#those specific circumstances lead into some of the most genuine pieces of media ever

[zeravmeta]

jjba is one of those series thats like deeply and profoundly beautiful in near indescribable ways but also you cant take it too seriously because the series itself circles the wagon and takes itself SO serious it becomes ridiculous. and thus its incredibly genuine despite everything

[butwhatifidothis]

I also think that part of the reason why the church gets so much hate is because of how much general distrust there is in organized religion in real life. Like I went into Three Houses trying to keep an open mind and during White Clouds I really couldn't see what was so heinously wrong with the church even during the Lonato thing that made the institution so much worse than what Edelgard was inciting. I could be totally wrong but I was under the impression that Rhea didn't squash the insurrection because they were a part of the Western Church but because they were actively rebelling and, on top of that, Lonato was bringing civilians into the conflict. That, along with the fact that Rhea knows for an absolute fact that the goddess existed and that she herself is old as dirt (trauma included) makes her decisions make a lot of sense.

I'm playing through AM with my friend who's never played before and they IMMEDIATELY said they distrusted the church because Jeralt doesn't like Rhea (for understandable reasons but my friend also ignored his very sus behavior of not explaining literally anything to Byleth) and because organized religions must be inherently bad.

It’s something that’s heavily related to a player’s inability to separate the reality of their specific circumstances with those of the fiction they’re consuming. They implant their experiences onto things that are only somewhat related and then extrapolate “facts” about the fiction that are, many times, actively shut down and/or disproven by that fictions lore or story or plot.

And, like, it’s normal to relate fictional things to your personal stories if you see connections to them. I’d wager a good amount of people find some aspect of a character they like/love that sticks out to them specifically because of a similarity they share of some kind, whether big or small. I know of people who’s fave superhero is The Flash because The Flash is fast and they ran track and hey, that’s cool, a superhero who’s ability is running really fuckin’ fast and I wanna be really fuckin’ fast. To use myself as an example, I can relate to the struggles Claude specifically has with race because many of the things he says correlate very well to my personal experiences with race. So, going by that line of logic, the opposite is clearly going to happen as well; there are many villains, or characters of either or neither allegiance towards good and evil, who have traits that personally affect someone in a negative way.

But here’s the thing about that... Claude and I have similar experiences with race. He’s still a prince, and I’m still someone who’s never seen above the poverty line in terms of income. He’s never had to live off a box of Whoppers he happened to find under his bed for three days to hold off until the food stamps come in because there’s just no food and no money to get any food. And on the flip side, I’ve never had people try to kill me just cuz I’m mixed. I’ve never felt the pressure of having to lead thousands of people to safety or have them die, directly due to my inability to lead them well enough. We still have extremely different lives and I can acknowledge those differences when looking into his character, regardless of whatever connection I may have with him otherwise, and that’s where these people fail in terms of critically consuming 3H as a piece of media.

These people - understandably, to an extent - look at Rhea, this devout religious woman who heads a major religious institution, and they automatically connect the language she uses as a devout religious person to the negative experiences they personally had with religion... without acknowledging the differences between the two. They see Rhea and they don’t see a bisexual who surrounds herself with and gives shelter to former criminals, foreigners, and people in need of a home while asking for little in return - they see their local pastor, or some other religious leader/person, who’ve done them wrong, and thus Rhea hates gay people, she hates POC, she’s a zealot and unreasonable and she’s this terrible person with no redeeming qualities. And this isn’t me arm-chair psychology-ing these people - they poke fun at themselves about how much they let their personal experiences cloud their judgement of the game and its characters with bingo cards for liking Edelgard having “raised with religion” be one of the slots and things like that. 

And really, why else would “religious institution led by white-presenting race of people” be automatically turned into “racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and violent to any who aren’t their religion” when 1) one of the main characters - the one calling Rhea racist - himself eventually says that racial diversity fits well and snug in the Seiros faith, 2) not only is the leader and founder of the religion a bisexual woman, but no one says anything about having their love be confined to one specific gender anywhere, with heavily coded LGBT relationships like Shamir+Catherine and Dorothea+Petra being just as LGBT coded in SS - where Rhea can potentially come back as archbishop - as anywhere else - hell, when one of the most devout followers of Rhea clearly is romantically interested in her and faces no repercussions or consequences for openly being so despite being female herself, and 3) the Church only ever uses violence when either called from the outside for help or forced to when outside forces try to attack them? Why are we hearing all of these awful things about the Church when it sometimes is never even implied? 

It’s in large part due to religion being such a sensitive part of people’s lives that they are unable to disconnect their personal experiences with religion with the fictional religion the media they’re interacting with provides them. Rhea, as a devout religious leader, especially with how genuinely morally gray she is, was never going to land well over here in the west, double especially to an audience of people that very clearly are already inclined to ignore pieces of the game’s story, lore, plot, and character interactions to fit their own preferred version of what’s happening. Triple fuckin’ wombo-combo especially since the game itself fails to do Rhea any favors until the literal last second of two out of four routes and only shove in her directly admitting she was wrong in her actions in the hardest support chain to build up in the entire game, and even then only at the last part of it. Poor girly didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell

[hecallsmehischild]

Recent Media Consumed

Books

The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. About ten or fifteen years ago, I tried to read this and was totally overwhelmed by it. I kept it around, hoping maybe someday I might be able to read it. I finally have, and here are my impressions: WHY SO MANY NAMES. WHY YOU HAVE TO NAME EVERYBODY, AND EVERY TRIBE OF PEOPLES, AND EVERY INANIMATE OBJECT, AND EVERY LANDSCAPE FEATURE. WHY. *ahem* So. I have a general comprehension of the events of The Silmarillion, but I dealt with it by doing what you do for an impressionist painting. I (mentally) stepped way back and let all the names flow by me, and if there were names that were repeated a lot, then I mentally attached appropriate plot points and character details to those names so I could track with who they were and what they were doing. And, actually, I found myself able to hang on and enjoy the book for the most part. This is going to lead into a re-reading of the Lord of the Rings books, since I haven’t read those in about as long…

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. I haven’t read some of these books since pre-teen years, with one required re-read of The Two Towers in high school (i.e. it’s been many an age since I’ve read these and my memory of the stories has been far more heavily influenced by the movies). In re-reading the first book, I was struck by the extreme tone shift for the Elves and Dwarves. Elves seem much closer to happy, mischievous fairies than these ethereal, solemn pillars of elegance and grace the movies show them to be. And Dwarves are far more bumbling and craftsmanlike than the movies show. Aside from that, The Hobbit was a pretty solid adaptation from the book, and the book also reminded me that this story was the first time I experienced “NO, MAIN CHARACTERS DON’T DIE, HOW DARE YOU,” and probably was the first book to make me cry. I must have been 8 or 10 years old. I FORGOT HOW MUCH THIS STORY INFLUENCED ME.

A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell. I have a longer-than-usual list of things to say about this book. First is that it was just that level of difficult that I was struggling to understand while reading it (on Audible), but I think I got it. Sowell has several base concepts that I see repeated throughout his books, though he does like to dedicate whole books to specific aspects of the same topic. He is pretty damn thorough that way. So, for example, I would put this book in the middle of a three-book spectrum of similar concepts: Intellectuals and Society (most concrete and easiest to read), A Conflict of Visions (next-level abstraction, a little difficult to read), Knowledge and Decisions (root abstract concept, very difficult, I have not been able to get past chapter 2). The second thing I have to say is about a couple interesting concepts it proposes. Its whole point is to help readers understand the roots of two ways of seeing the world that come into severe conflict politically, and he calls them by their root titles: the constrained and the unconstrained visions. He traces the path of each back through the intellectuals that most spoke of them (tending to contrast Adam Smith with William Godwin and Condorcet). Though he leans heavily toward the constrained vision (based on reading his other works) he does his best to make this book an academic study of both, with both of the visions' strengths and flaws and reasoning and internal consistencies fairly laid out. In doing so, he helped me understand a few things that make this situation really difficult for people on opposing sides to communicate. One of them is that root words and concepts literally mean different things to different people. I had some vague notion of this before, but he laid out three examples in detail: Equality, Power, and Justice. It was kind of astounding to see just how differently these three words can be defined. It makes me think that arguing about any specific issues rooted in these concepts is fruitless until first an understanding has been reached on terms, because otherwise two parties are endlessly talking past each other. Another really interesting idea he brought up is the existence of “hybrid visions” and he named both Marxism and Fascism as hybrid visions. This was especially fascinating to me because I have seen the accusation of “Nazi” flung around ad nauseam and I wondered how it was that both sides were able to fling it at each other so readily. Well, it’s because Fascism is actually a hybrid vision, so both sides have a grain of truth but miss the whole on that particular point. In any case, this was a little difficult to read but had some fascinating information. For people who are wondering what on earth this gap is between political visions, how on earth to bridge the gap, or why the gap even exists in the first place, this is a really informative piece.

Movies

The Hobbit & Fellowship trilogies (movies). I mean, it’s definitely not my first watch, not even my second. But I went through it with Sergey this time and that means the run-time is double because we pause to talk and discuss details. This watch came about partly due to Sergey’s contention that Gandalf’s reputation far outstrips his actual powers, so we ended up noting down every instance of Gandalf’s power to see if that was true. Conclusion: Gandalf is actually a decently powerful wizard, but tends to use the truly kickass powers in less-than-dire circumstances. That aside, this movie series was always a favorite for me. I rated The Hobbit trilogy lower the first time I saw it but, frankly, all together the six movies are fantastic and a great way to sink deep into lore-heavy fantasy for a while. And I’m catching way more easter-egg type details after having read the Silmarillion so it’s even more enjoyable. (finally, after about a week of binge-watching) I forgot how much this story impacted me. I forgot how wrenchingly bittersweet the ending is. I forgot how much of a mark that reading and watching this story left on my writing.

Upside-Down Magic. Effects were good. Actors were clearly having fun and enjoying everything. Story didn’t make enough sense for my taste, but it was a decent way to kill flight time.

Wish Dragon. So, yes, it’s basically an Aladdin rewrite, but it’s genuinely a cheesy good fluff fest that made me grin a whole lot.

Plays

Esther (Sight and Sound Theatres). < background info > This is my third time to this theatre. There are only two of these in existence and they only run productions of stories out of the Bible. The first time I went I saw a production of Noah, the second time I saw a production of Jesus. My middle sister has moved all the way out to Lancaster, PA in hopes of working at this theatre. My husband and I came out to visit her. < /background info > So. Esther. They really pulled out all the stops on the costumes and set. I mean, REALLY pulled out all the stops. And the three-quarters wrap-around stage is used to great effect. I tend to have a general problem of not understanding all the words in the songs, but I understood enough. I highly recommend sitting close to the front for immersive experiences. This theatre puts on incredible productions and if you ever, ever, EVER have the opportunity to go, take it. Even if you think it's nothing but a bunch of fairy tales, STILL GO. I doubt you'll ever see a fairy tale produced on another stage with equal dedication to immersion.

Shows

The Mandalorian (first two seasons). Well. This was pretty thoroughly enjoyable. It felt very Star-Wars, and I’d kind of given up after recent movies. Felt like it slipped into some preaching toward the end? Not sure, I could be overly sensitive about it, but I enjoyed this a lot (though I did need to turn to my housemate and ask where the flip in the timeline we were because I did NOT realize that the little green kid IS NOT ACTUALLY Yoda).

Games

Portal & Portal 2. Portal is probably the first video game I ever tried to play, back when I had no idea what I was doing. Back then, I attempted to play it on my not-for-gaming Mac laptop. Using my trackpad. Once the jumping-for-extra-velocity mechanic came into play, I just about lost my mind trying to do this with a trackpad and gave up. Later I returned to the game and played it with my then-boyfriend on a proper gaming computer. Now, after having played several games and gotten better at "reading the language" of video games, I decided I wanted to see if I could beat the Portal games by myself. Guess what. I BEAT 'EM. Yes, I remembered most of the puzzles in Portal so that's a little bit of a cheat, but I'd say a good 2/3 of Portal 2 was new puzzles to me. It is crazy how proud I feel of myself that I could beat Portal 2, especially. Learning how to play video games at this age has really knocked down the lie, "You can't learn anything." Though I still suck at platformers and games that require precision. Since I find those types frustrating, I probably won't be playing many. Games are about enjoyment, so I'll push myself a little, but not to the point where I can't stand what I'm playing.

The Observer. I like the concept and the art but I don't think I could keep trying to play this game. It's really depressing. My in-game family members all died of illness or accident or committed suicide. I also kept getting executed by the state. In order to keep us all alive I'd have to do pretty terrible things that I have a hard enough time contemplating even in a fictional setting.

Baba Is You. Fun and interesting concept, but I got stuck pretty early on. Don't think I want to push as hard on this one.

[finmartinn-blog]

Rank Your Business by Digital Marketing Services in Milton

How to Rank for a Keyword in 10 Steps :

                      Digital Marketing Services Milton

Ranking for a keyword in organic search is a repeatable process. You won't get the outcomes you need 100% of the time, particularly in case you're another site attempting to rank for a well known Keyword, yet in the event that you pay attention to content advertising and SEO, you can begin to get things going. Things like rankings, and traffic, and deals.

Here are the ten stages to rank for a keyword in Google.

Stage 1: Lay the Groundwork  :

This is extremely to a greater extent a pre-step than an initial step. You'll have to have basics in place bolts set up before you can plan to rank for any irregular keyword. These pre-requirements include:

A solid site –

The more extended your site has been near, accumulating authority and connections, the better. It's additionally key that your whole website follow SEO best practices – start with Google's Webmaster Guidelines on the off chance that you don't have the foggiest idea what that implies.

A system to draw on –

In request to rank rapidly for a watchword, it's valuable to have a worked in system to impart new substance to – a blog following, a crowd of people on interpersonal organizations like Facebook and Twitter, email gets in touch with you can connect with for periodic assistance with a connection. In the event that you don't have the foggiest idea what that implies, it's a great opportunity to begin thinking about third party referencing as relationship building.

Look at our Company: That Increase Traffic to Your Website

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:

Stage 2: Do Your Initial Keyword Research :

You may think you realize what keyword you need to target, however truth check your senses. Utilize a few catchphrase apparatuses to get a feeling of the quest volume for the watchword just as the opposition before you settle your watchword decision. Your main considerations will include:

Picking a watchword with great volume, yet not all that much volume –

all in all you would prefer not to focus on a catchphrase that has low relative pursuit volume if there's a comparable term that is considerably more well known. For instance, there are generally over twice the same number of looks for "yakkity yak occupations" versus "yakkity yak professions." However, don't in every case naturally go for the watchword with the most noteworthy volume or trouble; a few catchphrases are essentially excessively serious and not worth your time. You're not going to rank for "carrier" except if you are, truth be told, an aircraft.

Picking a watchword that is applicable to your plan of action –

You're bound to prevail with regards to positioning for a catchphrase if the term is significant to your site and your business. You're additionally bound to get some genuine profit for your positioning – recall that rankings all by themselves aren't especially important, except if they're driving advantageous traffic and leads. For instance, a gathering arranging business may target "how to cook for a gathering" – however "how to cook rice" isn't generally going to be pertinent to them or their intended interest group.

At this phase of the procedure, you ought to likewise make a rundown of close minor departure from your essential watchword. These will be useful recorded as a hard copy and enhancing your substance later on.

Stage 3: Check Out the Competition :

When you've chosen a watchword, do a quest for it on Google and a couple of other web crawlers to perceive what your opposition is as of now doing. Give specific consideration to:

The areas and URLs –

what number are precise match spaces? Does each URL in the best 10 incorporate the keyword are same ?

The titles –

How do the title labels consolidate the keywords?

The kind of substance that is positioning –

Product pages? Blog entries? Recordings?

The kinds of organizations that are positioning –

Are they immense brands? Private ventures? News destinations?

How definitive those locales are –

You can utilize a module to check the age of the destinations in the

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, the size of their connection profiles, etc.

You're searching for ways that you can separate yourself. You'll have to do in any event as much as your rivals are doing to beat them. In a perfect world, you ought to accomplish more, and improving.

Stage 4: Consider Intent :

The more explicit the watchword (think long-tail catchphrases), the simpler it is to measure the searcher's expectation, and the simpler it will be to present what those searchers are presumably searching for. In search showcasing, "purpose" is our best conjecture at what the individual utilizing the pursuit inquiry truly needs. Consider the accompanying watchwords and notice how much simpler it is to figure the plan from the words alone as you go down the rundown:

glasses

eyeglasses

discount eyeglasses

discount eyeglasses outlines

discount eyeglasses outlines for kids

Solicit yourself, what sort of substance best serves the catchphrase? Right now, would clearly be a determination of child's eyeglasses available to be purchased. From the primary term, you can't tell if the individual is searching for eyeglasses or drinking glasses. Also, in any event, for the second, the individual may very well be searching for pictures of eyeglasses; there is no unmistakable expectation to purchase. A web based business is for the most part going to be attempting to rank for business catchphrases.

Google's organizers have said that the ideal web index would serve just one outcome. You need to be that one outcome that fulfills the searcher's need so they don't skip back to the indexed lists, searching for a superior answer.

Stage 5: Conceptualize the Content :

Next, structure an arrangement for the real substance you will make that will – ideally – rank for your picked watchword. There are numerous ways to positioning for a watchword, including yet not restricted to:

An article

A blog entry

An item page

A file or catalog of connections (to different pages on your webpage or around the web)

A definitive guide

An infographic

A video

In

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you find every data and keywords that's you want .

To what extent will it take to make the substance? Who ought to make it? Will you do everything in-house or redistributing? Do you have all the assets and spending you need? Try not to get crushed: No issue your size or your spending limit, you can make a blog entry. Content like infographics and recordings will require more assets. Here and there, the most ideal approach to answer a pursuit inquiry is with a device, similar to a home loan adding machine. If so, you'll need designing assets.

Stage 6: Execute :

Here's where things become real. Execute on your arrangement. Once more, you shouldn't surge any of these means, yet it's particularly significant not to surge this one. To an ever increasing extent, web indexes are searching for top notch content that benefits the searcher, not watchword stuffed spam or pages brimming with promotions that solitary advantage you. On the off chance that you'd preferably purchase traffic over put in the exertion it requires to win "free" natural pursuit traffic, examine PPC. "Website design enhancement isn't simple" ought to be your mantra.

Stage 7: Optimize for Your Keyword :

In all actuality, stages 6 and 7 ought to be entwined. Advance your substance while you're making it, as opposed to applying enhancement sometime later. This is the place the rundown of watchwords you figured in stage 2 comes in. Influence those watchwords where you can in your substance, however not to the point of seeming like an insane robot. Recollect that there are a ton of "undetectable" places for watchwords, and I'm not looking at utilizing white content on a white foundation or whatever else that abuses Google rules. I mean stuff like picture document names – clients won't see these on the off chance that they're not searching for them, yet they can expand your watchword rankings.

For a full rundown of on-page enhancement factors, look at

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manual for the "great" page. Another great tip is to duplicate Wikipedia, whose pages will in general have outstanding on-page enhancement.

Before you hit "distribute," it's a smart thought to rapidly twofold check your catchphrase look into. It's conceivable that your substance has advanced during the improvement and creation stages, and you'll have to ensure that there's still arrangement among watchword and substance.

Stage 8: Publish :

It's (at long last) time to push your substance out into the world. Contingent upon the sort of substance it is, you may should be cautious about booking this progression. This isn't typically a thought for evergreen substance, however it might be significant for content that is attached to something in the news, an occasion or a pattern. You may likewise need to arrange with PR or other invested individuals at your organization, for instance when propelling substance identified with another item or administration.

Stage 9: Promote :

This progression is significant and should come following distributing – truth be told, for huge bits of substance, it's incredible in the event that you can do a few media exceed before the piece goes live. Ensure you do what you can to get your substance before whatever number eyeballs as could be expected under the circumstances before it even gets an opportunity to rank for the catchphrase:

Offer your substance through your business' social records – Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn et al. In the event that you can, do this through your own records as well.

Utilize social catches or gadgets on your site to advance free sharing – Make it simple for perusers and watchers to prop the chain up. They're bound to tweet or offer your article if they should simply click a catch.

Assemble connections to your substance – Whatever the eventual fate of PageRank, third party referencing is as yet a colossal piece of SEO (regardless of whether it is the most irritating part). Look at our blog file on the point in case you're hoping to find out about third party referencing.

Gathering online visits and social offers will assist you with accrueing joins, which will assist you with acquiring that positioning.

Stage 10: Analyze :

You're not exactly done at this point! The

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is a living medium, and it's never past the point where it is possible to all the more likely enhance your substance. Check your watchword positioning physically (be certain you're marked out and not seeing excessively customized outcomes) or with a position checking apparatus. Likewise utilize your investigation to perceive what watchwords your substance is really positioning for – they probably won't be the specific ones you at first focused on. In the event that, following a long time or somewhere in the vicinity, you're not positioning for the correct watchwords, you have more work to do. Ensure that your substance:

Is really optimized

Is really high-caliber

Is truly visible

It's likewise conceivable that the watchword you picked is excessively serious and you have to downsize your desire. Have a go at focusing on less serious catchphrases until you've developed greater position.

That is it! This is the procedure we follow to rank for many keywords identified with search showcasing. Whatever your business specialty, you can make a similar procedure work for you. So GET STARTED WITH US Digital Marketing Services Milton!

[chingonabrujita]

The Role Of Science

As I stated before, research is going to be the cornerstone of this little project. It has to be, really. Scientific research tells us how the body works. The fields of anatomy and physiology tell us how the body is constructed and how it operates, respectively. Subsets of these fields, namely biomechanics, kinesiology, and exercise physiology, give us specific data on how the body moves and how it responds to physical activity. Without that information, we'd be stuck with a process of guesswork, and that's not good for anybody. It helps to understand what science actually is. I don't mean the pop-culture treatments of science; unless you've actually gone through some kind of post-secondary education, you may be convinced that science is what you see in TV shows. I can go ahead and tell you that it's not based on mad scientists working in hidden lairs; it's not rogue misunderstood geniuses making strides that the rest of the orthodoxy rejects. It's certainly not a 'belief system' that just happens to be opposed to emotion and faith. At its core, science is a process of observation and description. You see something happen, then figure out why it happened. That's all science is once you boil it down to the basics. You watch something happen, describe it in as much detail as you can, and then figure out why it happened. As you might imagine, this process can get quite in-depth, and most experiments will often raise more questions than they answer. Despite claims to the contrary, this is the greatest strength of science. It can update itself and constantly opens up new avenues to explore. We're always refining our knowledge and understanding. It's not a matter of having unchallenged absolute truth. It's a matter of constant learning. We've formalized this process into a series of steps called the scientific method. In broad terms, the researcher will come up with a hypothesis, design a way to test that hypothesis, then gather the data from that test to figure out what actually went on. A hypothesis is simply an idea or concept that can be tested: the sky is blue, grass is yellow. In reality, a hypothesis is usually very specific, some statement that can be tested in detail. When the average person says 'I have a theory...' and then goes off to talk about whatever he thinks about some subject, he's actually talking about a hypothesis, not a theory. In science, 'theory' has a different and specific meaning. The hypothesis is a question that needs to be tested, and thus either proved or disproved. The test of a scientist's hypothesis is the experiment. Experimentation has to be tightly controlled to ensure that there's nothing to confound the results. For example, if you're doing a study to figure out whether or not darkness helps you sleep, it won't do you much good to do it in a loud room. You'd have no way of knowing what was affecting sleep - is it darkness, or is it the fact that the room is loud and keeping your subjects awake? In this example, the loud noise is called a confounding variable, which makes it impossible to know if the thing you're studying is actually responsible for the effect. If you can't establish a cause-and-effect relationship, then it's impossible to say that X causes Y. This is why controlled research is important, to narrow down the exact cause of the effect we're watching. A big chunk of experimental design is about removing or minimizing confounding variables. If we don't do this, we can never be certain that there's a cause-and-effect relationship - we can't know if what we think is the cause is really the cause. When we have a hypothesis that stands up to repeated experiments, then it's formalized into a theory. Now as I mentioned, laymen tend to use theory and hypothesis interchangeably, implicitly meaning 'an idea I have about something or other'. In the science world, a theory is a hypothesis that has been tested and tested and tested again; through all that testing, it's remained true. A scientific theory has a proven track record, so we can assume that it holds true in all the circumstances we can test; certainly there's no reason to call it into question. Obvious examples of this would be things like gravity and germ theory. They've been tested so thoroughly that we just take for granted that they're true, though once upon a time they were just somebody's working hypothesis.

That leads to another thing I need to touch on. Scientific theories are explicitly designed to be falsified; they need to be tested and challenged. That doesn't mean we want them to be wrong; it means that we want them to be as accurate as possible, and this means they must be open to new data if they are wrong. A theory that has withstood scrutiny is a theory that's reliable. On the other side of the coin, a theory that's called into question by a new observation is a theory that will need to be updated – because it might be wrong. It's a process of constant refinement and learning. The ability to challenge and refine knowledge is the difference between a scientific theory and dogma. I can't emphasize this point enough. Science isn't about always being absolutely right - it's about being as right as possible with what we know. Case in point. Everyone's heard of the theory of gravity. Isaac Newton first formalized this back in the 18th century when he had a legendary run-in with an apple, or so the story holds. To this very day, Newton's ideas on gravity are considered fundamental to physics. Gravity is quite possibly the easiest of all theories to test, and I don't think anyone outside of Wile E. Coyote has ever come across an exception. Now, what would you say if I told you that Newton's theory of gravity is wrong? Poppycock? Balderdash? Not so fast. Back in the 1930s, one Albert Einstein came along with his theories of general and special relativity that stood Newton on his ear. Relativity is a complex mish-mash of concepts that are quite beyond this book, but the gist of it is that Newton was wrong - but only in circumstances that don't tend to arise on Earth (astronauts can notice the difference down to billionths of a second due to the difference in gravity in orbit, but that's about it). As far as anyone on our planet is concerned from day to day, Newton is absolutely correct. Yet he was still wrong. So what happened? Well, modern physics is still using Newton's concepts of gravitation because they're still accurate. We only invoke Einstein under those conditions where relativity fits better - when things are moving very fast, or when things are very very heavy. The classical theory of gravity, as Newton's work is known, wasn't thrown out; it was improved. Newton wasn't wrong, he was just incomplete. He simply didn't have any way to test things in the way Einstein did, and since it was completely irrelevant the the world of humans, it didn't matter. It was only when we reached out for further understanding that we discovered the greater detail. That's the role of a theory in science: it will stand as long no new information contradicts it. When we're talking about a well-tested and well-understood theory, the odds of it being thrown out completely are next to zero. Gravity isn't going anywhere, as one example. If something comes along to expand on the theory of relativity, you can guarantee that we'll still rely on Einstein's work. The new theory will only define new phenomena – it won't contradict anything we already know or anything we've already observed. Theories are refined and improved, but very rarely are they contradicted. This is unfortunate in an age where we have a sensationalist media that thrives on controversy, because they'll make it seem like any minor flaw or issue is suddenly a 'great controversy'. I don't care what the news or some web article tells you, science just doesn't operate like that. The reality is that we understand a great deal of how the final picture will look; missing a few pieces doesn't change that. Mass-media science reporting would have you believe that a puzzle, obviously creating a picture of a mountain, was really showing you a cat – just because you were missing the piece that contained the mountain peak.

It's never about absolutes, really (you see what I did there?). The point is not to think as right/wrong, but 'most likely correct' or 'probably not possible' based on the current body of evidence. When a scientist says something will 'never' happen, the implied meaning is 'so unlikely based on what we know that for all purposes it will never happen'. This is alien to a society so used to thinking in simple polarized terms like good vs. evil, but that's how things are. Which brings me to the field of exercise science. Unlike physics, chemistry, or even biology, exercise science isn't a fundamental subject. It's a subset of physiology that looks at how the body responds to physical activity. What this means is that in practice, it's not a very specific or well-understood field in comparison to others. Exercise science is comparatively vague, leaving open a lot of room for interpretation. There's as much creativity, and dare I say art, involved in the field of physical conditioning as there is genuine research. Aha! Science can't tell us anything! Not quite - the whole discussion on the scientific method throws that reasoning out the window. Just because we haven't finished the puzzle doesn't mean we can't tell what the final picture is going to look like. Exercise science still has quite a bit to tell us. The trick here is parsing it into useful terms, not just throwing it all out because it's not 100% complete. A lot of people seem to think that science has to give you a specific workout program, and never ever be wrong, in order to be useful. A lot of people will put science on the back burner, giving more credence to their own experiences. In both cases (and plenty of others) this boils down to people just not understanding the role that science plays - and not understanding how to apply the information that it gives us. Like any field, you'll start out with a broad understanding. With time and research, the knowledge will gradually filter down to greater detail; and that's the real power here. By narrowing things down, research establishes boundaries. It doesn't necessarily give us specific details and protocols, and you wouldn't expect it to do this. But it does give us general starting points. Most important of all, it tells us what doesn't work. You may wonder why that's important. Why should you care what you can't do? You want to lift weights, and you need a program to do that, right? It's important so that you can see through misinformation. Further, knowing what not to do is how we establish starting points. You'll always rely on trial and error to some degree, but you can make that process much easier by ruling out things that won't be productive. All that said, we have to be careful. Research does have very real limitations and we have to acknowledge those. Too many people treat research like an almighty gospel, as if presenting an abstract or two can justify any claim. It doesn't work that way either. When you look at a research paper, you'll find some common themes. First and most notable is the abstract, which is a brief summary of the research and the results of the experiment. This is useful because it lets you get the key details with a quick glance. A well-written abstract will cover all the bases and give you the idea of what the paper is describing. However, there are nuances and subtleties that an abstract just can't convey, and when we're interpreting a paper to figure out how useful it is, you have to look at the whole thing to make sure it's applicable. Research papers are written with certain common content. They'll all go into details on their initial hypothesis, or what they're wanting to test out; they give details regarding the actual experiment, including who or what was the subject, how the experiment was performed, how data was collected and so on; they'll detail the results of the experiment and any data collected; and finally the authors will usually discuss the results, how they relate to existing research, and what can be taken away from the paper. This is all done for good reason. Research is all about transparency. If you go into detail with regards to everything you did, then other researchers can duplicate your results and confirm your results. If you make an unusual choice in your experimental design, people can see that and note it. If your results don't fit with the rest of the data, you can explain why: maybe it was something to do with your actual test, or maybe it had to do with how you collected your data. In short, you have to consider a lot of variables when you're interpreting a study. In exercise-related research, there's a few recurring issues we have to look at in particular. Most research into exercise deals with either aerobic exercise or with rehabilitation. As you might gather, this isn't terribly useful for generalizing into strength-training concepts, let alone something specialized like bodybuilding. Although the West is starting to catch up, a lot of what you read about is actually taken from older Soviet-era information, which, while not bad necessarily, can be hard to corroborate. Once we start to look at the Western research into actual strength exercise, we start to see a common theme: 'untrained subjects'. Now, in some ways this is good because at least it's done in humans. However we run into some potentially major issues because we've seen it demonstrated repeatedly that an untrained person just doesn't respond the same way as someone with years of experience. Lots of strength-training studies will demonstrate amazing results in untrained subjects, but comparatively few of them account for this so-called 'newbie effect'. Beginners can get away with lots of things; often they will still improve in spite of what they do, not because of it. When we're trying to establish a cause-and-effect relationship, this can throw a huge wrench into things. It gets worse. The bulk of the research into the actual biochemistry and physiology is done in rats. While there's a lot of similarities in humans and rats, there's a lot of differences too. There's plenty of examples where things that happened in rats didn't pan out in humans; that's a big weakness. This is a favorite tactic of the supplement industry, actually. They love taking some rat research or weakly applicable research in humans and then claiming it supports their new magic product. They conveniently ignore the fact that not only is that data not applicable, but they also have exactly nothing showing their claimed results in humans. Besides the claims of the product users, of course - but that's not placebo effect or anything. See also my earlier point about controlling for variables; when you don't perform research in controlled conditions, you can't be sure that your attributed cause is creating the effect. Since giving out free supplements to bodybuilders is almost the definition of 'bias' and 'placebo effect', these testimonials have to be considered highly suspect. And of course all of these objections can apply just as easily to any workout routine, or any study that looks at strength training. The good news is that recent years have given us a good number of studies that have started looking at these factors in humans. It's still not perfect, but the picture is shaping up to be much clearer than it ever has been.

Finally, there's a limit to the resolution of research as it applies to any single individual. It simply can't apply to every last person in a literal sense. There's always going to be some deviation from this norm. This is where the creativity and trial-and-error aspects come into it. We can establish general starting points and guidelines, but these are derived from statistical analysis. Your mileage may vary, and in fact it's highly likely to deviate from the general rules by at least some degree. I say this because one of the big objections I see is that science 'doesn't apply'. I have a hard time seeing how that can be the case; by definition, science just watches and describes. To say that science 'doesn't apply' would be suggesting that somehow your body just happens to differ from everyone else's body. Last I checked, humans all had the same basic physiology. Your body will have specific responses within the boundaries that research describes, but you won't ever do something that's just completely out of left field. There are ways to account for your individual needs, though, and the fortunate thing is that nobody will deviate that much from the baseline. You need to adjust things to the individual, yes, but that doesn't give you permission to go do anything you feel like just because 'everybody's different'. You still have to obey the guidelines, even if you have flexibility within those guidelines.

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[smartphone-science]

The fourth episode of my podcast, Counterintuitive, is online! Join me for a journeys into stories which are not what they seem to be. Episodes examine unusual concepts from a broad spectrum that will surprise you and then make you think. Because there’s always a layer beneath. You can find new episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, YouTube, or SoundCloud. Below, you’ll find the transcript of this episode with some references / further reading hyperlinks. The music for this episode comes from FreeSound, specifically these pieces:

https://freesound.org/people/Dexnay/sounds/82310/ https://freesound.org/people/kangaroovindaloo/sounds/138288/ https://freesound.org/people/Setuniman/sounds/154907/ https://freesound.org/people/reecord2/sounds/85040/ https://freesound.org/people/bigmanjoe/sounds/365958/ https://freesound.org/people/fmceretta/sounds/426709/ https://freesound.org/people/tyops/sounds/443086/ https://freesound.org/people/tomtenney/sounds/125225/ https://freesound.org/people/LukeIRL/sounds/176020/ https://freesound.org/people/sofialomba/sounds/467936/ https://freesound.org/people/PSOVOD/sounds/416057/

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Transcript

In late 2016, seven penguins vanished from the zoo in Calgary, Canada. Well, not literally vanished. Their bodies were found after all. To the last of them, the seven penguins drowned. Imagine, penguins drowning. In water. In the summer of 2017, a pair of mountain goats got stuck on Brean Down cliff in Somerset, England. So badly, in fact, that they were trapped there for months. Some people were worried about the goats as the days passed by and they grew ever thinner. A few animal lovers even tried to climb up and carve a path to freedom for the stuck goats. Yet an unperturbed spokesperson of the National Trust remarked ‘It is common for goats to get onto ledges and rock faces and, while it can look as though the goat is stuck, they do tend to get themselves down when they are ready.’ Mere hours after this statement – imagine the sad irony – one of the goats jumped from the ledge, fell down, and died.

Introduction

My name is Daniel Bojar and this is Counterintuitive, the podcast about things which are not what they seem to be. This time we will zoom into a conviction, a bias, an intuition we all carry with us. It’s the naturalist bias or appeal to nature fallacy, glorifying all things natural and condemning everything artificial. I mean, just consider the emotions evoked by the words ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ and you already see the problem we have at our hands. Because natural isn’t perfect and artificial isn’t bad by default. But, first things first. We’ll get to artificial in a future episode, so let’s focus on natural here. Since the naturalist bias is strongly anchored in most people, we have to exercise caution not to provoke backlash. So we’ll start slow, remote, perhaps insignificant. We’ll start with a humble beetle.

Main

We’re in Western Australia. It’s dry, it’s hot, and seemingly devoid of life. Well, not quite. In front of us flies a beetle, a large specimen of the species Julodimorpha bakewelli, also known as the giant jewel beetle. Not so humble after all. But giant indeed, as these insects can reach lengths of up to four centimeters of bright red or brown color. Like so many species, the survival of the giant jewel beetle is endangered because of our actions. But there’s a twist. We don’t hunt these insects, we don’t exactly destroy their environment, heck, in this case not even climate change can be really blamed for the slow demise of the giant jewel beetle. If you want to be mean, you could put part of the blame on the giant jewel beetle itself. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Our story will soon lead us to Harvard University, North America, and eventually the whole world. Yet for now, we’re still in Western Australia. Just a few meters from where we started, our giant jewel beetle has found what it was looking for. Or, rather, what he was looking for. Because, you see, it’s August and that means it’s mating season for the giant jewel beetle. And mating season means finding the best possible mate, to ensure maximal genetic fitness for the offspring of our beetle. That’s why he endured the blazing Australian sun and now his insectile eyes are locked on his precious prize.

Finding a good mate is crucial for individuals of any species. Operating through natural selection of the fittest offspring, evolution usually occurs in species which reproduce sexually. Thereby, they accrue mutations which can improve or deteriorate the fitness of offspring, with fitness implying the number of their offspring. So, you would think that mate selection with its direct link to procreation is one of the processes where evolutionary investments would have the greatest payoff and which are therefore optimal to the highest degree possible. Having established this mechanism as a particularly well adapted process in the evolution of species, I will now spend a good part of the rest of this episode to dismantle this notion. Because if I can convince you that the intricately evolved mate selection system isn’t always working, maybe I can convey my broader argument, that natural isn’t necessarily good. Ready?

Let’s not quite yet return to our giant jewel beetle. After all, they had millions of year of evolution to adapt to their environment, so they should be fine for a minute or two without us. Instead, let’s go to Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts. It’s September 29th, 2011. Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz have come here for an award ceremony. Specifically, their award ceremony. Several Nobel Laureates are present as well, together with other distinguished scientists, and of course the media. This prize captures quite some international attention. The scientific work Gwynne and Rentz will be awarded for was published nearly 30 years earlier, in 1983. At the time, they were stationed at the Department of Zoology in the University of Western Australia. See the connection? Their paper, of course, focused on Julodimorpha bakewelli, the giant jewel beetle, and its mating process. The prize which Gwynne and Rentz receive in 2011 is typically described as awarding ‘research that makes people laugh and then think.’ It’s the Ig® Nobel Prize, an award which honored research about kickstarting barbecues with rocket fuel, alarm clocks fleeing from you to aid waking up, or the science of sword swallowing.

Back in Western Australia, our beetle has proceeded in his mating mission and, while we were gone, reached his mating partner. He extends his aedeagus, the protrusion to release his sperm, and tries to insert it. I should have warned you that this will get steamy. After mating, the female giant jewel beetle will lay the fertilized eggs at the roots of Eucalyptus trees, where new beetles will hatch and joyfully populate Western Australia. But wait. Something’s odd. The mating partner our beetle has selected seems large. Too large. You could even call it gigantic. Instead of a length of four centimeters, typical for a giant jewel beetle, the mating partner beneath our beetle is 23 centimeters long. Granted, it’s brown, but if you look closely you’ll see that it’s not a female giant jewel beetle. It’s a beer bottle.

In their paper, which was honored with the Ig® Nobel Prize, Gwynne and Rentz found that properties of beer bottles – brown color, reflectiveness, and stubs or undulations on the bottle – are sensory stimuli which are extremely salient for male giant jewel beetles. These are features which those beetles typically look for in female beetles, yet they prefer Australian beer bottles in trials. The increased activation, or even overactivation, by these features, in this case by special types of bottles, is an example of what researchers refer to as ‘superstimuli,’ which are often artificial. To demonstrate that this really represents a genuine effect, Gwynne and Rentz presented their beetles with wine bottles, which didn’t impress the mate-seeking beetles much. Apparently, they’re discerning drinkers.

It may seem funny to picture giant beetles humping glass bottles in the desert, but researchers are actually worried this behavior might endanger the survival of the whole species. Next to the foregone mating opportunity, by choosing a beer bottle, giant jewel beetles engaged with their glassy partners have been observed to fall easy prey to ants which calmly start to dismember the occupied beetle. The beetle-bottle romance really seems to be an intense thing.

Now, is this an episode about the giant jewel beetle and its challenges in life? Yes and no. The preference of our beetle for beer bottles over female beetles represents an evolutionary maladaptation. Basically, this means that the salience of features overly present on beer bottles is a bad choice, in evolutionary fitness terms, in a world littered with beer bottles. Provocatively, it’s stupid of the beetle to like beer bottles better than real mates, there is no payoff to this in any way. The first objections to this will be that it’s our fault that beer bottles lie around and, also, it’s just been a few decades and evolution has basically no chance to catch up with changes that quick.

And I think we now have finally arrived at the core of this whole issue.

Of course it’s true that it’s our fault that the environment is littered with beer bottles and, for many reasons, we should try to remedy this unfortunate circumstance. But, abstractly, every animal changes its environment by its actions, humans included. The notion of a keystone species, beloved by conservationists and environmentalists alike, is exactly that it has a disproportionate effect on its environment compared to what would be expected based on its population. So animals hailed as the most important in an ecosystem change it the most. Naturally, we as humans do that on a gargantuan scale and destroy a lot in the process, but in principle change is nothing foreign to nature. That’s what evolution is for after all.

Imagine if we stick to our despicable habit of littering in the countryside. Male giant jewel beetles with an affinity for beer bottles will be removed by natural selection over the long-term and the evolutionary process goes on. Yet it’s not a given that the species as a whole will adapt. It may survive or it may go extinct if it can’t change fast enough. This depends on a lot of factors, pure chance in terms of mutating the right genes at the right time being one of the biggest. And if the species does change, the mate selection will be quite different than before and may even be worse than before. Because by accruing evolutionary changes to avoid beer bottles, you may need to sacrifice valuable salient attributes typically used in mate selection. You just can’t optimize everything at the same time. In the end, the product, if viable, will not be better but different. Evolution is goalless, so the assumption that evolved creatures accrue advantages in a continuous fashion over time is faulty.

The other major issue is speed. Environments change, and species will change accordingly, or die out. But importantly, this doesn’t happen at the same time. First environments change, and then species adapt, by selecting the few random individuals which by chance exhibited mutations that are now beneficial. Because pre-adaptation of a whole species to potential changes in the future would be too wasteful to sustain. This means that there is a time in between, in which environments already underwent significant change but the species in its entirety didn’t fully adapt to these changes yet. You can see this with our beetles. Their environment changed, but they haven’t yet changed accordingly. Since evolutionary processes typically take months, years, decades, or even longer, all dependent on the generation time of the animal, all we get is a snapshot of the whole process. As a consequence, the species and animals we currently observe are not necessarily well adapted to their current circumstances. We have no way of intuitively telling if what we see in any given species is a snapshot or a stable state. Our main fallacy is to view evolution as a result or a thing that happened in the past and now just fine-tunes species a bit further. Evolution, however, is a process, and frequently a messy process at that.

So to recap: in a fast-changing environment, natural oftentimes is decidedly suboptimal. And with climate change and the drastic influence we humans as a globe-spanning species have on the environment, changes occur with a mind-boggling velocity and with far-reaching consequences. Which means we really have to update our conception of optimized ecosystems and the species therein. Drowning penguins and plunging mountain goats may be a rare sight but they are currently entirely absent from our imagination and intuition. As we idealize and even idolize animal ability, conceptions of failure in their environment don’t even begin to enter our intuition.

If you’re still not convinced, take the island of Surtsey in the Atlantic Ocean, close to Iceland. Before 1963, no land existed at the coordinates which now harbor Surtsey. Yet by now, Surtsey boasts fauna as well as flora. A timespan of around fifty years may be sufficient to populate a virgin island, a process extremely fascinating for scientists to observe, but it’s certainly not enough to achieve evolutionary mastery over these fresh surroundings. Animals inhabiting Surtsey will have come from somewhere else and, on an evolutionary level, are still adapted to their previous environment and will continue on this route for a very long time. Therefore, current species present on Surtsey certainly can’t be seen as the embodiments of perfect adaptation to their surroundings. In fact, some of them may not even be categorized as ‘good’ in terms of their adaptation to the environs of Surtsey. But as long as no better adapted species comes along, desiring the same evolutionary niche for itself, the original maladapted species might be able to eke out a living thanks to a lack of competition, even though its adaptation to its environment is far from ‘good.’ In new environments, natural absolutely doesn’t go hand in hand with exhibiting good adaptation, as many species will die out because of a clear lack of adaptation.

Even in largely non-changing environments evolved doesn’t mean optimal, just good enough to avoid extinction. Consider the humble ant. You could easily see it as the embodiment of industriousness, on par with bees perhaps, constantly used in metaphors implicitly glorifying the natural world. It epitomizes the attitude of a selfless worker chugging along to sustain and further the colony. At least that’s what intuition will tell you. In 2015, researchers around the entomologist Daniel Charbonneau at the University of Arizona conducted a simple experiment: paint differently colored dots on each ant and track them. What did they find? Around 40 percent of ants don’t do anything; nearly half of the entire working force! They just sit around and watch the others do all the work. They’re lazy. Normally you wouldn’t notice that as an observer because ants are scrambling about in a dizzying mess, making it hard to track individual ants and compare between them. Currently, it’s believed that these slackers are forming a kind of workers reservoir. Remove the productive ants and, eventually, the lazy ants will step up their game and make sure that the colony has enough food and other materials. On a grand scale, this might make sense in terms of robustness in the face of adversity, though it appears to come at great cost. And it’s decidedly not in line with our intuitive assessment of industriousness and optimality.

But let’s go back to changing environments, because as we’ve seen they’re the norm. When humans entered North America via the Beringia land bridge from Siberia a couple of ten thousand years ago, they dramatically changed the environmental framework resident animal species were operating in. Being expert hunters, early humans relentlessly culled unprepared animals, which before this had no reason whatsoever to prepare themselves for this onslaught. Most affected by this were species constituting the megafauna, animals weighing more than 40 kg. And by ‘most affected,’ I of course mean that they went extinct. A lot of them. Species dying out in North America shortly after the arrival of humans include the Western camel, the mammoth, all forms of wild horses, all variants of North American tapirs, and the American lion. That’s just a tiny fraction of the species our ancestors hunted to extinction. You add naturally evolved humans to naturally evolved animals and what do you get? Certainly not perfection.

But wait for it, the most insightful piece of information is still coming. Obviously, not all animal species in North America went extinct in prehistoric times. Survivors included the grizzly bear, bison, bighorn sheep, and grey wolves. What did all of these animals have in common? Their ancestors coevolved with humans in Asia. By slow natural selection of fit animals via an increasingly skilled population of human hunters, for these species the descent of humans into North America didn’t represent a radically new environment. They were prepared.

There are hardly any species which you could point to that survived the megafauna extinction and whose ancestors did not coevolve with humans. One of these remarkable exceptions is the pronghorn, colloquially known as the American antelope, even though it technically isn’t even an antelope and is more closely related to giraffes. The pronghorn and its ancestors didn’t spend any time in human-populated areas and still survived the incoming human hunters. This is remarkable. And it only could do that with an extraordinary ability it possesses. Because the pronghorn is the second-fastest mammal on our planet, inferior only to the lightning-fast cheetah. Even then, three of the four pronghorn genera in existence succumbed to the evolutionary pressures of hordes of human hunters. So in effect, to even have a chance at survival as a species, you either need to be already familiar with your surroundings or you need to be world-class in something which incidentally is beneficial to your survival once change is underway.

This unlikely constellation of factors doesn’t bode well for the infallible quality we often bestow upon nature and all things natural. Especially if you consider that this sequence of events is not limited to North America. Here’s an incomplete list of habitats in which the arrival of enterprising humans in prehistoric times led to mass extinction events in the megafauna shortly thereafter: Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, Cyprus, Japan, Madagascar, and South America. As Carl Sagan already noted, ‘Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.’ Most species fail, precisely because they were not good, in terms of their environment. Evolution makes species only as efficient as they have to be for their current environment, not as much as they could be in theory. Adapted instead of optimal. Being complex creatures with multiple needs, animals aren’t perfect and sometimes, if change occurred relatively recently, they’re not even good. And for better or worse, change is underway, with increasing temperatures, ocean acidification, deforestation, extreme weather events, and much more, so even if we can slow it down we better get used to some of the natural losing its splendor. As for the giant jewel beetle, its current adaptation to its new environment certainly can’t be described as good and won’t be for a long time if beer bottles remain in the plains of Western Australia. If it survives this struggle, the giant jewel beetle won’t be the same as before. But, and this is crucial, it won’t be better, just different.

Outro

I hope you’ve enjoyed this instalment of Counterintuitive! If you did, join me next time where we’ll talk about the fascinating multitudes of our personalities. You can find references and further reading for this episode in the show notes. If you like Counterintuitive, please recommend it to your friends and give it a 5-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcast from. It really helps. A new episode will be uploaded every two weeks. My name is Daniel Bojar and you’ve listened to Counterintuitive, the critical thinking podcast about things which are not what they seem to be. You can follow me on Twitter at @daniel_bojar or on my website dbojar.com, where you will find articles about more counterintuitive phenomena. Until next time!

via Science Blogs