#til: script tags exist

[thespacelizard]

i have SOLVED the lightbox. everyone cheer and clap for me figuring out how to call an external javascript file

[late-to-the-party-81]

Meet, Greet, Indiscreet - Chapter 1

AN: I’m back again trying to shoe-horn in a few more bingo fills before the end of the month, so I have a three part Shrunkyclunks for you. Thanks to @endlesstwanted who had to deal with my tired brain not aligning my tenses when they were beta-ing.

Likes are loved, reblogs are golden.

Mood board by me and dividers by @firefly-graphics

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Master list | Stucky Bingo Master List | SRB Master list

Summary: When Captain America, Steve Rogers, and his boyfriend, YouTuber Bucky Barnes’ private relationship gets accidentally made public, they end up being interviewed about the romance between them as part of the PR repair. How did these two love-birds meet, and what happened to make hot gossip for the media?

Relationships: Modern Bucky Barnes x Cap! Steve Rogers

WC: 2.3k

CW: Modern Bucky Barnes, Cap! Steve Rogers, Anxiety, Fluff, TV Interview, Flashback, Canon typical violence, meet cute/ugly, flirting, flirting at an inappropriate time, brief non-consensual kiss.

Bingo Fills and Challenges

Stucky Bingo- Flashbacks

Steve Rogers Bingo - Battle of New York

The lights were shining bright and hot on his face and the buzz of people moving around was loud in his ears. Steve sucked in a deep breath. He could do this, he had been in front of the cameras numerous times. However, this was different. On all of those occasions he’d been doing it as ‘Captain America’. Today, while he was still that, sort of, he was having to let a bit more of his private self - a bit more of Steve - show.

The host, a genial man in his late fifties with dark hair and glasses, flashed him a sympathetic smile, if somehow knowing the internal struggle he was dealing with.

“It’s gonna be fine,” the host placated. “I’m not gonna go off piste with the questions. Try and think of this like any other interview you’ve done, but with a different focus. Not so stern and stiff. And you’re not here alone, either.” He gestured towards Steve’s companion on the plush sofa.

Bucky grinned at him, leaning nonchalantly against the soft fabric, arms draped along its back. Steve wished he could be that relaxed. However, as he and Bucky were here more out of a PR need than any real want to be interviewed, he thought he could be forgiven for his stiffness.

Various crew members bustled around the stage, measuring the light levels, checking that microphones were attached properly, and dusting powder onto the host’s forehead, when Steve felt Bucky lean across to him. “I’m right here.”

Such a short phrase, but one that immediately helped to lessen the anxiety building inside him. Which was good, because at that moment the director stood up.

“10 seconds ‘til we’re on air, people. 4. 3.” He went silent for the last two seconds, holding up his fingers instead. The host immediately seemed to morph into someone else, right before Steve’s eyes.

“Welcome back. It’s time for our next guests, who need very little introduction. It’s Steve Rogers - Captain America, and YouTube and gaming sensation, Bucky Barnes!” An applause track started to play and Steve felt his face morph into a rictus grin, which made it difficult to get out his greeting. Now he knew what a deer caught in headlamps felt like. But then Bucky, his sweet, silly and loving boyfriend, slipped his hand into Steve’s where it lay between them and started to brush his thumb back and forward over Steve’s knuckles. His anxiety lessened even more and he managed to tune back in to where he was, realising that Bucky and the host had exchanged some silly pleasantries while he’d been sitting looking like the most awkward human to have ever existed.

“So,” the host continued, getting into his script, “you’ve come here today to talk about your relationship, which you had been keeping private until it came to light in an unexpected way a few weeks back. I know there was some speculation - some rumours - about the two of you after a previous incident a year ago, but I don’t think anyone was expecting your announcement, or the form it took.”

Steve felt his pale Irish skin betraying him as he felt a hot wave of embarrassment rush up his neck. “Well - I -” His tongue felt thick in his mouth. The words didn’t want to come and then he felt Bucky pressing his leg against him as well, grounding him. “I’m quite a private person, at least compared to Buck, so we weren’t really trying to hide it, but I will say that we didn’t ever plan to announce it like we did.”

Both the host and Bucky chuckled at Steve’s choice of words. ‘Announce’ was really the right word. ‘Unveil’ would have been more appropriate.

“Well, before we get to that part of the story, let’s start at the beginning. The first incident - the one that sparked the initial rumours - was after you met at a Stark Gala, is that right?”

Bucky grinned. “It was definitely where we were first introduced, but it wasn’t where, or when, we first met.”

“Ooh!” said the host, with such genuine interest Steve almost forgot that it was at least partially scripted. They, or rather their PR team, had divulged there was more of a story to tell, but not what it was, only assuring the TV executives that it was safe to be aired and would add an extra aspect of romanticism. “Tell me more!”

Steve couldn’t help but smile as he looked over at Bucky, forgetting for a moment he was being recorded live on national TV, mooning over his boyfriend. “Yes - it was totally unexpected. Apparently fate had an agenda we weren’t even aware of….”

Flashback - New York 2011

It was utter chaos on the streets of Manhattan. Steve was pressed to the ground, on his back, as one of the aliens that had come through the portal opened by Loki was trying to push its bladed weapon into his face. With a sharp and desperate wrench, he managed to twist the glowing edge aside, giving him room to backhand the creature and then follow it up with a jab. His assailant flew to the floor, unmoving. Steve assumed he’d broken its neck. 

As he staggered back to his feet, the voice of Clint, positioned up on the rooftops as Steve had asked, sounded in his ear. “Cap - the Bank on 42nd, passed Madison. They’ve caught a lot of civilians in there.”

“I’m on it,” Steve replied and set off running. As he reached the bank, he could see army and police standing outside, unsure as to what to do. It wasn’t as though there were protocols for this sort of thing. Going in through the front door would probably be a bad idea - that would be too obvious and he’d be shot at as soon as he made it through. However, looking up, he could see the open windows on the second floor and a plan coalesced inside his brain.

Taking a run up, and using an abandoned car as a ramp, he launched himself up into the air, the shield in front of him to protect his eyes. He burst through the opening and, as hoped, he had the element of surprise. Five of the alien creatures were standing up on this mezzanine, gesturing threateningly with their energy weapons. He rolled across the floor, and as he came to his feet, Steve launched his shield at the closest, incapacitating him immediately.

He dived across the space, slamming into a coffee table as two of them opened fire, before engaging one of them in hand to hand combat. Almost effortlessly, he broke its neck and threw it over the balcony onto the floor below, the hostages gasping as they got out of the way.

“Everyone! Clear out!” he shouted, but suddenly another alien grabbed him from behind, its clawed hand grasping at his face and snagging on his cowl. He jabbed it in the ribs - or where ribs would be if it was human - and backflipped over its shoulder, able to turn it and use it as a shield as one of its comrades fired. Dropping the body to the floor, he realised something. That first one - it had been holding a device in his hand that had dropped to the floor. A device that was now beeping louding. Beeps that were getting faster and faster.

The last alien standing picked up the device - the bomb -, raising its arm to throw it at him. Steve rolled over the floor, picking up his shield on the way. He jumped into the air, curling up as small as possible behind his shield just as the device was thrown at him. It exploded, taking out the last alien, but the shock wave also sent Steve shooting back through the window he’d come through, out into the air above the street.

Time seemed to slow down, and for a moment he was floating. However, the world soon sped up again and he was falling, landing face down onto the car he’d used to get in, crushing the roof with his ribs taking most of the impact.

With his ears ringing, he got to his feet, trying not to wince, and in that instant he really took in what was going on around him. The scale of the destruction, the complete hopelessness of the situation hit him. How on earth were they going to get through this? Survive this? Off to the side, the police were evacuating all of the civilians from the bank, trying to get them to a safe place somewhere underground. All Steve could do was try to breathe.

From the corner of his eyes he saw someone duck under the arms of the first responders, and he turned, worried. It was a young man, maybe only 20 years old. He had shaggy dark hair poking out from beneath a baseball cap, and he wore a bright orange T-shirt and knee-length shorts. It was definitely a look. As he got closer, Steve could see he had ice blue eyes, plump lips and a bottle of water in his hand.  He stopped in front of Steve, the bottle extended in his hand, and Steve took it with a nod.

“Are you okay?” the guy asked. “You just got blown out of a window!” His face was doing a strange thing, where he was obviously excited but trying not to look like it.

Steve finished drinking the water and looked around for a trash can, trying not to grin at the guy’s demeanor.

“It takes a lot more than that to stop me,” he chirped back, and launched the empty water bottle across the street and into a can that was tilted at an angle. As the plastic thunked in, he wondered what on earth he was doing. He was in the middle of a catastrophic event, and somehow he was flirting. Now was definitely not the time or the place, even if the young man was extremely cute.

With a cough, he squared his shoulders and tried to put on his best ‘Captain America’ face.

“You’d best go back and join the others. Get to safety.”

His new fan opened his mouth to say something in response, but Steve didn’t even get the chance to wonder what it was going to be, because in the next instant all the blood drained from his cute face and he grabbed hold of Steve’s forearm, yanking him down. 

“Look out!” he cried, and Steve ducked his head as he allowed himself to be pulled down. A shot from an alien weapon zipped across where his head had been, fizzling into the lamp post behind him.

Almost immediately, he shook off the young man, stood and threw his shield at the creature that had shot at him. The vibranium ricocheted off the alien, knocking it to the ground where it twitched for a moment and then went still. Reaching down, he pulled the man who’d now saved his life back to his feet. “Thanks for the assist,” he said, not even trying to keep the smile from reaching his eyes. 

The young man looked back at him, his own eyes wide and his mouth hanging open, before blurting out, ”Woah! You just keep going, don’t you?”

He didn’t know where it came from, but he let out a chuckle and then gave him a wink that could only be described as flirty. “I can do this all day,” he intoned, more than a small note of amusement in his voice.

”Cap!” Clint’s voice sounded in his ear again. “Are you taking a nap? We need you.” Despite the fact that he should have turned all of his attention to the information Clint was giving him, he couldn’t help but drink in the sight of the beautiful young man out of the corner of his eye. With all the directions memorised, Steve turned with reluctance to say goodbye.

”I gotta go. Stay safe, please.”

He was about to turn away, about to start running back down the street, when a pair of arms twined around his neck and a pair of soft lips pressed briefly against his own. “For good luck,” the stranger said as he stepped back. “Go save New York.”

Steve raised his fingers to his lips as he watched the young man return to the group of civilians being ushered to safety, his mind reeling on what had just happened.

“Cap! For Thor’s sake, get over here!” Clint shouted at him over the comms. With a shake of his head, Steve turned and ran back into the fray.

The present

The show host looked utterly enraptured, his elbows resting on his desk and his face cupped in his hands. Steve was also certain the man was making goo-goo eyes at him. At his side, Bucky was grinning while hanging on his arm and resting his head on his shoulder.

”And you didn’t see each other again for over 10 years?” 

Before Steve could open his mouth, Bucky interjected. “No, but obviously I never forgot him. Who would forget being saved by Captain America?”

“Seems to me that you saved him in return,” the host replied.

Now it was Steve’s turn to butt back in “He certainly did. And despite the intervening years, I never forgot him either, even if I honestly thought I’d never see him again. I hadn’t been out of the ice for long. Hadn’t really gotten a hand on this century and its freedoms compared to what I was used to. Bucky here made a lasting impression.”

“So the years went by and then came your fame, Bucky, and an invitation to Tony Stark’s Nouveau Tech Gala. Were you nervous, knowing that you were probably going to see your hero again?”

“So nervous,” Bucky said with an emphatic nod. “I thought I was going to look like some kind of mad stalker because I was sure that he had forgotten almost as soon as he’d gone back into the fight and I knew I’d end up fangirling over him.”

“But I hadn’t forgotten,” commented Steve, placing his free hand on top of their joined ones.

“And I’m forever thankful.”

Chapter 2

Tag list: @km-ffluv, @wheezy-stucky, @kmc1989, @kombatfather1796, @christywrites, @alexakeyloveloki, @doasyoudesireandlive, @galactusdevourerofworlds, @crayongirl-linz, @mightstill, @nicoline1998enilocin, @starrkermarvel

[yawneesims]

Nine people I want to get to know better

i was tagged by @saturngalore so thank you!

last song: Headlock by Imogen Heap

favorite color: Goldenrod Yellow or Powder Blue

currently watching: High Potential. I love a good quirky detective solves odd crimes show and this one is currently a favorite. Hoping for a season 2.

last movie: Captain America: Brave New World. Wasn't a huge fan of it, felt cheap, rushed and a bit of a mess at times. Also the dialogue felt kind of unfinished? Very much sounded like a first draft of a script.

sweet, savory or sour ? Savory! I have a low tolerance for sour stuff unless it's lemonade and I hate limeade because it's more bitter than sour. I'm also a firm believer in a lot of food being too sweet when it would taste better with less sugar or at least being backed up with salt.

currently reading: How Long Til Black Future Month by N.K Jemisin. Technically a re-read but it's a great book and I definitely recommend starting with it if you want to get into her stuff.

relationship status: single

current obsession: My current legacy family. I haven't been this attached to a non-challenge family in years. I think it's a combo of the latest packs actually being somewhat good and using minimal CC+Mods.

last google: “water themed boy names/water themed boy names that start with h" <- previously mentioned legacy family ended up having coincidental matching names so i had to keep up with the trend. I'm currently at Hudson, Harbor and Huron. Hurley and Hali were also options but didn't fit the kid.

currently i'm working on: Building a house for previously mentioned legacy family. I'm up to my ears in floor plans but can't build to save my own life. So I'm just adding a room to their existing home whenever we need to expand. The roof is a disgrace but it's at least there so whatever..

tagging @tayesimz @giannascorner @ashubii @gingermalta @alorasim @jayveesim @d4isywhims @fiftymilehighclub @sonicblooms

Feel free to ignore the tag, just curious x.

[my-child-is]

My Child is Neurotypical

So I made a few...dozen...posts on twitter about my experiences being neurodivergent. They’re a roughly 60/40 split between being autistic and having adhd with heavy overlap. They take the form of a parent in denial saying “My child is neurotypical” and the response of “Your child is X” where X is a common neurodivergent experience phrased as if coming from a teacher.

(I’ll be updating these as I make more)

Classroom

Your child was a pleasure to have in class

Your child can’t focus unless they’re playing with something

Your child has awful handwriting

Your child is tapping their foot through class

Your child just needs to apply themselves. They can clearly do the work but keep making silly mistakes

Your child had a breakdown over not getting all their homework done

Your child is quiet and struggling to stay on task

Your child thinks school was indistinguishable from torture but struggles without the structure

Your child needs outside structure or they can’t figure out what to do first

Sensory - Sound

Your child hears the CRT TV noise (double this if they hate it)

Your child needs to cover their ears any time you use a blender

Your child wants to know where that buzzing is coming from

Your child can tell if the fridge has been opened recently from the other room

Sensory - Touch

Your child can’t wear rough or slippery fabrics

Your child hates any texture beyond flannel (any other distinctive texture works too)

Your child hates tags on clothing

Your child overheats in thick socks

Your child wears sportswear but hates sports (@checkerfired1 on twitter)

Your child thinks water has a strange texture

Your child finds showering exhausting but also doesn’t want to get out at the end

Your child can’t stand the feeling of oil on their skin

Sensory - Light

Your child sat in the dark from noon til sunset before starting their day

Your child thinks sunlight is ‘too much’

Memory

Your child forgot they were hungry halfway through making dinner

Your child has had midnight new years pass by because they forgot to wait for it

Your child can’t keep a grasp on time

Your child is confused about how it’s already evening

Your child has over 50 tabs open in chrome

Your child can only ‘wing it’ because they always forget what they planned to say

Your child made a list of what they needed to do and forgot to check it

Your child came up with a ‘my child is neurotypical’ post but forgot

Stimulation

Your child can’t focus without background music

Your child thinks everybody is exhausted after conversations

Your child drinking caffeine is like a roulette wheel in its effects

Your child struggles thinking while seated

Your child likes to constantly be chewing on something

Your child finds crowds overwhelming

Your child finds existing at night less exhausting

Sleep

Your child is reading this in the middle of the night

All of your child’s friends live on the opposite side of the world because they can’t maintain a traditional sleep schedule

Your child had midnight new years pass by because they’re normally awake well past then even as an adult

Your child has trouble quieting their brain to sleep

Dyspraxia

Your child is extremely klutzy

Your child’s phone typing is riddled with typos

Empathy

Your child felt guilty for bumping into the table

Your child is painfully uncomfortable watching shows with awkward situations

Your child cries even thinking about somebody being in pain

Your child is extremely trusting with new people they just met

Emotions

Your child has lots of mood swings

Your child hates compliments because they’re sure they’ll disappoint and alienate anyone who thinks anything good about them (from @MaebyIsSweet on twitter)

Sharing

Your child shares extremely personal experiences with people they just met

Your child can talk for hours about the same subject without getting tired

Communication

Your child learned nonverbal communication from the family dog/cat

Your child gets frustrated because people can’t understand them

Your child has been discussing the same topic for 30 minutes without taking a break to breath

Your child tends to speak repetitively - they may feel somewhat scripted

Your child feels like an alien sent to observe humans

Your child cries when instructions aren’t clear enough

Your child communes with animals because they make more sense than people

Your child doesn’t see the point of small talk

Your child finds comfort in the scriptedness of small talk

Your child is anxious about misreading people’s intentions

Your child is anxious about contacting somebody because they think it’s too last second

Your child gets frustrated when instruction manuals skip steps

Your child is constantly anxious about misunderstanding

Your child needs subtitles to hear anything

Your child has times they struggle to make words

Consistency (Anxiety)

Your child asks for the same meal every time they come home

Your child watched a single movie more than 3 times in one day

Your child feels anxious watching new movies or tv shows

Your child nearly has a stress breakdown if plans change last second

Your child’s anxiety spikes every time you ask them a question

Your child has a favourite song they’ve listened to for a week straight

Your child finds split second decision making stressful

Your child gets anxious if they don’t exactly follow their daily routine

Masking

Your child can pick up accents easily

Your child grew up wishing they could just go live in the forest away from people

Your child gets anxious when you ask aabout their day

Your child emotionally relates to fictional characters more than real people

Your child has said ‘I just don’t have the energy to act human right now’

Your child has described people as ‘just too much’

Your child was so ashamed of being different they tried to reshape their personality so people would like them

Misc ones I haven’t really sorted yet

Your child is protective and doesn’t like anybody new coming into their room

Your child wishes it was easier to get up and do what they need to

Your child is confused by how other people relate to their gender

Your child thinks their functioning is an inconvenience to people

Your child is either ‘on’ or ‘off’ and there is no in between

Your child gets stuck in excitement feedback loops with their friends

Your child is convinced they just aren’t working hard enough

Your child is on their third hobby this week

Your child spaces out randomly during the day

Your child considers every step of getting dressed an individual task they have to do (from @sisi7304 on twitter)

Your child differentiates between food they like and food they think is good (@sweetmoonpigeon on twitter)

Your child has severe imposter syndrome about whether they’re neurodivergent ‘enough’

Your child isn’t sure what they’re supposed to do to be a man or a woman

Your child’s fingers and toes change colour in the cold

[furubaa]

Notes on Mushishi - Vol 1 & 2

This is the start of my personal notes on every Mushishi chapter (anime ep # in brackets). I’ve reread the manga over and over again looking for specific stories, so this is just for easier reference. 

VOLUME 1

1 - The Green Gathering (S1E1, The Green Seat)

Ginko learns of a boy who can create life by drawing or writing and decides to pay him a visit 

“The green here is so vivid it’s eerie”

A personal invitation to a banquet, presented with clear sake in a shallow green saucer - the exquisite scent of kouki, the water of life. 

The dull pain of being frozen mid-transformation, one foot out the door; realisation of emptiness, and yearning for a full exit from the world

Color seeping out of an untouched brush; power passed down the generations

Everything covered in moss where the kouki soaked in the ground

2 - The Soft Horns (S1E3, Tender Horns)

Ginko is summoned to cure villagers from hearing problems caused by Mushi, and to cure the village head’s grandson Maho, who has sprouted four horns on his forehead.

A quiet village deep in the mountains where even the wind does not pass; absolute silence on snowy nights, when even the sound of your voice disappears.

Bombarded with a flood of sounds, the spirit tires, and body weakens til death. The murmuring of a single Mushi is a microscopic sound, until made aware of the trillions of Mushi clamouring all over the world, calling to each other like echoes.

An intimate gesture of protection - the sound of your mother. A volcanic eruption seen long ago. The lava inside of you, dissolving everything.

3 - The Pillow Path (S1E4 The Pillow Pathway)

Ginko pays a visit to a man named Jin who has premonitions in his dreams as a result of a Mushi affliction caused by Imeno no Awai. 

4 - The Light in the Eyelids (S1E2 The Light of the Eyelid)

Ginko visits a girl named Sui, who is suffering from a Mushi affliction that has made her eyes sensitive to light.

“Behind your eyelid you have another eyelid.” 

There's a river of light flowing underground that illuminates even the pitch black; there has to be total, true darkness to see it. “Light particles come from very far away/ and they flow past me.” “Stretching out for eternity at your feet”

Ginko sitting on the opposite side of the river bank; a warning from a stranger.

“You spent too much time in the dark with Sui” ... Mushi that breed in the darkness. 

5 - The Traveling Bog (S1E5 The Traveling Swamp)

Ginko is traveling through the mountains to see his friend, Adashino. Along the way, he meets a girl named Io, who lives inside a swamp that is capable of moving by itself.

Ginko finding himself travelling in step with a swamp that sinks into the earth and then floats up over and over again, passing through the mountains

A girl sacrificed to save her village from a flood, wearing ceremonial robes; a bride presented to the water god, pushed off a cliff in a storm.

A large green thing that calmly rose up through the raging water; swimming at the bottom of a river that was overflowing its banks. It said, “You should continue to live.”

“When people drink them, their bodies become transparent... and then, they flow away.” Choosing to become Mushi is to exist between life and death; slowly wearing away at your human heart.

Following the journey of a ten thousand year old swamp to its death; moving towards the sea, the dying form of a liquid mushi. Accompanying it on its final journey.

“Swamps are born, eventually they stagnate, and when the universe they have contained within themselves ends... they get up on their own and start to move.”

VOLUME 2

6 - The Mountain Sleeps (S1E11 The Sleeping Mountain)

While traveling, Ginko passes through a town settled near a mountain. He learns that a Mushi Master is living on the mountain, but hasn't visited the village for quite some time, and every person who had been sent to find him has fallen ill and died.

“A smell both sweet and rancid that rises from the ground and touches each leaf. One by one. Coiling around them and choking their skin. A light vein, where the river of light flows.”

Ginko tapping into a mushi that acts as the mountain's nerves, sinking their wills into the plants and running around. 

“The water of life (...) Women bear children like cats or dogs; twins, triplets, or even quadruplets, abandoned in the mountains.”

A travelling Mushishi who puts his roots down. The one he loves committing an unforgivable act so that they can be married. Assuming the role of a slain mountain boar god; his bones will lie here. 

An aged man, summoning an immortal spirit to take his place of guardian forever - a necessary sacrifice to return the world to natural order.

7 - The Sea of Brushstrokes (S1E20 A Sea of Writings)

Ginko comes to a house which has a library full of mushi-related scrolls. There, he meets the girl who writes the scrolls, and hears the story of the curse that has been afflicting her family for generations.

A large dark crypt; an enormous library of scripts recording ancient history

Scribes cursed with immobility and marked for death, the only way to quell the Mushi is to seal them with words. A tradition of inviting travelling Mushishis to feed the writers myths in order for them to expel their words, physically manifesting them, an excruciating process for survival of self - and if not, the survival of your descendants. Plucking words and returning them to order, duty. Little by little, a receding scar. 

8 - They That Breathe Ephemeral Life (S1E6 Those Who Inhale the Dew)

Ginko's services are requested by a boy named Nagi, who lives on a distant island, to investigate the case of Akoya, a girl revered by the people as a "Living God".

A brief moment during the spring tide is the only time you can get to the island; only safe one day per month to take a boat out. a barren island with little soil, villagers surviving with moral support from their god. 

Tapping the center of the forehead with a needle, a curlicule of a mushi spiralling out

“When i was the Ikigami and aged when the sun set i could always shut my eyes and fall asleep feeling satisfied (...) But now my legs tremble at the immense amount of time ahead of me.” Living Mushi's life cycle of a single day - every second of every day experienced fresh, so much wonder you can't keep up. “My heart was always satisfied.”

When faced with tragedy, the girl finally chooses to return to the state of suspension - the luxury to forget and detach from mortal burden.

9 - Rain Comes and a Rainbow is Born (S1E7 Raindrops and Rainbows)

Ginko encounters a man named Koro, who has a strange habit of pursuing rainbows, and helps him find one particular rainbow that he is looking for - the Kouda.

A father delirious for rain - a strange man running around happily, and a mysterious rainbow dancing in odd shapes. A body that thirsts - “I miss that rainbow so much… I can’t stand it.” 

A boy who runs away to escape the burden of a dying father; to prove his worth and his father’s.

Ginko who must travel constantly, taking a break by finding purpose in small goals - You can’t live only for the sake of living; rest is essential. 

A natural phenomena created from light and imbued with kouki - “There's a reason they occur, but they have no purpose - existing only to keep flowing. Nothing can affect them, but they affect those around them, and then they leave.”

* 10 - The Veil Spore (S1E21 Cotton Changeling)

A couple summons Ginko to investigate their sick child, Watahiko, who has developed green spots all over his body. The father explains that the child didn’t look human when born - instead, it was a strange green mass that swiftly escaped. A year later, he found a baby under the house.

A wedding procession that passes through a forest - “A green stain on my cotton wedding gown.” A boy born green and formless, that slipped out and under the house. The main body; a mat of spores spreading under the house, dirt that wriggles under the sun.

One year later, it sends out a human-mushroom; every half year, the same child born again and again. Harmless children joined together at the root, that exist only to collect nutrients, that die and spit out seeds. “Mushi that wear the skin of your dead child.”

The human instinct to kill everything we don’t understand.

A baby with a body that grows faster than the mind. Children that evolve rapidly - “After learning words i forgot how.. I forgot how.” The primal instinct for survival lost. The cost of intelligence.

The Watahiki, when faced with danger, disconnects its children from the root, in an attempt to save at least the seeds - the children change form and enter a long dormant period.

An organism that strays from its recorded life cycle. 

Not that I’m doing this for public consumption (who even is going to read all this) but anyways FYI I’ve got structured notes on the next volumes in my drafts & if I ever get round to finishing all of them they’ll be tagged as #mushishi notes 

[watchinglikeafangirl]

Tagged by @shortpplfedup because I thought it would be fun

1. Your all time favourite BL and why?

I told sunset about you

Everything about it. It does everything right. The script, the directing and the acting, it's all on point and makes this whole show special to such degree that you just can't get over its story. Everytime I go back, I know why I love it so much. Everytime I think about it, I want to cry. Because I told sunset about you is so beautiful it hurts and the nostalgia coming along with it is overbearing.

What I loved most is the cinematography because there are so many details to discover. The scenery often says what's not spoken alound, so the audience always understands the emotional conflict without being told. Every show and movie that works like this is good when it comes to carrying the atmosphere. But it's not only the composure of the scenery, it's the story, the characters and the acting. Teh and Oh-aew are pretty complexe characters and even though they are introduced as being nearly the same person when it comes to goals and choices, you more and more get how much they are actually not alike and rather complete each other than being the same. So, their lovestory makes sense, nearly feels like destiny and Billkin and PP portray them in a very lovely way.

Yeah, I LOVE this show but only ITSAY deserves my whole heart. IPYTM didn't pull me off my feet at all and it didn't even get close to anything ITSAY-related, in my opinion.

2. The one BL that scared you for life

Tonhon Chonlatee because how badly can you mess up?! It was scary how quickly things crashed down because it started of at being ok and went down the hill completely. Tonhon was the worst character. He was homophobic and everytime he made Chonlatee uncomfortable or me in front of the screen wanting to vomit, was explained with him actually liking Chonlatee in secret? Sorry, but I didn't buy it. He was a disgusting and horrible person, made everyone scared to show they're gay and didn't ever see his faults. Yeah, this show scared me because it was toxic and went down the hill so fast and so deep that I couldn't even realize what happened.

3. Is there any BL that made you feel very single?

Gameboys because they deeply care in a different way than friends do and when watching I craved for something like that.

It actually felt like true love and even though they only knew each other via screen mostly, their bond was so strong and it made me feel a bit lonely and yes, very single.

4. If you could change one thing from a BL, which one would it be?

The non-existent relationship in 2gether. This sounds a bit harsh and their relationship wasn't non-existent but it wasn't show that much either. Sarawat flirted a bunch of times and they said they love each other and it was all pretty wholesome but at some point, I really wondered if they even moved to the next level. Tine stayed shy around Sarawat the whole time, they never kissed except at the very end and I wished for a bit more than flirting only. There wasn't even much physical contact. They looked just like close friends to be honest. If they didn't want to insert many kisses, that's fine, but they hugged for like one time and never held hands. For me, their relationship was a bit unbelievable.

5. That one BL you detest

Theory of love looks like something I wouldn't like but I haven't seen it, so we stick with TharnType - especially season 2.

I still don't know why I watched this til the end without skipping. My internet was too bad to skip but boy it was hell to endure. Season 1 was a guilty pleasure but season 2 messed up in so many ways, I can't count. Everything went down the hill and the only thing keeping it alive was MewGulf's real chemistry because not even TharnType had good chemistry but at least the actors were comfortable with each other, so it looked okay between them. But oh boy, this show was terrible. Terrible writing, terrible directing and partly terrible actors. The whole concept was bizarre and dumb. I felt like my IQ dropped from watching because of all this inconsistency.

6. Your top 5

I told sunset about you

Cherry Magic

Gaya sa pelikula

Gameboys

We best love: no 1 for you

7. That trashy BL you lowkey like

History 4: close to you even though it had many problems. I managed to look past them and quite enjoyed it then but the second the final was over I started laughing at myself in surprise how I could've looked past every wrong thing they did. But I did it and enjoyed the good moments, let the bad ones wash over me.

8. Your favourite korean BL

Light on me because it had all the fluff and complexe characters. The love triangle was written in a realistic way and everything about this show was right. The side characters had proper screentime and I cared for them all. Some choices were a bit frustrating but they were teenagers and teenagers just act stupid sometimes. The accuracy of the life of teenagers hit way too close to my life, to my school.

9. Season 2? Which one?

Definetly Gaya sa pelikula. There are so many things left unsaid and so much Karl needs to discover.

10. A bunch of BLs will air soon, which are you the most excited about?

Probably KinnPorsche. The teaser looked so epic and it's a lovestory with a bodyguard which always catches my eyes. Don't know when it will air but I hope soon and I'm afraid I am too excited... but well, it can only be better than golden blood because that one was something else.

I tag everyone who feels like it

[the-nysh]

At what point in the story you started liking Garou as a character? What was his first impression on you and how did it changed later as the story progressed?

Oooh! What a GREAT question, I’m so glad you asked! ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (Cause yes, my perceptions of him certainly did change over time! And that’s one of the fun things I love to see happen with other opm fans too.) So let’s see…*pulls up a chair and shovel to dig thru nearly 5yrs of archives* where to begin~

It was definitely a gradual process (so buckle in, this is gonna be a looong chronological trip thru memory lane. About 3500~ words!)

First impressions

Early on (and cause I’m skeptical to most new characters who I don’t ‘know’ yet), I remember feeling kinda like ‘huh? Who the heck is this guy? This wannabe Hiruma-lookalike (recognizing some of Murata’s recycled Eyeshield 21 char design elements for him) with some silly double Vegeta hair? The hell does he think he’s doing??’ Beyond being kinda incredulous about him, I honestly didn’t really give him much passing thought or attention either, and definitely not anything on a deeper level yet. He was just kinda there (I suppose?), but also out there forcefully (cockily and somewhat annoyingly?) inserting himself as the ‘villain’ into the story at times (which wasn’t really my thing), seemingly WAY in over his head with reckless antics and overambitious about what he was claiming to be and challenging himself to do (which I thought seemed both ridiculous and ironic to set up like that when characters like Saitama exist to directly check/refute his aims).

So at the time I wasn’t fully ‘on board’ or invested much in his story/concept yet cause I hadn’t really seen him…define himself (beyond those first impressions) into his own fleshed-out character. Because he still kept reminding me too much of other characters (I even heard him with Hiruma’s voice) rather than breaking out on his own. Murata’s early art also had yet to really evolve and settle him into his own distinguishable ‘face’ for that matter too (he would though later, when he’d draw ‘Garou’ recognizable as himself and not like…‘Hiruma’s shadow’ anymore). So with all that coming in, it’s hard to ‘see’ or genuinely ‘like’ a char at first when they haven’t done much yet to distinguish themselves from others and grow into their own. (Oho, how time will tell~)

This impression of Garou hadn’t really changed much and continued all thru the Metal Bat fight, by the way. (I actually caught up to the manga around the time Murata introduced MB with the centipedes and was about to start his fight with Garou. Events which weren’t on my highest priority to see either, cause I still mostly preferred seeing Saitama + Genos interact instead.) But on a surface level, I at least knew Garou was fun/impressive to watch and his excitable/feral energy was infectious and entertaining (Murata really knew how to hype him up too), but other than that, I’d yet to really ‘like’ him on his own (enough to talk/blog about) still.

I first eased into reblogging stuff with him back in Oct 2016, which included the first reblog of his back muscles (lol) appreciating how Murata drew him facing Watchdog Man so ksjggh that part of the story (when Murata was teasing their fight) was also when Garou starting having a presence on my blog. :O

First turning point

However, I distinctly remember the first ‘aha I see now’ point in understanding him better was when I did a second reread of the webcomic. (I don’t exactly remember when that was, but probably sometime during the tournament arc when the pace was kinda dragging, so I prob reread the wc around then for fun.) It was around early-April 2017 when I later admitted that (in the tags):

I’ve come to really like Garou, a second read of the webcomic made me fond of him, of his background and ideas he wished to set out and change, his heart was in it and he had his set of morals, but he was young and brashly took the wrong path, I really want to see him return someday now that he's learned better

Cause following the big webcomic reveal at the end of his arc (when Saitama calls him out), going back thru his entire story again you could totally spot all the consistent hints and signs (from both his backstory and actions) ONE sprinkled the entire time, making everything revealed about him true, and not suddenly sprung up outta nowhere. It was finally like ‘aaah, I understand what’s up with him and can sympathize where he’s coming from. Yes that makes sense. :O’ However, this clarity/acknowledgment had yet to shift from simply ‘seeing’ or understanding a thing as knowledge, to actually feeling it (connecting on a deeper/personal level) later. That’ll remain a big distinction.

May 2017, I first started writing some early meta break downs about him, starting with his end-arc parallels in Suiryu’s despair moment and from this, there was acknowledgement how all ONE’s manga additions (up til then this was still all tournament arc stuff) were only building further context towards what’s to come much later on in the webcomic.

June 2017, I started posting stream coverage about him (vs Watchdog Man stuff when he intercepts King and Saitama.) Around this time I also admit this kinda stuff in tags ‘goodness how I love that this nerd has a soft spot for that kid (truthfully he's not monstrous at all)’ for appreciating the manga’s wholesome extra Tareo moments.

Second big turning point

Around Sept-Oct 2017 was when post content/stream coverage kinda started exploding during the whole vs A/B heroes + shed fight. This whole sequence, following the tournament arc, was the first big long-awaited return back to the wc’s script (with style!), but with significant expansions (esp to his character) never seen before. In particular, the bullet shielding moment was changed/revised from him simply standing there in the wc, to Garou protecting Tareo in the shed.

Truly awesome and moving because dang, he selflessly put his life on the line for that ‘Garou the determinator fending off the impossible while protecting a kid ;o;’ Firmly standing up to (injustices) and revealing his solid moral core, like wow, what a guy. <3

Murata’s stream output picked up significantly back then too (compared to his slower pace drawing the previous arcs), so I also admitted: ‘gosh been cheering for Murata's hard work just like Garou's in-chapter determination!’

But also cause this whole fight was like the first actual, legit demonstration (shown, not told) of Garou’s prodigious fighting skills, intelligence, tenacity, resourcefulness, perseverance, etc. Like this is what he’s actually capable of when pushed to the brink; testing the actual quality of his character (showing his true colors) and allowing those merits to shine while under unfavorable, difficult, and desperate conditions. And all impressively done in a way to make the audience both believe it and root for him (presented from his side much like a protagonist? Wild! 8D) It was extremely thrilling and badass (truly that whole shed part was brilliant, narratively and spectacle-wise. As I’ve repeatedly gone back to write about many times and again. :’D) My impressions of Garou around this time:

yoooo boi see I really like Garou, the wild prodigy determinator with a misguided goal, going all out and demonstrating his talent and prowess (even tho he gets in over his head), PROTECTING CHILDREN WHEN HE PRETENDS HE DOESN'T CARE, omfg what a softie (as Saitama would say) :'D, yaaa see he was never a 'real' monster at all, Saitama can see straight through him, and what he REALLY wants to achieve

Dec 2017, first started getting some sporadic Garou anons after the whole epic manga spectacle vs Genos + Bang + EC fight with everyone.

Jan 2018, back when Garou was captured in the MA base and then left to his own devices above ground…things started getting really interesting. Including noticing ONE’s more careful (or perhaps more transparent?) approach to writing Garou’s manga portrayal this time around. Different and more nuanced from the wc for instance, so there were many fascinating contradictions and complexities to uncover (break down meta-wise) about his convictions, beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and how he applied those thru his actions and behavior (revealing decisive acts of character). This was when @gofancyninjaworld also started joining in to discuss and explore Garou’s ongoing dilemma with his goals and mindset. “His heart is in the right place, but his means are not, because at his core, he’s not a monster.” I admitted ‘Garou’s one of the most well-written characters in the story, I feel.’ And I was really looking forward to all the significant changes ONE was doing to make his manga story all the more defined and cohesive than it already was in the wc. That made things extra engaging (when there’s a desire to look deeper into things for fun and excitement for more).

Third turning point

Feb 2018 Oooh man. It was around here, (when Garou saves Tareo from the bullies and confronts RR and Bug God) that I was really starting to feel that shift happening (the impression of him turning into something more), so I had to comment on his ongoing characterization presented thus far (budding into a well-rounded, 3 dimensional character) and how ONE was (re)writing him in a more personal, sympathetic light that made him so easy to root for and genuinely likeable. I was fully AWARE of this happening and what both Murata and ONE were doing to increase his appeal. Admitting the more they revealed of him the more I was falling deeper for him, and fully welcoming it by narrative design. (Like alright let’s goooo! 8’D) Cause it was obvious how much differently and expansive he was getting portrayed vs the wc (with much less moral ambiguity). I said:

“Garou’s not simply a rogue, prodigious teen going on a spiteful rampage with an overconfident, slasher smile. Consistently, he’s been shown what really makes him tic: what gets him serious, passionate, sincere, and desperate – things that force his hand to either fight or defend against, with standards and ideals that he’d put his life on the line for. All of it is great: a variety of expressive emotions and definitive acts of character that all build towards the whole. Which we’re then left to ponder exactly what that is. Is he truly a villain or a hero? Is he really a troublemaking bad guy or actually a misguided ‘nice guy’? The answer isn’t so black and white; it’s more like a mix of ALL of the above. And I LIKE that. As ONE has presented him, Garou is Garou, and not really someone to align or classify as simply one or the other. He’s in that kind of delicious gray zone where he’s getting put to the brink to show his true colors. And it’s so GOOD and refreshing to see.”

That plus the manga showing his deeper bond with Tareo, his gruffly protective qualities (ok but that’s kinda hot?) and a more sincere showing of his morals (which he refused to budge on no matter what anyone else ordered him to do), brought on all the feels. :’)

Stream coverage + ch commentary devolved to like unintelligible screaming, with some ‘man he’s so fucking cool,’ or ‘damn protective Garou’s SOO good,’ or ‘I swear the more Murata draws of him the more I fall for him like wtf,’ or even the flat out ‘GODDAMMIT MURATA ;A;’ types of suffering reactions, ahaha.

At this point I was all ‘bring on the Garou appreciation; he deserves it; I have a mighty NEED’ but was kinda annoyed/frustrated with the fandom cause there was hardly any recent fan content of him (relevant to his current plot progression, it was all suspiciously dry or old ship-related content I wasn’t interested in cause the plot had moved on, so I was like omg where is everybody, hello?!) It was already a dry spell in between seasons so overall fan content was slow anyway, but it seemed like there were so few actual fans of him (to my confusion?!) So I started making my own content (beyond just the stream coverage and ch reactions/commentary + meta) with the expression posts appreciation.

March 2018. U-uhoh, things (and posting frequency especially) were starting to escalate. His reaction to literally getting backstabbed by the monsters and losing Tareo (his quiet but seething controlled feral rage) definitely had me feeling™ things.

Final nail in the coffin

April 2018 Oshit;; Garou forcefully storming and bulldozing his way thru the MA base, his awesome BIG DAMN HEROES moment rescuing Tareo from Royal Ripper, to his hilarious absolute tsundere™ moment denying it (before running into Rover and immediately protecting the kid again) pretty much destroyed me. This was also like the first time I’d seen ONE make a character go full tsundere mode and pull it off in a genuine comedic way (with the classic ‘it’s not like I came here to save you or anything baka’ line and all) so pfft, that was so much endearing icing on the cake. :’D

At this point someone even asked me who’s my favorite opm character, to which I was all, ‘Garou’s current manga content has been on fire so he’s been quickly skyrocketing into my favs (if he wasn’t there already)!’

But then Murata soon dropped THIS ‘protect the child’ page all with perfect timing, and I was…fucking doomed.

'sugoi ojisan' was pretty much the moment of instant death for me ;A; my constant reaction to the streams has been that gaijin 4koma meme with laser heart eyes for emphasis, and I'm pretty much losing my ability to articulate much beyond screaming at this rate

Garou’s behavior could then be summarized as ‘a very stubborn and in denial asshole tsundere little shit nerd. <3’ But there was classic ONE heartwarming irony in there too, cause Garou hadn’t fully ‘lost’ his battles either…during those critical times where he actually assumed the role of the ‘hero’ for Tareo instead. (Oho~)  

basically Garou is a great character, the more you look into how ONE has built him the more meta af it gets

May 2018 (the long-awaited debut of the wc ‘scarf’ vs Rover towards Garou vs Orochi’s epic wtfshitstorm) lolwhoops~ I finally made the inevitable back muscles compilation while also writing longer, more in depth meta posts about him.

Murata delivered some of the best stream content we’ve seen of him. (Completely on FIRE, both literally and figuratively. And looking back, this was probably some of the most fun Murata’s stream sessions ever got. :’D Was awesome to be a fan tuning in during this time.)

even Murata was doodling chibis of himself freaking out in the margins XD

Delivering content from the pose of peak badassery…to dropping stream doodles of peak heartwarming/cuteness (Garou & Tareo in suits) on the fans for good measure.

bam Murata’s out to kill us with his art ...Murata can you like -maybe- chill? ABSOLUTELY NOT

Basically Murata knew exactly what he was doing, always delivering and servicing the fans (drawing the coke bottle was a fan suggestion too) yet also remaining a huge tease~

Towards S2 and beyond

June 2018, following the Orochi fight, Garou was put on a bus and absent from the manga for a while, so I went back revisiting older content again (rereading the manga for fun) and realizing/noticing/wondering stuff I hadn’t really caught about him before like…oh no why is he cute?? Was he always this way or had my eyes finally opened after everything??? (Cause aside from him being a little shit or a cool badass, he was also a complete dork and a nerd, and an oblivious dummy, and just…that was so…wtf endearing, a full package of fun to enjoy.)

But we soon got clips of Midorikawa’s voice reveal (from the opm drama cd) and all hell broke loose among the resident Garou fans. 8’D Especially cause his voice was ‘dark/smooth/mature/sexy’ as opposed to a higher-pitched, unhinged teen voice many had expected (remember that old Hiruma voice I first thought for him? So interestingly many fanboys were disappointed with this deeper voice casting). But also cause Midorikawa said “I’ll do my best to make Garou even more charming than before,” so we were excited to see Garou’s popularity spike even more cause of s2.

Aug 2018, the s2 key visual revealed with Garou prominently featured up and center and I WAS NOT PREPARED!!! I remember having like a full hyper-incoherent breakdown because of this so…yeaaaaah. 8’D I was all rationalizing,

If anything it’s all Murata and ONE’s fault that (the hype and appreciation for him) feeling’s grown even stronger. He was already a thoroughly fun walking meta source, but the manga made his softer/compassionate moments much more obvious (than in the wc). Just watch as this badass dorky nerd becomes even more hugely popular than he already is!

April 2019 was his anime debut…coincided with his post-arc WEBCOMIC DEBUT AFTER 5 FUCKING YEARS (before he even returned in the manga even) IMPECCABLE timing from ONE, holy shit people lost their minds. Including Murata, who had to draw him too! With all that and the anime airing (adding even more wholesome cute Tareo interactions not seen in the manga), fandom participation (+anons) really started to kick off.

I remember seeing the influx of new fans and how so many (who didn’t ‘know’ him yet either) would unironically label him as genuinely ‘evil’ or a ‘heinous villain’ at face value, which….uhhhhhh were the kinda takes that were hard to take seriously, but I appreciated how ONE’s writing allowed the readers to see and think for themselves as the narrative revealed more (rather than believing everything the characters said or claimed), so it’d only be a matter of time until they ‘saw’ the truth about him too. :’)

May-July 2019 the anime continued airing with fandom activity popping, until August when he finally reappeared and ‘awoke’ in the manga! ;A; After like an entire full year of him mia too. This was also the time frame when all the thirsty (and interestingly meta-hungry) Garou anons started (finding me???) regularly chiming in with fun participation. I was grateful though, cause they prompted certain takes I couldn’t have come up with on my own, and allowed me to think, examine, and explain things much more closely and thoroughly than I had ever posted before. (Yaaay~) Such as looking into just what IS it about him?!

“Garou wouldn’t be as compelling, engaging, and appealing as a character without (all) those other interesting layers and nuances to talk about too! :D It’s even better that way! Cause Murata can draw everyone looking drop-dead gorgeous and conventionally attractive, so just having a pretty face and impressive muscles isn’t enough to make him stand out in a special way from the rest of the cast. Already all those things (about him) are certainly impressive, so just what is it about him in particular? (That makes him unique.) The fact Garou has all that AND those other compassionate & interesting qualities to him just makes it the icing on the cake for a complete, well-rounded package. The fact we can know him, for all his feelings and attitude why he behaves and acts the way he does, such as when he’s contradictory, troubled and tsundere-like sometimes, to hardcore and badass other times, to softer and empathetic to fiercely righteous, protective and determined other times, and all portrayed in the way he’s capable of the range (and makes us feel) the entire spectrum of emotion too. …Like whoa (I could keep going but I’d be preaching to the choir at that point aha), all that only enhances what’s already there. In this way, I feel the Garou we’ve come to know by now is much more endearing and appealing than the one we were introduced to at the start. Because as he appeared then, he may have seemed like just another wannabe thug-of-the-week we might not have given much passing thought & attention to. But now…uhoh, you could arguably say he’s grown to the point he’s almost taken over the rest of the manga (within good reason!) by challenging our perception of who’s even the active protagonist. :O Who keeps us engaged and tuned in to see more. Buaha, just what the hell happened?! Now that’s quite the impressive feat from both ONE and Murata to create a character with a lasting impact like that!”

…So that’s what happened. :’D In my opinion, I feel Garou’s best moments where we (or really, I) got to know him better (shed scene, Elder Centipede aftermath, dine n dash, rescuing Tareo, all up towards his fights vs Rover & Orochi) mostly only happen until after s2 so… Since those were some of my absolute fav manga moments (which only enhanced my perceptions of him), those’ll be the moments I’m really looking forward to see animated in s3. But most of all, I’m hoping to witness some of that same ‘aha!’ gradual realization process happen to newer fans who come to appreciate him too. :’3

[shikai-the-storyteller]

WFC: Siege watch!

Part 1: Episodes 1, 2, and 3

[Part 2] (Linking because Tumblr isn’t even showing the post on my blog or on my dash 🙄)

As a side note: every single person in this fandom is horrible at tagging their spoilers, you guys really need to do a better job at that because I’ve got a bunch of blockers on and I was STILL almost spoiled multiple times. Come on you guys...it literally came out today, be better about this.

Alright going to try and keep expectations low because I feel like the target audience for this is G1 dudebros who take a series about transforming cars way too seriously, but I’m still cautiously optimistic because a friend vetted for the dudes working on this show so WE”LL SEE

Episode 1

Aw man there’s only 6 episodes??? Bummer, I wonder if they’re already working on Season 2 or if they’re going to see how this does and let it die in the water if it’s not popular enough.

Things I know going in: Skyfire / Jetfire is in this, Megatron has big lips, and Elita is in it. That’s literally it, I’ve managed to avoid spoilers thusfar (though a few of the promo images implied Skyfire’s a Decepticon, so you KNOW that’s gonna break bad eventually)

WHEELJACK Wednesday THURSDAY

OH MYG OSH IS THAT SKYWARP??? EXPECTATIONS ARE NOW SKY-HIGH

The transformation sequences look so reminiscent of those stop-motion videos people do of their Transformer toys transforming. This isn’t a dig at the animation style, I think that’s rather charming and I wonder if it’s intentional.

Wow Bumblebee sounds like a jerk. I’m instantly on-edge, please don’t make all the characters ~hyper-masculine mean guys who don’t know how to have fun or talk about their emotions~

“The Autobots aint paying you for attitude” YOU TELL HIM WHEELJACK

Yooo Velocitron exists!

Ahh so Bumblebee IS just a mercenary, not an Autobot

OHOHO HERE”S JETFIRE

Wow Jetfire you’re really going the bad dude route huh

Ayyyyyy there’s Starscream

YOOO THERE”S THUNDERCRACKER

Thundercracker I appreciate that you’re using fancy tech to identify wheeljack but his Autobot badge is literally Right There

WTF

WELL THAT DIDN”T LAST LONG HUH...that’s a bit disappointing

OH NVM THAT WASN”T A HEEL-TURN THAT WAS JUST A STRAIGHT UP “I”M THE BOSS” MOVE

huh so they’re making Skyfire the target of Starscream’s desire for power. hmm

WHY ARE YOU GUYS RUNNING JUST TRANSFORM INTO CARS unless they’re too low on energon to do it??

There he is...Mr. Big Lips

Well that’s a surprising take Megatron

Isn’t that Cybertron and Luna 1 in the sky though?? Are they on Cybertron rn or not??

Megatron’s voice is really throwing me off, if it weren’t for his helmet and color I’d really think that was Overlord

ITS TRUCK DAD

OHOHO HE SAID THE THING!!!!

Why does bumblebee have lips too

“What do you know of slavery?” Alright that line did make me go “OHHHH”

“Alpha Trion would be ashamed!” “Of us both, I think” ouch, but nice to see Alpha “Grandpa” Trion back in a series

Megatron PLEASE don’t say “I’m enjoying this, Prime” in that voice while I can hear Optimus groaning in the background

AYYY ELITAAAAAA

Why are the Seekers chasing these guys, who are running on foot, ON FOOT??? CHANGE INTO YOUR DANG ALT MODE

WHEELJACK SWORE

man I’m only like a few minutes in and I’m already bored. I’m going to watch the whole thing, but I feel like this is really lacking soul or personality so far. It very much feels like the script was written by people who aren’t familiar with these characters, so they’re writing them how they EXPECT them to sound, not writing them as they actually are. It’s more than a little disappointing, but this is only the first episode, so I’ll keep going and see if this is consistent throughout the series.

Oh man, just listening to Elita you can tell she was written by a dude. Oof.

There’s the Ark!

Dang everyone’s running low

Jeez Optimus and Elita wouldn’t just walk by all these injured Autobots!

And Optimus wouldn’t brush off his officers!! Agh!!!

YO Ultra Magnus!

Chromia!!!!!

oh my gosh is THAT Red Alert??

Hey where’s Ratchet though

Gosh the writing is so STIFF!!!! I can’t stand this, if I wasn’t a die-hard Transformers fan I would’ve bounced a few minutes ago

 It might also be the way the VAs pause between words, please speak normally, these constant pauses between words are frustrating

Ok but where the frick is Soundwave

“His arrogance I actually like” pfft

Annnnd here comes Ultra Magnus to accept the treaty on Prime’s behalf, where he’ll get held hostage and probably wind up beefing it.

Episode 2

SOUNDWAVE!!!! BABY

And Shockwave!!! 

YO SKYWARP ACTUALLY GOT A SPEAKING LINE

I want to know where Megatron got all this fabric for those stupid flags and where Ultra magnus got that cloak

Is. Is that Prowl with a weird paint job

Wow bad aim dude

Ultra Magnus you dummy....

Ok but if it was a battle then who were they fighting against???

Wow you’re really just gonna stand there and take that Magnus?

I know they’re on a time-crunch because they only have 6 episodes, but they have to do more to make me care about the characters. I’m inclined to care about them already because I’m familiar with the series and because as a stand-alone, even I’m like “Ok. So?” whenever new problems come up for them. I’m not invested!

Not to compare the two, because I feel like this entire liveblog will turn into a comparative essay, but Cyberverse got me invested in characters within the first episode! They were on an even TIGHTER time-crunch because their episodes were only 10 minutes, and yet they did a great job weaving a tight narrative and making good use of their time to tell a story and have characters charm the audience.

Optimus: Til All Are One Rodimus, coming out of nowhere: TIL ALL ARE ONE

WELL THAT”S NOT THE VOICE I WAS EXPECTING FOR SHOCKWAVE he sounds a bit reminiscent of his TFA version

What does de-rez mean

Ok but that’s assuming that this thing will automatically reprogram them?? Reformatting doesn’t automatically mean someone will turn into a Decepticon!

You know, there’s a lot of talking in the show but the dialogue doesn’t actually say a lot. It doesn’t reveal much about the characters or tell me who they are.

YOOO THERE”S SOUNDWAVE

AUDIO BOOB

It really annoys me that characters always pause after saying “I”. It’s always “I.........[long pause] rest of their sentence.”

what do you mean “Teams” Optimus there’s like 5 of you guys

I love you Soundwave!!!

Whoa wait was that Impactor in the background?

ughHHHHHH I HATE THAT MY BIGGEST PET PEEVE IS “what have you done?” SAID UTTERLY MONOTONE WHEN IT’S NOT EVEN A BIG DEAL!!! YOU CAN”T FLIP THAT LINE OUT WITHOUT ACTUALLY PUTTING IN THE FOOTWORK TO EARN IT!!! AGH!!!

Again, it feels very much like the writers read the wikipedia page for Transformers and maybe the first sentence of each character’s bio page and then wrote the entire script from there. It’s frustrating. I hate being so severe in my reviews because I hate dunking on my fellow writers because they don’t always have final say in what happens, but this is astonishingly poor writing.

Like, I can see what they’re TRYING to accomplish, but it feels like they whiff so badly.

YO IT IS IMPACTOR

oh thats Barricade that’s why I thought that was Prowl

Chromia!!!! My darling!!!! I can’t believe there’s only two girls in this show so far

Oh that’s Cog, I wasn’t sure if that was Beachcomber or what

Nice one Chromia

Oh is that Mirage?

Ugh ANOTHER WRITING PET PEEVE: Constantly having characters start to say something but then then their dialogue gets cut off. It’s fine if it’s once in a while but over and over it’s annoying

I also feel like a lot of the VAs lack...emotion. They don’t emphasize the lines. Like, “Get him into the repair bay” is one example. Depending on how you emphasize certain words in that sentence, you can infer a lot! Emotion, the state of mind of the character, etc. But when it’s delivered in such a bland way, it’s a bit like “ok whatever”, which is how I’m starting to feel about this whole show. This doesn’t go for all the VAs or all lines, but it’s consistent enough that my mind’s wandering.

RAVAGE??? RAVAGE???? RAVAGE?!?!?!??!?!

It was probably Bumblebee.

Not to be nitpicky but it should be “Neither we nor the Autobots”

The idea of reformatting is so stupid!!! It implies that Autobots and Decepticons are inherently different, which is stupid!! It’s so dumb WHY DO YOU GOTTA GO THAT ROUTE IT”S SO STUPID (ESPECIALLY SINCE THEY”RE TACKLING THE TOPIC OF OPPRESSION??? THEY”RE SAYING THEY”RE LITERALLY DIFFERENT SPECIES AND USING IT AS A PLATFORM TO SAY ONE GROUP IS INHERENTLY BETTER THAN THE OTHER. THAT SUCKS)

Episode 3

RATCHET!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lmao love your lipgloss Megatron

Ohh is Ratchet going to fix Impactor??

PROWL??? HE”S SO SHORT

Gosh please, please don’t have humans in this show

lmao Skyfire called Starscream a tool

RATCHET!!! :D

I’d like to see who was on the writing team of this show

Isn’t that Mirage?

YEAH THAT IS MIRAGE

Again with the sentences consistently being cut off....

Is that Sunstorm?

Points to Chromia and Mirage for showing the first bitof personality in this show.

Yooo Ratchet! Oof he’s not chummy with Prime huh

YOO CAMINUS EXISTS TOO

LMAO FEISTY GRANDPA

Oh Mirage come on

Actually no, don’t shut Impactor up he’s right

“I didn’t patch you up just so you could blow a valve here” *snorts*

Wouldn’t it be frickin hilarious if Magnus just popped open a panel and Minimus came out and just dipped outta there

lmao nice lightsaber Jetfire

LMAO “PULL THE TRIGGER MAGNUS”

JEEZ JUST PUNCH HIM RIGHT IN THE FACE WHY DON”T YOU 

Ratchet is the ONLY character they’ve given personality in this show so far.

Jeez Mirage cool your jets

Oh for frick’s sake Optimus be cool

Megatron please stop torturing your ex boyfriend

Ok but who did they rise against??? Were there Quintessons in this universe too?

oh come on you guys

Oh boy something tells me Skywarp isn’t going to survive the rest of this episode

Oh jk, Skyfire just let him go. Well alrighty then

I’m not sure how they found the Autobot base, they implied that it was because of Impactor but that doesn’t make sense

This post is getting long so I’m going to spit it between two posts

[naeshitsherlock]

I would put this under a read more under the cut or whatever but I’m on mobile and I don’t think I can so basically I just need to dump this here to put it in my diary tag for future reference and posterity etc

So I’ve been back to watching crazy ex gf on Netflix after a long break (watching too much at once makes my own personality go a little crazy so I gotta be careful) and it helped me realise the context of my brain a little better. Unfortunately I can’t find the exact scene on YouTube so I gotta send the script quote instead which has less impact

...so I can’t even find the quote so maybe I paraphrased it in my dream idk. But anyway, not the point. So Rebecca has an emotional collapse and just... gives up. Like wholly and completely. Overdosed on antianxiety pills and gets sent to hospital for a psych evaluation bc clearly she’s not right

And this new doctor comes along and tells her he’s talked to her therapist and checked out her symptoms and thinks he’s maybe got a real accurate diagnosis for her

And it suddenly fills her with so much hope, and she sings this incredible song that might stay in my heart forever

https://youtu.be/nK2DlLmVc20

“Fake it til you make it” is my absolute motto I live by bc I always felt like I don’t feel like other people do. If I get caught up in the moment of something then I can have fun, sure, but generally? Day to day? I mostly just exist inside my own violet thoughts

Everything is just a hazy dark purple

So she sings this song about finally, _*finally*_ having hope that somebody can tell her why she feels how she feels and that there’s a way to cure it

And she’s looking at people who have mental illnesses and says ‘perfect they’re not but at least they know who they are’ (I’ll come back to this part later for another reason)

And that hit me like a ton of bricks

So I’ve been on antidepressants now for three years, but over those years I’ve tested a whole bunch and different concentrations (wait, doses? Science brain takes over sometimes) and even though the one I’m on now makes me feel... I guess stable, I still don’t feel... good

And every time I see my doctor she asks if it could be better

And it’s so hard to remember what I was like _before_ I started taking meds, but then I saw this episode and it just smacked me up the head

Like if you go from having long hair to bald, it’s an easy comparison, yeah? But what if you just chop centimetres at a time until there’s nothing left

It’s so hard to compare between what it was and what it now is

Just sort of realising that knowing what your problem is is a huge weight off your shoulders and I realised how different I am now from me back then

And then I was watching this and Rebecca was like ‘it’s too much effort to do things or see people or go outside or even just exist’ in the most heartbreaking voice, like completely not a deadpan joke, just absolutely broken down and reduced to basal nothingness, and I got like a sudden timetravel moment back to those feelings

When I was in high school I couldn’t hang out with my friends bc of anxiety. My mum forced me into the car to drop me off once and she had to drive me home after I couldn’t stop sobbing in front of my friends for 10 minutes telling them that I really wanted to hang out with them but I felt physically atrocious and was about to throw up my entire gastroinstestinal system

Realistically, one of my biggest issues is that I haven’t even been diagnosed with depression. I’m taking antidepressants but my doctor has never outright stated that I have depression

And even though I’m rational and I know the symptoms add up, there’s still this really quiet voice in the smallest corner of my brain rejecting it

Even back last year when I was in a flat by myself and not working bc I couldn’t find a job, I had... at least two absolutely gut wrenching breakdowns

I was crying so hard I couldn’t breathe, like a goddamn baby who can’t use their words to convey their feelings

And it sucked even more bc I CAN use words and I SHOULD be able to convey my feelings, and I just can’t

I cried for almost two hours

It was an awful wail/shriek and once I stopped hyperventillating it would start again

I’ve had anxiety literally as long as I can remember. I was never able to hang out with friends or go to a bathroom without my mum in a restaurant or even just go to a shop and buy something at the checkout until I started uni, and even then it was such a struggle getting through that

I still have that anxiety but now I’m able to boss it around better, but even then I shit myself when I have to go to a shop alone or just... have a professional opinion? Because I feel like an absolute fake

My entire being is just consumed by ennui (the most accurate definition being ‘a crippling listlessness’)

Even going to the doctor, I know it helps, but every month I get anxiety over making the appt, getting the train, seeing the receptionist, talking to the doctor, filling the prescription, making a future appt for the next month, getting the train back, and getting back to my flat

And the whole thing takes ~2h a month but it absolutely destroys me bc it’s not... I guess it’s not enough

I’ve never been seriously suicidal and I hope I never will be, but at the same time one of the reasons is... you have to have an actual desire to kill yourself

I don’t know the last desire I ever had

When I was in high school and my sister almost died in hospital from anorexia I had a complete break, bc my parents just went distant and I probably saw my mother... less than an hour a day. While I was 16. Once I woke her up to tell her I was going to school and instead of saying morning she said ‘I think your sister is going to die’

8am that happened at

I had to then deal with the anxiety of ‘how do I deal with going from being the older sister to the only sister’

If I could pinpoint a moment where I broke? That would be it

...getting back to your original point about how nice it would be to _live_?

I’ve never lived

Not once in my life

That’s why i was trying so hard with online dating even though I hate it so much, because I just want to figure out who the fuck I am and maybe that’ll help me live

It’s similar to the depression - I’ve never had the label so I don’t feel comfortable knowing what’s wrong

I can’t say ‘oh I have the flu, that’s why I feel shitty so it’s ok’

I’m never ok with feeling shitty just _because_, there’s almost always a reason

‘Perfect they’re not but at least they know who they are’ is the one thing keeping me going, that maybe if I work out who/what I am then I’ll start enjoying my existence

I have no major problems, nothing financial or emotional or physical, I’m privileged and surrounded by a support system I guess but I’ve still always felt an extreme detatchmebt

Recently I’ve found myself being super bitter and jealous towards things like the LGBT community bc it’s people celebrating their identity, and I feel like I don’t have one

And yeah ok I can tell myself things like ‘it’s fine to not have a plan’, ‘it’s ok to not know who you are you just need to find yourself’, ‘it’s alright not to get married and be in a committed relationship’, but there’s always part of me that can’t accept those things

[bluemagic-girl]

Serena Williams Has A Message For Everyone Who Wants Her To Shut Up And Play

Serena Williams has a message for critics who want her to maintain tranquil about social issues and just engage in tennis. 

“The working day I end combating for equality and for individuals that look like you and me will be the working day I’m in my grave,” Williams vowed at a press convention on Saturday.

Serena just isn’t getting a split

pic.twitter.com/Mj1G8KbKhb

— Yahoo Athletics (@YahooSports) July 13, 2019

The opinions have been rapidly echoed by soccer sensation Megan Rapinoe. 

“You know what? I’m gonna combat for equivalent fork out each individual day, for myself, for my group, and for each individual one particular person out there,” Rapinoe said on NBC, introducing:

“Man, girl, immigrant, U.S. citizen, man or woman of coloration, whatever it may possibly be. ‘Equal shell out,’ as the wonderful Serena Williams reported, ‘til I’m in my grave.’” 

Williams, who has gained 23 Grand Slam titles, fell just quick on Saturday in her quest to tie Margaret Court’s history of 24, getting rid of in the Wimbledon finals to Simona Halep.

Throughout her occupation, Williams has experienced to offer with loads of criticism for being outspoken on issues these as sexism, racism and the gender fork out hole, specifically as it relevant to women of coloration.  But far more not long ago that criticism came from a stunning supply: tennis legend and activist Billie Jean King.

King suggested previously in the match that if Williams needed a crack at the record, she should give up staying a movie star for a 12 months and a half. 

“No extra Fulfilled Galas,” King informed the BBC. “Just end all this insanity because she is trying to be everything.”

King was quick to insert that this information was for Williams if her key objective was to proceed to crack tennis records. 

“If she is quite delighted the way she is, then fantastic,” King claimed. 

Actual Existence. Real News. True VOICES.

Assist us tell a lot more of the stories that make any difference from voices that way too frequently stay unheard.

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[caeleighsims]

FINAL SCRIPT

(signs to direct him to the room)

Sign on the door (studio sign?)

Name plackets on the table for each “expert”

Cheesy music playing

2. Roll intro to our “show”

Rebeccas’s welcome

“Hi, hello and welcome back to your annual transmission of Good Morning, AMFI.  My name is Rebecca and I'll get this show on the road! I am very happy to welcome all of you and very excited to announce that today‘s talk is about ... Fabulous Fashion Mags!

Aren’t you sick and tired of buying the same old glossy magazines? Of seeing the same covers, photoshoots, brands and even models all the damn time?

Well, we are! Today in the house, live, on screen and in color: representatives of this year’s issue of GARMENT! If you don't know Garment Magazine, it’s time to get an editorial update! The magazine is annually relaunched, honoring a single garment at a time. This issue treats SCARVES as royalty from the cover 'til the very end. Next to the representatives of Garment, we have a special guest over today.

“My sources tell me, that this year's issue is, next to the scarf, all about wittiness and having fun! The status quo is questioned, humor is used as coping mechanism, and the content is putting boring stereotypes into a new spotlight.. Sounds fun, right?

But before we dive into details, I’d like to welcome our panel of Garmenteers!

Please put your hands together for Xenia, the Editor in Chief, Milembe, who makes sure the magazine is printed to perfection! And Caeleigh, curator of all the knee-slapping content found on Garment’s Social Media!”

PAUZE & APPLAUSE  

***Xenia, Milembe, Caeleigh enter***

So Xenia, welcome, you are joining us on screen because you are managing the entire magazine from another part of the globe! ** XENIAS SAYS HELLO** As I mentioned every generation of the magazine revolves around one garment. This year you chose the scarf, an interesting choice if you ask me...what made the scarf the perfect garment for the 2020 issue??”

Xenia: “Even though you might think the scarf is one of the simplest garments that exists, it is actually incredibly versatile. Tell me, do you know of any other garment that you can wear around your neck, on your head, around your waist… literally anywhere. Next to its versatility, the scarf is also a great carrier of meaning. It is basically a fashionable, wearable banner. A scarf communicates, whether this is cultural, religious or empowering matters. A scarf can literally say it all! Besides that, the scarf has been the hottest topic on the catwalks this season, haven”t you seen?”

Rebecca: “I see. So, the scarf can actually send out powerful messages. I understand that your message to the readers is to question the status quo, while having fun. How did you find this approach, and how did you translate the ‘having fun’ part of the brand?”

Xenia: Aren’t we all tired of the humdrum and monotony we are fed by typical glossy magazines? We wanted a fresh take and make it entertaining! By doing this we want to challenge the reader and create awareness among them so they can recognize the stereotypes themselves, and think about how we can do it differently. How are we making sure there’s fun involved? I’ve got one magic word…PARODY. We are playing with the exaggeration of stereotypes, we make them absurd and hilarious. So while having a laugh, we make you wonder: Why are all these ridiculous clichés the norm for magazines at the moment? And why don’t we play around with it more often instead of staying stuck on the same content all the time?”

Rebecca: “I like that! But why do you think we need this now? What makes it so…2020?”

Xenia: “Have you been on social media at all? Hahahaha. When COVID-19 broke out the only thing I saw on there were all these memes about our ridiculous behavior. Even though you might think it’s risky to make fun of a situation like that, I am sure we all secretly laughed. And it actually made me reconsider our behavior. I realized that I don’t actually need to stack up on toilet paper, it’s just straight up absurd! I think that especially now, in times of meme-culture, our target group needs a dose of humor in order to cope with and challenge the crazy, stereotypical ideas that are out there. So yes, I think our magazine concept is very 2020!”

Rebecca: “An interesting outlook, very in line with the Zeitgeist. You made a comment about COVID-19. You’re creating and printing a magazine in times of isolation and social distancing, while the whole team is sprinkled all over the globe! How has this affected your way of working?”

Xenia: “Obviously it was a little, WELL, no, actually very, different from what we expected, but we made the best out of it!! I see the whole team on the screen and communicate via digital platforms, although quite unfamiliar at the beginning, worked out well for us. I would like to give out a special thanks to the team for adapting that fast, since it can be hard communicating when we don’t get to see each other physically. Next to communication, of course, there were some difficulties with getting productions done, such as photoshoots and interviews. But we managed to create all content within the safety measurements made by the Dutch Government.”

Rebecca: “That is great to hear! I can imagine it was a struggle delivering a magazine with all its expected photoshoots, interviews, and content which needs field research in general.  

Speaking of photoshoots: As we know, the major names in the magazine world, such as Vogue, Elle and Harper’s have their editorials filled with well-known brands, which - spoiler alert - are also their biggest sponsors. I assume that you guys did this differently and that you carefully chose which brands to include in the magazine, am I right?”

Xenia: “Yes, definitely. The fashion in the magazine obviously mostly features AMFI Designers. Besides that, we decided to support young and conscious designers, brands that are commonly seen as ‘unconventional’, vintage clothing and of course some digital fashion! “

Rebecca: “I’m excited to see all the brands and designs in the magazine! One thing makes me curious, how was the process of finding AMFI designers for collaborations?”

Xenia: “It was a struggle sometimes, as we wanted to include current designs and many of the designers weren’t in Amsterdam for us to borrow their creations. On top of that, most of them were pre-occupied with their own Corona worries. However, with helping hands from all departments we were able to reach a good number of designers and used their designs for our shoots and cover.”

Rebecca: “I think it is truly amazing what you guys have managed to create in such wild times. Now, I have been asking myself, Milembe: how on earth do you get a magazine printed during quarantine?”

Milembe: “It sure has been a lot of phone calls and discussions with different print shops. But all is looking good, and our pre-sales are rising daily!”

Rebecca: “Where can I buy mine? It truly sounds like a worthwhile investment, which is important because we are killing trees for it after all. Sustainability is an ever-present topic, and you guys have been taking this very seriously, am I right?  

Milembe: “You can buy the magazine with one of our students or at Athenaeum Boekhandel. We also have a distributor who makes sure the magazine is sold in stores all over Europe.

Sustainability is very important to us indeed. That's why we chose a sustainable printer. They print with sustainable ink, we chose recycled paper and the printer is CO2 neutral. They invest in planting new forests as well. So yeah, I think it’s fair to say that we are trying to take eco-friendly to the next level!”

Rebecca: “Now I don’t know about you, but these experts got me really excited to see this magazine! I think it’s time to stop the talking and start seeing what it looks like! Xenia, I’ll pass the mic onto you, and let’s have a look into this mag!”

6. Xenia walks through the plank

PLEASE FILL IN

8. Explanation of social (ask questions to Caeleigh)

Rebecca: “Well that was very exciting, I can’t wait to get mine delivered! But before it comes to that, I can enjoy all the content you are showing on your social channels! Because yes, Garment has been very active on social media, and dear viewers if u are not following them I strongly advise you do so.

This morning before coming here, I actually did some serious stalking online. When I took a look at the Instagram account of Garment magazine I found all the wit, the fun and the parody representing your magazine. You really got me with the memes, the ironically long list of hashtags and your interactive and surprising stories. I was laughing out loud and tagged all my friends instantly!

So Caeleigh, as the mastermind behind all these productions, can you start with telling me something about all the different social platforms you’re using?

Caeleigh: “As of now we have mainly been active on Instagram. And by posting daily, uploading frequent stories, using hashtags, and creating content that that encourages interaction and reposting, we have managed to steadily grow our following. Other than that, we will soon be making use of IGTV, and posting more frequently on Facebook once we start uploading articles and content onto our website… which just went live today!

Rebecca: “I can imagine it takes a lot of creativity to make all posts for these platforms. How do you come up with the designs for social, the images, the captions, the memes, the gifs and all? In other words, how are you translating the magazine to online?”

Caeleigh: “I think the most important thing for us has been to pay very close attention to the magazine development in the workshops. And we also have people from image, design and text on the Social team that provide great insight into each department. We always use the same colours, fonts, graphic elements and tone of voice to keep it all within the brand. And the magazine has even taken on a couple of ideas of ours as well. Like a horoscopes spread, for example. And finally, every post we upload is either discussed in the workshops, or sent to Xenia and the other leads for approval before going live.”

Rebecca: “It is really great to see how everything comes together like that, giving us a holistic idea of your brand identity. Now I don’t want to spoil things, but I heard some rumors about a Garment reality show… That would definitely be something I have never seen with Garment before!”

Caeleigh: “Yes! definitely something new for us... which is really exciting. We were brainstorming ideas on how we could make our viewers more invested in the process that goes on behind the scenes of Garment Magazine. And instead of just showing snippets of content here and there, we came up with the idea to create a whole storyline for people to follow along, where we introduce them to all the jobs on an editorial team and their role within the company. We decided to embrace the idea of parodying reality television, playing into the tropes of what people consider "fashion people" to be like. Again, inviting our viewers to laugh at the exaggeration of these stereotypes and question how or why they exist.”

Rebecca: “I can’t wait for this!!! How often will it be produced and where can I check it out?”

Caeleigh: “So, we will be filming on June 8, with a crew of 6 actors, a director and a cameraman. We're also getting help from an editor in Toronto. But the bottom line is, you should all expect to see 5 episodes posted bi-weekly, with the last one airing at our launch!”

Rebecca: “A launch event? During quarantine? What can I expect this to look like?!”

Caeleigh: “It's definitely going to be unlike the launches from past years. At first, we bounced back and forth between a couple of online ideas, but since this quarantine has dragged on for so long we've noticed that people are getting really tired of just staring at their screens all day. Now that the laws regarding social distancing have become more lenient, we're planning to use this to our advantage and plan a very small pop-up event. The idea is for it is to be a maze-like event, almost like an art installation, where each section or room is a different theme, in line with the magazine. Expect to see parodies of cliches found at award shows, articles in the magazine brought to life, and an over-the-top Tell-Sell booth at the end where you can purchase your own copy of Garment. Obviously, we'll stay in contact with the RIVM to make sure the protocol is followed properly at all times and people are safe.

Rebecca: “This all sounds very promising, but quite difficult to handle all by yourself. Will you make use of any sponsors or partners?”

Caeleigh: “Yes, of course. We already have our location sponsored, as they are willing to offer a very significant discount on the space. Next to that we've been reaching out to Dutch beverage companies to see if they would be willing to sponsor our event as well. We only just changed the whole launch plan last week, but there's been an impressive amount of progress made already.”

Rebecca: “Thank you Caeleigh, looks like you’ve got it all figured out. Please keep posting and please make sure to send me an invite for the event!”

9. Go over to Milembe

Rebecca: “So, I would like to move over to this lovely lady, the queen of print, Milembe! I understand Garment is quite a big production. Can you tell me precisely how many magazines will be printed?”

Milembe: “We'll print 1250 magazines to be precise. Last year a number of 1500 were printed but quite a lot were left over. Selling this year will be a lot more difficult than last year because of these weird times. This is why we decided that it would be good to slightly reduce the copy count, also keeping sustainability and less waste in mind.”

Rebecca: “Good number! I would definitely be able to get my hands on one of these gems. Right?”

Milembe: “Pre-sales continue to rise despite the extenuating circumstances”

Rebecca: “Wow, that’s great!!! Must help in financing the print, but how else are you handling the finances for the production? Maybe you can give our special guest Dirk a closer look into this?”

*** Milembe hands over the financial overview and shortly explains to Dirk what he can find inside this document ***

10. Sign off “thanks for tuning in / Questions

Rebecca: “Now that we’ve seen every inch of Garment’s scarf issue. From concept, to social media, to finances, I would like to thank you all for joining in. Especially our team of experts and our VIP Dirk! I can’t wait to see the end-product and I hope we got you excited as well! In case our special guest or the audience have any questions, now is the time to ask!”

[bizmediaweb]

What is Social Listening, Why it Matters, and 10 Tools to Make it Easier

Social listening allows you to track, analyze, and respond to conversations about your brand and industry online. It’s a key component of audience research.

If you don’t have a social listening strategy in place, you’re missing out on valuable insights. What do your customers think about your brand? What are they saying about your competitors?

This guide will show you how to uncover those insights and more. And then we’ll tell you what to do with them.

But first…

Table of Contents

What is social listening

Why social listening matters

How to get set up for social listening

Social listening tips

Social listening tools 

Bonus: Download a free guide to discover how to get more sales and conversions with social media monitoring on Hootsuite—no tricks or boring tips.

What is social listening?

Social listening is a two-step process.

First, you monitor social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitors, product, and any keywords relevant to your business.

Next, you analyze that information and look for ways to put what you learn into action. Taking action might mean something as simple as responding to a happy customer or something as huge as shifting your overall brand positioning.

Taking action is what makes social listening different from social media monitoring. Social media monitoring is all about collecting data. It allows you to look back at what has already happened.

For instance, you can use the information you gather through social media monitoring to test one campaign against another or monitor ROI. It’s also great information to help prove the value of social when it comes time to set the yearly budget.

Social media monitoring is based on metrics like engagement rate and number of mentions. Social listening looks beyond the numbers to consider the mood behind those social media posts. This helps you understand how people actually feel about you and your competitors, rather than simply counting the number of times your name comes up.

This “online mood” is also called social media sentiment. Keeping tabs on social media sentiment is a key part of social media listening. Understanding how people feel about your brand helps you keep your marketing and product development efforts on track. It also allows you to respond right away to positive or negative posts.

The main thing to understand is that social listening looks forward rather than backward. It’s about analyzing the information you collect and using it to guide your strategy and day-to-day actions.

Why social listening matters

If you’re not using social media listening, your marketing strategy has significant blind spots. Real people are talking about you and your industry online. You want to listen to them, right?

Simply put, if you care about your customers, you care about the insights you can get from social listening. Here are some of the ways social listening can benefit your brand.

Customer engagement

Social media listening helps you identify opportunities to engage in conversations about your brand. This could be anything from someone saying how much they love your product to a customer service request.

For example, on its annual Purdue Day of Giving, Purdue University uses social listening to identify donors. They then to respond personally to everyone who mentions on social media that they donated.

This creates donor engagement and excitement, increasing the odds that people will donate again the next year. It also helps the university keep the momentum going on this critically important fundraising day.

Elizabeth Holmes thank you for your suPURDUEper donation on #PurdueDayOfGiving to Purdue Swimming & Diving! @purduesports @elizabethann29 pic.twitter.com/LdpdRCqnIJ

— Purdue Swimming (@PurdueWSwim) April 26, 2018

The online fundraising event is growing each year, with more than $37 million raised during the 2018 event.

Tweak your strategy in real time

Remember, engagement is great, but only if comes with positive social sentiment. Social listening allows you to spot changes in sentiment in real time, so you can get a sense of what triggered the change. Look at your recent posts to get a sense of what has gone so right—or so wrong.

If you’re getting a lot of positive engagement, look for the reasons behind it. Your customers share a ton of useful information about what they like and what they don’t. Those lessons can help guide your strategy across channels.

For example, Penguin Random House used social listening to guide its publicity strategy for Leah Remini’s book “Troublemaker.” The book was getting good reviews, but they wanted to understand why. What exactly did readers like?

Using social listening, the publisher learned that people most liked Leah’s personal storytelling and authentic voice.

Based on that finding, Penguin Random House focused promotional attention on Leah herself, rather than on Scientology—the subject of the book. When they hosted an author Q&A on Goodreads, they specifically focused on questions about Leah’s own life.

Social listening also helps you address PR disasters before they get out of hand. If sentiment is down, review the social feedback for lessons that could prevent a similar misstep in the future. If sentiment is way down, look for the cause and make changes right away, by pulling a problem post, or apologizing for an insensitive Tweet.

Maybe you’re not getting much social engagement at all. Social listening can help you adjust your strategy to get your engagement numbers up.

For example, Oslo Metropolitan University was not seeing much social engagement. Using social listening, the university was able to determine which topics its audience wanted to talk about.

They started by monitoring and analyzing keywords. They learned that alumni stories, student life, lab work, and job vacancies created the most engagement. By focusing on those subjects, they were able to engage students, potential students, and potential job applicants on their social channels.

View this post on Instagram

???? Et nytt kull paramedicstudenter takker av ???????????? Lykke til i viktig yrke. ???? @emma.betten

A post shared by OsloMet (@oslomet) on Jun 3, 2018 at 8:19am PDT

The university also uses social listening to discover relevant conversations. They can then get attention from valuable contacts who might not otherwise have engaged with their social accounts.

“We listen to young people talk about what they want to become when they grow up,” said Hallvard Lavoll, the university’s Social Media Manager. “We listen to what journalists are talking about on Twitter—when they’re looking for experts, we tell them about our scientists and researchers. We listen to our graduates. We go in, say thanks for staying with us and good luck.”

Learn how people think about you compared to your competition

Social listening is more than understanding what people say about you. You also want to know what they say about your competitors. This gives you important insights into where you fit in the marketplace.

You will also learn what your competitors are up to in real-time. Are they launching new products? Developing new marketing campaigns? Taking a beating in the press?

Social listening allows you to find out about these new opportunities and threats as they happen, so you can plan and respond accordingly.

Uncover pain points you can be the first to address

When you monitor important industry keywords, you will uncover conversations about products, services, and features that don’t currently work for customers. This is great information to feed through to your product development team.

Can you tweak an existing product or add a feature to resolve the problems people are talking about? Maybe what you learn will spur a new product idea.

You’ll also learn about frustrations with your current products. Can you tweak your products to help address the concerns? If you do, be sure to tell people about it with a targeted marketing campaign.

For example, through social listening, Brita learned that customers often complained that the people they lived with did not refill their Brita pitcher. When the company released a product that reduced filtration time, they used this complaint as the basis for their ads.

(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = 'https://ift.tt/2yXZ2vG'; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

Stephen Curry shows King Bach how to avoid roommate tension with our new Brita Stream. Tag your Best Roommate Ever. ????Watch the full music video here: https://youtu.be/zI8UnfP21lI

Posted by Brita USA on Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Develop new sales leads

Social listening helps you identify people asking questions about your industry. It’s not often a great idea to leap into someone’s online conversation with a hard sell. But you might find great leads that you can nurture into relationships for social selling.

Reach out, make a connection, and share helpful information. This will help establish your brand as the best resource when it comes time to make a purchase decision.

Identify influencers and advocates

Monitoring social conversation about your industry will give you a sense of who the important influencers are. These are important people to connect with. As the term implies, they can have a huge influence on how their followers and fans feel about you—or your competitors. You will also find people who already love your brand and are saying great things about you on social media. These are natural brand advocates. Reach out to them and look for opportunities to collaborate.

How to get set up for social media listening

Before you dig into the nitty-gritty work of social media listening, you need to decide what you want to listen for.

The keywords and topics you monitor will likely evolve over time. Using social listening tools, you will learn what kinds of words people tend to use when they talk about your business and your industry. You’ll also start to get a sense of what kinds of insights are most useful for you.

That said, here’s a list of important keywords and topics to monitor right from the start:

Your brand name and handles

Your product name(s), including common misspellings

Your competitors’ brand names, product names, and handles

Industry buzzwords

Your slogan and those of your competitors

Names of key people in your company and your competitors’ companies (your CEO, spokesperson, etc.)

Campaign names or keywords

Your branded hashtags and those of your competitors

Unbranded hashtags related to your industry

You should also monitor common misspellings and abbreviations. We’ll show you some social listening tools that can help you keep an eye (or ear) on all of this at the end of this post.

Social listening tips

Here are some important points to help you get the most from your social listening efforts.

1. Identify where people talk about you, not just what they say

Don’t limit yourself to one or two social networks. Cast a wide net with your social listening program.

You might find that the conversation about your brand or your industry is very different on LinkedIn or industry blogs than it is on Facebook. Maybe people talk about you a lot on Twitter, but not at all on Instagram.

You need to know where people are talking about you and your industry, and how those conversations vary across networks. This will allow you to create a clear strategy to join the conversation through both organic engagement and paid advertising.

2. Learn from the competition

You never want to copy someone else’s strategy. But you can gain plenty of insight about what works and what doesn’t by listening closely to what people think about your competitors.

It’s a lot less painful to learn a hard lesson by watching your competitors make a mistake than by making it yourself. Learn what you can from your competition’s wins, but keep an even closer eye on their missteps.

3. Collaborate with other teams

Your social listening efforts will provide a wide range of information that will be useful to share throughout your company. Maybe it’s a customer post that needs a response right away. Maybe it’s a great idea for a blog post. Or maybe it’s an idea for a new product or new feature for an existing product.

The customer service, content marketing, and product development teams could all benefit from what you learn. Seek input from those teams, too. They might have specific questions you could answer by tweaking your social listening setup.

4. Keep an eye out for change

As you start to collect social information, you’ll develop a sense of the normal conversation and sentiment about your brand.

Then, you can watch for changes. Major changes in engagement or sentiment can mean that the overall perception of your brand has changed. You need to understand why so you can adapt your strategy appropriately. That may mean riding a wave of positivity, or correcting a misstep to get back on course.

5. Learn from what the data tells you

Remember: If you don’t take action, you’re only engaged in social media monitoring, not social listening. Social listening is not just about tracking metrics. It’s about gaining real insights into what your customers and potential customers want from you, and how you can better address those needs. Make sure to analyze patterns and trends over time, rather than just individual comments. These overall insights can have the most powerful effects in guiding your future strategy.

10 social listening tools

With so many sources to monitor, you need tools to help you with social listening. Here are some of our favorites.

1. Hootsuite

You can use Hootsuite to set up social media streams that monitor conversations and keywords.

When you see an opportunity to reach out to potential customers, influencers, or advocates, you can respond directly or assign the response to someone else on your team.

2. Hootsuite Insights

Take things a step further with graphical reports that allow you to monitor more than 100 million data sources, including from news sites, blogs, and forums. You can also track sentiment by location, language, and gender.

3. ReviewTrackers

ReviewTrackers allows you to monitor reviews from more than 85 reviews sites, including TripAdvisor and Google Maps, as soon as 15 minutes after they’re posted.

4. Talkwalker

Talkwalker offers advanced social listening capabilities covering blogs, forums, videos, news sites, and review sites, as well as social networks.

5. Synthesio

Track conversations on highly specific topics within carefully segmented audiences. Synthesio can tag mentions by language, location, demographics, sentiment, and influence, and the reports include a social reputation score.

6. Audiense

With Audiense, you can identify any audience, no matter how large or how specific. You can then create reports that tell you what they talk about, what they like, and even how they think and behave.

7. Brandwatch

Brandwatch lets you monitor the tone and impact of the conversation across 95 million data sources. You can set up email alerts to let you know when an important conversation is taking place.

8. Mentionlytics

Track mentions, keywords, and sentiment in multiple languages and find potential influencers across social networks and other online sources.

9. Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro

Reddit sees 114.5 million unique views a month, and is a prime site for in-depth discussions. Conversations here are a key source of social intelligence, and this app will help you find and track them.

10. NetBase

NetBase uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) so you can find the most relevant conversations across the social web.

    Hootsuite makes it easy to monitor keywords and conversations on social media, so you can focus on taking action on the insights available. Try it free today.

Sign up

The post What is Social Listening, Why it Matters, and 10 Tools to Make it Easier appeared first on Hootsuite Social Media Management.

What is Social Listening, Why it Matters, and 10 Tools to Make it Easier published first on https://themarketingheaven.tumblr.com/

[unifiedsocialblog]

Social Listening: What it is, Why You Should Care, and How to Do it Well

Social listening allows you to track, analyze, and respond to conversations about your brand and industry online. It’s a key component of audience research.

If you don’t have a social listening strategy in place, you’re missing out on valuable insights. What do your customers think about your brand? What are they saying about your competitors?

This guide will show you how to uncover those insights and more. And then we’ll tell you what to do with them.

But first…

Table of Contents

What is social listening

Why social listening matters

How to get set up for social listening

Social listening tips

Social listening tools 

Bonus: Download a free guide to discover how to get more sales and conversions with social media monitoring on Hootsuite—no tricks or boring tips.

What is social listening?

Social listening is a two-step process.

First, you monitor social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitors, product, and any keywords relevant to your business.

Next, you analyze that information and look for ways to put what you learn into action. Taking action might mean something as simple as responding to a happy customer or something as huge as shifting your overall brand positioning.

Taking action is what makes social listening different from social media monitoring. Social media monitoring is all about collecting data. It allows you to look back at what has already happened.

For instance, you can use the information you gather through social media monitoring to test one campaign against another or monitor ROI. It’s also great information to help prove the value of social when it comes time to set the yearly budget.

Social media monitoring is based on metrics like engagement rate and number of mentions. Social listening looks beyond the numbers to consider the mood behind those social media posts. This helps you understand how people actually feel about you and your competitors, rather than simply counting the number of times your name comes up.

This “online mood” is also called social media sentiment. Keeping tabs on social media sentiment is a key part of social media listening. Understanding how people feel about your brand helps you keep your marketing and product development efforts on track. It also allows you to respond right away to positive or negative posts.

The main thing to understand is that social listening looks forward rather than backward. It’s about analyzing the information you collect and using it to guide your strategy and day-to-day actions.

Why social listening matters

If you’re not using social media listening, your marketing strategy has significant blind spots. Real people are talking about you and your industry online. You want to listen to them, right?

Simply put, if you care about your customers, you care about the insights you can get from social listening. Here are some of the ways social listening can benefit your brand.

Customer engagement

Social media listening helps you identify opportunities to engage in conversations about your brand. This could be anything from someone saying how much they love your product to a customer service request.

For example, on its annual Purdue Day of Giving, Purdue University uses social listening to identify donors. They then to respond personally to everyone who mentions on social media that they donated.

This creates donor engagement and excitement, increasing the odds that people will donate again the next year. It also helps the university keep the momentum going on this critically important fundraising day.

Elizabeth Holmes thank you for your suPURDUEper donation on #PurdueDayOfGiving to Purdue Swimming & Diving! @purduesports @elizabethann29 pic.twitter.com/LdpdRCqnIJ

— Purdue Swimming (@PurdueWSwim) April 26, 2018

The online fundraising event is growing each year, with more than $37 million raised during the 2018 event.

Tweak your strategy in real time

Remember, engagement is great, but only if comes with positive social sentiment. Social listening allows you to spot changes in sentiment in real time, so you can get a sense of what triggered the change. Look at your recent posts to get a sense of what has gone so right—or so wrong.

If you’re getting a lot of positive engagement, look for the reasons behind it. Your customers share a ton of useful information about what they like and what they don’t. Those lessons can help guide your strategy across channels.

For example, Penguin Random House used social listening to guide its publicity strategy for Leah Remini’s book “Troublemaker.” The book was getting good reviews, but they wanted to understand why. What exactly did readers like?

Using social listening, the publisher learned that people most liked Leah’s personal storytelling and authentic voice.

Based on that finding, Penguin Random House focused promotional attention on Leah herself, rather than on Scientology—the subject of the book. When they hosted an author Q&A on Goodreads, they specifically focused on questions about Leah’s own life.

Social listening also helps you address PR disasters before they get out of hand. If sentiment is down, review the social feedback for lessons that could prevent a similar misstep in the future. If sentiment is way down, look for the cause and make changes right away, by pulling a problem post, or apologizing for an insensitive Tweet.

Maybe you’re not getting much social engagement at all. Social listening can help you adjust your strategy to get your engagement numbers up.

For example, Oslo Metropolitan University was not seeing much social engagement. Using social listening, the university was able to determine which topics its audience wanted to talk about.

They started by monitoring and analyzing keywords. They learned that alumni stories, student life, lab work, and job vacancies created the most engagement. By focusing on those subjects, they were able to engage students, potential students, and potential job applicants on their social channels.

View this post on Instagram

???? Et nytt kull paramedicstudenter takker av ???????????? Lykke til i viktig yrke. ???? @emma.betten

A post shared by OsloMet (@oslomet) on Jun 3, 2018 at 8:19am PDT

The university also uses social listening to discover relevant conversations. They can then get attention from valuable contacts who might not otherwise have engaged with their social accounts.

“We listen to young people talk about what they want to become when they grow up,” said Hallvard Lavoll, the university’s Social Media Manager. “We listen to what journalists are talking about on Twitter—when they’re looking for experts, we tell them about our scientists and researchers. We listen to our graduates. We go in, say thanks for staying with us and good luck.”

Learn how people think about you compared to your competition

Social listening is more than understanding what people say about you. You also want to know what they say about your competitors. This gives you important insights into where you fit in the marketplace.

You will also learn what your competitors are up to in real-time. Are they launching new products? Developing new marketing campaigns? Taking a beating in the press?

Social listening allows you to find out about these new opportunities and threats as they happen, so you can plan and respond accordingly.

Uncover pain points you can be the first to address

When you monitor important industry keywords, you will uncover conversations about products, services, and features that don’t currently work for customers. This is great information to feed through to your product development team.

Can you tweak an existing product or add a feature to resolve the problems people are talking about? Maybe what you learn will spur a new product idea.

You’ll also learn about frustrations with your current products. Can you tweak your products to help address the concerns? If you do, be sure to tell people about it with a targeted marketing campaign.

For example, through social listening, Brita learned that customers often complained that the people they lived with did not refill their Brita pitcher. When the company released a product that reduced filtration time, they used this complaint as the basis for their ads.

(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = 'https://ift.tt/2yXZ2vG'; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

Stephen Curry shows King Bach how to avoid roommate tension with our new Brita Stream. Tag your Best Roommate Ever. ????Watch the full music video here: https://youtu.be/zI8UnfP21lI

Posted by Brita USA on Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Develop new sales leads

Social listening helps you identify people asking questions about your industry. It’s not often a great idea to leap into someone’s online conversation with a hard sell. But you might find great leads that you can nurture into relationships for social selling.

Reach out, make a connection, and share helpful information. This will help establish your brand as the best resource when it comes time to make a purchase decision.

Bonus: Download a free guide to discover how to get more sales and conversions with social media monitoring on Hootsuite—no tricks or boring tips.

Get the free guide right now!

Identify influencers and advocates

Monitoring social conversation about your industry will give you a sense of who the important influencers are. These are important people to connect with. As the term implies, they can have a huge influence on how their followers and fans feel about you—or your competitors. You will also find people who already love your brand and are saying great things about you on social media. These are natural brand advocates. Reach out to them and look for opportunities to collaborate.

How to get set up for social media listening

Before you dig into the nitty-gritty work of social media listening, you need to decide what you want to listen for.

The keywords and topics you monitor will likely evolve over time. Using social listening tools, you will learn what kinds of words people tend to use when they talk about your business and your industry. You’ll also start to get a sense of what kinds of insights are most useful for you.

That said, here’s a list of important keywords and topics to monitor right from the start:

Your brand name and handles

Your product name(s), including common misspellings

Your competitors’ brand names, product names, and handles

Industry buzzwords

Your slogan and those of your competitors

Names of key people in your company and your competitors’ companies (your CEO, spokesperson, etc.)

Campaign names or keywords

Your branded hashtags and those of your competitors

Unbranded hashtags related to your industry

You should also monitor common misspellings and abbreviations. We’ll show you some social listening tools that can help you keep an eye (or ear) on all of this at the end of this post.

Social listening tips

Here are some important points to help you get the most from your social listening efforts.

1. Identify where people talk about you, not just what they say

Don’t limit yourself to one or two social networks. Cast a wide net with your social listening program.

You might find that the conversation about your brand or your industry is very different on LinkedIn or industry blogs than it is on Facebook. Maybe people talk about you a lot on Twitter, but not at all on Instagram.

You need to know where people are talking about you and your industry, and how those conversations vary across networks. This will allow you to create a clear strategy to join the conversation through both organic engagement and paid advertising.

2. Learn from the competition

You never want to copy someone else’s strategy. But you can gain plenty of insight about what works and what doesn’t by listening closely to what people think about your competitors.

It’s a lot less painful to learn a hard lesson by watching your competitors make a mistake than by making it yourself. Learn what you can from your competition’s wins, but keep an even closer eye on their missteps.

3. Collaborate with other teams

Your social listening efforts will provide a wide range of information that will be useful to share throughout your company. Maybe it’s a customer post that needs a response right away. Maybe it’s a great idea for a blog post. Or maybe it’s an idea for a new product or new feature for an existing product.

The customer service, content marketing, and product development teams could all benefit from what you learn. Seek input from those teams, too. They might have specific questions you could answer by tweaking your social listening setup.

4. Keep an eye out for change

As you start to collect social information, you’ll develop a sense of the normal conversation and sentiment about your brand.

Then, you can watch for changes. Major changes in engagement or sentiment can mean that the overall perception of your brand has changed. You need to understand why so you can adapt your strategy appropriately. That may mean riding a wave of positivity, or correcting a misstep to get back on course.

5. Learn from what the data tells you

Remember: If you don’t take action, you’re only engaged in social media monitoring, not social listening. Social listening is not just about tracking metrics. It’s about gaining real insights into what your customers and potential customers want from you, and how you can better address those needs. Make sure to analyze patterns and trends over time, rather than just individual comments. These overall insights can have the most powerful effects in guiding your future strategy.

10 social listening tools

With so many sources to monitor, you need tools to help you with social listening. Here are some of our favorites.

1. Hootsuite

You can use Hootsuite to set up social media streams that monitor conversations and keywords.

When you see an opportunity to reach out to potential customers, influencers, or advocates, you can respond directly or assign the response to someone else on your team.

2. Hootsuite Insights

Take things a step further with graphical reports that allow you to monitor more than 100 million data sources, including from news sites, blogs, and forums. You can also track sentiment by location, language, and gender.

3. ReviewTrackers

ReviewTrackers allows you to monitor reviews from more than 85 reviews sites, including TripAdvisor and Google Maps, as soon as 15 minutes after they’re posted.

4. Talkwalker

Talkwalker offers advanced social listening capabilities covering blogs, forums, videos, news sites, and review sites, as well as social networks.

5. Synthesio

Track conversations on highly specific topics within carefully segmented audiences. Synthesio can tag mentions by language, location, demographics, sentiment, and influence, and the reports include a social reputation score.

6. Audiense

With Audiense, you can identify any audience, no matter how large or how specific. You can then create reports that tell you what they talk about, what they like, and even how they think and behave.

7. Brandwatch

Brandwatch lets you monitor the tone and impact of the conversation across 95 million data sources. You can set up email alerts to let you know when an important conversation is taking place.

8. Mentionlytics

Track mentions, keywords, and sentiment in multiple languages and find potential influencers across social networks and other online sources.

9. Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro

Reddit sees 114.5 million unique views a month, and is a prime site for in-depth discussions. Conversations here are a key source of social intelligence, and this app will help you find and track them.

10. NetBase

NetBase uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) so you can find the most relevant conversations across the social web.

    Hootsuite makes it easy to monitor keywords and conversations on social media, so you can focus on taking action on the insights available. Try it free today.

Sign up

The post Social Listening: What it is, Why You Should Care, and How to Do it Well appeared first on Hootsuite Social Media Management.

Social Listening: What it is, Why You Should Care, and How to Do it Well published first on https://getfblike.tumblr.com/