sitting at the back of the classroom who’s put into some type of TAG, gifted program, or some authority figure has probably called you smart and/or “gifted” at some point in your life. Academics probably came easy to you at one point, maybe they still do.

You’ve probably felt your chest swell up at the shower of compliments about your intelligence and at another... you’ve probably felt like people put you in a pedestal and overrate you so you’re stuck with this inherent fear of failure, and it causes you to completely shut down when the things that came easy to you at one point no longer do so.

It’s gifted kid syndrome hitting you like a brick to the face. And if it hasn’t yet, oh you’re in for a surprise, honey.

And I’m sure many of you have come across funny, relatable posts like this:

And you want to know why most of you relate?

Image Description: INTP, INTJ, INFP, anf INFJ’s rate the highest in a giftedness per MBTI Type chart

No. You’re not hallucinating. It’s not even a joke at this point. It feels true because it probably is true.

(Granted, the study that captured similar results to this graph is long lost to the internet, but the best source I found with it was a reddit post I will be citing in the reblog.)

Now, my next point is where we find a split.

INFPs and INTPs and their Need to Question Everything (even if it’s about one sentence [insert creator here] said that one time during a 4-hour long stream)

The strongest connection I found between the two leading personalities of DTeam Tumblr is they share Extraverted Intuiting (Ne) as their auxiliary cognitive function.

I’ll use a quote that explains Ne better than I could ever explain it in my own words:

“Extraverted intuition or Ne is very much focused on patterns and making connections from information they gather... Ne dominant users enjoy being able to explore things in a much more open manner, not wanting to feel closed off to the possibilities around them... They are also highly imaginative people, who enjoy being able to come up with unique hobbies and experiences... They are not afraid of imagining things which seem almost impossible to others... [For INFPs,] Ne is what creates this detailed and incredible thoughts process which keeps them busy for long periods of time.”

And another:

“Auxiliary Ne manifests in people constantly questioning the world around them, but unlike ENxPs, they can be more pick and choose about this. But generally, they don’t take people, things and events at face value.“

Now, think about the community you’re in right now. Think about the post you’re reading at the moment.

DTeam Tumblr is full of over-analysis posts, whether about Dream and George’s secret love for each other or about the inherent problems with Dream’s shipbait and gay jokes or theories about what’s going to happen next in the dream SMP lore and the dramatic betrayals and creator’s descend into madness and more theories about sexuality and charts depicting creator’s personalities and what they’d be likely to do in different scenarios and... ooof, I’m out of breath here. You get my point.

DTeam Tumblr is literally a group of ex-gifted or gifted introverted people who love to read or write analysis, theory, and discussion posts about sweaty Minecraft Youtubers because they’re probably too overwhelmed by real life and find joy in obsessing over “dumb” things.

That’s it. That’s literally the post. I might as well end there.

But I won’t.

Because obsessions is exactly what I want to focus on next.

The Inherent Nature of the INFP and their “Micro-Obsessions”

This is me having a one-to-one conversation with all my INFPs reading this.

Do you sometimes just set your mind on a goal--like, let’s say, writing a book--and you spend so much time obsessing over it to the point where you burn out and suddenly it never sees the light of day because you move onto your next goal or obsession because now you’re getting ready to launch your freelance website so you can start a business on [insert new hobby here]?

Or do you just suddenly find a fandom or a show or a channel you really enjoy and you spend the next few months doing nothing but engaging with it and reading fanfiction and drawing fan art or making dumb analysis posts on your main Tumblr account where suddenly you get an influx of followers from that community and now people are expecting you to just post about MCYT!?

Oh, sorry, I got a little carried away at the end there...

Anyhow, my point is, do you ever develop an obsession over something all the sudden only for it to just disappear when you find something new or just fall into the deep crevices of your mind only for it to maybe reemerge a few years later after you get a deep sense of nostalgia remembering it?

I call them micro-obsessions. And I recently found out, I’m not the only one who does this!

Here’s another quote for you:

“According to Carl Jung’s theory of cognitive functions, when an INFP makes a decision, Ne comes in second to another process known as Introverted Feeling (Fi). Fi does not use logic to make a decision. It uses how we feel about the decision according to our values. In other words, it asks, “Which choice feels right for me?”

Ne, on the other hand, craves new ideas and experiences to explore, which causes INFPs to always be on the lookout for something novel.

Unfortunately, INFPs can get stuck in a loop, going back and forth between their Ne and Fi. They search to understand their values by constantly trying new things. They ask themselves, “Does this feel right?” then throw it over their shoulder as they move on to something else.”

So, you’re probably asking right about now, Light, how the heck does any of this have anything to do with the Dream Team and MCYT!?

Well, my friend, it has EVERYTHING to do with the Dream Team and MCYT and DTeam Tumblr as a whole.

Because INxx’s are predisposed to end up in places like this--fandoms on Tumblr, channels that speculate whether Mario is evil, watching dramatic Minecraft smp wars and elections as opposed to looking at the news that depicts Murphy’s Law as 2020′s new favorite epigram.

The introvert in them causes them to prefer socializing in small communities online where they’re not forced to engage in conversations if they don’t want to or put into uncomfortable situations where they have to talk to that one friend of their friend who wants to make meaningless small chat.

Their Intuition causes them to wonder into places like Tumblr where they can engage in deep discussions about their newest obsessions, and they won’t be judged for writing a 500+ word post about why Dream’s shipbait tactics are a genius algorithm strat or simping over sweaty Minecraft boys.

DTeam Tumblr is a safe haven for INFPs and INTPs who might be placed in the “other” category or marked as weird for being interested in “childish” entertainment or being different from the general population overall, whether that’d be sexuality, point of view, age, gender, etc. A place where you can fully be yourself and not have to worry about disappointing people.

INFPs are predisposed for drowning themselves in their micro-obsessions to avoid all of the madness in the world--even if that means giggling like a little girl while reading memes about your favorite Minecraft YouTube creators.

That is a deep-dive into the mind of a typical DTeam Tumblr user. What do you think? Is it accurate at all? Is it completely off? Let me know in the comments!

And with that, I digress. I’m not sure whether I’ll be covering general demographics next week or diving into the topic of ships (could be a mix of both), but I will be posting about it eventually, so make sure to hit the follow if you got to the end of this post and enjoyed it or learned something new from it!

Friendly reminder that this survey and post is in no way supposed to be taken 100% seriously. These are just the ramblings of a math major INFP with too much time on her hands and way too big of an obsession for MCYT. My asks are always open for literally anything, whether if you want to ask me about this or any DNF related subject, my own opinions, or just criticize the whole of this post and tell me it’s complete trash! I’ll answer as long as it’s appropriate!

And, again, thank you everyone who filled out the survey. Without y’all, this post wouldn’t be possible. I really enjoyed writing it! Adios!

#dteam #dteamblr #dttblr #mcyt #dreamwastaken #georgenotfound #sapnap #dreamnotfound #dnf #dream team #dream smp #dteamblr demographics survey #analysis

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tes-trash-blog · 4 years

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ElaborTe

So if you like Nords or stan them or cherish them as much as I do the Snow Elves, you might wanna skip this one.

TW: White supremacy, Neo-Nazism, the trash blog going completely off their shits

From the early days of the Elder Scrolls, the Nords have always been.. Well, Norse-coded. As far as races and their lore-evolutions go, they’re the only ones who have held steady in their Nordy McNordness throughout the series. They’ve always been hardy, fair-haired men and women from frozen reaches of Skyrim. They’ve always had a foothold in that tundra, as early as the days of Labrynthian, first featured in Arena. They’ve always preferred axes and steel over magic and guile, and before anyone says anything about Project Tamriel or out-of-game lore or whatever Kirkbride said about robots and wasabi, I’m talking explicitly about canon here, as canon is what most gamers see in these games.

From their appearance to their armor and weapons to the draugr and ancient gods, the Nords are very much the Elder Scrolls’ answer to the Fantasy Viking, which in itself is based on the Vikings of yonder year.. Give or take a few embellishments. Their axes have harsh-but-intricate carvings, their armor is lined with fur and made from honest steel, they have names like Hulda and Sigrid, Roggvir and Thongvor, their voice actors hail from Sweden or can put on a Scandivan-esque accent. They look, sound, act, and dress Norse.

In media studies, this is called coding, a relatively new term in academia and so far still largely used in queer studies. Unlike allegory, which is an intentional one-to-one comparison of something vis a vis Lion Witch and the Wardrobe or Ender’s Game, coding is by and large unintentional, or at least unclaimed and not explicitly stated. It is a byproduct of beliefs, biases, and bumbletyfucks the writer possessed as they created a work, and left unchecked it can lead to problematic elements.

This isn’t to say that coding is terrible, or Bad, or Problematic (though it often is at least one, and sometimes all three), but rather, it is a limitation of being human. Most writers are human as are most of the audiences the media reaches out to, and as such are bound by their worldview and preconceived notions and biases. Just because it can be problematic doesn’t necessarily mean it always is going to be problematic. A skilled writer can recognize this and work around it, or even play with the preconceived notions the audience has. I’ve seen very few white writers accomplish this, even fewer that were cisgendered men, but it’s doable.

However, if these notions are left unchecked, unchallenged, and uncritically accepted, you end up with uh, things. Things like, oh, the Khajiit who steal and deal drugs and travel in “caravans” (oof), the Bosmer who are the only brown Elves in the game and are also cannibals (yikes), the Reachfolk are dressed in untanned animal skins and wear antlers and do guerilla warfare and fucking yikes Bethesda what were you thinking???

You also end up with the Nords, who really took a nosedive from Fantasy Vikings into Gleeful Killers with Magic Shouting come Morrowind, where the Snow Elves had a proper introduction if only to show that the Nords of old were mass murderers, but, y’know, felt kinda bad about it after a child soldier killed their leader. It makes for a sad story, but it’s a cheap, Ender's Game-esque out so the viewer doesn’t have to feel bad about rooting for them. “They felt bad, guys! It’s okay!”

These deeply problematic aspects of Nords-as-homicidal-maniacs only became more apparent with the arrival of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim.

Here’s where that white supremacy warning I gave earlier comes into play. You still got some time to check out and enjoy your day.

Still here? Alright.

It was a perfect storm. As I said in a previous rant, Skyrim came about in a time of unprecedented White Anxiety. I cannot stress enough how much white people lost their damn minds when Obama was elected president. There were threats on the then-President’s life, on his wife and daughters, on a daily basis. Gun sales reached record highs out of fear that the boogeyman Democrat would take their guns away. Libertarianism soon became a shorthand for a white supremascist who likes to smoke weed. The so called Tea Party screamed about “freedom of religion” while openly applauding anti-Islamic hate crimes and calling the President by his middle name/dogwhistle “Hussien”, white supremacist hate sites saw an influx of traffic; Stormfront, the oldest of the bunch, saw a jump from 23,000 users in 2004 to over 100,000 in 2008, and this was before bot users were a thing admins had to weed out, this was before a certain foreign power took a keen interest in installing a useful idiot.

This was home-brewed vitriol.

All the while, right wing media went batshit. Fox News had their Mustardgate “scandal”, a dogwhistle to their populist audience that their leaders weren’t like “the average American”. Conspiracy theories sprung up right and left (pun intended) about the Obama administration and “the shadow government”, of which those neo-Nazi sites, with their surge in fresh-faced users, were a wellspring for. Being the Internet, their memes and “facts Big Media doesn’t want you to hear” spread like a cancer to the greater Internet-- Reddit and its subsidiary Imgur, Tumblr, Twitter, 9Gag, countless other pockets of blogospheres and forums and media platforms. It was, and still is, fucking inescapable.

And of course, Nazis love them that Norse aesthetic. They love the cold where only real men could survive, unlike those weak-willed patsies and *checks notes* dijon-mustard lovers. They love the pale skin and light hair of the people as that’s their idea of genetic purity. They love the runes, the affectations, how the Norse folk of old just invaded and pillaged and were so strong, they did Blood Eagles and were so masculine.

And therein lies why I hate the Nords. I hate how they went from Generic Viking to Murder Men, I hate the direction Morrowind and onward took with them, I hate how no one had the foresight to either tone down these aspects or put a spin on them like they seemed to do with other races. I hate how quickly actual racists took to this fake ass race, I hate how they tried to pull a “both sides are the same” in that stupid Civil War questline when one side is an actual ethno-nationalist paramilitary cult.

I hate how the writers of Skyrim were cowards, and I hate that they apparently looked at Ur-Fascism and saw a checklist. I hate that they gave the Nords, and by extension you, the player, a moral justification for rallying against a “high-brow”, “elitist”, “globalist” “oppressive”, distinctly non-Nordic and non-Mannish group of people because they “threaten the Nord way of life”. But let’s make the Elves the Nazi allegory so there’s no qualms whatsoever about siding with the Fantasy Republicans. I hate that every other stereotype of non-Nord races can be found in that game, from the skooma dealing Dunmer to the thieving Khajiit to the bootlicker Imperial to the fucking High Elves. I hate that they only expanded on the morally-justified genocide of the Snow Elves with Songs of the Return, and then further reinforce how “good” that was by having you meet the guy who slaughtered children. I hate how, barring one easily missable side quest that still uses bothsidesism there is no challenge to this bullshit way of thinking. I hate that a sizable chunk of Stormcloakblr are also very clearly racist. I hate that my Ysgramor/Pelinal shitpost started to gain traction after someone with a rage face icon reblogged it with a “Kill All Elves” tag. I’ve deleted it since. The meaning is lost on those wastes of breath, and was 100% the cause for this rant.

I hate how the writers could have done better, but didn’t.

#this one took a while because i had to summon the fortitude to write it #no sources just anger #TEStalk #lore overanalysis #critical analysis #tw: white supremacy #tw: nazism

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contentbaer · 3 years

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How to build White Hat SEO Links for Contentbär SEO

So, how do you go about doing true White Hat SEO link building these days? This is perhaps the most often asked question of mine.

To be honest, there is a LOT of incorrect material on the internet about how to accomplish link building that isn't "WHITE HAT."

To be clear, requesting for links for the sole goal of getting them is against Google Webmaster Guidelines and hence not “white hat.”

The good news is that you may now produce a significant return on investment without manually establishing links. Today, I'm going to show you how I've been able to naturally grow links and generate cash without writing a single email, guest post, purchasing a PBN, or doing anything else that link builders do to build links, and how you can do the same.

Does that make sense? Let's get started.

Build Authority for Contentbär Contest Using Your Market's Vulnerabilities

SEO is marketing, not magic. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: it's not magic. Rankings for keywords and links are only a small element of marketing that will ideally result in dollar signs. So, if you could find alternative ways to get revenue outside rating a webpage, wouldn't you want to? The importance of competitor research cannot be overstated.

Here's how to spot flaws in your specialty, as well as how to turn those flaws into natural links and long-term advantages. Take a look at your top 3-5 competitors' platforms to discover where they perform the poorest and best. Determine what works and what doesn't for them.

Is it skyscraper (long form) content that they're after? Maybe 10 minute Youtube videos with unique layouts? Do they have a successful Twitter outreach strategy? and so on. The argument is that if you're just starting out and want links, don't reinvent the wheel; instead, concentrate on establishing authority. To put it another way, strive to copy what your competitors are doing first and then innovate, rather than the other way around.

Consider the following scenario: Because the market on YouTube was so undersaturated in comparison to Google when I launched my SEO service, I started developing big content there. I now have 25k subscribers and over 1 million views on my YouTube channel, and I generate clients, backlinks, reviews, and other revenue from that asset alone on a regular basis. That isn't all, though.

I'm able to divert traffic to new assets that I want to promote and make money off of, such as Facebook groups, blog entries, courses, and so on, thanks to the authority I've built on YouTube. And, if I choose, I can leverage the authority and viewership I've built on Youtube to build links simply by discussing the new assets I'm developing.

In a moment, I'll expand on this. Value is quite important.

If you're having trouble getting links, it's likely that you're not providing enough value for your audience to link back to or share the material you're creating. Alternatively, you may have no audience at all. That is why you must have a strong foundation.

Look, it may seem obvious, but figuring out who you're selling to and what they genuinely want in the first place, if you haven't already, is critical. At the end of the day, you must understand: There are two categories of users who will see your article.

People who are likely to purchase from you

Individuals who will link to you There are some similarities here, but for the most part, people who buy from you are unlikely to connect back to you. So, at first, your content and authority development should ideally be aimed toward the people who will connect to you.

Is that clear?

Doing a roundup or an interview is a great approach to gain links from these folks. Pitchbox is my favorite tool for this because it allows me to connect with some of the world's top experts in any subject with just a few clicks. Take, for example, a recent article I wrote about "the top SEO tools recommended by professionals." All of this outreach was automated, and it only took a few minutes to get the piece published. Every single one of these suggestions came from people with blogs and, in some cases, large social media followings. Not only do I get almost free content from people who know a lot about the subject I'm having them write about, but I also get the chance to gain a link from them in the future because they were mentioned in the piece.

Let's go one step further for Contentbär.

I also now have a direct line of communication with these individuals, so if any of them have unusually high authority in the industry, I could invite them to an interview on my Youtube channel, then give them the video and transcription to post on their site with a link back to me. Again, focusing on building connections and substance rather than going out to random website owners and asking for a link is a WAY better marketing strategy. Make something that people want to tell their friends about.

Figure out what your industry's true needs are if you really want to establish links. Some SEOs seems to only want to do the following:

Investigate keywords.

Find a keyword with a large search volume that appears to be profitable.

Create material based on a guess at the word count.

Inquire about linkages.

I'm hoping the page will be ranked.

For a variety of reasons, this is a bad plan.

If you want to rank for something, you should first check at what is already ranking well for that topic. It's possible that the content is already well-formatted, with thousands of words, video, photographs, comments, and so on, and in that case, simply putting words on a website isn't going to cut it.

You're trying to figure out why Google is giving that page such a high rating in the first place. It's usually because the post is something that people genuinely want.

After you've figured out these two things, you'll want to aim to beat the average user intent and go above and above in terms of not just word count, photos, video, and so on, but also in terms of beating whatever the average expectation for that post is.

If someone is looking for top gaming tips for "insert new game," and the best article on the market is some weak post about 3 strategies to win, which isn't even directly targeting what people are looking for, you could easily write an article on the top 5 gaming tips and rate it without a single link.

If you want to build links, though, you should aim to go above and beyond the average and make the top 50-100 gaming advice, and BOOM, you've got something special worth connecting to. In terms of naturally creating links, obviously you won't want to just generate content and hope someone reads it; instead, you'll want to use the strategies I outlined earlier to bring in more visitors. Here's how I'm going to promote the article you're reading right now.

Originally, I'll have it indexed by Google Search Console so that Google knows the stuff I'm authoring first appeared here.

After that, I'll make a video in which I read this article and add my own thoughts and observations. Once the film is released, I'll link it back to this page in the hopes of having it rank as a video in Google Search as well (making sure I add JSON-LD video markup to the post with a plugin I acquired).

Then I'll take the video and post it on my Facebook group, page, and personal profile in its native format. I'll publish the video to similar other SEO groups after I see how well it performs.

After that, I'll directly repost this post on Reddit. Then, to target recent visitors, I'll launch a remarketing campaign on Facebook advertisements.

Then I'll send an email to my 4k-strong email list, telling people to read the piece and watch the video. After that, I'll share this article on LinkedIn.

You get my drift. At the end of the day, my Youtube video or blog post may only receive a few hundred views and appear on Google's or Youtube's fourth page.

However, my article on various assets will acquire THOUSANDS of views before it even ranks, thus increasing the chances that I will obtain a link or a share.

So there you have it, that's how I develop links without going out and doing it myself, and how you can do it too. If anything was unclear, please let me know by leaving a comment and I'll get back to you as soon as possible.

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tigerkirby215 · 4 years

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I can’t make builds so let’s talk about the latest UA

I can’t make builds right now so let’s talk about Feats. I’m honestly a big fan of feats but I do think that ASIs are a little too strong by comparison in 5e. I feel like in order to compete with ASIs in 5e a Feat needs to do one of two things:

Offer new unique abilities that provide a large boost to your character’s capabilities so that taking them is worth sacrificing an ASI. (Feats like Crossbow Expert, Great Weapon Master, Warcaster, etc.)

(Half Feats) Provide a nice bonus to reward you for slower progression, or for having an uneven ability score to increase. (NOT ATHLETE, but feats like Linguist, Resilient, and the racial feats from Xanathar’s)

For the most part feats do accomplish these two concepts well but there are some feats that are laughably weak (Keen Mind, Weapon Master) while others are way too good. (Lucky.) I think that Feats should remain as options for players who want to build a specific build. They shouldn’t be the “best” choice but rather they should be inherently optional for those who want the power boost they provide.

With that in mind we got an Unearthed Arcana for Feats, and since I want to do more on this Tumblr than just make League of Legends builds I figured I’d throw my thoughts out into the wind.

Artificer Initiate

The main strength of this feat by far is that the spells are added to your spell list. This means that Artificer Initiate is a very easy way for just about any spellcaster to get access to Bless and Cure Wounds / Healing Word. These spells are fairly independent of their spellcasting modifier so getting both of them as a Wizard, Sorcerer, or even Warlock can be good in a pinch.

Other than that the ability to cast spells with tools is nice but ultimately pointless. It’s good if you’re playing an Artificer / Wizard multiclass but Artificers can already cast spells through their infusions. Ultimately this feature of the feat would work better if there were more Intelligence casters in 5e.

It’s a very fun feat for roleplay and has good utility, but I don’t think anyone’s going to be begging to get this feat.

4 / 5

Chef

How the mighty Gourmand and the “mighty” Song of Rest have fallen. Okay let me start with the obvious: the “treats” you can make are complete fucking trash. They’re laughably underwhelming and serve more as a ribbon ability than anything.

As for the Song of Rest-esque effect Song of Rest was already a grossly underwhelming ability for Bards. It’s really sad that it was so underwhelming they flat out gave it to everyone (at the cost of a feat) but I don’t think that harms the Bard class too much.

Just overall the feat really doesn’t live up to the fantasy of being a cook. Two underwhelming abilities for the price of an ASI? No thanks.

2 / 5

Crusher

“Hi I’m playing a Champion Fighter with a Warhammer!” The utility of this feat starts and ends with the critical hit modifier which I’m gonna be honest is insanely overpowered.

“But what about moving people? My Monk can now push people off cliffs!” Have you ever played a Minotaur? To be fair you probably haven’t. Pushing people around will hardly ever be useful. There’s perhaps niche utility in pushing someone away so you can run without provoking opportunity attacks but the Mobile feat does this so much better while also giving you additional movement.

Perhaps the only niche use of this feat is that it can increase your DEX, making it a good Half Feat for Monks that isn’t fucking Athlete.

1 / 5

Eldritch Adept

I really like this feat. It’s kinda become a running gag on this account that I really like sticking Warlock levels into things, and while it isn’t just for the invocations that’s definitely a big part of it. There’s a lot of really cool invocations that you can grab to make your character mildly magical without messing them up by multiclassing. To name all the invocations you can get as a non-Warlock:

Armor of Shadows is, has, and always will be the invocation you take more for character flavor than for practicality. Reddit has been theorycrafting how to break this feat with an Abjuration Wizard but I think that’s a bit too niche.

Beast Speech is really cute conceptually but will rarely be useful. I can guarantee that every single Druid and Ranger is going to hoover up Eldritch Adept just to talk to their animal companion though! (This would’ve been a nice feat to put in my Kindred build if it had existed at the time.)

Beguiling Influence... take Skilled instead. Maybe some niche use for the Half-Elf Rogue who wants proficiency in literally every skill in the game.

Devil’s Sight! This is the main Invocation people are going to be looking for! Magical Darkness is incredibly hard to use effectively and this invocation is pretty much the only way to make it not completely useless?

Eldritch Sight: at-will Detect Magic is never a bad thing but it always suffered from opportunity cost. This makes it available for Bards.

Eyes of the Rune Keeper: just get the Comprehend Languages spell tbh. It’s a ritual after all.

Fiendish Vigor is alright. Decent on an Eldritch Knight as a backup Second Wind.

Gaze of Two Minds is far, FAR too situational to be useful.

Mask of Many Faces is a god-tier invocation for Arcane Tricksters. It ticks me off that you can’t take this feat as a non-caster for a regular Rogue to gain access to this.

Misty Visions depends on what your DM lets you get away with using Minor Illusion for.

Thief of Five Fates: just get Bane from another source.

It kinda bumbs me out that this feat is restricted to just magic users, and I feel like that part of the spell could be removed. Also kinda bumbs me out that you can’t blow two feats to get Agonizing Eldritch Blast (Magic Initiate [Warlock] + Eldritch Adept) but I sort of understand why that’s a thing. But invocations are the perfect example of something worth losing an ASI for.

5 / 5

Fey Touched

Here’s the first feat that I think is a little too good. Let’s get the elephant out of the room first: Fey Teleportation. The differences between the two feats are as follows:

Misty Step from Fey Teleportation comes back on a short rest.

Fey Teleportation is locked by race.

Fey Touched gives you two spells.

Fey Touched lets you add the spells to your spell list.

Oh and let’s talk about some of the spells that are in the Enchantment / Divination school: Bless, Command, Detect Magic, Dissonant Whispers, Heroism, Hex, Hunter's Mark, Identify, and Sleep. (Just to name the notable choices.)

This feat should’ve been a full feat (no ASI.) Adding both Misty Step and Hex to your spell list as a Cleric or Paladin is more than enough to make this feat OP. If Artificer Initiate is a full feat than this should be too.

5 / 5 - OP award for being OP

Fighting Initiate

This should be a half feat. Actually: this should be merged with Weapon Master. I personally already Homebrew the Weapon Master Feat to do this along with the effects of Weapon Master (+3 weapons, +STR or DEX.)

If this was done as an eratta to Weapon Master (instead of its own feat) the feat could be taken by Wizards who want a way to defend themselves, Rogues who want more options Scimitars cough while also honing their own skills, or Barbarians who just finally want a fighting style. I’m glad something like this is finally being considered but please just buff Weapon Master instead.

4 / 5

Gunner

Crossbow expert for guns. A lot of people interpret this as a silent endorsement of guns in D&D or a hint at a potential official gunslinger (sub)class but really I just think Jeremy Crawford got sick of people asking him “does Crossbow Expert work with guns?” on Twitter.

gun / 5

Metamagic Adept

IE the feat that’s making Reddit throw a hissy fit. Does this suddenly make the Sorcerer class useless? Well excluding the fact that Sorcerers get way more sorcery points, metamagic options, and the ability to turn their spell slots into Sorcery points (and vice-versa)? Put bluntly your options are:

Make (Charisma Mod) creatures succeed their saving throw for your spell. (Rarely going to be used unless you’re already a Charisma caster.)

Double the range of your spell. (Maybe useful for a Cleric to extend the range of Cure Wounds idk.)

Reroll (Charisma Mod) damage die. (Kinda useful for spells that roll few dice.)

Double the duration of your spell. (Perhaps some niche use with certain spells.)

Can’t use Heightened Spell

Can cast one spell / cantrip as a Bonus Action. (One use of a bonus action spell isn’t really worth a whole feat.)

Cast 2 spells without verbal or somatic components. (Can’t be counterspelled!)

Make a spell of first or second level hit two targets. (Actually has some niche use for certain spells. Particularly nice to get extra value out of healing spells.)

(UA)

Change the damage type of a spell. (Maybe useful for Tempest Clerics? But barely.)

Ignore cover. (Very rarely useful.)

Reroll a spell attack once. (Kinda meh; might be useful if you have a very big attack roll spell but you probably won’t.)

I think the main thing Reddit is upset about is two uses of Subtle Spell for a Wizard but... if your player took anti-counter spell insurance instead of an ASI let them have it? Chances are you’re way too counter spell-obsessed if the Wizard casting a good spell once and awhile ruins your game.

As for the feat itself? The two that rely on your Charisma mod are hard to use for that exact reason. Beyond that there are some interesting ones beyond “anti-counter spell insurance” but I feel like two Sorcery points to use on metamagics isn’t enough. Probably a testament to how underwhelming the Sorcerer class is as a whole.

3 / 5

Piercer

It’s Savage Attacker and Brutal Critical combined in one half feat. I guess if you’re using Piercing weapons but I can’t shake the feeling that Savage Attacker would be the better option.

One interesting thing to note is that essentially all ranged weapons do piercing damage, and this feat doesn’t have a melee limitation like Savage Attacker. This could be a good feat for a bow fighter to do more reliable damage.

The irony though is that even though this is essentially just Savage Attacker I’m forced to say it’s overpowered since it provides more utility than Savage Attacker (assuming you don’t use weapons that don’t do piercing damage) as a half feat. This isn’t really a testament to this feat being overpowered, but rather that Savage Attacker should honestly probably be a half feat as well.

2 / 5

Poisoner

This is how poisons should work! It’s perfect for someone who wants it, and it looks well-balanced overall. The gold cost, action economy, and CON save requirements makes this feat fair for the DM.

It’s interesting that this feat allows you to ignore resistance to poison but not immunity. Poison was one of the elements Elemental Adept couldn’t affect which was part of the reason that Green Draconic Sorcerer was so bad (among the zillion and one other problems with Poison damage.) Overall this feat is really awesome but it’s held back by poison damage as a whole in 5e. Basically if this was for any other damage type than poison it would be great (which makes me wonder what this feat would be like with flaming poison.)

4 / 5

Practiced Expert

This is basically a slightly worse version of the Prodigy feat but it’s a half-feat and it’s for all races instead of just for humans and half-races... honestly Prodigy is such a shit feat that I see no issue with this. I already let non-humans take Prodigy in my campaigns. My only real complaint is that this feat proves that Prodigy (as well as the Skilled feat) should probably be half feats.

4 / 5

Shadow Touched

Darkness is very hard to use without abilities to see through it (Devil’s Sight.) But other than that what can you get? Disguise Self? Just take Eldritch Adept instead for unlimited Disguise Self. There are very few low-level Illusion / Necromancy spells when compared to Divination / Enchantment. There are some midway decent ones (Inflict Wounds) but is it really worth it to lose an ASI for Darkness and Inflict Wounds? Put bluntly: no. Maybe some niche use for Darkness spam Warlocks to get an extra “spell slot” but it’s still underwhelming.

2 / 5

Shield Training

It’s nice to be able to grab a shield as a caster who likely has their off-hand open anyways. It’s also nice for a fighter to be able to “chance stances” and drop their AC in exchange for harder hits. The only part that bugs me about this feat is that the fantasy of an arcane caster using a shield as a focus is weird to me. I feel like there should at least be some sort of gold cost to convert a shield into a “not-quite Ruby of the War Mage” that can be used as an Arcane Focus.

3 / 5

Slasher

This feel like the best of the damage feats since it actually lets you do some unique stuff. Being able to slow enemies (without fucking Sentinel) lets melee fighters keep their allies safe, and giving allies disadvantage to hit you allows you to be a lot sturdier.

The sad truth is that this is probably the most underwhelming of the damage feats though. It’s very hard to use this feat as anything other than a Swashbuckler Rogue, and in order to get Slashing damage as a Rogue (Scimitar) you’d need to blow another feat or do some multiclassing. Slows in melee range are largely useless, and the crit is unreliable. I really want this feat to be better.

4 / 5

Tandem Tactician

Here’s the one feat I honestly have a big problem with. I don’t think being able to Help as a Bonus Action makes this feat OP. (It’s nice for anyone to be able to gain access to a useful Bonus Action without multiclassing.) But the problem lies in the fact that this feat lets you affect two people with the Help action. This makes the ability to give two melee allies (such as your Rogue) Advantage even more broken. People can already testify to how strong Mastermind Rogue is for its action economy increase.

And the best part? This feat still fails at giving Bonus Action Economy to “everyone” since backline characters can’t use the 10 foot range Help. I’d much rather this feat be given 30 feet, and Mastermind Rogue given an eratta to have its ability reach 60 feet or something idk.

1 / 5 - OP and dumb award for being OP and dumb

Tracker

“LOL RANGER IS OFFICIALLY USELESS NOW XDDDD” Jokes aside Hunter’s Mark and tracking abilities is good value for a half feat. Magic Initiate (Warlock) or Fey Touched are still probably better than this feat, but if you need the Survival skill then this is helpful.

4 / 5

FINAL RATINGS

Favorite Feat: Eldritch Adept

Least Favorite Feat: Crusher

Most OP Feat: Tandem Tactician

Weakest Feat: Shadow Touched / Chef

Overall this Unearthed Arcana excites me because I’ve always liked Feats and thought that they were cool. In my opinion it’s much more interesting to create a character with unique abilities over one that’s just traditionally strong. A lot of these feats need revision but I hope that practically all of these get published so we can make some truly unique characters with them.

#DnD 5e #dnd #Unearthed Arcana #feats #dnd feats

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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WHAT THE AVERAGES

Having people around you caring about startups, which is more work. To us that's positive evidence an idea is a good thing. The stories that seemed to be nothing more than filling out a brief form the briefer the better. The only style worth having is the one you can't help. You have to be able to test-drive any Web-based applications. Nearly everyone who writes about it says that economic inequality should be decreased, I shouldn't be helping founders. It will be very valuable to understand precisely which ideas to keep and which can now be discarded. But disappointing though it may be somewhat blurry at first.1

Watching users can guide you in design as well as its results.2 I think there are two components to the antidote: being in a place where rudeness isn't tolerated, most can be polite. We would have sold. Because Web-based applications.3 A woodworker creates wealth. In fact we only spent about $2 million in our entire existence. And yet when I was in high school I spent a whole day watching TV I'd feel like I was descending into perdition. Like the managers of mutual funds or hedge funds, VCs get paid a percentage of the money they manage: about 2% a year in management fees, plus a percentage of the gains.4 While we were writing the software, our Web server, using the browser as an interface.5 Viaweb had a scripting language called RTML that let advanced users define their own page styles.

This doesn't mean big companies will disappear.6 And this team is the right one adjacent to it.7 I'm not sure why. And so you tend to deal with bugs wholesale.8 In software, it means you should give users a few basic elements that they can watch you. That's much more likely to discover new things, then instead of turning a blind eye to the places where conventional wisdom and truth don't quite meet, you should do it yourself. Fortunately for him, they turned it down, and one of the reasons kids give up drawing at ten or so is that they were onto something. The Mac was popular with hackers when it first came out, and if they try to redo something, it will mean a very different world for developers.9 Or more precisely, the effect of the decisions they make. The customer support people and hackers. Since the 1970s, economic inequality in the US.10 If so, your old tastes were not merely different, but worse.

Notes

It's conceivable that intellectual centers like Cambridge in that so many startups from Philadelphia.

That should probably start from scratch. I believe Lisp Machine Lisp was the season Dallas premiered.

Letter to the point of a social network for pet owners is a way in which many people work with founders create a silicon valley. There are circumstances where this is not too early if it's dismissed, it's usually best to err on the way we met Charlie Cheever sitting near the door. For sufficiently small audiences, it would be to say that IBM makes decent hardware.

Some find they have less money, it's ok to talk to corp dev guys should be easy to discount knowledge that at some point, there are signs now that the missing 11% were probably also encourage companies to do as a general term might be a good nerd, rather than given by other Lisp dialects: Here's an example of a reactor: the editor, which merchants used to build consumer electronics and to run an online service. There are a different attitude to the point of treason. Robert in particular, because they couldn't afford it.

Among other things, they have less room for startups is uninterruptability. Simpler just to steal a big VC firm wants to invest more.

Simpler just to steal a big company, and I bicycled to University Ave in Palo Alto. It's probably inevitable that philosophy will suffer by comparison, because it might make them less vulnerable to legal attack. A good programming language ought to be a problem later. I read most things I write out loud at least try.

We didn't swing for the linguist and presumably teacher Daphnis, but as a rule of thumb, the world.

It should not try to avoid companies that can't reasonably expect to do that.

In the late Latin tripalium, a well-known byproduct of oligopoly. In a startup in a situation where they are now. They live in a band, or because they wanted to than because they are so intellectually dishonest in that. What has changed over time, because spam and P nonspam are both genuinely formidable, and Reddit is Delicious/popular with groups that are still called the executive model.

But iTunes shows that they decided to skip raising an A round. In Boston the best hackers work on open-source projects now that the lies people told 100 years. Did you know the answer to, but also seem to have gotten where they all sit waiting for the coincidence that Greg Mcadoo, our contact at Sequoia, was one of the most useless investors are also the highest maintenance.

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xylune · 6 years

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This sums it up for me in the comparisons between Gabi and Eren.

This is quoted from a Reddit user, and it really summarizes my own feelings as to why I don’t share people’s opinions on “how alike” Gabi and Eren are. I was going to try and explain it myself, but this person nailed it better than I think I can.

-“Early Eren was my favorite character back in the day when season 1 was airing, who is very similar to Gabi. They both are tenacious and want to defeat the “bad guys.”

But, there are some key differences between Gabi and Early Eren.

1: Gabi is kinda arrogant. She treats her peers as if she’s better than them. Eren was the fifth in the class rankings and didn’t act arrogant at all. He just didn’t understand why Jean was training so he didn’t have to fight.

2: She hates Walldians because that’s what she was told. She’s really brainwashed. You could argue that she’s just a kid, but so were Marcel, Annie and Bertolt and they all knew Marley was suspicious af. Eren had an actual reason to hate titans, he saw them attack his home and eat his mom. He didn’t hate them before the attack, he just wanted to see the outside world. Gabi has a reason now to hate Walldians due to their attack, but her reason before was eh.Here is why people hate Gabi in general as well

1: She laughed while blowing people up. Like, why.

2: Reasons outside of the actual story. Gabi hates the characters who many people have grown to care about and deeply love for many years, all because of where they live. It’s hard not to hate that person.“

^^All of this and more. The two are NOT alike except in their passion to destroy their enemies and their impulsive tempers. That’s it.

#Attack on titan #manga chapter spoilers #reasons #fanbase division #Eren #Gabi #Please stop comparing them just because they're both hotheads

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brittanyyoungblog · 3 years

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How Marijuana Affects Sex

April 20th is known by many as 4/20 Day and it’s an unofficial holiday that celebrates all things marijuana (to read up on the history of 4/20 Day, check out this article from VOX). Given that marijuana is going to be a hot topic of conversation this week, let’s take a moment to discuss how it affects sex.

A lot of people use marijuana in one form or another as an aphrodisiac—a tool to boost sexual desire and/or arousal. So what effect does marijuana actually have on people’s sex lives? And how do the sexual effects of marijuana compare to other substances? Here’s what the research says.

Frequent Marijuana Use is Linked to Having More Sex

A large, nationally representative U.S. survey found that the more frequently people smoked marijuana, the more often they got it on. This was true for both men and women. Specifically, frequent marijuana users were having sex about 20% more often on average compared to those who abstained.

What’s not clear from this research, however, is whether this is an effect of the substance itself, or whether marijuana users in general have different or more relaxed attitudes toward sex. As a result, it’s possible that these folks would be having more sex regardless of whether they were using marijuana. To learn more about this research, check out this article.

Women Who Combine Marijuana and Sex Report Better Orgasms

In a study of nearly 400 adult women in the U.S. who were surveyed about marijuana use and sex, researchers found that a majority of users said that marijuana makes sex more pleasurable and increases sexual desire. Most also reported improvements in sexual pain, and marijuana use more than doubled the odds of reporting satisfying orgasms.

On the basis of this study, the researchers suggest that marijuana should be explored as a potential treatment for sexual difficulties in women. Learn more about this study here.

Marijuana Has Complex Effects on Men’s Sexual Performance

I summarized the extensive body of research on marijuana and male sexual performance in a previous article, and one of the takeaways was that these studies have produced conflicting results. For example, marijuana use is linked to both improved and impaired erections. However, it’s difficult to know what to make of these findings because most studies haven’t controlled for dosage level, marijuana strain, and individual sensitivity to the drug.

This body of research also finds that, while most men report that marijuana enhances sexual satisfaction and heightens sensations, not all men experience this (just as not all women who use marijuana report better orgasms).

So while it’s clear that many people—men and women alike—find that sex is better with marijuana, different people experience different effects because there are a lot of different variables at play here.

Marijuana Has Different Sexual Effects Than Alcohol and Molly

In one study that compared the effects of alcohol and marijuana on sexual function, researchers found a distinct pattern of effects. For example, alcohol was more often linked to having sex with strangers and partners you might not normally go for, whereas marijuana was more often linked to sex with partners who are already well known. This explains, in part, why alcohol was more frequently linked to sexual regret. Likewise, people were more likely to say the physical sensations of sex were enhanced/heightened with marijuana, whereas they were “numbed” with alcohol. Alcohol was also linked to more physical performance issues. In addition, while marijuana was more often described as leading to tender and slow sexual experiences, alcohol was linked to more aggressive and intense sex. Learn more about this study here.

In a more recent study, researchers compared the sexual effects of marijuana, alcohol, and molly/ecstasy. The findings largely aligned with the previous study in terms of how alcohol and marijuana compare. However, when you add in the ecstasy comparison, ecstasy is linked to even greater reports of heightened sensitivity than marijuana. Ecstasy is also linked to longer and more intense sexual encounters than marijuana; however, ecstasy (like alcohol) is linked to more reports of sexual performance problems than marijuana.

It’s also worth noting that alcohol and ecstasy are much more likely than marijuana to make people feel attractive, to enhance attractiveness of others, and to make them more outgoing. Learn more about these findings here.

Takeaways

The overall pattern in the data supports the idea that marijuana users, on average, tend to report having more and better sex than people who abstain or use it infrequently. However, there is wide individual variability in how marijuana affects one’s sex life—it makes sex better for some and worse for others. However, marijuana tends to result in fewer sexual difficulties compared to other commonly used substances, such as alcohol and ecstasy.

The key, then, when it comes to understanding how a given substance is likely to affect sex for a given person is to know what you are consuming (and whether it is being combined with anything else), how much, and what your body’s general sensitivity is to that substance.

Want to learn more about Sex and Psychology? Click here for more from the blog or here to listen to the podcast. Follow Sex and Psychology on Facebook, Twitter (@JustinLehmiller), or Reddit to receive updates. You can also follow Dr. Lehmiller on YouTube and Instagram.

Image Source: Photo by Gage Walker on Unsplash

You Might Also Like:

Sex Question Friday: Is Marijuana An Aphrodisiac?

Medical Marijuana Laws are Linked to Increases in Sexual Activity and Birth Rates

Medicated Sex: How Many People Use Drugs To Enhance Their Sexual Performance?

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reputationiseverything · 4 years

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How Using Emotional Marketing in Content Can Help Drive Way More Sales

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Whether you care to admit it or not, the decisions you make today will be driven by your emotions. In emotional marketing, we talk a lot about using psychological triggers to get customers to click, convert, engage, etc.

“By leveraging common psychological triggers all people have,” you might hear, “you can drive more sales.”

While it may feel like we make decisions with our minds, using logic and reasoning, the “mental triggers” we hear about are tied more to emotion than anything else.

Case in point, Antonio Damasio spent time studying individuals with damage to the area of the brain where emotions were generated and processed.

While these subjects functioned just like anyone else, they couldn’t feel emotion.

The other thing they had in common was they all had trouble with making decisions.

Even simple decisions about what to eat proved difficult.

While they could describe what they should be doing using logic and reason, most decisions couldn’t be settled with simple rationale.

Without emotion, they weren’t able to make a choice.

This is supported by data from Gerard Zaltman, author of “How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market.”

Zaltman found that 95% of cognition happens beyond our conscious brain, instead coming from our subconscious, emotional brain.

Emotions are an X factor you can’t control, but you can’t afford to ignore them in your content marketing.

Why is Emotion Marketing so Effective?

When you make an emotional connection with your audience, it’s incredibly easy to steer them to the desired outcome.

You’ve formed an emotional bond, however brief and fleeting, that makes them open to ideas and suggestions. It creates a certain level of trust that’s virtually impossible to artificially manifest.

Rob Walker and Joshua Glen found firsthand what an emotional connection can do.

In one experiment, they bought hundreds of items from thrift stores and similar locations — all cheaply priced.

The duo wanted to see if they could sell the products using an emotional connection through the power of stories alone.

With 200 writers on board, they generated fictional stories for the products and used those stories to sell the thrift store items at auction on eBay.

They raised just under $8,000, which was a profit of approximately 2,700%.

And they did it all using that emotional connection through storytelling.

That’s not to say there isn’t a place for the logical or the rational in decision making.

This is where marketers often leverage the theory of dual processing in psychological marketing.

The theory holds that the brain processes thoughts and decisions on two levels.

The first level is that of emotion, which processes automatically, unconsciously, and provides a rapid response when we need it with virtually no effort.

The second level is the more deliberate and conscious thought process, where we handle decisions with reason and logic. It happens far slower than the emotional response.

In most cases, we fire back with a ready response from our emotions and then try to consciously rationalize it.

Think about some big-brand rivalries and preferences will surface in your mind.

How do you feel when you look at this major brand comparison?

Here’s another common one that has people divided, sometimes within the same family:

And then there’s this brand rivalry we know all too well.

In each of these, you likely have an opinion almost instantly about which you prefer, but it’s not because you have a logical reason.

It’s typically tied to emotion and/or experience; how you feel using their products, or how the brands left you feeling after an experience or reading a news article.

The brain then tries to rationalize that emotional response.

For example, your emotional response goes straight to Coke and then your brain works to rationalize the decision by deciding that it tastes better in a can, it’s fizzier, has a stronger bite than Pepsi, etc.

So, while you might feel like you’re making a rational choice about your beverage, it’s really just an emotional one.

The most successful marketers know how to lean on the emotional over logic in order to make their content draw in the audience.

That’s why nearly a third of marketers report significant profit gains when running emotional campaigns, but the number of successful campaigns dips if you introduce logic into the marketing.

And those results get sliced in half when marketers switch to logic over emotion.

Emotion Marketing Doesn’t Guarantee Successful Engagement

We experience a laundry list of emotions every day.

Is it really as simple as leveraging some emotion to make content more effective?

Yes and no.

Emotion is certainly important, but there are also other factors like timing, exposure, the format of the content, how it’s presented, who produced or shared it, etc.

Despite understanding the role emotion plays in content, we still haven’t quite perfected a formula for what makes content go viral.

Though we’ve gotten pretty close.

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Brands have long tried to inflate the consumer’s emotional response through manufactured content; some met with great success.

Take, for example, Intel’s five-part “Meet the Makers” series.

The videos profile a person around the world who uses Intel’s technology to create new experiences and build new technology that makes a difference in the world.

Like 13-year-old Shubham Banerrjee, who used Intel’s technology to build an affordable Braille printer.

And of course, some companies try to leverage emotion and create viral campaigns that just don’t take off.

CIO reported a number of failed viral marketing campaigns, such as “Walmarting Across America.”

In this blog, two average Americans travel across the country visiting Walmart locations, reporting their interactions on a blog along the way.

After countless upbeat entries about how people loved working for the company, it was discovered that the trip was paid for by Walmart and the entire thing was a campaign created and managed by the company’s PR firm.

That didn’t receive a warm reception from the blogosphere, which deemed the content to be a “flog” or fake blog.

Which Emotions Attract the Most Marketing Engagement in Content?

Many emotions fuel our behaviors and our decisions, especially our purchase decisions.

Some more than others — especially when they’re authentic.

A study was done by Buzzsumo analyzing the top 10,000 most-shared articles on the web. Those articles were then mapped to emotions to see which emotions had the greatest influence on content.

The most popular:

Awe (25%)

Laughter (17%)

Amusement (15%)

Conversely, the least popular were sadness and anger, totaling just 7% of the content that was most shared.

Two researchers at Wharton also wanted to dig deeper into virally shared content to find commonalities and better understand what makes that content spread.

What they found was the emotional element, and some very specific results tied to emotions.

Content is far more likely to be shared when it makes people feel good or it creates positive feelings such as leaving them entertained.

Facts or data that shock people or leave them in awe were more likely to be shared.

Instilling fear or anxiety pushes engagement higher, from comments being posted to content being shared.

People most commonly shared content that incited anger, leaving comments as well.

While some emotions are more likely to engage than others, every audience is different. What drives one to action may do very little for another.

This modern adaptation of Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion, illustrated by CopyPress, shows the range under eight primary emotions: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation.

For content to be widely shared and have an impact on your audience, it needs to leverage one or more of these emotions.

The proof is on the web, not only in the statistics I shared above, but also in the popularity of user communities that regularly share content.

Just look at Reddit and some of the most popular subreddits by subscriber count. Each can be tied back to emotions (some more obviously than others) like anticipation, awe, joy, and more.

Here’s how some of those emotions can play into the engagement with your audience:

Anxiety May Cause Uncertainty For Customers

You don’t want your audience to make bad decisions. Bad decisions can lead to buyer’s remorse, which can paint your brand and the overall experience in a negative light.

But it can be helpful if you leave the audience a bit more open to influence.

A Berkeley study revealed that anxiety can be linked to difficulty in using information around us to make decisions. When we experience uncertainty, it becomes harder to make decisions and our judgment is clouded.

Still, anxiety can also spur people to act as a result of that uncertainty.

Take a two-year study by Wharton Ph.D. student Alison Wood Brooks and a Harvard Business School professor.

They found that upon increasing the anxiety of certain subjects with video footage, 90% of the “anxious” participants opted to seek advice and were more likely to take it.

Only 72% of the participants in a neutral state, who viewed a different video, sought advice.

Capture the Focus of Your Emotional Marketing Audience With Awe

Awe is comparable to wonder, but it doesn’t always fall under the umbrella of joy or humor.

It’s intended to captivate the audience and keep them riveted.

You often see this kind of hook in headlines that seem so earth-shatteringly significant that no one in their right mind would want to miss it.

Here’s a good example of that kind of awe used in content when Dropbox first launched.

Co-founder Drew Houston submitted his product to the website Digg, hoping to get some visibility from the social bookmarking site. That headline helped significantly.

Another great example of using Awe to capture attention is a video produced by Texas Armoring Corporation.

To emphasize the quality of the company’s bullet-resistant glass, the CEO crouched behind one of TAC’s glass panels while several rounds were fired at it from an AK-47.

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Awe can impact decision making as much as anxiety.

A study from Stanford University found that people experiencing awe are more focused on the present and less distracted by other things in life. They also tend to be more giving of their time.

When you have their attention and their focus, they’re more likely to have time to rationalize a decision.

Drive People to Action With Laughter and Joy Through Emotional Marketing

While joy and laughter can have their lines blurred, they’re really two different emotions when it comes to your content.

Because while laughter often leads to joy, not everything that is joyful is laugh-out-loud funny.

Still, next to awe, joy, laughter, and amusement were the highest contributors to social sharing and engagement in the above studies.

That influence goes all the way back to early childhood.

As babies, out first emotional action not long after being born is to respond to the smile of our parents with our own smile.

Per psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, joy and amusement are hardwired into us from birth.

His studies tell us that our innate desire for joy increases when it’s shared. That’s the nature of the “social smile.”

That explains why these feelings or emotions are such huge drivers behind the virality of content. Happiness, overall, is a huge driver for content sharing.

In fact, Jonah Berger’s study of the most-shared articles in the New York Times (around 7,000 articles) revealed the same kind of results around emotion.

The more positive the article, the more likely it was to go viral.

Brands have worked “joy marketing” into their strategies for decades, aiming to make their audience feel warm, comfortable, and happy.

That’s the intent of campaigns like P&G’s highly successful and viral “Thank You, Mom” campaigns that are injected with a lot of emotion (especially joy) when celebrating the strength of mothers.

Joy can take a lot of forms, though, and it doesn’t have to be commercially intended to elicit a direct sale.

Look at what Beringer Vineyards did with influencer marketing.

Russian Instagram sensations Murad and Nataly Osmann built a following of more than 4.5 million people with photos featuring them holding hands at locations around the globe during their world travels.

They attached the hashtag #FollowMeTo on those posts.

The couple teamed up with Beringer Vineyards to create some images meant to inspire joy, love, and of course the sense of adventure the couple already shared with their hashtag.

Immediate Gains in Emotional Marketing From Anger

Anger may be perceived as a negative emotion by some, but it can have positive influences as well as positive outcomes when leveraged in the right way.

A leading researcher in the study of anger, Dr. Carol Tavris, draws a parallel between anger and how it impacted society over the years.

Women’s suffrage, for example, developed from anger and frustration.

Anger can be empowering for the individual, bringing a sense of clarity and positive-forward momentum. It gives people a feeling of direction and control according to a study from Carnegie Mellon.

In the previously mentioned study on content shares in the New York Times, negatively perceived emotions like anger are equally associated with the virality of content.

In fact, Berger’s study of the New York Times content found that content which incites feelings of frustration or anger is 34% more likely to be featured on the Time’s most emailed list than the average article.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you deliberately create controversy by taking shots at readers or picking fights.

The key with using anger in content is to frame an issue that incites anger or frustration in a way that’s constructive.

You have to be thought-provoking and engaging.

This interactive graph from the New York Times is an example of how content can lead to frustration and anger over economic or societal issues.

This piece of content is simple, yet it provokes engagement as well as thought when results are revealed in comparison to what an individual perceives to be the truth.

Using the Right Emotional Marketing Words in Content

The difference between logic and emotion in content comes down to the words we use and how we position statements and information.

It’s just like the laundry list of power words used to improve conversion, or terms commonly used in e-commerce to get customers to buy more products.

When creating copy and content, you have to be acutely aware of whether you’re taking a rational or emotional approach to the information you’re sharing.

You need to think about the response you want to elicit to help guide your content development to make the right kind of psychological and emotional connection with your audience.

The context of your copy can remain the same.

By changing the words you use, however, you can make content appeal more to the emotions of the audience and prospective customer.

The simplest approach to finding the right high-emotion words takes only three steps:

Think about the action you want your audience to take when they read your content.

Decide what kind of emotional state will drive that action. What would make them do what you want them to do?

Choose emotionally persuasive words appropriate to the action and the emotion.

What you’ll find in researching the right words is that emotionally persuasive and impactful words tend to be abrupt. It’s the short, concise, basic words that appeal most to our emotions over our intellect.

Just look at this list from the Persuasion Revolution.

The majority of this emotionally weighted list (and there are over 350 items) is made up of shorter words.

The rational mind, on the other hand, tends to associate with longer and more complex words.

You Can’t Assume When it Comes to Emotional Marketing

It’s not easy to make that emotional connection with your audience. You have to know them.

Like anything else in marketing, your decisions and the content you create needs to be based on data. In this case, that data is your audience research.

That same research that tells you what topics to create, where your audience spends their time, and the content they prefer to view, can clue you into how to make that emotional connection.

You just need to expand your buyer personas.

In this case, you want to build up the psychological profile of your audience. You can achieve this by asking the right questions to help steer your content research and production.

What do they find humorous?

What are the pain points that frustrate them?

What topics make them angry?

What are common problems they speak about?

What kind of content is being shared that clearly pleases them or brings joy?

Your research could turn up a common topic or theme that appears frequently in the content they read and share.

For example, you might discover that a certain segment or demographic in your audience has a strong affinity to family values, or health and wellness.

Turn that into a content campaign that shares the feel-good side of your company.

Delve into the family life of your employees, how your company supports the work/life balance, or better health initiatives.

Google is well known for its company structure, promoting flexible schedules, support of family time, personal projects, and a focus on work/life balance.

The company often shares behind-the-scenes images (visual content) showing off employees enjoying what they do. Here’s an example from Google Sydney’s offices:

That can influence a positive emotional response toward the brand when targeted segments see that content.

Emotional Marketing Works in the B2B Process

Don’t get caught up with the dated idea that emotion is only applicable to consumer-focused businesses.

Emotional marketing has its place in the B2B world as well.

You may be dealing with a longer buying process between one or more organizations, but the decisions are still made (and fueled by) people who are absolutely driven by emotion.

That includes emotions like:

Awe: over what a solution is capable of and feeling empowered to bring that solution to the workplace.

Anticipation: in finding a piece of the puzzle in a product or service that will help the company achieve its next goal or milestone.

Fear: in purchase decisions that could reflect on the individual, resulting in a personal risk associated with a B2B purchase.

Joy: in knowing that a B2B purchase is likely to lead to a positive outcome that will reflect positively on the individual.

Emotion absolutely influences B2B purchases, and in some cases, emotion matters even more than logic and reason.

Conclusion

You hold a great deal of influence with your audience when you’re able to tap into their emotions.

Once you understand your audience, you can better determine their emotional state.

From there, make the decision about whether you need to influence and exploit emotions that are already present, or if you want to create or give rise to emotions the audience wasn’t initially expecting or experiencing.

Even the most (seemingly) rational decisions are influenced by emotion — and that applies to everyone.

When you learn how to leverage that emotion in your content, you will see increases in engagement, social action, and conversions within your funnel.

How do you use emotion in your content and copy?

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remelitalia · 4 years