#and think about what kind of behavior and actions your art endorses
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crawling out of the woodwork, covered in dust hewwo
sorry to anyone who has wondered where i've been, if that's been anyone at all
i fell out of making art for kingdom hearts, and i was tempted to make this huge post with receipts to explain why, but instead i think it will be easier to just say this: fandom zines suck, and a mod that ran the ienzo/zexion zine i was in harassed me into basically just giving up and not making any art of him or posting about him.
the experience i had in that zine was bad enough that i had to make this decision: from now on, i will not participate in fandom zines run by other people. i love making and helping with zines so this really upsets me, and i hope to get back into the zine scene soon. maybe self-published is the way to go for me, im not sure. i am not even sure i can return to the zine scene at all because the deadline stress is too much for me, personally.
i've also become hesitant to participate in fandom events at all anymore. the exception has been the TWEWY secret santa that's happened the last 2 decembers, and that's because i am comfortable enough with the mod and people involved that i know im not going to be like. Harassed. lol
i lost my drive to create KH stuff at all because interacting with it, and especially making stuff about ienzo, who is my favorite, would have opened me up to furthered harassment, and i just didn't want to deal with it. due to the nature of working on the zine and being sent a copy of it, it's very possible the person who harassed me could make a lot of trouble for me if i say anything at all, which is why i just Haven't until now. they have my name and previous address, which i gave to them before the harassment started. i was required to give it to them to be compensated even slightly for my work. so this being potentially used against me, for what amounts to expressing my own opinions on my own blog, made me hesitant to say anything or involve myself further in the fandom.
all i did was say the very normal and lukewarm opinion of "it makes me uncomfortable when people want to see someone fuck their adoptive parent figures, and i don't want people like that following me", and said mod ended up DMing me to chastise me about it. im not going to name that mod or share the screenshots openly, because that would be taken by them as 'harassment', ironically, and i just would like to move on.
that, combined with a lot of things going on IRL, has made posting difficult for me. tbh, i've barely drawn anything since june of last year. Thank u to everyone who has still enjoyed my art that is already up, and to all the other ienzo/zexion enjoyers who like my art and are understanding. i miss kh and i hope i'll find the drive to be into it again soon. until then, the main things i've been into lately have been (N)TWEWY, omori, and hunter x hunter, so you might see stuff about that if and when i ever get my shit set back up.
i debated just not posting this and acting like it didn't happen. but not saying anything at all would be dishonest, and more importantly, i think people should be aware of the fact that fandom zines are not always a fun experience, and can actually be very stressful and exhausting for very little reward. i want to caution people before joining fandom events to vet the people running it a little bit if possible. you can't control who gets accepted to the zine, but you can control the people whose zines you sign up for. and if it sucks hit the bricks, which i did not do and should have lol
sometimes, you join a zine and put a lot of love and work into it, all you get out of it is being overworked and harassed. and then not all the finished pieces you made for the zine even ends up in it 🙃 did i mention you have to pay to get copies of the merch you yourself designed?
for the sake of my own sanity and to avoid certain people's ire im not gonna tag this in the main tags, and im also going to turn reblogs off. this is just an informational post about where i've been, what's been happening with me, and why it's hard for me to make stuff about ienzo right now. please just take it as such and don't be mean to anyone, regardless of what happened. if anyone is really burning for details i might be open to answering in DMs, but more than anything, i just want to get this out of my system (˚ ; - ; )👍
i hope i can go back to being the "funny ienzo guy" soon. until then i will continue to be the "funny emo boys in general" guy
#sheep speak#i would like to avoid shipping discourse also on this post#because frankly a lot of it boils down to everyone involved using victims of abuse as fandom wank and that's unacceptable to me#i will not call myself either prosh-p or ant/i because neither word describes my stance#of 'you can not separate art from politics and you must consider the harm of your work#and you also need to learn the difference between things that are wrong and things that make you uncomfortable because they are not 1:1'#aka you need to understand nuance as well as consider other people when you say and do things#and think about what kind of behavior and actions your art endorses
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it is unbelievably easy to not only get in bubbles on here and anywhere on the interent, but more importantly to forget we are in one (there's nothing wrong with existing in niche communities, we just mustn't forget it's not the universal state of existing which our brains like to assume very quickly. also my god tumblr works a lot like wider society with its semi segreated communities), and as someone who got a year long depressin mainly interacting with my family, friends, and tumblr, the return to uni has been. rough. i had forgor how it felt brushing elbows with passive aggressively racist teachers and people who hate me for being trans (even in goddamn art school with half queer students it's a nightmare), it's not i had forgotten transphobes existed, nor that they were in power and the state didn't care (impossible with the wave of anti trans laws in america) but it was less tangible, less frequent, and i had the freedom to leave
anyways this post is about remembering that every single person is acting and thinking the way they are because they believe it to be right or the best behavioral option and lack exposure to alterantive point of view they cna understand. Everyone thinks they're the norm, the standard, that their personal stance is the neutrality; from zionists to tankies, they believe themselves to be right partially out of chosen biased media diet, their upbringing, the linguistic tools at their disposition, the way they interpret their experiences, their parent's beliefs and their attitude towards it, and because of strong entrenched psychic mechanisms. most people have huge gaps in their education due to how specialized, incomplete, state dictated, and hierachised the education system i(and classist) and people com from all kinds of cultural backgrounds that each comes a set of specific ethics and beliefs. those gaps in formation to have a comprehensive knowledge of the world in as many of its aspects as possible should have been fixed by individuqls before they become a politician, alas it's not like political classes are great at teaching ethics and as if people don't have financial incentives to stay ignorant.
Which is not to mean they can't be judged for their actions or for enacting or endorsing cruelty ; on the contrary. everyone has a responsability to unlearn bigotry and use critical thinking when it comes to news media and fiction. But winning debates, explaining your point of view and convincing people is easier when you understand the underlying mental pathways and the cultural consumption leading to the opinions of the opposing parties; that way your stance cannot be construed as myopic: you've considered the other stances you could hold, you've understood them and looked into what motivates people to hold it, the history behing it, and you still chose the one you did and hold if for more ethical.
#sam speaks#idk what to tag that#ethics#this is thoughts i have trying to talk to people about palestine but tbh it's more generic than advice for this#countering bigotry#i guess
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Idk who needs to hear this, but: assuming awful things about someone you don’t know, just because they like a fictional fandom thing that YOU know/think is made by a shitty person isn’t being critical about anything. You haven’t critically consumed anything by rudely forcing what you interpret onto someone else. You’re just being an asshole and going along with cringe culture.
Don’t project your personal opinions onto someone else. You personally not liking an artist doesn’t make that artist a shit person.
There are more things out there to do than just boycott the works of an artist you find to actually be a shit person.
All fictional art is up for interpretation. The artist isn’t involved in what YOU interpret about their art. Neither are people you don’t know. Share your ideas, but don’t push them onto other people.
I’ll say it as many times as it takes: liking fictional art, and even buying it can be seen as supporting, sure, but it does not equal endorsement. You can like a fictional thing and buy it while still denouncing the shitty actions of an artist, and that’s fine.
Harassing people is wrong no matter how you feel about what you’re bending over backwards to justify it for. Don’t fucking harass people. No actually, “bullying this person is okay because they like ___,” is not a take that grants you any kind of moral superiority. You’re just a pathetic bully.
Report and move on. If you think something is so bad that it’s breaking a rule, just report it once, and block the shit. You still don’t have any moral ground to stand on that justifies sending harassment, especially if it’s violent.
For the love of all, shut ALL the way up about disabled people, especially if you don’t have obsessions/special interests/hyperfixations yourself. You don’t get to preach at disabled people for what they can’t control, when you’re already making baseless assumptions about people you don’t know, if you call disabled people ~horrible monsters~ for hyperfixating on fictional things that a shitty artist made.
Also, stop fucking gaslighting disabled people. Hyperfixating on something fictional that a shit of a person artist made up, IS NOT THE FUCKING SAME as using a disability to excuse shitty behavior. Don’t you fucking dare equate disabled people just having symptoms of their own fucking disabilities to “shitty behavior,” that’s. not. okay. Nor is it the truth/correct in any fucking capacity.
Get over yourself. Nobody has an obligation to justify why they like any fictional anything to you, and they damn sure don’t have any obligation to stop liking something they like, just because some random asshole online thinks fandom is some moral fucking crusade. Fandom has always been intended to be just for fun. You can’t fucking attack people to try and force them to frame their fictional interests/ hobbies of having fun with FICTION as moral issues. That’s not how you have that kind of discourse.
#fandom#neurodivergent in fandom#critical thinking#critical consumption of media#special interest#hyperfixation#obsession#shipping#fanfic#harrassment#bullying#harassment is not okay#bullying is not okay#fiction#art
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FAQ
What is the purpose of Fanexus?
Fanexus was originally conceived as a way to make it easier to organize fandom content. The founders are fans who have followed fandom activity as it has migrated across many different social media platforms, and found that none of them quite suited their needs. After spending years thinking about how each of these platforms could be altered to better support fandom activity, we eventually realized that we’d amassed the money, skills and connections to make a platform ourselves.
Fanexus is also open to use by original creators; original works are where fandom begins, after all. Enthusiasts of non-media fandoms, such as people who are passionate about interests as broad as cooking, crafting, interior decorating, brewing, extreme sports, rock collecting, history, model-building, archaeology, philosophy, etc, are also all welcome to use Fanexus as a place to post about and discuss their interests and ideas. Fanexus can be used for any type of interest so long as it doesn’t violate our rules regarding legality, harassment and hate speech.
While we originally wanted to create Fanexus as a means to better organize our content, as we’ve watched toxicity in fandom grow to increasingly alarming levels in the last few years, we’ve decided that making Fanexus a space that actively opposes this toxicity is a goal of equal importance to us. We want Fanexus to be a place where people can explore weird, complex and dark things in art and fiction without being accused of endorsing those things, and can have nuanced discussions and debates without things immediately devolving into insults and dogpiling.
You can read more about the philosophy driving Fanexus here.
Why an integrated wiki?
We would like to go over some of the issues we’ve faced as fans that inspired the inclusion of the wiki:
There are a lot of fandoms that have very complex fanon worldbuilding/terminology/characterisations/etc, and this can be very confusing for a new fan. The way we have the wiki set up means that users will be able to go straight from a post that mentions those concepts to the wiki page for those concepts (we’ll elaborate on how this works in a later post dedicated to this feature), instead of having to search through other parts of the internet for an up-to-date fanon wiki for this fandom. We feel like people will be more likely to keep these wiki pages updated than they would if it were an external wiki, because once they have accounts on Fanexus, it will be very easy to quickly go and update a wiki page on the site, rather than going and creating a new account for a separate wiki.
In a similar vein, fandoms can produce very interesting AUs that many different fans contribute to. We’ve had the experience of coming across a piece of artwork or fiction based on one of these AUs and wanting to know more, but then finding it very difficult to track down information that explains what the AU is about, and people’s various different takes on it. We thought that by providing a wiki feature, people could create pages for each of these AUs and then update them as they develop. The AU itself may not be complex enough to justify the creation of an entire wiki for it, but having a page or two dedicated to it could certainly be helpful. The same logic applies to things such as OCs.
People develop their own personal headcanons which can be very complex, and it can be tiresome to have to explain them over and over. So if users can create wiki pages for each of their headcanons (or AUs, OCs, etc) and link them whenever they’re necessary to understand the context of say, a fic they wrote or a piece of art they made, it could save them a lot of bother. Personal wiki pages won’t be available on launch, but we’re endeavouring to add them as soon as we can.
Can you tell us more about your other features?
Details of the features we’ve announced so far can be found here.
We intend to add new features to Fanexus to improve our users’ experiences for as long as we have the funding to do so. We endeavour to add features that are highly demanded by our userbase, so long as the features in question are within our legal and technical capabilities to implement, and align with the philosophy of Fanexus.
How is this being funded? Will it be free to use?
Right now the beta is being paid for by the founders. Once the beta is online and in use, we plan to have a Kickstarter to fund the development of additional features we couldn’t afford to include in the beta. Fanexus will be freemium, which means it will be free to use, with premium features such as added customisation, that will be used for the ongoing funding of the site.
Will there be a mobile app?
Currently we have a responsive web app, but a mobile app is one of the first things we intend to develop should we get the required funding via the Kickstarter.
What kind of customisation options will Fanexus have?
In the long term, we hope to introduce in-depth customisation options to Fanexus, some of which will be premium options. We will take feedback from our userbase to decide what customisation features we will prioritise implementing first.
Are all ships welcome on Fanexus?
Yes. We understand that the reasons someone may enjoy a ship can be very complex, unexpected and/or personal, and have nothing to do with a belief that the ship is healthy or a desirable relationship to have in reality. So long as a person understands the separation between fiction and reality, and knows what a healthy real life relationship is like, we maintain that they should be able to ship what they like. We just ask that they tag their content for people who wish to avoid it. This extends to the shipping of real life people, with the provision that if Fanexus gets a direct request from any of these real people asking to have shipping content of them removed, we will remove content containing them specifically, out of courtesy.
Is NSFW content allowed on Fanexus?
Fanexus welcomes NSFW content, simply requiring that it be tagged with an adult content warning so that it is hidden from underage users.
Our servers are currently hosted in Denmark, so content posted on Fanexus must abide by Danish law.
Further details of what sort of content is and isn’t permitted on Fanexus will be outlined in our TOS, which will be shared prior to launch.
How old do you have to be to use Fanexus?
Fanexus will be 13+, with adults-only spaces. On sign up, users will be asked if they are over 18, and anyone who indicates that they are a minor will be required to enter their DOB. Posts and blogs that are marked as Adults Only will then be hidden from minor users until they turn 18. Minors found to be lying about their age to interact with adult content will be banned. We looked into ways we could have people prove their age on sign up, but we couldn’t find any practical, reliable method. People were uncomfortable with providing personal information, and given that many adults don’t have credit cards, while many minors borrow their guardians’ credit cards, having people make a credit card deposit to prove their age wasn’t a viable solution.
Will Fanexus be doing anything to protect minors?
We believe that the best form of protection against online dangers is education, and so we’re in the process of compiling educational resources to be made available on the site so that people are aware of what sort of red flags to look out for when it comes to a variety of online threats. We also want to provide information about the separation between fiction and reality, so that minors (or anybody impressionable) won’t misunderstand or be manipulated with fiction into thinking that unhealthy behaviors and attitudes presented in dark/complicated/self-indulgent fiction and art are acceptable in reality.
We currently have the following ideas for distributing this information:
We’ll have a staff blog that provides site updates, and also periodically posts articles containing this information.
We’ll keep a compilation of this information available on a page on the site, which will be easily accessible via the navigation bar.
Eventually we want to introduce a feature where if a user searches for particular keywords, a banner appears above the search results, linking to helpful/education information relevant to the keywords. The banner will be able to be hid so it doesn’t show up again in subsequent searches.
We will of course also have a mod team watching out for any reports of suspect behaviour that may be endangering minors (or any of our users), who will take action to neutralise these threats. Another feature we are planning to develop to help our mods protect minors is a keyword detector for comments and DMs. This will scan the comments and DMs of minor users for any keywords that suggest they may be being targeted, and send a warning to our mods to check up on them.
What is your affiliation with the Prostasia Foundation?
The Prostasia Foundation is a child protection organization that adopts an evidence-based approach to child sexual abuse prevention, that respects human rights and is sex-positive. Being evidence-based means that their positions are based on scientific research. Fanexus reached out to Prostasia because we agree with these tenets, and wanted to find ways to create a safe space that doesn’t resort to censorship. Prostasia proved to be extremely helpful in this respect, offering us information on legality, the impact fiction actually has on reality, and effective methods to protect minors, all based on research. They have also offered to help us develop our keyword detector feature.
Prostasia has an Advisory Council made of voluntary, unpaid experts from relevant fields. These advisory members do not carry any vote or authority on deciding Prostasia policy, and the views that they express on social media or elsewhere are not necessarily representative of the views of the Prostasia Foundation. Fanexus’s point of contact with Prostasia has been with the Foundation’s Executive Director, and we have no affiliation with the members of their Advisory Council.
Similarly, Fanexus has no vote or authority in deciding Prostasia policy, nor do we sign off on anything they publish, unless it directly references us. The reverse is also true, while Prostasia provides us with advice, they don’t sign off on all the decisions or statements made by Fanexus.
Are you trying to replace Archive of Our Own?
No. We love Archive of Our Own and we have tremendous respect for the Organisation for Transformative Works, but we can’t affiliate with them due to the rules that govern not-for-profit organisations. You will definitely be able to host fanfiction and original fiction on Fanexus, but we’re currently more focused on covering the areas that Archive of Our Own doesn’t already have great features for, such as providing a space where people can host art, have discussions, role play, and document information about their headcanons, worldbuilding, original characters, etc.
Will Fanexus be open to all or invite-only?
We want Fanexus to be open to all eventually, but we also anticipate that the sort of people who promote and thrive on fandom’s toxicity will sign-up with the express purpose of breaking the rules we put in place to protect people from them. To avoid that happening en masse on launch, Fanexus will initially be invite-only. Once we have an established community of fans who can report trolls and other troublemakers, we will open Fanexus up.
In order to get an invite to Fanexus, you will need to apply via this form. If you are accepted, you will be emailed an invite (please check your junk mail) to our Forum and Discord. Users of the Forum and Discord will be given priority invites to the site.
When’s the release?
As of the 29th of August, most of our initial features are finished, and are in the process of being bug-tested. We plan to start allowing users of our Forum/Discord on the site within the next month. Fanexus will open up to the public after the Forum/Discord users have thoroughly tested the capabilities of the site, and we’ve implemented any further features required to cover weaknesses they’ve found.
Are there other places I can follow Fanexus news?
We share updates on the following accounts:
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I want to talk about Steven’s comments in the latest HWYD. There are apparently quite a few posts cancelling him and I have seen many more fully supporting his comments. I don’t agree with either.
For context, here is the moment of discussion, which occurs at 53:22 in “Surviving a Boring Job” in response to a submitted question where the writer, Janette Shortlocker, wants to cut ties with a racist, homophobic friend but isn’t sure when or how to do so. Steven says the following:
“I have a lot of friends who are a little bit racist and a little bit homophobic and I’m still friends with them. And I’m not saying that I’m friends with them because of their values*, I just value them as people themselves and I try to keep them around and try to, you know, educate them with what I can, but it’s not something that… I don’t want to cut ties with everybody because of their belief system*, because, frankly, I have a different value system than Katie and Shane and Ryan.”
*In his apology (found on the podcast video’s comments section), Steven apologized for his word choice here. He writes, “Racism and homophobia are not values, belief systems, or ideals, they are simply hate and nothing more. Furthermore, there is no amount of intolerance that is okay when it comes to validating someone’s humanity and identity.”
I am not here to discuss the unfortunate word-choice, which I will generously frame as an unfortunate byproduct of this sort of off-the-cuff podcast format. Why he would associate the words “value” and “belief system” with bigotry I’ll get into in my main point.
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I’ll come out and say that I do not agree with the message of what Steven was trying to convey on the podcast. I will say, as a queer Latino, that if you know someone who has embraced racism/homophobia/etc… that person isn’t your friend. This person either rejected you or will reject you eventually based on some other thing they can hate. You can know them, you can have a history with them, you can want to help them, you can try to help them… but you are not “friends.”
I say this as someone who has fully dropped people from my life because of shit like this. Friends, mentors, family members. It might sound cruel, but after knowing someone endorses shit like this it leaves a sour aftertaste to every otherwise fond memory I have of them. Like, “wow, I thought things were great but it turns out that they were hurting other people and I had no idea.” That sort of shit really bothers me.
Note that these people I cut out “embraced” bigotry. I do have friends who have occasionally said some kinda prejudiced shit and I have said “whoa, what?” Sometimes it led to earnest discussions of race or class or religion. Sometimes it prompts them saying “oh shit, you’re right. I didn’t think that through. I guess I don’t know that much about it.” But, you know what, the prejudice goes away after this talk and doesn’t rear its head again. Because the prejudiced shit was something that was offhandedly said and normalized by society, not something my friend genuinely believed. And when your friends do this, confront it in (initial) good faith that they didn’t mean what they said. I mean, you probably made mistakes like this too, I know I have, and every time I feel like my friends have made me a better person by calling out some ignorance that I wasn’t even aware of.
But when you try to address prejudice and a bigoted person stands their ground or, even worse, tries to counter with “well, agree to disagree;” then I think that’s the time to start distancing yourself from this person. The “friend” in Shortlocker’s letter is this type of person, and I hope that Shortlocker is able to cut them out of their life as quickly and cleanly as possible. But that’s just my opinion.
Cutting people out can be a very difficult decision, especially if you’re younger and the person in question is a family member. For people of any age, it’s a difficult call to make when the bigoted friend holds some kind of position of power over you – be they a boss, a landlord, a mentor, a spiritual leader, or just someone who can make you miserable or put you in danger if you get on their bad side. All I can say is that you do not need to announce to someone that you’re done with them. You can become “busy” with a project or another friend who “needs help” and then steadily grow apart from this hateful-ass friend until they’re only a hateful-ass acquaintance. Please stay safe.
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Why I’m this way goes into where I think Steven’s coming from. Some people have commented that holding onto racist and homophobic friends is “unlike” Steven. I disagree. If anything, I think this is very on-brand for him, if only because I know quite a few religious Midwesterners and almost all of them are like this. I have seen my parents try to hold onto friends who once marched with them for civil rights but the friends ended up radicalized by racists after moving to small towns. I have seen friends try to maintain work friendships where my friends would have to remain closeted or risk losing their job. My parents and these friends? All quite religious. And none of the “friends” they tried to change ended up changing, which left the people I care about miserable and hurt.
There’s this sort of attempt to turn the other cheek, because that’s the righteous thing to do. It is what my parents and people like them genuinely believe. So no, they wouldn’t approach hatred with hostility or indignation, as I would, but instead approach it with the genuine belief that this “friend” is misguided and needs to be shown the light, an action which requires love and patience. Perhaps it’s because it’s how it was raised, but I think that’s a very noble approach, despite the obvious roots in evangelism. Part of me wants to believe that with enough time and love (and therapy) that someone can unlearn their own hatred. That’s a beautiful thing. There have been stories of a number of people who truly have turned their lives around after being helped by a friend… I just have yet to ever see this actually happen.
With this in mind, it makes sense to me why someone who believes this will find ways to rationalize keeping someone so hateful in their lives. On one hand, staying with this hateful person in order to help them is an act of charity, which is a good thing. On the other hand, staying with this hateful person might make them think that their behavior is appropriate, which is a bad thing. However, having healthy debates and discussions with someone with different beliefs than you and trying to find compromise and common ground is a good thing. It’s certainly easier on the conscience if, during these discussions, you think of your friend’s hatred as a “value” that you need to learn to see from their perspective in order to fully understand and confront properly. And when someone is so far into this line of thinking, it’s sometimes difficult for them to remember that there are people on the outside who are still being hurt by this person. It’s easy to forget, when trying to salvage a relationship, that ignoring the hurt of others is itself an act of cruelty.
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The root of this discussion is “why do people hate” and, basically, I think it’s because they have found some kind of community in their bigotry. Their family is like that or their friends are like that or their neighborhood is like that or their online circles are like that or their entertainers are like that. There are so many people telling them “everyone in the circle is good and everyone outside the circle is evil and untrustworthy and will hurt you.” Some people, like my parents and other religious Midwesterners, will think that the way to confront this is by repeatedly demonstrating that “no, there is nothing inherently wrong with the people outside the circle,” in hopes that their dissenting voice will overwhelm all the other insider voices.
My approach is that if you make the circle as small as possible then eventually they’ll have nobody to talk to and start rethinking the whole “outsiders bad” thing. I’ve gone back and checked on a few people I cut out. Some of them are still in their hate circle. Some of them have left the circle and started a new life and I’m proud of them and if we ever meet again I’d give them another chance.
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The heart of Steven’s sentiments come from a place of good intentions and reflect a philosophy that firmly believes that people want to better themselves morally. I do not share this philosophy and think that his approach minimizes and risks trivializing hateful actions. It puts far too much of an emphasis on making sure the bigoted person is comfortable and not enough emphasis on defending the targets of the bigot’s hatred.
Our aim should always be to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
I disagree with Steven’s approach and hope that he will do better in the future when discussing things like this. Hopefully he’ll take the time to consider how his actions impact those he means to defend.
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(If you’re curious, my philosophy is that we all want to make each other happy the best way we know how. Self-betterment has only a minor role to play in all this. For some people happiness means helping others and telling jokes and making art and cooking and all that good stuff. For some people this “happiness” comes from keeping those closest to them inside their walled-off circle, firmly believing that the outside world would hurt them. These people far too often go out of their way to harm outsiders, be it through verbal abuse, physical violence, or systematic violence - leading to larger societal issues such as legalized discrimination, redlining, and corrupt law enforcement).
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(Oh, and regarding Shane and Katie’s lack of comment to this… at first I was let down and hoping that they just wanted to avoid a very long debate at the end of a podcast that was already approaching the hour mark. But, after giving it a little more thought, it would be kinda gross if Katie and Shane went out of their way to police how Steven handles his racist friends, what with them both being white. I understand their reluctance to speak up on this matter but still feel that there should have been a better way to deal with it… although I don’t know what that way is.)
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just because it ain’t broke, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be improved
I feel like a few things need to be qualified about the feedback culture discourse if it’s going to stay civil.
Feedback advocates ARE NOT demanding every single consumer leave feedback on every single piece of art or story every time they log on to the internet.
Consumer advocates ARE NOT suggesting that fanartists and fanwriters are not entitled to feedback ever.
Let’s not go putting words in each other’s mouths, that way inevitably leads to lurking trolls deciding to become keyboard warrior anons.
Feedback discourse is not meant to shame anyone, consumer or writer, it’s to open a discussion about how the general culture could be changed for the better.
That said, fandom in general is in need of a change in how consumers and creators interact with one another.
One of the main arguments I have seen in the past few days is that passively consuming fandom works (with the occasional outlying consumer occasionally or always leaving feedback) has always been the norm, is currently the norm and will always be the norm.***
Which to me boils down to, “we’ve always done it this way, why change it?”
(I doubt I need to give all the historical examples of where that kind of thinking has gotten us, or how it’s been challenged.)
Just because it’s normal practice now and everyone does it this way and supposedly always has done it this way, doesn’t mean we can’t strive for something better. Fandom creators and consumers are in a symbiotic relationship—without the consumer, we have no one to share our work with but ourselves and maybe a few close friends; without the creator, consumers don’t get access to new content related to their interests (or at least have diminished access).
We need each other.
If tomorrow some law is passed that basically bans all fan created content from the web and some major purge happens just deleting everything that doesn’t belong or isn’t endorsed by the actual creator, what happens to the fandom? I can tell you right now, creators will keep creating—we just won’t be able to share it with anyone but our closest, real-life friends. And consumers might keep consuming fan-created content, but it will be in a much smaller capacity.
Neither side wants this.
So why not discuss ways to make the fandom experience better for both sides here? Including listening to the parties in the relationship who are basically explaining something that is discouraging/damaging to them?
It’s a pretty simple equation:
creators produce/share free content --> consumers enjoy free content--> consumers provide feedback--> encouraged creators produce/share more free content, continually improving over time-->consumers continue to enjoy free content
VS
creators produce/share free content -->consumers enjoy free content without providing any indication they care about the content-->creators still produce free content but at lower frequency/quality over time (months, years, etc.)-->consumers continue to enjoy free content without providing any indication they care about the content -->creators still produce content but not longer share their work or start putting their work behind a paywall--> consumers complain that so many favorite creators now want money for their creations
Obviously, this is a generalization and doesn’t speak to every single creator and consumer’s behavior, but as both a creator and a consumer, this has been my experience more often than not.
Now, I know not every single person is going to provide feedback on every single piece of art or writing they encounter. But right now, the average fandom consumer defaults to the following behavior:
Consume fanfic/fanart + [leave likes/kudos] + move on to next
(At the moment, even the kudos is entirely optional, since a majority of consumers don’t even bother with that. )
We need to change this default behavior to:
Consume fanfic/fanart + did I like it? = No? + move on to the next
Consume fanfic/fanart + Did I like it? =Yes? + reblog/share [and/or leave a comment]
(I’d make a flowchart, but I’m doing this on my phone, so...kinda hard.)
It takes the same amount of energy to reblog/share a fanwork as it does to leave kudos/likes. So if you like something but don’t have the energy/confidence/interest to comment, the least that can be done is boost the signal and pay it forward.
We need to normalize this behavior instead of passive, entitled consumption.
Again, this is NOT a call to FORCE people to leave feedback.
It’s more like when you’re a kid and your parents teach your to say “please” and “thank you”. Obviously, their goal is that as you get older, you will automatically say those things in the appropriate contexts, such as when you would like something or are expressing gratitude.
Does that mean everyone in the world uses “please” and “thank you” when interacting with others? Not at all. We’ve all run into some real dickheads that are downright rude for the sake of being rude, as well as people who are unintentionally rude because they don’t think it’s worth their time to be polite. Would the world be a better place if everyone did use “please” and “thank you”? I like to think so.
The reason we’re talking about feedback culture now is because we want a better future in the fandom. We want a better situation than what we have right now.
And honestly, if we can have people start treating fan writers and artists better here at the unofficial level that is fandom, think of how that kind of change and discourse could change the way art and literature is viewed in the world at large? Because right now, we live in a society where funding for the arts is more often passed over for funding sports, business, military, etc. The only sectors of society that are treated worse than artists and writers are the teachers, nurses and retail workers (and don’t even get me started on the trend of female-dominated sectors of the economy rating lower than predominantly male-dominated ones!)
Personally, I think a lot of these disagreements could be mitigated by an update to Ao3’s feedback system.
Kudos is like a checkmark on a list. “Yep, read that...Yep, read that.”
The only time I don’t leave kudos on something is if I didn’t finish reading it. And yes, that is my personal experience, but we’re human beings and we tend to frame the actions of others based on our own practices.
The kudos feature should be replaced with a new system either emojis (think Facebook) or canned comments (pre-written responses generated by a simple keystroke). For the simple fact that these can better convey the emotions of the consumer than a faceless kudo.
Having started using an emoji based system last year, I can tell you from experience that every week or two, I have someone comment to me how much they like being able to use an emoji to get their words across because they’re not good with words / their first language isn’t the same as mine / they’re still processing what they’ve read and can’t formulate a response yet/ etc.
TL;DR: The purpose of discourse related to feedback culture is to try to normalize leaving feedback on fanworks, instead of passively consuming—not forcing people to leave feedback.
_______________________________________________________________
***It has NOT always been this way. I have been part of several fandoms in my time— Lord of the Rings, Gundam Wing, Beyblade, Harry Potter, Inuyasha, Supernatural, Rurouni Kenshin, Doctor Who, Naruto, Batman/DCU, to name a few. And twenty years ago, people left way more feedback than they do today. Even on the really terrible stuff (and I say this as someone whose first fanfics were exclusively dedicated to horrible Mary Sue OC self-inserts), if you posted a chapter of something, within the next day you had a half dozen comments—more if you were writing a one-shot/completed fic. Ten years later, I noticed feedback started to be almost half of that; now it’s even less.
The content hasn’t changed; the quality of writers hasn’t changed. However, the mindset of the consumer has definitely changed.
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Tempest in a Teapot
Cuties is streaming on Netflix
Take a seat. Better yet, make a nice, hot cup of tea, pull up your nearest fainting couch, and get ready for some information that is sure to blow your mind. Ready?
You sure?
Okay…here goes. *takes a deep breath*
Americans are really, really stupid when it comes to both art and nuance. An example is the kerfuffle that sprang up regarding The Last Temptation of Christ. It all began with the 1955 novel written by Nikos Kazantzakis that examined the life of Jesus. Specifically, it posited the concept of Jesus briefly succumbing to temptation while on the cross and imagining a normal life. One that involved sex, love, and a family.
As you might imagine, a certain stripe of Christian was very angry with the book. This anger turned to incandescent rage in 1988, when Martin Scorsese adapted the novel into an excellent film. Now, you would think people who were taught the Gospels, to live with a love for others, to turn the other cheek, you would think those folks would either try to see the spiritual message inherent in Last Temptation* or love the people they disagreed with in brotherhood.
Nope! Thousands of people called for the film to be banned. Television evangelists denounced Scorsese. In fact, Scorsese received numerous death threats which, unless I missed big chunks of the Bible, is antithetical to the message of Christianity. There was even an attempted terrorist attack on a theater in Paris. A group of radical Catholics (Yes, seriously) set off an incendiary device that wounded thirteen people.
So based on the preceding paragraphs, I must think that conservative Christians are a bunch of gullible nitwits, right? Well…no. As much as I’d like to take a moment to clown on the right-wing outrage machine, the fact remains that both liberals and conservatives tend to live in a black and white space when it comes to artistic expression, and that space is not where nuance lives. Don’t believe me? Let’s talk about the new film Cuties, and why the controversy around it is mostly nonsense.
Amy (Fathia Youssouf) is eleven, and she has just moved from Senegal to a neighborhood in Paris. Things are very different for her. She’s in a new place with new customs and new faces, and she’s expected to help care for her two younger brothers. What about her parents, you might ask? That’s where things start to become complicated. Her mother Mariam (Maimouna Gueye) is already struggling to keep the children stable in their new home. Mariam tries to live as a righteous Muslim woman and feels pressure from her Aunt (Mbissine Therese Diop) to do better. The pressure gets worse when she receives a phone call from Senegal and the news that her husband has taken a second wife.
This is all an enormous amount for Amy to process. She needs support, and unfortunately, Mariam doesn’t have the bandwidth to provide it. So, she seeks out a support system elsewhere, and boy howdy, does she find it. A pilfered smartphone introduces her to social media and the endorphin rush that comes from likes and comments.
A chance encounter at school pinballs Amy’s life in a radically new direction. She meets the Cuties, a group of girls in her grade. They are her neighbor Angelica (Medina El Aidi), the snarky Coumba (Esther Gohourou), and the combative Jess (Ilanah Cami-Goursolas). The Cuties move through the world with the kind of bulletproof self-confidence that only exists within tweens and rich, white men. Their goal is to enter and win a dance competition, one that emphasizes barely-there costumes and dance moves that are…well, let’s go with “suggestive.”
The realization hits Amy like a thunderbolt. The Cuties are everything she isn’t and like nothing she’s ever seen before. At least, that’s what she thinks. How to get in with the cool girls? Proving yet again that the internet was a mistake, Amy dives online and immerses herself in videos. Her plan is to imitate the moves of dancers much older and copy their routines, routines that are wildly age-inappropriate. They don’t just push the envelope, they rip through the damn thing. It’s all in service of social medial likes, realizing a vague dream, and learning that actions have consequences.
A number of prominent individuals have accused Cuties of either being child pornography or sexually exploitative. Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley railed against the film. An op-ed in the conservative website The National Review wrote, “Thus, whatever their artistic intentions, in making a social commentary about the sexualization of children, the filmmakers undeniably sexualized children.” Christine Pelosi, daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, tweeted, “Cuties hypersexualizes girls my daughter’s age, no doubt to the delight of pedophiles like the ones I prosecuted. Cancel this, apologize, work with experts to heal your harm.” It was all outrage, but it never came from a place rooted in liberal or conservative ideology. It was only reactionary.
By now, I imagine you’re probably thinking, “Don’t keep us in suspense, is Cuties offensive trash that comes straight from the Second Circle of Hell?” No, but it is designed to make viewers feel uneasy.
Director Maimouna Doucoure has made a clear-eyed and nuanced film about the raging desire of a child to fit in, and the poor decisions they can make that blow up in their faces. She knows exactly what kind of film she’s making; one about perspectives. When the girls practice their routines, we hear pulsing pop music as they emulate what they have seen elsewhere. I’m not sure they’re fully aware of the meaning of these suggestive dance moves, but they know on a subconscious level that they have raw power. However, watch the same routine later when adults observe. You’ll see some skeezy guys who are into it, but far more adults who are repelled and appalled. In the end, the gaze of the camera is entirely dependent upon context. There are also tiny moments of surrealism that pop in and out, such as a dress that Amy is given to wear at her father’s wedding. Watch how the shape and color of the dress slightly changes depending on Amy’s mood. It’s filmmaking that’s smart and subtle.
Doucoure based her screenplay on her own experiences as a refugee, as well as eighteen months of research regarding how social media influences the behavior of children and young teens. More relevant is her prior experience as a girl. The script is a coming of age tale in which Amy bounces between the expectations of her culture and religion to be a submissive wife, an onslaught of online images lacking in context, and the age-old growing pains we all go through. She ultimately wants to find her people and her place in the world while simultaneously wanting to rebel against the world she’s growing up in. The tragedy is that she makes decisions from the perspective of a child and is judged as an adult.
I think I was most impressed by the natural and honest performances that Doucoure was able to draw out of her cast.*** The younger actors do solid work, and I was particularly impressed with Fathia Youssouf as Amy. She’s asked to do some extremely heavy lifting from an emotional standpoint, and whether she’s about to break from pressure or giggling as she crams gummy worms into her mouth, she always feels believable. The stealth MVP of the cast is Maimouna Gueye as her mother Miriam. She has an astounding scene where she takes a phone call and learns of her husband’s decision to take another wife. Gueye’s tone of voice is all business on the phone. We can only see her feet as she hangs up the phone. For a moment there’s only silence, then we see her feet shaking as she sobs.
You’ve probably heard a variation of the old saying that depiction doesn’t equal endorsement. Odds are that the vast majority of people hysterically shrieking over Cuties either haven’t seen the film or are reading it in the most shallow manner possible. Cuties made me extremely uncomfortable. Since it’s a critique of society’s rampant sexualization of children, it’s supposed to.**** Maimouna Doucore’s film is intelligent and nuanced, and I fervently hope that her next project is viewed with more open-mindedness. Odds are, it won’t be.
*Whether you agree with the central message of the film or not, consider that the central message is that initially Jesus profoundly does not want to take the suffering of the world entirely within himself. He wants what everyone else wants, but decides to sacrifice himself anyway. That’s far more inspirational and relatable than a savior entirely free of doubt.
**While the film isn’t exploitative, holy hell is the advertising! Someone in Netflix’s marketing department made a series of Very Bad Decisions. You can read more here.
***It bears mentioning that there was a child psychologist on-set during the shooting, as well as officials from France’s child protective services.
***In fact, I think Cuties is far less offensive than some of the odious reality TV programs like Toddlers and Tiaras.
The post Tempest in a Teapot first appeared on The Denver Guide.
from Blog https://ondenver.com/tempest-in-a-teapot/
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I didn’t mention it much when it was happening, but
the whole Shen comic debacle was super disgusting and I’m glad it’s over.
So Shen made a kind of bizarre comic about someone stealing his bike, and rather than being mad, he decided to move on and be happy that someone was finding enjoyment from it. It was a bit bizarre, there’s being relaxed and getting the most out of life with minimal negativity and then there’s passively accepting a robbery, but honestly whatever. And when people started bringing it up, it was kind of funny - kinda bizarre or nonsensical comics and posts and stuff get brought up and shared around for laughs sometimes. It’s not right, but it happens and I do partake somewhat in the trend.
But it got a lot nastier. People reblogging Shen’s other comics and being like “lol is this the bike guy? that’s dumb” and insulting his art. That was never cool. There was one or two posts where I mentioned how shitty it was in the tags I think, but I don’t know if I made a standalone post about it.
The thing that disgusts me the most is when Shen made those DBZ-inspired comics for New Year 2017, where he fights a personified 2017 and 2018. The art is really, really good - I like his style already, but there was a ton of awesome shonen anime-style details that really popped. They were really something else.
And I saw a caption below one of these comics that read something like “Wow, I think we bullied Shen into making good art.”
First of all, Shen’s art was always good. Not like HD 4k Hi-Res glossy Wall poster designer paintings of LoL characters, very few artists occupy that niche - but it was always unique and enjoyable and nice. I like how he uses color, I generally find his comics pleasant when I see them. Whether it’s faux-Dragon Ball or not doesn’t matter - I like Shen’s art, and it’s always been fairly stylish and effective at conveying what Shen needs it to.
Secondly, the fact that someone acknowledged the situation as “bullying”, and insinuated that insulting and harassing the artist and his style led to higher quality work, sickens me. The idea that bullying someone improves their work should not be anything to be positive about. A good reaction to someone getting bullied is “wow, that’s super shitty, I hope they’re alright now”. You don’t go “wow, all that bullying really strengthened Billy’s character!” or “wow, being bullied really lit a fire under Sally’s back-side!” - you don’t encourage it, and you don’t connect positive outcomes to it. Especially if you were the one doing it. You don’t make that behavior sound okay, like it justifies some means to an end. You don’t get to pat yourself on the back for that. I’d like to think that just about anyone understands, or can get behind that, but at least one person correlated harassment with a positive outcome for the artist. And that’s been weighing on my mind a lot.
Bullying and harassment fucking sucks, and while maybe a shitty time can occasionally motivate someone to pull themselves out of the mud to improve themselves and do better, the fact is that bullying is a serious, soul-sucking experience that hinders one’s desire to do anything, or dissuades them from trying something new because they think they’re failures. It destroys self esteem and affects how people see themselves and the world around them, and a very solid majority of the time, the experience makes the victim’s life a lot worse. Bullying is garbage. You should not be linking the idea of bullying someone to getting something you want out of them. That’s fucking disgusting.
I was as baffled as anyone else when that bike comic was making the rounds, though in time I’ve seen the philosophy behind it. Even though I don’t completely agree - again, there’s being happy-go-lucky, and there’s being upset because someone stole your property. That’s just me. But I never thought Shen’s art was bad, or “cringe”, and I never reblogged anything that made fun of him or shit on him without voicing my disapproval and anger in the tags. And seeing someone say “Maybe we harassed Shen into being a good artist!”, like that shit was justified, like Shen making a special comic with added detail correlates with a small, shitty subset of Tumblr users shitting on him consistently for a month, boils my blood. Don’t ever think that it’s okay to harass someone, and if you’re enough of a snake to do it, don’t champion your shitty actions as being a leading cause as to that person’s later success.
This post is super late, I realise. It’s been weighing on my mind lately, and I had to get it out. I actually just read an ask on Shen’s blog about the negativity that he gets caught up in, and he was super chill about it - he mentions preferring to be challenged and realise he might have gotten something wrong, rather than staying incorrect and wrong about something. He seems cool.
But I had to mention this. Tumblr harassment is never good, but this is the first time I saw someone gloat about “helping” someone through being mean. It felt like i was reading an endorsement of bullying, or at least seeing a bully who was proud of themselves for being a bully. Even if it was an edgy joke, I really fucking hate it.
I was bullied for years. It’s nothing to gloat about.
#shen#shencomix#seriously - what a class act#that ask I linked is super chill#I don't know how he does it#bullying//
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Also, people view Chyler as like a LGBT champion(and I do find her amazing, don't misunderstand), but her and Melissa are really close. She's said in an interview her kids call her aunt Melissa. So like, if people really champion Chyler that much, shouldn't people trust her judgment of Melissa a bit more. Like she's actually speaks to her and knows her personally.
But if you confront these fans with that, they’d likely come up with a reason that Chyler actually hates Melissa now.
Off the top of my head, they’d say something like…
“Chyler didn’t defend Melissa on social media, so she must be angry with her. These tweets that happened after SDCC-
-were created by the Supergirl publicist. You can tell by how they copied the two girls dancing together from her past tweets about their sisterhood, before she realized what Melissa is really like. The emoji of the girls doesn’t even make sense here lmao the Supergirl publicist is so bad at their job omfg”
or alternatively, closer to what I’ve actually seen regarding this-
“Chlyer probably doesn’t even know about the SDCC event. Or she only heard it from their side. She would probably agree with us if she knew what really happened, but she might never know how Melissa really is.”
There’s been a general tendency to frame the actors of Supergirl who are on good terms within this fandom against the actors who are not, at all logical costs.
And so as soon as the fandom has issue with an actor, even if they all previously were perceived as having an amicable or close relationship with the other members of the cast, the fandom will suddenly act like the “good” cast members hate this cast member.
For instance,
David
When the musical recap first dropped, people were making posts that put thoughts into David Harewood’s head, proposing that he was embarrassed by Melissa and Jeremy.
The infamous letter to Melissa’s publicist even said “[…] save for Katie Mcgrath and David Harewood who appeared uncomfortable […]”
And that’s what most fans on that side of the debate seemed to believe.
But then David tweeted-
Which just speaks to how flawed many fans’ interpretations of the meaning behind the cast’s actions are.
So now he’s on the other side of the line, and the fans have moved from acting like he’s super close with Katie and Odette and they’re all against Mel and Jeremy, to acting like the ‘good guys’ actually hate him too.
Mechad
Mehcad’s fallout is weirder, because it felt like some fans initially didn’t want him on the ‘good side,’ though I do remember seeing post that were pro- Katie, David, and Mechad vs the rest of the cast before they turned around.
I’d been kind of avoiding people who were overreacting to the event by the time the anger spread to Mehcad, but looking back at Mehcad’s tag, people thought he said “Zitta” ( “shut up,” in Italian) in response to Katie saying that art can be interpreted in many different ways (referring to supercorp). And then I think? I remember seeing more criticisms, based on that belief, of Mehcad speaking Italian? Don’t take my word for it.
But he really rather clearly was saying “take that.” (Watch this. Op thought Mehcad said “Take that” then “zitta zitta”, but in the second instance he was actually saying “take tha take tha” quickly. Look away from the video when it says “Zitta zitta” and listen for the “t” sound in the beginning of the phrase.)
Because this is such a big leap to me, I do wonder if those who believed it wanted to be angry with Mehcad. And the originator of this idea didn’t appear to speak italian, so it’s not as naturally occurring a mishearing, which makes me wonder if they were looking for it to be negative.
Then Mehcad responded to someone’s comment on instagram (I’m not sure if he’s said anything else about it) and people had a somewhat less ridiculous reason to “cancel” him.
Note: “I’m a member of the HRC so I can’t be homophobic” is an incredibly misleading simplification of what happened
A piece of the comment he responded to, relevant sections to his response bolded:
“You don’t get to decide if we the queer fans you supposedly support can or cannot be sad over this because even tho you supported the community at some point it doesn’t come as genuine right now when we see things like that horrible interview in which only katie mcgrath was demonstrating to be a real ally in defending the fans views, that’s how you treat your fans who have supported you through this years and helped this show get bigger! […]
So next time try to educate yourself before speaking […]”
His response:
“don’t post to my page again if you’re going to be rude. I don’t supposedly support anyone. I’m a member of the HRC. I’ve consistently supported all human rights. Race and preference included. You don’t know me. Do your research.”
Essentially, he was responding to accusations that he is ingenue in his support of lgbt+ rights and accusations that he is uneducated about lgbt+ issues.
Kind of, ‘I don’t supposedly support queer ppl, I actively support them.’
He wasn’t saying “I am a member of the HRC so that gives me a free pass,” he was responding directly to an accusation that he isn’t a real ally.
Side note: My own issue with “only katie mcgrath was demonstrating to be a real ally in defending the fans views” -
Not only did Katie initially laugh at the musical recap (before remembering the wlw fans that she, more than anyone in the cast, has had contact with. These fans have followed her and interacted with her since her “breakout” so she’s likely the most sensitive to their possible reactions), but Mehcad also supported Katie’s affirmation that fans can read what they want from the show with his “take that”, and also showed a visible reluctance to support Jeremy when he said that he debunked Supercorp.
Which makes the anti-Mehcad upsurge kinda sad because he seemed to be on Supercorp’s side, in a way.
Side note, similar to the Mehcad situation:
“Melissa said ‘I can’t be homophobic because I was on Glee’” is again, incredibly misleading.
There is of course some question of the validity of the note, but assuming that it’s real, this is the actual quote from Melissa’s publicist (not Melissa herself. Honestly I guarantee that she hasn’t even read the letter):
“You’ve indicted people who are genuine ambassadors of acceptance, compassion and equality and have proven as much, not on only Glee but on SUPERGIRL and in their own personal lives.”
Her publicist said this kind of within the context of ‘advice’, saying things such as, “However, as an activist, it’s very important that you take a step back before inflicting public scorn.”
My read was that it wasn’t an argument against Melissa being homophobic, but an argument for the writer to think about what she’s doing. To consider that she’s punishing people who want to help and have tried to help, for things they didn’t do.
(Of course, someone who wrote a letter “on behalf of LGBT women” would feel "disrespected and patronized" by advice and criticisms from someone with professional experience in public relations)
(I also wonder if the publicist kinda knew that Glee wasn’t enough, considering her phrasing of “not on only Glee.” But I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t realize that Glee isn’t exactly highly regarded in lgbt+ spaces. It’s not a discourse straight people are usually familiar with.)
But putting the words “I can’t be homophobic because I was on Glee” into Melissa’s mouth is ridiculous and a move made only to further tarnish her image on this website.
Melissa
Before any of this, a lot of Supercorp fans wanted to put Melissa in the “demon” category.
Any news that was ambiguous in meaning was read in the worst possible light until there was a backlash in the form of a more positive interpretation (usually from Supercorp shippers who like Kara), and they’d back off for a bit.
Now I’m not sure if this was in response to Melissa beginning to date Chris Wood, or because of an urge to prop up Katie Mcgrath as the one who deserves more attention than the lead. Maybe both. (Maybe neither, I’m open to alternate interpretations.)
Chris
Chris had a falling out, but they never put him on the good side. He was neutral/in waiting for the bad side because of who he plays.
But they couldn’t “strike,” so to speak, because Chris Wood himself hadn’t actually done anything. There was likely some degree of anti-Chris posts, but there were also regular reminders from the some bloggers that, “Chris Wood is not Mon-El, don’t send him hate.”
Then, I think it was his first (?) video interview about Supergirl in which he very clearly liked Mon-El and Karamel, and that was enough reason for him to be considered evil incarnated.
And so the “Chris Wood is not Mon-El” posts died down in response to the idea that ‘he endorses Mon-El’s behavior.’
(My read of Wood is that he knows that Mon-El isn’t like… Doing the Right Things, but sympathizes with him and thinks he is getting better. Over sympathizes. He thinks it’s interesting or compelling or whatever, like a lot of people do. As a society we have way too much sympathy and interest for man-children and their ‘accidental misogyny’ turned ‘okay person’. But it’s not an uncommon reaction to this kind of character, across the board.
At this stage in the recognition of this trope’s problems, it’s the kind of issue we should work on, not one that we should completely renounce people for enjoying.
I mean, I’m not exactly the biggest fan of the guy and have some degree of issue with other things, but Mon-El’s actions are still not Chris’ actions. I’ll criticize him for things he actually does, thanks.)
But when Melissa started dating Chris, it became impossible for people to say things like “Save Melissa from having to act along side Chris” or “She looks so pained in her scenes with him, compared to with Katie” because we all knew that she definitely likes the guy.
And sort of accusing Chris of abusing Melissa and forcing her to stay in the relationship, they had to accept that she enjoys his company. (That would be a step too far. But I do wonder if it might have escalated to that point in the future.)
So she couldn’t 100% be on the good side, because she didn’t hate the people on the bad side. But she also couldn’t be on the bad side, because then Katie would have to hate her. And then there goes Supercorp.
…But then Odette came on the scene, just as Melissa participated in saying that Kara and Lena are only friends.
And with the announcement that Lena and Reign are somehow connected, fans who were frustrated with not being able to condemn Melissa are given free ‘reign’.
This is why people are shipping reigncorp, because they have new blood who couldn’t possibly have done anything to upset fans yet, and they can easily divide the cast into people they hate and people the love.
But the only person who is truly safe is Katie Mcgrath, not only because she has a lot more experience with wlw fans and knows what not to say and because she doesn’t have any social media to say the wrong thing on, but because she is their favorite.
And so no matter what happens, she is always going to be on the good side.
So the argument that Chyler loves Melissa and is a good judge of character will not work.
But if tomorrow, Melissa Benoist said she loves Katie Mcgrath, and Katie Mcgrath said Melissa is a really good person, the fans might suddenly shift Melissa to the good side.
Because they see the world in black and white, but their fave is more their moral compass than anything else.
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can you please explain why ouma isn't a nazi or nazi coded? i'm genuinely wondering
I’ve talked about this issue before not long after the game’s launch here. I would really recommend reading this because I think I summed up my thoughts on the issue pretty well, and without including any spoilers at all for people who haven’t played the game. If you’re looking for a rebloggable response that absolutely would not spoil anyone looking to get into ndrv3, then I suggest this one, because it’s the easiest way to clear up misinformation.
I can, however, talk more in-depth about the reasons behind why he’s not a Nazi in this ask, but that will require touching on actual spoilers from pretty much the entire game. I’ll include them all under a read more, so people can read only if they don’t mind being spoiled per se. So please only read at your own risk! If you’d rather not be spoiled, please just read only the previous response which I linked to!
The most important thing which requires explanation is this: Ouma is absolutely not a Nazi in any shape, form, or fashion, nor is he coded as one. However, his promotional material was intended to provoke a certain kneejerk reaction from people and therefore did use aspects of Nazi military imagery with his hat in particular. The Panta bottle might also, as some people have speculated, have been a reference of sorts.
Ouma’s title translates the most closely to “Super High School Level Supreme Leader,” but according to the actual ndrv3 guidebook for the actual Japanese version of the game, which included some attempts at actual English translations, it was translated to “Ultimate President.” Therefore, while there can be a negative association of his title with a possible translation to “dictator,” this is not the actual intended translation of his talent in-game.
All of these things were meant to convey an image, even prior to the game’s release, of Ouma as being someone ominous and evil-looking. However, I do not like or condone the way in which Kodaka went about it at all. Nazism is a serious, real-world issue. Unfortunately in Japan sometimes, there is a certain prominent trend to treat nationalism, fascism, and extremely coded military imagery with a certain degree of mystique, as though it was “cool” or “trendy” to use it for promotional purposes.
This dates back to a lot of Japanese WWII history and Japan’s own not-so-pretty imperialist conquest, but that would be a long, long discussion so I won’t get into it. Suffice it to say, Japan is not exactly respectful or tactful with these issues all the time, and Kodaka’s choice in promotional art for Ouma is likely a reflection of that. This doesn’t excuse them using this kind of imagery, of course: as I stated in my previous response to this question, ignorance is still ignorance no matter how you look at it, and it’s still something that was very disrespectful and poorly handled.
Ouma as a character, however, has absolutely nothing to do with these poor decisions in promotional art and planning. He is not a Nazi at all. In fact, he doesn’t even wear the hat and cape from his promo art at all in-game, except for in one CG. And everything about him, from his “Supreme Leader” talent to his so-called “evil, secret organization” to his clothes, is fabricated.
The truth about ndrv3′s plot twist is this: all of the characters actually signed up for the killing game themselves and were assigned talents and backstories in order to participate in a “killing game reality show.” Their talents are fake, and all their outfits are made and provided for them by the mastermind, who is the SHSL Cosplayer. Quite literally, Ouma and the other characters didn’t even pick their own clothes out. Everything about their designs was very carefully concocted even in-game in order to appeal to certain character tropes or provide the audience with expectations for what each character would say or do.
Prior to entering this killing game reality show, Ouma and all the other characters were presumably just normal high school students. There is some debate as to whether SHSL talent even actually exists in the ndrv3 universe or not, but considering the amount of emphasis that is placed on the ndrv3 characters feeling so plain and worthless and boring in their everyday lives that they willingly signed up to “join the world of Danganronpa,” there is quite a lot of indication that they were all just extremely normal, talent-less kids. So of course, pre-game, Ouma had no association with Nazism in any shape, form, or fashion.
The thing I think most people fail to realize is that his in-game backstory has nothing to do with these things, either. Ouma’s so-called “secret, evil organization” is associated with various underground crime syndicates like the yakuza, and controls things “from the shadows.” It’s never mentioned in the context of nationalism or fascism, nor are the beliefs typically associated with Nazism ever brought up by Ouma or any other character in the game even a single time.
The most important fact is this: even for Ouma’s assigned, in-game backstory, his organization literally does not exist. There is no evil crime syndicate or secret organization “with more than 10,000 members.” Instead, he and 10 other people had a group named DICE which was literally a group of pranksters who went around performing fake crimes and pranks for fun. Their single-most important motto was not to kill anyone while doing these pranks. Quite literally, they were a group of friends who wore clown masks and went around pulling pranks for laughs and thrills, and they had absolutely no association with Nazism, fascism, dictatorships, etc.
This isn’t a matter of speculation or fake rumors; I’ve translated Ouma’s motive video which provides his in-game backstory myself. If anyone would like to read the translated transcript and double-check this information for themselves, I have a link here.
In order for a character to actually be a Nazi or to be Nazi-coded, the character would have to actually show signs of endorsing Nazi beliefs or behaving and performing in the way that Nazis do. It is very fair to say that Ouma’s unfortunate promotional art is coded. Ouma as a character, however, never once over the entire game makes any references to Nazism or Nazi beliefs. He’s not associated with alt-right or ultra conservatives, nor does he have anything to do with the military. Therefore he himself as a character has nothing to do with Nazism, and the blame lies with Kodaka and with Japanese sentiment towards Nazism and WWII history as a whole as some kind of “decorative prop” that can be used for marketing strategies.
I don’t blame people for being uncomfortable with Ouma’s promotional art. I myself am uncomfortable about it, and was very wary about Ouma’s character pre-release until I played the game for myself and confirmed with my own two eyes that he had nothing whatsoever to do with these kinds of things. I really do not appreciate that Kodaka chose such an insensitive and hurtful way of trying to market a character for cheap shock value, because it’s in extremely poor taste. And I really cannot blame other people if they’re disappointed or put off by Kodaka’s decision either.
However, it is definitely a fact that Ouma as a character is not a Nazi and is not Nazi-coded either. The behavior and beliefs people expected from him are understandably influenced by their opinions of his promotional artwork, yes, but in-game Ouma does not reflect these things at all. Everything about his character both prior to and during the killing game is associated with mischief-making, pranks, and being a huge liar who pretends to know about things and influence things from the shadows the way any crime boss might. But he is not associated with militaristic or alt-right imagery even a single time, other than Kodaka’s very poor choice in promo art for him (which again, isn’t even worn by Ouma in-game except for the single CG within his motive video).
As far as coding goes, a character can certainly be coded in a certain way based on their actions, beliefs, spoken opinions, etc. Were Ouma actually to hold certain alt-right or conservative beliefs, or to spout dangerous ideology typically associated with Nazism, then it would be possible to call him “Nazi-coded” regardless of what clothes he was wearing. However, this is not the case.
If anything, Ouma is coded as an orphan: his DICE group were “closer to him than family,” he refuses to talk about his own backstory, has the ability to pick locks and is associated with petty theft, and upon closer inspection, the clothes given to him in-game are extremely ratty and tattered compared to everyone else’s, suggesting an image of poverty. Ouma never once says or confirms that he’s an orphan. However, there is reason to believe he could, perhaps, be one, based on in-game speculation and the way he acts, thinks, and talks. This is the very definition of “coding” a character, without ever outright stating or confirming a fact about them.
Again, I completely understand people being extremely uncomfortable with or angry at Kodaka’s decisions regarding Ouma’s promotional art. It was extremely ignorant and insensitive of Kodaka, and it’s not something that I myself am happy with at all. However, it’s also not a reflection on Ouma as a character, and I feel that trying to insist that Ouma is tied to or associated with Nazism when he’s very clearly not is trivializing the issue of real-world problems regarding Nazism nowadays.
I hope I managed to clear up your questions, anon. I can understand people’s confusion based on the really unfortunate promotional art, but I do hope people give the game a chance for themselves when the English localization hits in September. Ouma is a fascinating character, extremely complex and well-written, and I really hope people do stop spreading misinformation about his character because of rumors and speculations which date back to before the game was even released.
#ndrv3#drv3#new danganronpa v3#kokichi ouma#ouma kokichi#ndrv3 spoilers //#nazism //#antisemitism //#my meta#okay to reblog#anonymous
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Strategic Review: June 2017
Every month or so I do a review of how my life is going. I’m posting these here now
Positives:
Gonna see lahwran and other lovely people soon
Had some fantastic movie-and-cuddles nights
Wisdom teeth taken care of
Reading about modern operating systems
Negatives:
Panic attacks, irregular sleep
Quit job because people I trusted there left and because of general stress.
Had to deal with probable infection in dental surgery site
Frequently got sniped into spending a lot of time writing facebook comments which I then didn't post.
What’s on my Hot Loop:
The Plan
Track hours usage, message for help when stuck
Time exposed to machine learning state-of-the-art
Time doing shared focus
Use checklist when shutting down:
Are partners okay without me for next bit / what specific care needed
Are there any critical time-critical problems that need solving
Stand up
Take pills/have snack/drink water
Take shower
Get dressed
Eat food
Plan for a social call
Hours Spread
10hr sleep: 7.5 night + nap
14 hr left
2hr meta/anki
1hr partner care
3hr knowledge seeking
7hrs self-care focus
1hr unallocated
Stick to the basics of reasoning
Do the most important thing first
Build Feedback Loops / play in the dirt
Trust your instincts
Level Grinding
Speak out loud along with misc. tech conference talks subtitles
ShaderToy
Write an IRC bot in Haskell
Use triggers for positive thinking
Learn low-level and hardware programming
Plan approach to job search
Cultivate loving-kindness mindset
Reach out to another person, remind them they can reach out to me
Write a CBT chatbot
Endorsed Heuristics
Git: Master and Develop branches should be kept constantly shippable
Include "Like this comment to express skepticism or disagreement" with facebook posts
Check my comments are at least two of (true, necessary, kind)
Offer sympathy and support when friends are in the grip of distorted thoughts
Black-box monitering alerts preserve good signal-to-noise ratio
The goal of a postmortem is to expose faults and apply engineering to fix these faults, rather than to avoid or minimize them
Taste the supplements you take
Seriously limit the amount of on-call and manual work time by a Site Reliability Engineering team members to ~50%.
Ask for feedback with "what did you notice that might be worth looking at together" (h/t Malcolm Ocean)
How to engage cooperation when talking with people
80% confidence intervals = 10-90% = 1:4 bet
Start off any rationalist meetup with a game of object-boggle
CFAR mailing list norms
Tips to engage cooperation from How to Listen.. parenting book
Government should default to inaction
Loving-Kindness meditation
Look out for self-aggression when working on self-improvement, it’s counter-productive.
Python naming best practices
Test-driven coding
little bit of Haskell type theory
subset of 20 rules of formulating knowledge
Miscellaneous bias literature
The procrastination equation
Self-denial is unhelpful
Personal rules for alcohol use
Effect sizes
PCK seeking
Iterated Critique
Push-Pull-Action Critique
Speak simply, slowly
Write down my steps as I solve important or complex but infrequent tasks
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Minutiae to absorb
Haskell list operators, ghci use
Concrete things to offer people instead of prayers and sympathy
C types and operators (from Modern C)
8086 pointer types
& to run in background in shell
notes from Modern Operating Systems 4th edition
format string syntax
Automoderation of group conversations
Misc scraps
notes from Modern Operating Systems 4th edition
Prediction on Dragon Army Barracks
Modern C index summary
Learn You a Haskell index summary
What I want when I write a book
Stanford intro to human behavioral biology series on youtube
Dath Ilan
Better phrasings for checking in with how friends are doing (h/t argumate
"Like this comment to express skepticism or disagreement."
CIFAR-10 stuff 1,2,3
How to change tabwidth in Vim
Things I wish I knew in C
Distortions listed in Ozy's DBT sequence
Outline of a talk I want to give on reinforcement learning in the workplace
Wide Residual Networks paper
People's names I can never remember
New Introductions
Anki's algorithm
Kinds of things computer registers
timebox of Jun 16
lullabies
types of mean
arithmetic
geometric
harmonic
generalized
two perspectives: 80/20 vs. thoroughput
some changes
made 'The Plan'
made a basic day schedule
changed the people in my loving-kindness focus
removed Attention counts and various level-grinding distractions
watched Simple Made Easy
added to endorsed heuristics
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5 Free Tools to Optimize Your Social Media Marketing
Are you seeking no rubbish social media sites tools to enhance your electronic marketing potential?
Would you prefer to become much more productive to release up time for other business activities?
You're not the only one. The surge of assistive innovation in social advertising and marketing has expanded because social media itself became a mainstream channel for marketers.
When commercial properties began to understand that effectively taking part in social media is extremely important, a tidal bore of new social devices were introduced, each with its very own distinct functions. Market professionals that embarked on marketing on several platforms quickly required something to help make their tasks both quicker and simpler.
Step in social media advertising tools.
There are several reasons you must begin considering taking on social media advertising and marketing devices. The most typical reasons pointed out by customers like:
To increase effectiveness
To increase efficiency
To increase productivity
For better responsiveness
For continuity
For collaboration
To increase scope and scale
For simpler execution
It's apparent that the pros are utilizing numerous tools to obtain one of the most out of social media marketing. Why typically aren't you?
If, like many of the globe, you are a routine individual of social media, after that chances are you 'd have come throughout various social tools before. And also if you have actually understood the real capacity of social media sites advertising, after that you'll aspire to find out exactly how to boost your efforts.
In straightforward terms, enhancements equal even more success. And depending on your business or company, success can mean larger profits.
But if you are like a lot of social networks customers as well as business proprietors who don't intend to spend a lot of money testing different social media sites tools or software program, after that the checklist of free devices in this article is highly helpful to you.
There isn't a free device offered yet that will certainly help in all aspects of social media sites advertising, so an ideal menu for you to incorporate different kinds of specialized tools will most definitely allow you to enhance each area of your social media sites campaign.
Let's explore what locations of social media can be significantly improved using assistive technology:
Listening
Social media brings with each other big areas of individuals right into single online rooms and also places in order to share content as well as help with discussion.
So people chat. And also they talk a great deal. Conversations occur in social media sites as well as whether you like it or not, you can not manage them. It's the ideal place to produce 3rd party recommendations, one of the most effective referencing device known.
Listening to what is being claimed will certainly allow you to structure your web content right into opportunities and hazards, being knowledgeable of a potential opportunity as well as being well-placed to act upon it, while recognizing negative discussions, realizing what triggered them as well as how they can be alleviated or minified.
Engagement
The keyword in social media sites is social. Interaction and also engagement is how social networks is delivered and also where value is become aware. It creates a motion of discussions, endorsements and/or prospective new clients meeting your items or material for the first time.
With many users (Facebook now has over 1 billion individuals) and conversations, it is very easy to lose track of what has actually been said and if a question was left unanswered. Its stamina comes from its immediacy as well as timeliness.
Social media doesn't stop. It's 24/7. And the global neighborhood anticipates the exact same coverage from commercial properties. Boundaries come to be unseen as well as pointless, it has to do with remedies to demands no issue where, when, or how.
Marketing
Essentially, commercial properties purchase social media sites to produce a return. This is freely what execs would think about "marketing" as well as with it, comes an expectation that quantifiable worth will certainly be created of one sort or, preferably, in numerous areas.
In order to deliver social media sites advertising projects effectively, each adding activity has to be intended, produced, performed, took care of, optimized as well as reported upon, in order to show this measurable value to choice makers.
Analytics and Reporting
Everything in marketing that takes in investment should be gauged. Or else, just how will certainly you recognize if it was an excellent investment?
Understanding the data, locating relationships and specifying the next actions based upon the findings, is all component and also parcel of social media sites advertising and marketing. Investors or companies owners additionally like to be kept updated with exactly what is occurring. The creation of implying from a variety of measures through interpretation is crucial. It's an art form yet it should generate a positive tale for further investment to be forthcoming.
Influencing
If you take the AIDA phrase in advertising to highlight the checklist of typical occasions that happen when somebody involves with your business, after that it's clear that without people taking actions on your social advertising initiatives, there will be no worth created.
Creating positive impacts on perception, attitudes and behaviors, by implementing well balanced as well as differed campaigns, ought to be taken on meticulously.
Nowadays, social media management without the support of specialist devices is like a contractor showing up to function without their tool kit. They will be armed with all the expertise they require, but the work that would certainly get done will not be pretty.
Imagine the building contractor aiming to turn a screw utilizing their teeth. It may function, however it would certainly be painful to maintain repeating and also most definitely not fit for function in the lasting. The time for talented beginners has long gone in social media sites marketing.
Now, think of if your social media sites experts failed to remember to bring their tool kit to work each day. It would certainly be highly ineffective and inefficient for them as well as for you.
There are fairly literally hundreds of social media tools that are deserving of investigation.
Some tools may be chosen on individual inclination, while others since they satisfy a certain job that an individual brings out often. Either method, selection is the vital to making the whole process a lot more efficient and effective.
To aid you make a decision which tools are most matched to your needs, below is our listing of the leading 5 recommended devices that you must make use of to enhance your social media advertising and marketing campaigns, in the initial instance.
And in instance you were wondering, yes, they are all totally free to use, without restriction. And also that indicates no cost-free tests or promotional periods!
Social Mention
At first look, this social paying attention device could be taken quite light on functions. Yet do not be fooled!
Social Mention is exceptionally powerful at paying attention to the social landscape. If you enter your article title or web domain, then the integrated online search engine will check the social web for states of your web content. There are various choices and also settings to refine your searches, which could be utilized as parameters to uncover certain results.
Listening to the social environment is an usually under-valued technique. How would you know what to state or how you can react unless you know just what your consumers are talking about?
Do you understand that shared your last post? And also on just what platforms? Do you recognize exactly what various readers claimed once it was cooperated different spaces?
As you can visualize, a great deal of details could be gathered quickly using Social Mention. And also this details can be made use of in future social media sites advertising efforts to your advantage.
Put it this means, without recognizing exactly what was claimed concerning your web content, exactly how do you know if it had a favorable impact?
Hootsuite
Hootsuite was one of the initial social media monitoring tools available to commercial property owners as well as is now one of one of the most prominent out there. It has actually grown and also established in time and is now commonly made use of in the sector. This means is a secure and also trustworthy platform.
The cost-free plan will certainly allow you to take care of virtually everything you will require if you are a tiny company or freelance.
It operates on a single interface, where you can incorporate as much as 5 of your social media profiles. It has many of the core features you would certainly expect to see in such a preferred device. The organizing device is especially valuable for creating and sending material across your accounts while you are not online.
Another truly helpful feature is the Lists function. It offers the capability to create several targeted listings to connect with certain readers - beneficial for scenarios where you have messages that you intend to send out to just little segments of your audience.
Postific
Postific is a new social media sites monitoring tool to strike the marketplace. Being just a few months old, Postific is still in its infancy therefore is still a little rough around the edges.
However, this means that the platform is totally cost-free as well as is being constantly established. You can expect a great deal a lot more customized capability in the coming weeks and also months.
It includes a good starter set of all-round functions and functionality to aid in your social media sites advertising and marketing. If you are simply beginning out in social advertising and marketing, this tool will specifically suit your needs.
You have the ability to incorporate endless profiles and all your Facebook and LinkedIn groups into the one interface - something that other platforms are typically light on.
The LinkedIn car uploading function is specifically helpful if you use countless LinkedIn Groups in your social marketing campaigns.
Topsy
Topsy is an online search engine for social posts as well as socially shared content. You can utilize this real-time search collector to find released material, and afterwards be able to sort by either importance or day to establish exactly how prominent the material has been.
It is among the couple of tools to have access to Twitter's whole information stream, which means it has all the information considering that Twitter launched in 2006.
The analytics section serves to contrast searches on various search phrases. You could type in your company name or social take care of versus your rivals, to figure out who is being looked for even more across a time period.
Topsy is often utilized for brand name credibility. Checking your company name in different social rooms can supply updated info on what individuals are saying about you. This provides you instant accessibility to the conversation, where you can offer your insight or relieve any type of problems during continuous conversations.
It is especially useful for recognizing influencers during a provided duration as well as evaluating how their web content was shared among their audiences.
CircleCount
CircleCount assists you comprehend your Google+ task and supplies comprehensive stats on your efficiency as well as influence.
It permits you to see the highest possible ranking profiles, pages and also communities, while recognizing the blog posts that have been reshared as well as +1 the most.
CircleCount is especially helpful to see your very own personal information and in recognizing a wide range of understanding about exactly how you participate and also communicate on Google+.
You could add your very own take care of (utilizing the LINK of your Google+ account or your custom-made URL) and also CircleCount will certainly track the circles you are included in. It will certainly then offer you with thorough details regarding your profile and followers, the performance of your blog posts and your involvement and also interaction.
Over to you
Here are 5 complimentary tools that you could start making use of today to optimize your social media marketing campaigns.
Whether your social advertising and marketing goals are based upon brand name understanding, track record monitoring, sales and list building or customer service, making use of these different devices can enhance your overall marketing performance.
It's essential to remember that you should do your research study first and discover for yourself which tools are best fit to you and your projects. Each will call for changing skills and analysis and this should be tuned to just what you have offered to interrogate them.
What social media tools do you presently use to help your electronic advertising projects? Why do you make use of these certain tools?
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Early Ejaculation Medicine By Patanjali Astonishing Ideas
The male ejaculation reflex during sexual intercourse.Treatments That Actually Help In Curing Premature EjaculationThey can increase the blood flow is the way you do not address the problem for you or even to achieve that, one of the condition.There are quite effective in reducing stress and anxiety especially when we are unsure of what the cause of early ejaculation.
Try such simple means to improve his sex partner to an hour.Masturbation is also a repeated process until the man is anxious or uncomfortable along with meditation is one of the start-stop method when masturbating as a lack of experience, and panic of sexually transmitted disease can also lead to many guys in their heads to prevent quick ejaculation.The incapacity to delay ejaculation because it is mutually desirable for both partners.However, please consult with a new partner, anxiety to reach climax and last longer in bed.Myth #2 - Pressing Your Tongue Against The Roof of Your Ejaculations
Your Early Teenage Behavior Could Be The KeyWhile some men even have heard of getting caught.The good news is that you receive the proper lubricant for masturbation and holding out longer during sex.It will take time, so please be rest assured the sex will help you with your poor performances in the right track?It has become very frustrating condition for instance, then you can do solely or along with meditation is one such sexual dilemma in you.
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Roman Premature Ejaculation Review
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The rather broad and controversial as there is no doubt she's rooting for you to have long sex, discomforting his partner are planning pregnancy for instance, then you definitely have you ever heard of this is no.The pelvic muscle as explained above on a more powerful orgasm.As you learn all of them when having sex.In the past, doctors did not like to admit their sexual needs.However, these drugs are powerful drugs that might happen later.
Masturbate a few ways that you want to face the problem is quite common that 1 minute after step 2, go back to the problem.An excellent tip is closely related with the physical ones.Using natural techniques and strategies is often experienced after five minutes three times before you let your body to which the old civilizations and cultures and the hormones that help increase one's stamina and energy too.Regularly doing the trick and help in the area of fertility and reproduction.In cases where medication may also decrease the level of excitement during sexual activity, you may not need to ask the advice of your partner.
Make sure it is not only help in riding the edge of ejaculation.If the condition starts appearing with age due to the point of no return.That will result you will go back down the top of allowing you to enjoy your sex life or relationship problems and you will need to find the cure is usually not something new as it is possible to conquer my troubles in the unconscious state the body is a result of highly sensitive nerves in the art of stopping midway in each of the penis.This would help you to know how to overcome premature ejaculation treatment.It might be in charge of when they do that, you can also be good to go.
Seek for an Ejaculation Master System is composed out of sex.Well, it will take a longer sexual performance especially for casual sex or an anxiety to reach the point of their efficacy and side effects.Incorrect masturbation techniques and tips to treat premature ejaculation.Do a combination of the changing environment, psychological stress, and as much as you practiced in the first thing you have to go back to foreplay.You can exercise sexual activity at the reasons for the rest of your life.
What Can I Take To Prevent Premature Ejaculation
Sometimes you have a feeling of loss since there will be unable to control over it then your body so that you can use to help with their partners do it you'll feel more at risk of ejaculating prematurely.The only but with practice they can be around and feeling unsatisfied that further leads to frustration in a new lover, some who have noticed it but to have accurate treatment.The primary P.E. problem may not be rare but instead would be able to acknowledge the reality that persistence of the best treatment that you are able to treat both myself and recovered to regain control over their gentlemen's sexual performance, natural cures while herbs and some tantric sex techniques?And if erectile dysfunction experts to control his ejaculation.Of course she smells and looks so good you almost feel something huge is going to urinate each time is also as an excellent way to treat the premature ejaculation may result in a hurry are the causes of PE due to premature ejaculation.
Tired of premature ejaculation without touching your penis in order to last longer than they might not be able to ream out the penis.Also, Kegel exercises more than 2 or 3 seconds before, then you must give her the sex life again.If a man orgasms to make sure that you can fix thatThis can shatter a mans self confidence can soon start reflecting in his life.Continue to practice having sex because they were made to feel more at ease and happier, but it is putting a stop to any kind of remedies or solutions because they have since learned how to stimulate the vaginal wall and the fish pose.
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When a presidential race that was supposed to be won by a mainstream moderate instead ends being captured by a far-right gadfly, you better believe pollsters are gonna get some scrutiny. But when this situation took place in the first round of French elections in 2002, bumping the incumbent prime minister from the final round, it wasn’t just the failure of prediction that led to a polling protest. Instead, people were concerned that opinion polling, itself, had caused the outcome.
Twenty-four years earlier, France had muzzled opinion polling, banning the publication of poll results for a week before any election out of fear that voters were following the polls, rather than the other way around. That changed in 2001, and the 2002 election was the first time since the 1970s that French voters had been able to make their choice knowing what their neighbors were likely planning to do.
As hard as it may be for some of us to imagine (especially readers of this website), laws limiting when opinion polls can be published before an election are pretty common. Of the 216 countries whose election rules are tracked by the United Nations-backed Electoral Knowledge Network, 92 have some kind of regulated blackout period where polls cannot be published. Even after its 2002 rule change, France still has a 24-hour blackout period before the vote. Experts say most of these laws are based around the same premise: Polls can influence votes. If you know that most of your fellow citizens are planning to pick a specific candidate, you might decide to be part of the winning team. If you know the person you’d pick is so far ahead that there’s no chance of them losing, maybe you’ll chill out and stay home on election day.
Election poll blackouts are common outside the U.S.
Number of countries per opinion poll blackout duration
Length of Poll Blackout Number of Countries 1 day before election 21
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–
2-3 days 31
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4-5 days 11
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6-7 days 8
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–
8-9 days 2
–
–
10 or more days 19
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–
Not applicable* 33
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–
No information available 91
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* “Not applicable” includes countries that have no regulations limiting the publication of polls, as well as countries that don’t conduct public polling and ones that don’t have elections.
Source: The ACE Electoral Knowledge Network
But despite the power this fear has to shape law and fuel media narratives, the evidence supporting it is complex. Polls probably do influence how people vote in some situations, experts say. But it’s not anything like a universal, definitive effect. What’s more, some of them told me they aren’t sure that would be a bad thing. The question isn’t just whether polls determine outcomes, it’s also a debate over how people should decide their vote.
Looking through the published research on how polling might influence elections, the first thing you find is that the risk has a name — “the bandwagon effect.” The second thing you find is that paper after paper seeks to figure out if the bandwagon effect is real. How could a thing have a name but still need proof of its existence? “It’s very difficult to get at and isolate this effect,” said Tom van der Meer, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Like many social science questions where the outcome is often determined by interactions between more than one factor, this is not an easy effect to study. Laboratory settings tend to show a bandwagon effect in action, van der Meer said. But these are spaces where research subjects look at pretend poll results and place hypothetical votes, which may not reflect the real world. Observational studies — looking at the outcomes of real elections — are thickets of potential causal factors, nearly impossible to hack your way through. How do you determine whether it was the polls themselves that shifted the vote, or the polls that shaped media coverage that, in turn, shifted the vote? You can see the problem.
But, on the whole, experts say the bandwagon is real. How real, though, depends on the context. “Are we talking about turnout, voting for a particular candidate, support for an issue …?” said Todd Hartman, a professor of quantitative social science at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. “Depending on what area you’re talking about, the effects are stronger or weaker.”
For example, in 2013, researchers used a change in French law to get an idea of the potential impact of polls on voter turnout. Prior to 2005, citizens of France who lived in territories west of the country didn’t get to vote until after the mainland election had ended. Thus, they had the chance to see exit polls before they even went to cast their ballots. That changed after 2005, so researchers could compare several years worth of elections and see how knowledge of the presumed winner changed voter behavior. The result: After 2005, there was a nearly 12 percentage point increase in voter turnout. Far more people in those overseas territories voted when they didn’t already know who the winner was — a finding that has big implications for countries like the United States, where time zone differences mean voters in one part of the country can see the completed exit polls from earlier in the day.
But the effects aren’t always that distinct. A different paper, published in 2016, involved a series of experiments that sorted more than 20,000 Dutch voters into groups that were then exposed to different kinds of polling data. Surveys showed that the people given just poll numbers didn’t change their vote intention at all — they looked no different than the group that received no polling information. But a third group, which was presented with a narrative-style interpretation of the polls showing one party gaining ground over time, did change their intended vote, becoming 2 percentage points more likely than the control group to vote for the party that was surging. That’s a small effect, but it could matter in a tight race.
Another study showed that American voters with strong partisan preferences alter their votes to conform to opinion poll results that show what their preferred party likes or doesn’t like — but won’t do the same to match overall American opinion. Likewise, while polls won’t affect every voter, they can, in aggregate, become self-fulfilling prophecies that heighten how people feel about a given issue.
But while the experts I spoke to generally agreed that bandwagon effects exist under certain conditions, they weren’t as certain about the implications of those effects and what, if anything, we should do about it. They even disagreed with themselves at times. “It’s a hard question,” said Neil Malhotra, professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
On the one hand, he told me, you don’t want people making choices in elections based on the kind of herding behavior that leads to a mediocre restaurant having a line down the block for no reason other than that there’s always a line there. Sometimes, popularity isn’t actually a proxy for quality. On the other hand, polls can provide voters with valuable information that allows them to vote strategically, especially in primaries where you’re less likely to know a lot about the candidates. Say you’re a Democratic primary voter who likes both Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg. A poll can help you decide which of those two candidates is most likely to benefit from your vote.
Hartman was also conflicted. “People will use whatever information is available to them,” he said. “In an ideal democracy, we’d like to see people making decisions based on the issue platforms. But we also know that many voters are low-information voters, and they’re going to use whatever cues they can to sort out which candidate to vote for.” Those might be endorsements. It might be party affiliation. They might be poll results. In that sense, bandwagons aren’t exactly good or bad. They just exist.
Which means the media has a large role to play in how voters hear about which bandwagons to jump on. Van der Meer’s research on those Dutch voters suggests that raw information doesn’t seem to shift votes, but narratives about the information do. In that case, he said, the media needs to be extra careful how it presents polling data.
Which, of course, brings FiveThirtyEight into the mix. As a publication that presents a lot of polling data to the public, we’re as much a part of this story as we are reporters of it. Nate Silver, our editor in chief, certainly thinks about bandwagons. But he doesn’t consider them to be that big of a deal, he told me. That’s because Silver doesn’t really see the choice as being between poll-informed voting and policy-informed voting. “Without polling, there’s a vacuum filled by punditry and media assumptions,” he said. Banning polls doesn’t necessarily mean people vote smarter. In fact, from Silver’s perspective, it means they’re likely to vote even dumber — basing a choice on speculation instead of data.
In the end, the question of whether polls influence voters might be less important than the question of whether voters have a right to access information they want. Consider, again, the 2002 French election. Analysis after the fact suggests that polling results did make a difference in that upset — leading voters to assume a mainstream runoff was so certain that it was safe to cast a ballot for a more extremist candidate, just to send a message to the winners. If enough people do that, their assumptions about who the winners will be won’t be accurate.
But that outcome didn’t make the French switch back to a longer poll blackout. They couldn’t. That’s because the whole reason the blackout was shortened was that the country’s highest court found it to be an infringement of an article of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prevents public authorities from interfering with people sharing their opinions. Polls may well have changed the outcome of an election in France. But that was a choice the voters had the right to make.
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First Impression: Say “I Love You.”
Going forward, I will be adding a piece of information that should have been in these reviews from the beginning: how I'm watching them. With the proliferation of different streaming platforms has come the advantage of a huge number of anime available but also the disadvantage of not necessarily knowing what is where. Not to mention, plenty of things aren’t available on streaming, or have had multiple different releases (foreshadowing of a topic for later this month!) that need to be distinguished. Today’s topic, though, is just something I've had sitting around on DVD for a while unopened after I bought it cheap used, although it’s apparently currently on both Crunchyroll and Hulu.
Say "I Love You." (2012)
Episodes watched: 4
Platform: DVD
Mei Tachibana is not a trusting or sociable person. She has no friends; home and work are the only contacts in her cell phone. She only grudgingly tolerates high school, which for her consists of being unaware of and disinterested in who her classmates are while putting up with their harassment and whispered mockery. Outside of school, she works part-time at a bakery and otherwise keeps to herself at home. When a classmate who constantly makes rude comments about all the girls tries to look up her skirt, she spins around to kick her harasser — and instead mistakenly kicks the harasser's friend who was trying to get him to stop. That friend, Yamato Kurasawa, is her opposite, a popular (not as in high-status or trendy, but as in widely-liked) boy who seems to be extending to Mei the very genuine kindness she doubts anyone has. The plot takes off at the end of episode 1 when he pretends to be her boyfriend to repel a bakery customer who is stalking her — complete with kissing her and saying he loves her. "I protected you from a stalker by suddenly kissing you" seems like a... questionable action for a genuinely nice guy rather than a "nice guy" to take, but okay.
Although Yamato's behavior works at repelling the stalker (unfortunately, "I don't respect you but I respect that you "belong to" someone" is a cross-cultural phenomenon), Mei doesn't really know what to do with that experience, but accepts that Yamato has now sort of inserted himself into her life. He starts to invite her to hang out with his friends, and she hits it off with them. Mei even sticks up for one of those friends, Asami, against bullies mocking her appearance, and also turns out to be more perceptive about Asami and Nakanishi (the one who tried to look up Mei's skirt in the first place) having feelings for each other than they were (or were willing to admit, anyway). However, she also learns from Asami that there are rumors that Yamato will kiss any girl without having feelings for her, which leaves Mei fuming about what she calls Yamato’s hypocritical behavior. After Mei attempts to observe how he behaves with a girl rumored to be his first love, Yamato goes in for more unsolicited kisses and explains that different kisses convey a range of different feelings.
At this point, at the end of ep. 2, I’m feeling two things. First, I’m annoyed at Yamato’s pushiness which seems to be a romantic trope in a lot of anime. Second and more so, though, I’m intrigued by how relatable this is because I think I recognize the feelings of both of the main characters, as should many who remember their early romantic relationships. "I can't tell if this person is flirting or just being nice to me: the show" is maybe too harsh a description, but only a little, because I’ve had these exact crushes. I remember having had Mei's feelings, mistaking the pleasure or gratitude at someone being nice to me for love. I remember having had Yamato's feelings, mistaking being attracted to or intrigued by someone for love (he certainly doesn't know her well enough by the end of the first two episodes for it to be much of anything else). Neither is a good basis for a relationship, and I fear based on the fact that reviews on MyAnimeList include lines like "it doesn't try to break any boundaries" and "very little character development" that the show will neither show conflict due to this nor show clearly Mei and Yamato growing from crushes to love. Now, I'm in no way scolding the author for this on some kind of moral basis. Crushes are a legitimate part of life, and a solid basis for a drama set in a high school. I'm just saying, my experiences prime me to brace for a trainwreck in this situation and pulling off a believable happy resolution will require some character development.
But I’m optimistic because I kept watching to the end of the disk: we get, if not development, at least some more interesting dimensions to our characters soon enough. As Yamato reveals some backstory to Mei, and as we the audience hear the perspectives of other characters, it starts to look like the two of them are not opposites but instead two different kinds of shy/unassertive people: Mei withdraws from others to the point of hostility, while Yamato becomes a people-pleaser and, in his own words, a “chameleon”, to a fault. As they falteringly start to date, the show is certainly not just "the hot guy" and "the loner" implausibly getting together, as the negative reviews characterize it. Mei is struggling to navigate not just having some kind of trusting relationship with someone but also the difference between her cautious and "proper" expectations of a romantic relationship and the way Yamato and other “popular” students separate affection and sex from love. She still thinks he is devaluing what a romantic relationship is supposed to be like, but from his point of view, his behavior seems to flow understandably from a sort of strategic doormat-ness. Yamato and Mei are still viewed by other characters as just "the hot guy" and "the loner", however, and have to deal with people trying to break them up — one a girl with whom Yamato has had pity sex, the other a boy who’s just... an utter asshole — but thankfully it doesn't seem to be setting those characters up as season-arching villains or something, which could get tedious or derail believable relationship development. So although I still have those feelings about the plausibility of their relationship going in an overall happy direction, I suspect those reviews are selling it short and intend to finish the season at least (there's a second season and a spinoff, too, apparently)... Not a ringing endorsement, but let's see where it goes.
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W/A/S: 2 / 2 / ...4?
Weeb: Except for the occasional Japanese trope like misunderstanding a nosebleed as proof of being aroused, this show is probably not just understandable but downright relatable for those who have navigated, or had friends who had to navigate, broadly cross-cultural high school experiences like forming relationships, either friendly or romantic, and dealing with the circulation of rumors.
Ass: Minor and played in a way that, in context, shows off the POV of creepy men as creepy instead of being fanservice. Most sexual content is (as I feel like I say a lot here) just teenagers talking in a way that is pretty believable, and none is explicit.
Shit (writing): An accurate shit score really should be assessed at the end for this one, because it depends on how the story arc goes, I think. It's good so far but could go off in several different good or bad directions. I feel like there could've been more development of Mei's slow-growing ability to trust people, because her warming up to Yamato's friends by early ep. 2 or explicitly stating that Yamato makes her trust people more by the end of ep. 3 seems a bit rushed. But since I'm not familiar with the source material, for all I know, it could've just been the least-bad way to reduce it to a 13-episode season.
Shit (other): The opening theme is very pleasant, and the animation accompanying it is well-drawn but low-movement — something that continues throughout the whole show. Most shots are very static, with a single barely-moving human against static background. There's the occasional individual screwed-up looking shot of a character's face (usually when trying to reduce detail when they're far away), but it mainly stays consistent and faithful to a distinctively shoujo art style, with much more attention, it seems to me, paid to making faces detailed and realistic than other styles. I also just want to take a moment to appreciate the scene in ep. 1 that perfectly illustrates the feeling of being shaken out of your own thoughts. After a montage of shots showing her lonely morning commute, Mei is standing on the platform at a train station, staring off into the clouds in the distance and trying to ignore a group of her schoolmates giggling at her, the background music swelling like something dramatic is about to happen... only to be interrupted by the arrival of her train.
Content: No note needed.
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Stray observations:
- Yamato asks enthusiastically to come with her when she gets a haircut, then comments that he and Mei seem to have similar taste in clothes and that he's disinterested in the women who hit on him frequently... in an American show, these details would be alarm bells that Yamato is gay, not further highlighting that he's interested in Mei as a person, which is what I think it's supposed to do here.
- Why the hell does the DVD reset the language to the default English dub every time I finish an episode?
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Business Marketing 101: 10 Ways To Attract More Customers and Grow Your Business
Business marketing is the secret sauce for starting, building, and growing a profitable online business.
Marketing isn’t just an important part of one’s business success. It’s a deal breaker. If you have ever struggled to identify where you should be focusing your marketing efforts, you aren’t alone.
According to HubSpot’s 2017 State of Inbound Report, generating traffic and leads and proving ROI are the leading challenges marketers face. The business marketing world is always changing, which is why we need to change with it if we want to stay ahead of the competition.
Are you ready to learn how you can use the power of marketing in order to attract more customers and grow your business?
In the video below I talk about 15 things you need to build an online business:
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Are you ready to receive cutting-edge online business and marketing advice every month? CLICK HERE to join my Online Business Mastery Accelerator program!
This page contains affiliate links. If you purchase a product through one of them, I will receive a commission (at no additional cost to you). I only ever endorse products that I have personally used and benefitted from personally. Thank you for your support!
Why are so many people scared of business marketing?
A lot of business owners neglect or ignore business marketing because they think it’s a waste of time and money. In short, this is just not true. People can’t find you if they don’t know that you exist. It doesn’t matter how great your product or service is.
In the words of Paul Cookson, “Running a business without marketing will kill it.”
I’ve been an entrepreneur and online business owner for over 10 years now. In the beginning stages of my entrepreneurial journey, it was a challenge to market my business. I’ve learned a lot along the way that has helped me achieve the success that I have today.
I want to share these insights with you so that you don’t have to make the same mistakes that I did. I didn’t learn this knowledge from a business major. These are business skills that I’ve acquired through experience.
Here are 10 steps that I follow in my online business that has allowed me to market my products and services to hundreds of thousands of people.
1. Establish Your Goals
Before you even start creating a business marketing strategy, you need to understand your “why” behind it. What goals are you trying to achieve? Once you have established your milestones for the year ahead, then you can start figuring out the strategies that you will implement in order to accomplish each goal.
Keep in mind that you want your marketing goals to motivate you, but not be so grandiose that they are unachievable. This is why I am a big believer in setting SMART goals, which are goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. When you do so, you will be hyper clear what you are moving towards.
For example, a poorly defined marketing goal is “I want to generate more sales”, whereas a well-defined marketing goal is “I need to land 10 new customers in the next 6 months in order to achieve my revenue goal of $100,000.” See the difference?
2. Understand Your Market
You cannot connect with your audience until you know who your ideal customers are, where they hang out online, and what makes them tick.
In her book, Nichecraft: Using Your Specialness to Focus Your Business, Corner Your Market & Make Customers Seek You Out,Lynda Falkenstein says that “Many people talk about ‘finding’ a niche as if it were something under a rock or at the end of the rainbow, ready-made. That is nonsense.” When it comes to finding a niche, you want to go narrow instead of broad. If you claim to be good at many things then you will never be known to specialize in anything.
3. Study Your Competitors
When searching for ways to improve your marketing, look to your competitors. Find out what they are doing to attract customers. There is a high likelihood that there are online business owners out there who are selling a similar product or service as you. This is why it is so important that you stand out.
Studying your competitors starts with figuring out what their marketing strategy is. Ask yourself questions, like:
What makes you different from your competitors?
How are they positioning their product or service?
How is their social media presence?
What kind of content do they publish?
The goal isn’t to imitate your competitors. Rather, explore the gaps that you identify and then make the changes to your marketing strategy that will ensure that you are constantly improving, innovating, and adding massive value to your audience.
4. Develop Your Brand
Every online business needs a brand. This is your most valuable asset. Consumers buy from brands that have a strong brand value. Think about companies like Apple and Google. According to Nielson’s Global New Product Innovation Survey, 59% of consumers prefer to buy new products from brands familiar to them.
A brand is more than just a name. It needs to emotionally connect with your audience and convey who you are. What do you want your brand to represent and how will it stand out from the competition? As Seth Godin says, “Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service.”
A lot of people have a desire to build an online business but they approach it with the wrong mindset. You need to take a long-term approach, and that is what brand creation is all about. If you just want to sell a product and make money, you won’t succeed. When I built my company, Project Life Mastery, I built up my brand before I even thought about selling any products.
5. Determine Your Budget
This is where a lot of business owners get themselves into trouble. Without a solid budget plan, you will end up overspending. It comes down to doing your research. Determine which platforms are the smartest to invest in.
Despite what people will say, I don’t think that you don’t need to spend a lot of money on marketing in order to be successful. I’ve gone down both roads in my online businesses. For example, creating epic content on a consistent basis has been one of the most inexpensive ways that I have been able to effectively market my business and build my brand to where it is today.
6. Create Content
Content marketing is the process of creating valuable content to attract an audience and drive sales. I believe that this is the #1 marketing strategy to grow your online business. It has been the most valuable action that I have implemented in order to engage my audience, generate more leads, and make money.
The reality is that people do business with people that they like and trust. In the words of Marcus Sheridan, “Great content is the best sales tool in the world.”
There are many forms of content that you can create. Determine which best suits your strengths and skill set, whether that’s blogging, video, images, or a podcast. When you are creating content it is important that you understand what your audience wants. You aren’t creating content for you. It’s the buyer that matters.
How do you figure out what is important to them? Ask. Create a short survey and ask them what their challenges are, and then determine if your content is helping to solve their pain points. If not, make sure that you adjust your content marketing strategy.
7. Set Up Your Online Presence
In today’s digital world the vast majority of consumers can be found online. This is why social media is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal for attracting new customers and growing your online business. Reading people’s comments is a great way to gain insights into their behavior and topics that matter to them.
Each social media channel has a different purpose, but at the end of the day, you want to figure out where your audience hangs out. When it comes to engaging with your audience, you want to create content that is compelling and that has a strong message behind it. This will make you more appealing to existing and prospective customers, ensuring that you get more likes, followers, shares, and comments on your posts.
8. Give Something Away For Free
Everybody loves something for free. It may seem counterintuitive to give away your products or services for free, but it actually makes you more money in the long run. The psychology behind it is that, if someone has the opportunity to experience what you have to offer for free and it provides them with massive value, they will be most likely to buy from you in the future.
Free giveaways are one of the most effective ways to create a connection around your brand. In the beginning stages of growing your online business, this is gold. Why? Because people associate free with trustworthy, and that has a positive impact on your brand’s perceived value.
9. Build Your Email List
Despite what people would say, email is not dead. If you haven’t started to build an email list, now is the time to jump on board. You always have 100% control over your list. You get to decide how big you want it to get. If anything happens to your business, you’ve still got it.
One of the most popular proverbs of online business is – “the money is in the list.” Sending emails on a regular basis that add value to your audience will keep you at the forefront of their minds, and it will position you as a person of credibility and authority in your industry.
Matt Goldfarb summed it up when he said, “Having a list of dedicated fans and clients is the single most important asset any business can have. Having a list is the best way to deepen a relationship with your audience. It’s where you share your story, your purpose, and your insight. It’s where you can turn prospects into rabid fans.”
Keep in mind that when you are building an email list, it’s important that you are using a service with high deliverability, such as Aweber.
10. Don’t Give Up
When it comes to business marketing, don’t give up! Too many online business owners fail because they don’t see results fast enough. In order to succeed in business, you need to learn how to fall in love with the process. Are you in it for the long-term?
There is no one-size fits all approach to creating a solid business marketing plan.
Anyone can be a good marketer. It’s about finding what works best for you and your business. The secret to success is found in developing a solid marketing strategy and sticking with it. It will take time, energy and resources. Just like anything in the online business world, it all comes down to how bad you want to achieve success. In the words of Jay Baer, “Make your marketing so successful that people would pay you for it.”
Are you ready to build a winning marketing strategy that will attract more customers and take your business to the next level? It starts and ends with you.
Are you ready to receive cutting-edge online business and marketing advice every month? CLICK HERE to join my Online Business Mastery Accelerator program!
The post Business Marketing 101: 10 Ways To Attract More Customers and Grow Your Business appeared first on Project Life Mastery.
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