#debating on whether i should include other artwork in general on this blog
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call out post for @ratsofftoya
TW: GROOMING/PEDOPHILIA AND SUICIDE MENTIONS
recently @i-am-a-fish got suicidal baited off tumblr for the most bullshitted accusation post I've seen so far.
apparently I-am-fish is a pedophile/ potential child groomer, as said by @ratsofftoya
All because he made a joke on twitter about moving to pornhub, and follows artists that draw lolicon/aged-up smut of fictional underaged characters.
but there are some major fallacies in @ratsofftoya 's accusations (as if it wasn't obvious enough).
moral appeal:
ratsofftoya's commentary on goldie's pornhub and sex toy posts were very moralistic despite the posts clearly being a joke.
Humor is subjective so it's okay if you didn't laugh at this post, but that isn't an excuse to take away its humor to demean someone by making hasty generalizations about his fanbase. We can't confirm his fanbase is mostly kids, but because this claim is based on a hasty generalization, it is an inappropriate appeal to emotion. Trying to imply that goldie willingly exposes kids to child porn, classic "but think of the kids!" argument.
• There is no data we have on I-am-fish 's audience age demographic.
• there is no proof that majority of the fanbase are minors. that's just a hasty generalization.
• I-am-a-fish does not claim to be a blog for kids, not including "18+" in your bio does not make you a blog for kids.
I can't believe i have to point this shit out, but tumblr and twitter are not for kids. Nobody on these two platforms should have to put "18+" in their bios because nobody below that should even be on these two platforms. I-am-a-fish is an adult making adult jokes on an adult platform, to imply he could be a child groomer because he makes sex jokes that minors see is unfair because thats beyond his control. Tumblr and Twitter are adult spaces and yet we are not responsible for kids being in a space where they don't belong, that responsibility goes to the parents. All we can do about minors in online adult spaces is REPORT them.
2. cherry picking:
ratsofftoya specifically picked TWO sexually suggestive artworks by japanese Twitter artist Krskii. problem is ratsofftoya uses these two posts to portay this artist as a highly lewd/fetish account, when that isn't the case. In actuality, krskii's twitter page is a fanart page for a duo from IDOL MASTER: cinderella girls starlight stage anzu fubata(the blonde loli) and kirari moroboshi. it's a fanart page for other IMCGSS characters as well. i use to play game, its alot of fun but its japanese exclusive so i couldn't play much due to language barriers. the fanart page is almost all SFW, but ratsofftoya pick TWO out of dozens of sfw pics to solidify her claim.
you can go on Krskii's twitter and see for yourself:
and my personal favorite:
(ooh lawd this is cute i might have it as a PFP with credit!)
anyway, ratsofftoya ignored these possibilities:
• There is no proof goldie liked the two photos, or any engagement at all.
• there is no proof that he had seen it, especially out of dozens sfw art.
• just because he follows this artist does not automatically confim he has a sexual attraction for lolis or kids. especially due to how the page is mostly sfw.
• goldie could just be a fan of IMCGSS.
this isn't a creepy pedo twitter page, just an idol fan page. but what really is illogical is the commentary ratsofftoya has in regards to loli drawings. Now with using two pics racy pics, ratsofftoya came to the conclusion that Goldie is sexually attracted to children. But lolicon isn't real children, it's not real CP and it's not even a realistic depiction of humans children, so what rataofftoya did was simply pass off her opinion of lolis as fact. I'm not trying to debate on whether lolicon is okay or not and im not gonna share my opinion, because the real point isn't the subject of lolicon but the wrongful accusation. the real fact is that lolicon is still legal, but social opinion of lolicon is very mixed, our opinions on such a complicated subject is not enough to convict someone as a pedophile. you're opinions do not hold that kind of power, especially without sufficient evidence. let's actually move on to ratsofftoya's evidenced and how insufficient it is.
3. False attribution of discord chats
the screenshots provided from the discord chats do not add up to ratsofftoya's claims, making the screencaps irrelevant more than anything.
she provided this screenshot of a mod stating their opinion on aged up fanart, and claims that this opinions makes ALL MODS in that discord MAPS and Pedo apologists. problem is that there is no real sympathy for any pedo/maps in both ratsofftoya and nestbian's screenshots. if anything, it's just some bad jokes, and Goldie doesn't even say one himself.
rattsofftoya commits the same fallacy like with the loli argument; the concept of aged up characters is complicated subject, its not illegal but there is alot of debate surrounding it. Ratsofftoya makes her opinion clear that aged up artwork of characters is wrong. she uses small and insufficient screenshots to to help make her OPINION seem like a fact, and accuse the mods of being MAP sympathizers. she's convicted these mods based on a biased opinion, the concept of aged up characters is not legally pedophilic so whether you think the subject is right or wrong, is still not enough to convinct others with opposing opinions as MAP enablers.
Another issue is how she claims minors are talking inappropriately with adults on discord, but there are no such screenshots, the screenshots provided give no evidence of such accusation. With her convictions based on biased opinions, that accusations is not going to be getting any credibility anytime soon. Many of us know how discord works, it's not unusual for adults and minors to be in the same server, it's not a pedophilic thing. But one thing that discord mods do is have NSFW chats specifically for adults, while minors are exluded and stay in the SFW chats. ratsofftoya has no screenshots on minors in a nsfw chat, you'd figure that nestbian would take screenshots of that if it was actually true.
Lastly, ratsofftoya uses these discord screenshots to further solidfy her statement that I-am-a-fish is exposing sexual content to children. But you don't see goldie or any inappropriate/sexual content in the screenshots, just problematic opinions at best.
4. Bad intentions:
from what i've said in this post above, I can conclude ratsofftoya's post overrall was very manipulative and biased. I think the most manipulative part of the post was the last paragraph:
Using the idea of child exploitation and sexual abuse to pull on people's emotions, a huge inappropriate call for emotion. yet, ratsofftoya has not proven or shown any child exploitation or pedophilia at all. we have yet to see any evidence of abuse! How can I believe ratsofftoya has good intentions when I can easily break the accusations apart and see lies?
As a real victim of child grooming, i won't speak for all victims, but as a victim I really don't like my trauma being used to witch hunt innocent people. My trauma is not for woke points, it's not a badge and it's not for your ego to exploit. It's pretty clear that ratsofftoya did NOT make this post for the well being of children and grooming victims, but the post was made for her moralistic ego. If anything, to use sexual child abuse to lie about others, is exploitive.
5. consequenses:
I commented on ratsofftoya's post, mentioning that there are serious consequences to false accusations. Of course the response was immature af so not sure if she'll ever learn, but I'll say it for those who'll hopefully listen to my advice.
Call out post with false accusations can destroy lives, and put you, the poster, in serious legal trouble.
Slander and defamation on its own can get you a lawsuit, you never know who on this platform has money for a lawyer. If this person you publicly slander is to self harm, commit suicide, or lose their job, you can be legally held accountable for it even if it wasn't what you intended to happen, disclaimers cat save you from that. Just because ratofftoya says the suicide baiting is wrong, doesn't mean that she isn't legally responsible for it, I-am-a-fish can legally use it against her. Even with the legal consequences, lying in its own has social consequences and it will be brought to light.
Remember this, you broke ass college students, no amount of woke points is worth the lawsuit. If you GENUINELY see a real predator, report it!
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DISCLAIMER; THIS HAS BEEN IN THE MAKING SINCE DEC 2017, I was just too shy to post it. Keep in mind that I'm not in any way, shape, or form trying to put my headcanons or interpretation of lore over anyone else's and this is pretty much just a general long-form run down for my roleplay blog to help people who aren't familiar with RS, so for my non-RS friends it's more of an explanation of how this 'tall ancient magic alien man' is and works. Physiology and some other cultural blurbs with the occasional emphasis on Sliske, because, well, that's what my roleplay blog is for. This is also mostly a passion project since I'm pretty fixated on this, if you read this at all, kudos to you and ily, ty for coming to my Ted Talk about this. Special thanks to people/friends who put up with me ranting abt this obscure fandom and helped me flesh out headcanons, and @theresiidentdevil the artwork that i commissioned that i use way too much bc devil really... really did my version of snek man nice. Other imgs used are scrounged from ja.gex’s concept arts and etc. ONCE AGAIN THIS IS NOT CANON, AND JUST MY PERSONAL HYPOTHESIS, feel free to reblog but please don’t like... edit or try to give me heavy crit or come @ me with some lore bit from so-and-sos tweet that I am wrong and am a doodoo head or something. This was just a spot o’ fun and please don’t try to drag my interpretation or expunge this for laughs on the official lore discord. I’ve seen it done before and it’s not cool. individual creative interpretation is beautiful, mob bullying is not.
To kick things off, the Mahjarrat are one of a few ancient tribes that live on the ash, lava, and stone wasteland that makes up the dead planet of Freneskae. They are highly skilled in magic and intellect by nature, as well as living by a firm form of kratocracy; a government by those who are strong enough to seize power through coercive power, social persuasion, or deceptive cunning. Along with this, their survival revolves around two rituals, one of death and sacrifice, the other of life and breeding. That right there should tell you a LOT about them, socially.
HEIGHT.
Height varies from Mahjarrat to Mahjarrat, they are always going to be towering over most species, and most humans, as lore states that they generally are 1.5x the average human height. Sans that one wild ass gene of hyper height that makes gargantuan Mahjarrat like Lucien and Zemoregal, who tower over even Azzanadra's spike pope hat. Sliske himself stands at an 8′4 height, but that's just my headcanon for this blog's sake.
SKULLS / BONES.
The Mahjarrat have thick skulls, if this wasn't pretty obvious with the additions of dual lines of bony ridges running parallel from the brow to back of the skull, and lower. Some, but not all individuals have rather, short horns as their 'first ridge' before normal ridges. They also seem to have a subtle browbone ridge above each eye. Sliske, as well as some of the canon Mahjarrat we know, have these short horns and I like to exaggerate them a bit as sharp and more obvious, because who doesn't love horns? I'd imagine there are also ridges across other parts of their bodies such as the shoulders, elbows, knees, smaller ones on the knuckles, and perhaps down the back and along the hips. Go wild. Anyways, their skulls are thick and heavy, as in if it comes down to having to head-butt someone at the sacrificial ritual as a last resort physical conflict when magic is exhausted, someone is going to be using every exploit they can to survive. Anything counts when your life is on the line.
*above concept art is of their lich-like forms. good for seeing skull shapes.
Most also have rather large jawbones and powerful jaw muscles, and have a decent bite force to clamp down; like above, can and will use the force of their jaws if they have to with a good 1,069 psi (pounds per square inch), a little less than a hyena, meaning they can break bones with enough force. The main reasoning for this is their powerful mandible adductor muscles and the leverage needed to keep their jaw closed in their lich-like forms with the loss of skin and some atrophy, when they begin to run low on energy before every 500 years ( more on this later ), otherwise their toothy jaws would be hanging open and they'd look quite silly. It's quite rare for a Mahjarrat to bite unless as a last resort attack, out of spite when healthy ( almost as if saying 'you are weak and aren't worth the waste of magical energy' ), or for other minute reasons. Males tend to have very pronounced 'spikes' on their chins and larger skull ridges, but it's not completely unheard of a female having a 'spiked' chin and larger ridges. Sexual dimorphism isn’t too well explained or solidified by Jagex, we haven’t really seen much due to the few living Mahjarrat we see.
TEETH / CONSUMPTION.
personal interpretation of sliske’s teeth here.
Speaking of teeth, Mahjarrat have exceedingly sharp teeth for being part of a race that is not carnivorous or needing any sustenance at all. They have more teeth than humans (not really canon, just my personal interpretation, I prefer them being very Alien over ‘grey human reskin’); while almost every tooth has a sharpness to it, be it incisors or tines in the molars. Their front teeth seem to be ridged with smaller points, you probably don't want to get nipped by them, even if it's just playful or affectionate (uh, whatever they deem as affection). It's a real shame that Sliske seems to enjoy this, in the few moments he puts on a faux air of affection to scratch an itch or when deciding to use seduction as a ploy to further his manipulation or intel gathering, among other rare, convoluted feelings towards someone he's 'affectionate' with. Teeth shape and sizes can vary due to the Mahjarrat way of breeding and eugenics to create survivability through offspring on what traits work. Basic Darwinism, tbh. Following my ever favorite serpent motif for Sliske, you can expect his teeth to be pretty ophidian/snake-like. Due to my headcanon to their dark blood color, Mahjarrats may have dark or black gums. Small addition: babs do have sharp defensive baby teeth that fall out into hellish adult ones. Nice.
Mahjarrat do not need to eat or drink, as they are fueled fully by an arcane energy that they receive from rituals, and slowly deplete this over several centuries. Their power can last even longer if an individual is stingy with their power, or unaware of their power like Kharshai, who spent several centuries in a human guise hardly using any energy while unaware he was even a Mahjarrat. Despite not needing sustenance, it's not unheard of for Mahjarrat to attempt eating or drinking for whatever reason, be it pleasure or to emulate others. Hazeel's memories almost adorably describe some Mahjarrat attempting to sit and politely eat with humans to 'bond with them', despite them later having to regurgitate what they had eaten and Hazeel's repulsion at any creature eating at all. Several lore snippets include Zamorak enjoying wine and in Kindred Spirits, Sliske making the comment he may be drunk after downing the contents of a bottle. Whether or not they actually can become inebriated or have any sort of digestive system to even mildly uptake anything is debatable. For headcanon's sake, I like to think Sliske has no issue with pleasure eating and for taste, especially chocolate, fully knowing he'll have to bring it back up later. Most Mahjarrat have tongues that can be dark in color to only slightly brighter due to their dark blood color. Like horns, some end up with a slightly bifurcated tongue tip, some do not and have a single, sharp tip. Sliske is an extreme mutated case and has a very obvious black, snake-like, forked tongue. Just don’t ask him to do the thip thip because he won’t.
(WHERE’D YA GET THOSE) EYES / SENSES.
Usually, A Mahjarrat's eyes correspond to the color of the jewel embedded in their crown, but not always. They have very, keen eyes and their eyesight is exceptional to suit the darkness of Freneskae due to the constant ashfall and cloud cover. They can see short distances, but farther into heavy smoke and ash than most species, and can indeed see in the dark with excellent night vision and have a structure similar to an animal's tapetum lucidem, which is what reflects light and makes that eerie glare you see from animals in the dark. Due to spending a lot of time on Freneskae and being well adapted to that environment, it was quite a jolt for them to get accustomed to sunlight on Gielinor when brought during the Menaphite War, as they were used to heavy 'cloudy' weather due to ash blocking out what light they did get, and being used to the constant lightning strikes and the glow of volcanic rifts and lava pools. But they adapt quite well and while they still prefer muted lights, they have no problem in the sunlight after adjusting a bit. Think of when it’s a sunny summer day and you leave your dark house and how for a few minutes you have to acclimate. Sliske has the most trouble with this, seeing as he still spends quite some time in the darkness of the Shadow Realm which is hazy and muted in light. He's quite prone to straining and headaches/migraines from bright lights on Gielinor ( and Earth since a lot of my writing takes place on Modern Earth ).
Mahjarrat have fairly acute senses and sharp ears, and while most concept art shows them similar to human ears, why not lorge, sharp, and pointy ( as not to be so human )? Plus, imagine a few with larger, pointed ones that flick when irritated. That's cute, but deadly. They can hear fairly well and can hear you talking shit. Not exactly up to par with a bat or a moth, but quite up there with horses or cats. I'd imagine the rest of their senses are pretty keen despite not using taste or smell as much as a human, but most senses are still fairly above a human’s.
I'm not exactly sure how they'd fare in the aspect of touch, but it is known that they are very, very strong and can break bones with their bare hands. They have exceptional strength in their bodies and despite teleporting some ways, I'll bet most of them are decently muscular or lean under those robes due to their solidity and a bad example perhaps, but, uh, have you seen Zamorak's exposed chest? I'm sure 'godhood' didn't change that much, albeit some. Who wouldn't love a decently built Enahkra who will hand your ass to you? A babe. Sliske himself, while being one of the leanest of the Mahjarrat, probably has core strength and broad shoulders under those pauldrons. I'd like to imagine he'd also ( as some other of his kin) would be pretty flexible and train his Praetorians to be similar and absolutely strong in the event of having to resort to physical combat or maneuvering out of capture. Most of them were born on Freneskae, a planet made of plenty of solid rock/crystal cliffs and caves, they made pilgrimages pretty often to the ritual site, so some rock climbing was probably involved as they grew. Plus, image small, child Mahjarrat, not able to teleport or be proficient in magic, just out on a day with less lightning, climbing around, chucking rocks into lava for fun. I'm getting off-topic and we'll talk about babbies some other post.
SKIN / STRIPES / SCARRATIONS.
personal interpretation body/stripe of sliske here. (mildly nsfw)
Skin colorations are usually running the gamut of dark grey, pale grey, and dull color such as a grey-green, grey yellow and more. It's also notable that Mahjarrat are shapeshifters and are known to slowly take on the appearances of the conditions they are in for extended amounts of time; Kharshai becoming more 'viking-esque' like the Fremennik people who took him in when he was unaware he was human, and also Bilrach's warped appearance from spending god knows how long in Daemonheim with larger ridges, scarring, and some more demonic-looking features. Sliske himself has a very deep, dark slate grey skin tone from the amount of time he spends in the dark of the Shadow Realm, beginning to mimic its dusk.
Mahjarrat have thick skin, built initially to withstand the heat and abrasion of their home world’s rocky and dangerous climate and environment, but also notably protective against icy and snow-fraught climates, as they have little to no issue or complaint at heading far North of the Fremennik Providence, near the icy fortress of Ghorrock where their ritual stone lays on Gielinor ( it's also notable that Jhallan asks the adventurer to re-seal him within a fuggin’ block of ice to rest again, proving they do not mind the cold at all ). Their skin can scar if proper regeneration is not taken to heal wounds, as Mahjarrat are known for almost instantaneously healing themselves of most wounds on the battlefield to their own volition, but this is quite rarely seen on them, sans Bilrach. For all we know, they could be quite scarred from lack of regeneration fueled by magical energy or quite severe wounds under those robes that cover most of their body, I personally headcanon that some may have some scarring on their hands and forearms due to the might of some of the spells they use. I also personally headcanon Sliske having a pretty nasty burn across his shoulder and ribs trailing to the hip on the left side from Tumeken's explosive self-sacrifice detonation that wiped out the entirety of his army and at least 3/4ths of the Mahjarrat present, sans the ones spared by Azzanadra's quick shielding. I would think that some of them also may have suffered from similar scars due to Kharshai admitting they were tired and wounded after the event.
Striping and markings can litter their forms in sparse or rather heavy. Most Mahjarrat have at least some facial striping that can be a monochrome pale grey or darker, or a bright color such as Wahisietel's bright red trailing across his ridges to his chin spikes, Enakhra's vivid pink colorations, and Khazard's orange striping. While stripes may look similar from individual to individual you are hard-pressed to find two Mahjarrat with identical markings, and we have never heard of any twins being born from their tribe in canon ( Not saying it's not possible! But that would be a lot of strain seeing as once child is hard enough for a pair to conceive ). It's unknown if the stripes are across the rest of their bodies, but I say to hell with it. Why the hell not? Let the stripes go as angular or curvy as they please across their skin. Why limit the imagination. They are aliens. For the sake of me writing Sliske; he's a very pale silvery, parallel stripy thing under those robes with handsome slate skin. Go figure, that's jus' me though. ( Whatddya mean I made a personal ref of that?? s w e a t s?? slight warning for some not safies. )
CLAWS / FEET.
personal interpretation of sliske’s rock climbin’ sharp feets here.
Mahjarrat probably do have clawed hands and feet, and they are thick and sharp, along with strong ( most likely calloused for some ) palms and heels for climbing ( possibly before they were so proficient with teleporting ) They are also prime last resort weapons if need be and constantly need filing down on Gielinor and other terrains since they aren't around the rocky outcrops of Freneskae and using them there as much, most Mahjarrat seem to opt to wear gloves anyway. Their legs and arms are also pretty sturdy for climbing despite not needing to do so as much. I’d imagine they might just have longer toe and finger bones for mild gripping abilities when it comes to climbing. I’ve also kinda headcanoned often that they probably might have wrapped parts of their feet in bindings, just to keep things like soft arches or tendon areas save when climbing or walking. Ancient hellplanet fashion, baby.
GEMS.
Just about all Mahjarrat ( and Dreams of Mah in general ) have at least one 'crystal' or 'gemstone' in their brows or crowns ( whoever in the wiki said Sliske doesn't have one is a fraud, just because we don't see it due his V tapered hood doesn't mean it's not there, as it has been shown in several concept arts that he does have two yellow-green or 'peridotite' colored diamonds, like his half-brother’s four of the same color ). When asked about it in the Children of Mah quest, Wahisietel states that even they are not sure as to why they have them but believe it to be a direct connection to Mah. It's also implied that a dead Mahjarrat's 'crystal' often records their last thoughts or actions. Most Mahjarrat have the exact same bright iris color as their stones ( the concept art with Sliske having gold eyes throws me off, but I'd imagine there could be some minor color differences ). It seems that gemstones look-alike from siblings and offspring, as Sliske and his half-brother Wahisietel have almost the same colored crystal and shape despite Wahisietel having four diamonds to Sliske's two.
ORGANS? OR LACK THEREOF?
personal interpretation of nasty snake man blood here.
It's truly unknown as to just how many organs Mahjarrat have and if there is any comparison to be made to humans. It can be hypothesized they do have at least a heart ( With more chambers than a humans? Or two! Who knows! ) and lungs. If they do have lungs, it could be stated that they are very strong and made to filter out the heavy ash and debris of Freneskae's poor air quality, our adventurer had enough trouble breathing on Freneskae if you didn't take face gear. They do not seem to have a digestive tract as they do not need sustenance or hydration and perhaps have a makeshift stomach that leads nowhere as if they do eat anything, they just have to regurgitate it. Onto blood, they possibly do have a circulatory system and blood, as Lucien states he didn't 'want to spill any more Mahjarrat blood'. Normal human blood would be a bit boring so I like to imagine they have thick, dark-colored blood that has some iridescent properties to it ( not glittery, but if you have ever seen what the ink in a ballpoint pen looks like when dumped out, it has a particular shine to it. ) and never seems to be just one color, like an oil slick. Probably because it's so rich in arcane properties which would also make it pretty toxic, bitter, or awfully sickly sweet. This also means that they would blush pretty dark in color and have dark-colored tongues and etc. rather than red like humans, that's.... kinda cute. Also, if we are talking about organs and parts, a small blurb, no, female Mahjarrat do not have boobs. There's no need since they probably do not feed their young at all. So breaking canon for the sake of biology, hi, Mahjarrat probably don't have boobs or nips. Kinda doesn’t make sense. SHRUG. But they do have belly buttons, so maybe they are gestated with umbilical cords.
THE BANE OF THE JMOD’S EXISTENCE: MAHJARRAT REPRODUCTION
Y'all wanted it Jmods yell when we ask for it, here it is: my reproduction hypothesis. We have little to no real canon lore for Mahjarrat other than that they do(?) reproduce sexually, it takes a lot of energy to do so (abt 50% physical effort, 50% the pair pooling their life energy into the event, kinda dangerous), and that they are culturally fond of breeding during earthquakes ( this was just a cultural tradition and it's probably possible to breed outside of this tradition, the jokes say it’s almost Pavlovian ). They have a specific ritual for breeding, The Ritual of Enervation. The Enervation is the foil of a Ritual of Rejuvenation where one of their kind is sacrificed to provide all others with energy and return them from their lich-like states to fleshy filled out ones, the Enervation is a pilgrimage to select a mate and breed to create a new Mahjarrat between a pair. It's slightly hinted that the pair chooses their mate based upon battle prowess or cunningness ( Zemouregal Senior chose his mate based on her skills in battle ) . Much like real animals today, they want only the strongest genetics and mutations to continue on. All of them fight each other for their pick of a mate. Very rarely do the pairs have any emotional attachment, this is rare. And the ritual still isn't pretty; I'll say it, they are rough lovers. Expect biting, scratching, bruising, and more. Kinky. Let me tell you, human genitalia are boring as hell when you are describing aliens. Phallic genitalia differs a lot from individual to individual, it's a slight 'grab bag to see what part works best for future genetics'. Mahjarrat bits are pretty internal until aroused since it makes no sense for them to be external seeing as all Mahjarrat lose a lot of skin and muscle to atrophy as they age and lose energy, so they'd do better internally and tucked away. Vaginal genitalia differs heavily as well, anything goes. Barbs? Sure. Flowery looking bits? Sure. It's aliens, guys. Go wild. Same thing with sexualities and genders, other than what they want to present themselves as, we don't know shit, so go for it. I'm fairly sure Mahjarrat really don't mind gender identity and anything goes, they see power, survival, and fighting over everything else. Sliske, of course, is male presenting and yes, has his own unique bits. Uh, ridges, bifurcated tip, fan-like appendage for preventing backflow. I'd describe more but I'm already pRETTY FUCKING SHY RIGHT NOW BC I DON'T KNOW HOW TO talk much abt this. I'm a beginner alien fucker. Give me a break.
UPDATE: I went there, I no longer have shame. bc I roughly drew it.
I’m not sure what the good estimate would be when it comes to how long a Mahjarrat gestates, is it longer than a human? Quicker due to magic? We just don’t know. The birth rate is exceedingly low due to the dangers and strain of Freneskae, it's not unheard of for miscarriages or mothers to pass away from lack of energy or during the fray of the constant other tribes attacking each other. Generally, it's a duty to protect a gravid mother of the sake of population, mate or not. Putting aside your disdain for your nemesis was hard but needed if you wanted to keep your tribe thriving. Fathers don't tend to stick around after the ritual other than to check in to protect their child and future genetics as insurance. Mothers rear children and if they could get along and not spat at one another, often looked after each other's children. Maternal groups were pretty common and one could leave another to watch their kids while they went off on their duties of making lightning rods, scouting, and more.
MISC?
Mahjarrats don't exactly have the same bonds as humans and familial life was harsh, mainly due to the stress of knowing your own blood one day might betray you and vote you off to be the sacrifice at a ritual. They are not affectionate as much as humans and care in their own backwards way about each other if they are family, but it's an arm's length approach. Sliske and Wahisietel seem to get along and still probably have their ferocious verbal quarrels and have possibly even physically scuffled a bit over things, but managed to have concern for one another, as do Mahjarrat who are as best a definition of 'friends' can be to them. Remember that they are very paranoid of one another and usually only see eye to eye if in the same political faction or having to make a deal or coerce one another to stand up for you if you are challenged at a ritual ( later on this became a huge political agenda between the two main sides; Zamorakian or Zarosian and fighting intensified at dislike for each other ). As they evolved from their creation, they just generally became more and more mistrustful of each other to point of paranoia. So affection is incredibly weird to them and the first thought that comes from it is 'what do you want and why?' and it's expected to be a deceitful notion. Hence, Sliske is incredibly good at persuading others and using deceitful action to lure people but the moment it's done to him, he'll play along but consider it warily as false notions. Sorry not sorry, that's pretty habitual to him and will stay with him, as well as his kin. You're never going to have a 'stable relationship' with any Mahjarrat. Well, not 100% at least. You can try, they might even appreciate it if they aren’t offended.
That’s about all I wanted to say and anything left out of this word spew can be covered in other posts. Like culture.... or babbies. I have a lot to say about Babjarrats but no place right now to keep up this long shit.
UPDATE: i talked abt my thoughts on babjarrats. it was the best of my life.
#✦ │ 𝙾𝙾𝙲 ––– that's a lot of fuckin' tea.#✦ │ 𝙷𝙴𝙰𝙳𝙲𝙰𝙽𝙾𝙽𝚂 & 𝚃𝙷𝙴𝙾𝚁𝙸𝙴𝚂 ––– i do hate parting with information.
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On tokens, markets, and a path to a real-time economy
Two years ago on March 1, 2019, I posted a Letter to my future self to the Bitcoin blockchain. This is the story of that letter, one where I didn’t write a word, and how two years later, the dream is still alive. There is an actual path with tokens and markets to make utopia a reality, and my case for what that might look like.
About a month prior to March 1, 2019, I had privately begun telling my close friends, colleagues, and family that I was going to be making a significant career and life change and dedicate the next chapter of my career towards building exclusively for the Bitcoin SV blockchain. You can guess the confused looks and concerns people had about what it was I was doing. Did I lose my mind? To be fair, I still get those messages today. I knew what I had envisioned when I first read the white paper back in 2013 and somewhere along that journey, the crypto industry had taken a path that veered dramatically from the one I had imagined. With Bitcoin having course corrected twice already via hard forks, I wanted and needed a guiding compass - a North Star. That’s when I had the idea to write a letter to my future self.
I confided in one of my best friends, Jackie to help me write it. It was a busy month for me, my mind was all over the place and I needed help. Over two afternoons, I shared with Jackie what I wanted to say, what was the possible world that I imagined. To her I must have been repeating myself since she and many of my friends had heard this for a decade. The future would bring Proof of Work from a term to describe a computer science thing to one that would describe the workings of the entire global economy and drive a seismic shift in how value was created and how we humans would interact and cooperate with one another. I wanted her to include a thank you to some people who helped me along the way - titans of the industry whom I was fortunate to cross paths and work with. Jesse Powell, gave me my first job at Kraken. CZ hired me to OKCoin in 2014. Star believed in me and gave me so many growth opportunities. At Circle, I worked with my long time friend Dan, who would go on to create CMS. A few days later, Jackie sent me a draft. I was pretty shocked at first, thinking hey this doesn’t even say Bitcoin in it. Where are all the names I wanted to include. Then I read it another time and when she asked if I wanted any changes or if the approach was right, I said, “Let’s not change a single word”. It was different, it was exceptional, to me it was perfect. I sent the letter internally as part of my Circle resignation email, flew off to San Antonio with my parents to watch the retirement ceremony of my favourite basketball player Manu Ginobili, and then a month later on April Fools Day, RelayX was launched.
Having this Letter out there has served me well. Nobody could have expected the course of events of the past two years both within BitCoin, and the world at large. Politics, COVID-19, money-printing, delistings, court cases, you name it. Without it as an anchor, I might have lost sight of the bigger picture. If you would have asked me then what BitCoin would look like today, I would have predicted a 100x rosier picture than the current situation. Despite most of the boom in the cryptocurrency industry having not occurred on the Bitcoin SV blockchain, the rapid adoption of blockchain and digital currencies from NFTs to DeFi, to institutions putting BTC on the balance sheet shows the underlying movement is in full force. Just this week, I watched sharpshooter JJ Redick utter the words “non fungible token, and blockchain technology” on his podcast talking about NBA Topshot. That’s incredible.
In the letter are the words - “Your world will be frictionless and marked by truth, freedom and fairness. Your world will truly be one that is defined by human imagination and honest work.”
I am making the case for tokens as the critical solution to a real-time economy. I want to break the spell of the narrow definition of tokens that has bounded the Bitcoin SV ecosystem. For much of the past two years, there appears to be two camps in BSV when it comes to tokens. The dominant one being we want only regulated tokens, security tokens, tokens backed by real assets, with real utility, that real businesses and enterprises can use to make their businesses more efficient. The other, perhaps out of jealousy for what’s going on in other blockchains being let’s just port those Ethereum ERC20’s over and let it run wild for it might pump the BSV price! Funny thing is neither has happened as developers are busy debating whether tokens should be on layer 0 or layer 1 or layer 100 but that’s a topic for another day. Both views are myopic.
Tokens are going to be a much bigger deal on BitCoin than anyone might imagine.
How many websites are there on the internet? I looked it up recently and the answer is 1.7Bn. How many token contracts are there on the Ethereum chain? The answer is 350,000.
Websites are kind of hard to set up - you have to purchase a domain name, at least use a website template creator, and there isn’t that much use for getting one for the average person. Not when you can have an Instagram page, a Facebook account, a Twitter handle, a Medium blog without having your own site. Yet there are 1.7Bn of them! Ethereum tokens are prohibitively expensive mining fee wise to generate. Out of interest, I asked one of the devs who minted the original USDC contract during my days at Circle to find the transaction. It cost 0.44 ETH. At today’s prices that’s well over $500 to create a token. Yet there are 350,000 contracts!
I would wager there will be over 100Bn unique tokens on BitCoin and I’d guess higher but I don’t want to be outside the bounds of the very Overton window I’m creating.
It takes a few seconds to issue a token on BitCoin and at current mining fees, less than a tenth of a cent to issue. If I’m a store owner, I might issue a different gift card a week for the various deals I have going on. If I’m an artist, a different NFT for each piece of artwork. Neither the store owner nor the artist needs more than one website and you start to see the math.
If reading this, you still think tokens are going to be contained to some narrow definition of ‘security’ tokens, or NASDAQ like tokens, or fiat currency tokens, realise it’s like saying the internet will only have The New York Times or CNN or some licensed officially approved site. It’s ok if not every account on Instagram is world class photography. Not every Twitter account is going to be insightful (that’s clear) and that’s ok. In a world of 100Bn unique tokens, You bet there’s going to be a great deal of useless ones and a pretty large number of scams. Just like there are websites that are phishing for your passwords, websites with illegal content, and websites with viruses in them. Over time, services emerged to protect you by blocking, or warning you about potentially dangerous websites.
What’s the bigger picture and what do tokens have to do with a real-time economy? I’ve made the case for there being a ton of tokens. Does that mean it’s just going to be a Coinmarketcap with a lot more pages? An exchange with a lot more trading pairs? No, a lot more exciting than that.
A world with 100Bn tokens means every single asset, service, good, company, project, video, post and many more abstract things than one can imagine is going to have a dynamic, live price. It’s not about the tokens, it’s about the markets. Today, you visit a restaurant and you check Yelp to see if has a good review. BSV entrepreneurs are making some new review site but with reviews posted on the blockchain thinking this is the problem that needs solving. “Immutable reviews”. Much more valuable than a review or immutable review however is if this particular restaurant’s loyalty token is trading at a premium to the other one next door. There’s actually money on the line. Then after eating, instead of being a foodie with a blog and an Instagram to hype up such restaurant, if you’ve got that talent for knowing what’s going to be the next hot restaurant, you can just buy on the open market more of the restaurant’s tokens. Yes, a local foodie just became an crypto trader. Now you profit when you promote the restaurant on your blog. The chef who started that restaurant instead of using Groupon to attract an initial set of customers who have no loyalty to you, can instead issue 10,000 tokens, where each dish costs 100 tokens. Pretty soon if your food is delicious, those token prices are going to jump. Think Global, Live Local is not just going to do good, it’s going to now make you rich.
I grew up in a lower middle class first generation immigrant family. I remember being a teenager in those years where oil prices were very volatile as the world approached the idea of “Peak Oil”. We would sometimes drive by a gas station one day where prices were a few cents cheaper than the day before, and even though the tank was half full, we filled up. Other days, the warning light would be on, but we held off for another day to fill up the tank in hopes prices would come down. Is this speculation on oil prices bad? Another fun memory I had was going grocery shopping with my folks and my favourite cookies were the Chip Ahoy Crunchy chocolate. Eating those with milk is probably half the reason for my height. Once in a while they would be on sale but next to them were the No-Name brand versions of the same cookies. Chip Ahoys were definitely better but were they $2/100grams better? No. We would calculate every time to decide which we would buy. Is this speculation on cookie price bad? How come other goods and services in the economy didn’t fluctuate in price? That’s what’s always fascinated me. I knew they would if they could. With Bitcoin, it was possible.
Tokens on Bitcoin with the perpetual scaling design of Bitcoin where it isn’t the holder that’s rewarded (Proof of Stake) but rather those contributing to scaling the network (Proof of Work) will lead to the formation of markets where markets were too inefficient to exist - unlocking trillions of value in the process.
A fully tokenised economy makes everything efficient, fair, honest, and real-time. I don’t mean efficient like fast transactions or cheap mining fees. It’s the economy that will be efficient. You won’t need to be a big grocery chain or a big oil company or big tech company with financial analysts, and big data and machine learning folks in order to know what to set the price of a Chips Ahoy or a Gallon of oil or surge pricing on a taxi ride. It’ll be orders of magnitudes better than that and for every person on earth because it’s all going to be open, issuable, transferable, tradeable. You won’t be checking page 978,950 of Coinmarketcap. You won’t be scrolling to AHOY/USDT on an exchange. I predict all of this will happen without you realising that it did and all our lives will improve as a result.
For those who immediately think of the regulatory ramifications of this, I’ve thought the same. In 2015, while leading OKCoin, I led our initiative to become the first international benefactors of Coin Center - the industry body working with regulators and governments. I am a minority seed round investor in Chainalysis which looks for criminal activity onchain. I look forward to working with all those who would like to embrace innovation while having an eye on ensuring an orderly, legal transition to this future.
I could not be more excited to support the emerging token projects on BitCoin, through building products, investment, advice, or even in spirit.
Bitcoin is plumbing - just plumbing where billions of trades and speculation down to the satoshi will be happening every second.
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The first.
The nice thing about blogging is that one doesn’t need to follow a strict academic essay structure: the issues and concepts I want to write about are always architectures built upon some underlying causal, foundational plot. It would be nice if we could hyperlink the written representations of our thought processes, but alas, that is one domain in which modern technology has fallen short. You might see that I jump around between topics, but I promise there are connections everywhere. So, here we go!
I’ve been hesitant to write about what ignites my passion the most.
There are a couple of reasons for this.
For one, save for some semblance of a university degree I attempted to put together years ago, I have little in the way of ‘respectable’ credentials. I rely on my own observations of what is happening around me. A high school friend once revealed to me a technique in visual arts that has stuck with me since. “Draw what you see, not what you know to be there.” I have applied this not only to achieve realism in the scant visual artworks I have produced and which have gone unseen by most others, but also to compose a coherent understanding of my world--or in other words, everything I feel. This “motto” of sorts shows that we often ignore details about our experience that are in plain sight. Despite holding this key, I am well aware that I have not necessarily earned any institutional authority to write on the matters that compel me so--yet, as a person who has simply lived and observed, I still feel that I should express myself, for what ever it may be worth.
Second, though my risk of legal and political persecution in some form or another is not as dire as was obviously the case in the past with established thinkers, I’ve felt compelled to dress my thoughts in verse, marching what I think are critical ideas down the runway, letting the audience gently scrutinize the layers of different conceptual fabrics in motion rather than to place what is thought to be controversial on a podium, open to the personalized savagery of modern “progressive” critique. Misunderstanding is a very real fear of mine as I believe it is one of the greatest tragedies of the human condition. I suppose, as a sensitive person who is deeply emotional and deeply invested in my own thought as a means to a better world, my intent up to now has been to create a buffer of some sort between what I theorize and the ideology-driven hate that tends to characterize Internet culture (which, incidentally now, always carries a ‘social media’ component with it). But I don’t wanna hide anymore.
Something I’ve noticed about that very vehicle for thought is how utterly unforgiving it is. Someone uncovers a person’s past involving a stupid, ignorant mistake along the lines of political incorrectness and suddenly all the good they may have recently put into the world evaporates because there is some sort of twisted expectation of social perfection we’ve adopted--even though there is some overlap between this absolutist, impossible approach to other, equally fallible human beings and the tendency to wax poetic about one’s own cathartic emotional experience, along with a new awareness emerging from the remnants of self-destruction, and forcing ‘compassion’ toward oneself in light of one’s mistakes.
The message is that “I” can learn, but “you” cannot. It seems that people are so volatile these days, they’re ready to pounce without really thinking about what a person is trying to say in earnest. And while I believe that we should work hard at our collective and individual duties to skepticism, I cannot condone, to the furthest reaches of any influence I may have, the deadlock of pseudo-critical thinking when it involves scapegoating and self-righteousness.
I sense (and feel) a lot of (justified) anger, and many well-meaning individuals are looking for a place to which they can direct such intensity. The unfortunate thing is that the fire mutates into hostility toward people who don’t deserve it. Shuffle formless anger into boxes designed to look nicely and glamorously radical, and chuck it at those who--excluding the really terrible people in the world--are honest and serious about answering the questions of “how to achieve the maximum possible distance from pain”, and, “what is, essentially”, and you’ve got a problem on your hands. Nothing is ever as simple as we’d like it to be.
And by the way, I find the dismissive “ok, boomer” attitude reprehensible. Like, OBVIOUSLY there are going to be differences among generations in “opinion” and lifestyles and so on. And obviously past generations have made what we now deem to be ‘mistakes’. But just like any individual who may regret past actions, whether personal or professional, one makes decisions supported by the most convincing reasons they can muster, and so they do the best they can with the knowledge they have at hand, at some particular moment. Maybe some visionaries in the past were able to extrapolate from the contemporary and predict what would happen in the future. Even if their equivalents exist in society today, we will not know for certain the downright traumatizing effects current societal mechanisms could force to manifestation in the years beyond, until they actually become fact. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And, there is wisdom that only comes through living life. That, I’m afraid, is not up for debate.
I must say this here, now. I realize I’m walking on eggshells with what I’m about to say. But, while it is clear that there is a significant degree of ‘white privilege’ in North American society, I’d be careful to declare ‘privilege’ an inherently white experience. It is an historical reality (and is therefore biased). Not all ‘white people’ are the same; and it is CERTAINLY not the case that it has only been ‘white people’ that enforced slavery, for example. And it is definitely true that different members of different religions and different races and different ethnicities and different cultures and different dialects have, historically, perpetuated evil across many axes. Furthermore, I believe that the explicit and intentional denigration of ‘white people’ MADE BY WHITE PEOPLE THEMSELVES is probably one of the greatest expressions of white privilege. How secure must one feel if they can freely diss their ‘own kind’ and know that nothing diabolical will happen to them? We owe justice through opportunity to people we have marginalized, but that is not the way. I just think that people are either willfully ignorant, accidentally ignorant, or have forgotten that all kinds of people can be villains, and further that a truly corrupt person will even torture people with whom they may have a great deal in common.
I tend to think that ‘intersectionality’ is a seriously important concept and is most empirically aligned with individualism. People move around more, cross-cultural contact happens more; global connection ushers cuisine, rituals and traditions, spiritual beliefs, and languages into landscapes that were previously barren of particular social technologies. The result is a person who may have many characteristics sort of in common with others who share those qualities in a scattered manner, but unless one of those forces was exceptionally prominent in the person’s life, the commonality is negligible.
Emergent from this phenomenon is the serious tension between individual self-actualization and the requirements for so-called proper functioning of the broader ‘community’ to which one feels they belong. The needs of each can often be at odds with one another, and it doesn’t appear to be an easy task to resolve this conflict. I do know that sacrifices will have to be made, as there is always a price to pay; I almost think of that as a universal law.
When I was 19 and took a philosophy of feminism class, I started noticing what problems arise when a mode of thinking is assumed to apply to a particular “community” (loosely speaking), just because its members all share some intrinsic quality. In the particular case I’m talking about, it was “being female”. When someone speaks the word ‘feminism’, it is loaded. You have liberal feminism, eco-feminism, radical feminism, third-wave feminism, black feminism, post-colonial feminism, and so on. The relevance of these various types is stretched so thinly throughout the human landscape that one could legitimately wonder why those theories should even be considered to have anything in common. In other words, how can you possibly come up with an ethic of revolution that applies universally to, I dunno, how many billion people in the world? Here’s a situation: women in the West, particularly in the Deep South, are fighting for their choice to have an abortion. Meanwhile, in some parts of India and China, female infanticide is more common than a decent person should like to admit, and that’s not because Indian and Chinese women want it! Asking someone who is thoughtful in ANY respect if they are a feminist is like asking someone if they believe in God, and that is not, nor should it be, an easy question to answer.
To be clear: what I am talking about is definition, and if you break down the etymological components of that word, you see that it is about deciding what sorts of conceptual boundaries must be drawn (the finiteness)--to determine what is included, and also what is excluded. My belief is that it is actually the interplay between those qualities intrinsic to a person and external forces placed upon us that dictate the degrees of self-satisfaction and happiness we experience.
That pain is to be avoided is generally unquestionable, though the finer details of rational action (because I do see the treatment of pain as an issue of rationality, and as something more fundamental to the exercising of rational action than market economics is) are still up for debate. And, I suppose, that is the case for many injustices that an active, voluntarily thinking society wishes to eradicate. I’d like to return to that topic some time in the future, but what concerns me today is the issue of essentialism.
Essentialism has been a problem for philosophers for a really long time. Often it is conceptualized as “what makes something that thing”, but in my view, Essence seems to lie in the realm of the experiential. In one minor paper I wrote for a metaphysics class, I argued (incompletely) that an object’s ‘essence’ could be partly defined by the function one identifies when they come into contact with said object. For example, because even though chairs can be made up of different numbers of legs, or be of different colours, or be upholstered or not, we place them into a category of ‘something to be seated upon’. But then again, there are many things that can be sat upon, and, on the other hand, one does not look at a real life dog and think of it as an object that innately serves a purpose, let alone is built for one.
So why am I talking about what seems to be an obscure and useless topic?
It is the utility of Essence that gives form to our experience. And for those who believe that we erroneously categorize and judge every single damn thing we come across in our lives, go ahead and try to reverse neurological evolution through time of geologic scale. I mean, this mode of existence came to be before we even defined what ‘values’ were.
Tangentially, my introduction to the study of philosophy started with the great divide between ‘rationalism’ (ie. some inherent structure which creates the capacity to ‘know’ already exists in a person at the time of birth) and ‘empiricism’ (the school of thought where a person only collected knowledge through experience after they were born with a ‘blank slate’ of a mind). I never understood why the distinction between rationalism and empiricism was so important, because it seemed so obvious that our system of moving through the world was a combination of the two. We see now that the belief in one to the exclusion of the other is just plain stupid: genetics, epigenetics, logarithmic counting in BABIES, education, debate, and research, all contribute to an individual’s understanding of the world. (It is this idea, too, that contributes to my belief that free will is an illusion [though a helpful one at that] and that ‘luck’ is an epistemological concept. I will also use this idea to, eventually, communicate my argument that astrology is theoretically plausible, but that involves discussing archetypes and the cyclical nature of our known world...) Note: “Epistemology” is the study of knowledge and how we come to accumulate it. I went on this tangent because I think we need to demonstrate a great deal of respect for both pre-existing neurological realities and the staggering potential of science to teach us about our environments and ourselves. There are some core things about us that we would be wrong to ignore, and unforgivably so if the sound science is right there.
We do not typically go through life coming into contact with objects or people and checking off items on a list that comprise criteria for something being what it is (unless, of course, you’re prone to collect little hints as to whether a potential lover loves you back or not.....). To do so would reduce the fluidity with which we interact with externalities. That being said, I can conceive of a time when one goes outside for a cigarette in the night and watches a creature (as I just did) that may be a cat, or that may be a raccoon, cross the road. You peer at this creature for several seconds, up until the point that you conclude, and are certain, that it is, indeed, a cat. It is then that you can move on with your life. Perhaps what helped you to come to this conclusion was a short list of criteria that separate catness from raccoonness. Obviously that would be more efficient than consulting an exhaustive mental list of “cat properties” and comparing it to a similar list, but of “raccoon properties”. But even so, by the time you’ve witnessed the cat/raccoon, you’ve already filtered out any possibility that the creature might be something else, like a stray dog, or a lizard, or a floating chair. In conclusion, I propose here that context is essential to Essence. And Essence is a fully whole sensory experience, insofar as your sensory faculties work. This is why it is so hard to define.
The social relevance of the concept of Essence is becoming more important with the emergence of identity politics, the crises in feminism, “queerness”, the feminine/masculine dichotomy, and even paradigms in psychological health. Inherent to Essence is continuity, and no one can argue against the notion that we rely on general continuity to go about our daily lives.
But out of continuity develops expectation. Expectation is immensely helpful for the reason I laid out above. Additionally, in public, we rely on a common yet tacit understanding that individual members of the public will behave in a way that is safe and appropriate for everyone. The problem is, if you have experienced a good chunk of your life, well into adulthood, having never seen an unfamiliar and idiosyncratic expression of certain properties, why WOULD you do anything else other than fumble in your acceptance that that is the way something is? Your mind scrambles to organize what you are interacting with in the way that makes the most sense.
I was once accused of being an essentialist because of some remark I made referencing biological differences between men and women. I wondered if the dude was joking because I really cannot grasp why someone would think that the differences are trivial. Lately I’ve toyed with the conclusion that there must be something essential, something bounded, about the way we express ourselves, which matches what we are that isn’t seen by absolutely everyone, including exuding femininity or masculinity. If there wasn’t something essential about these “descriptions”, why would anyone make an effort to look a certain way in the first place? Or, why would anyone have a subconscious tendency to adopt certain characteristics? The point I’m trying to make is that communication in the form of appearance is just as important as a verbal explanation of something, and can in fact be more truthful than what is verbally expressed. Whether one wants to admit it or not, you are offering information that allows others to draw conclusions about you. And it’s not that you merely fulfill a checklist of the sort that I mentioned earlier. It is that, often, though not always, each separate quality supports all the others, forming a sort of “mesh-like” coherence. If there wasn’t something essentially feminine that you identified with, or something essentially masculine that you identified with--if these things didn’t matter--there would be no point in going to great lengths to change your appearance to communicate something. (And I think this holds even in the case of the non-binary person.)
Of course, judgments are made all the time about people, which have nothing to do with being transgendered or cisgendered. A person asks you your age. Why? Because they’re collecting information about you and the particulars in the category of “age” should reveal something about you that you’re not stating explicitly. And this information is only grounded in other information the inquirer has about you. And the only reason this information might be reliable is because a consolidation of an individual’s past experiences tells them that a certain age represents an axis of consistency of mentality and/or behaviour. The deductions we make are not always accurate, but if we didn’t instinctively think of this information as important, we wouldn’t seek it!
I will now apply the above problem to sort out why we are in such a mess, socially. First of all, the person is born into expectation of behaviour. That expectation depends on their sex at birth (assuming the person is not intersex), their social, economic, political class, the levels of education their immediate family members have achieved, their spiritual practices, et cetera. It seems to me that feminism arose in the first place because of the particular kind of anticipation of behaviour that swirls around whether you have a testicle-penis or a uterus-vagina combination. The traditionally ‘male’ realm was the unexplored frontier to many women; it was one of excitement, possibility, and opportunity, and arguably more freedom than the domain to which women were typically assigned: the home. Women can produce babies, and if you could produce babies then you SHOULD produce babies, and you should care for them too. And not only that, but by virtue of the fact that you are a mother you can’t even fathom leaving your babies behind. I haven’t yet come across a proper articulation of why this point is so crucial to understand. The women who have the term “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) slung at them are attacked by people who don’t understand that this fundamental difference in expectation between female-born individuals and male-born individuals is looming in the background, and how damn well important it really is, because it inevitably shapes a person’s perception of the world and quite possibly the expectations they have of other people! And the perception that falls upon you isn’t just something you can shed on a whim. And also, why are people surprised that this is still an issue? Even as advanced creatures we still succumb to evolutionary forces. I don’t think any reasonable person could say that “you aren’t female even if you feel female”, but it’s not about how you “feel”. It’s about what happens between you and people once they figure out a vital fact about you. It’s about the context in which you, a whole being, operate. You want to talk about oppression? I think your self-identity being misaligned with how other people think you should be is pretty high up there in the ranks.
So, to digress a little: the notion of changing yourself and making an impression on strangers, making a difference in the world, is intoxicating. But we enter dangerous territory when visions of child-rearing and home care become afterthoughts. Child psychologists have identified the age range between 2 and 4 to be particularly crucial in socializing children; it is at that age that they are the most impressionable with regard to how they learn to interact with others. That’s not really a huge window to make sure you ‘get it right’. I think the family unit, whatever its configuration may be, is pretty foundational to the rest of society. While many people presently carry harmful opinions about things we don’t understand, and changing those opinions tends to be rather difficult, the most radical, most powerful thing we can do to initiate reform is to make sure the children we are responsible for grow up valuing honour, kindness, and a sense of duty and justice, not just in relation to themselves and their immediate families, but to society as a whole.
People are throwing tantrums because society hasn’t given itself an overnight makeover. I think that anyone involved in politics understands, either consciously or unconsciously, that even though political institutions and bureaucracies were created by real people, they’ve sort of become fragmented away from human life and are entities of their own, floating above our heads like clouds in the higher atmosphere, and which do not have any readily identifiable boundaries. It appears that the various bodies of legislation and bureaucracies have become so bloody complex in correlation with the complexity of human interaction that they seem almost impossible to disentangle. Furthermore, ideas take a long time to die...if they ever even do.
Rather than viewing child-rearing as a burden, I choose to view it as the greatest responsibility and the greatest tool we have for genuine change. I feel, honestly, that sometimes we waste energy trying to convince people of something where there is no convincing possible. We often preach to the choir because they’re the only people who make us feel heard--but our own little choirs already know and believe what we know and believe.
So. I think, once I reviewed what I said above, that I’ve attempted to illuminate a conundrum about simultaneous utility and danger found in the act of expecting. This “study” of sorts is a microcosm of a world where darkness and light are aspects of all things. I’m convinced that the formulation of potential is expressed in binaries, but unlike computers, we are able to interpret ambiguities, and in many pockets of society people are tolerant of self-expression. With so many belief systems up for grabs, and with the world as it is in its ebbs and flows, it is up to the individual to craft their own transcendent values as a way to “orient themselves”, as Dr. Jordan B. Peterson put it. Be mature and do not dismiss nuance. Challenge yourself. And for God’s sake, the next time you’re thinking of buying that innocuous avocado that’s become the symbol for the Millennial generation, ask yourself what is more important: dismantling violent and antisocial Mexican drug cartels, or supporting Mexican farmers who are trying to make their ways through life, just like every. last. one of us.
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Taking the credit score: can universities sort out educational fraud?
In July 2017, Allison Harbin, an artwork historical past PhD graduate from New York’s Rutgers College, uploaded a number of posts to her weblog, titled “Why I left Academia”. In them, Ms Harbin claimed that an instructional supervisor had used components of her work, with out acknowledgment, in their very own paper.
Ms Harbin raised the case with the college, which rejected her claims, calling them “unfounded” and defending the supervisor, who was not recognized within the weblog. However in her posts, Ms Harbin stated the response was “Orwellian”, claiming that some professors urged her to not say something, and when she did, clubbed collectively to cowl up what she stated was educational fraud.
Whereas the dispute continued, Ms Harbin’s blogs went viral. Inside hours she was inundated with tons of of emails from folks sharing allegations about educational exploitation by their superiors, the institutional buildings which make this behaviour permissible and an absence of help for these subjected to it.
Up to now, Ms Harbin has acquired over 400 testimonies from present and former graduate college students at 300 completely different universities around the globe, revealing what she calls a “systemic disaster in academia” which “can finest be described as an abuse of energy”.
Sunil Purushothaman, a former PhD pupil at Imperial School London, says he was a sufferer of exploitation
Over the previous 20 years, many universities have adopted a extra business enterprise mannequin, the place employment is obtainable to teachers on a brief foundation and the place the stress to lift new funds results in a “publish or perish” analysis tradition. Some observers consider that this fashion of operating universities will result in much more exploitation of graduate college students.
“There’s a stress on the safe educational to publish or be damned, due to the extent of efficiency administration and the deal with analysis cash,” says Jane Thompson, an official on the UK’s college and faculty union.
Within the UK critics spotlight the Analysis Excellence Framework launched in 2014, whereby teachers are ranked by and awarded funding in accordance with their printed output.
“There’s additionally the shortcoming of individuals on insecure contracts, whether or not PhD or early profession researchers, to really problem inappropriate or unethical behaviour due to the precariousness of their employment,” Ms Thompson says. “When folks on the prime are being squeezed it’s the folks on the backside who get the dregs of that.”
Ms Harbin says the scenario is identical within the US, the place universities and departments are additionally ranked by their printed analysis. Establishments have additionally in the reduction of on tenured positions and the roles out there for youthful teachers are likely to have a lot weaker employment protections.
Advisable
“There’s fewer professorships, there’s much less cash; these left have an unbelievable stress to publish,” she says. “Even in the very best of circumstances, even should you’re a good particular person, you’re incentivised to steal out of your graduate college students.”
One of the vital widespread types of exploitation happens within the “co-authoring” of analysis papers, says Joshua Krook, a visiting regulation researcher at Oxford college. “One of the best professors within the educational system have too many publications [under their name] to have feasibly written them themselves,” he says. “Whenever you discuss to them in personal, or their college students, you discover that what’s happening is the scholars they supervise are literally writing the articles, after which the professor will put their title on it as in the event that they’ve contributed.”
Allison Harbin says that when she took her fraud claims to her college the response was ‘Orwellian’
The issue is so endemic, Mr Krook says, that “your complete system of academia” is constructed on profiting from college students. Mr Krook, who has investigated the subject at 15 universities throughout the UK and Australia, says he has “not but come throughout a college that doesn’t have the issue”.
One pupil at a London college pointed to his supervisor’s workers webpage as an illustration of this. The tutorial, who works within the sciences, has greater than 450 papers listed there; the supervisor’s title seems as lead writer on lower than 70.
One other pupil from Sydney recollects how her supervisor demanded she “hand over” a 10,000 phrase paper she had written. He would put his byline on it first, and hers might come second. When she refused, the supervisor resorted to threats. The coed, who requested to stay nameless and left academia due to her expertise, described the exploitation of graduates as “one other type of abuse in society”.
Claiming credit score for one more particular person’s work is clearly seen as unethical and in violation of universities’ insurance policies.
However some consider that bylines mirror extra than simply authorship and analysis. “There are people who uphold the concept somebody deserves to be a co-author just because they introduced in cash or are excessive standing,” says Brian Martin, a social scientist and emeritus professor on the College of Wollongong, Australia. Others see co-authoring as a respectful signal of respect to the supervisor. “However,” Prof Martin says, “that clashes with scientific journals’ concepts, that solely individuals who have contributed to the analysis must be named”.
The differing views and lack of clear pointers is exacerbated, Mr Krook says, by the character of supervisor-student relationships. One-to-one relationships with little oversight or accountability can lead to inspirational mentoring. However they will additionally create giant energy and knowledge imbalances which might be straightforward to take advantage of.
‘Even in the very best of circumstances, even should you’re a good particular person, you’re incentivised to steal out of your college students’
“The professor is an authority determine, they introduce you to what’s regular within the subject,” Mr Krook says. “They’ll say what’s regular and what occurs on a regular basis, and since it’s coming from an authority determine you consider them.”
On events, the difficulty of who actually owns the mental property related to educational analysis can have profound monetary penalties. Sunil Purushothaman, a PhD graduate from Imperial School London, says he was a sufferer of exploitation whereas finding out below the supervision of Christofer Toumazou within the early 2000s.
DNA Electronics, an organization he co-founded with Prof Toumazou at Imperial, was first registered in 2003 below the title of Suniseq — a play on Mr Purushothaman’s first title, Sunil, and “sequencing”. In 2016, DNAe was awarded a contract price as much as $51.9m by a US authorities company, and Prof Toumazou received a European Inventors Award in 2014. DNAe is now a key participant in a world market price about $4bn in 2018 and rising by 15-20 per cent yearly. Nonetheless, Mr Purushothaman is unknown and penniless.
He claims Prof Toumazou pressured him to commercialise his work on next-generation gene sequencing and misled him into making use of for patents primarily based on his analysis for Mr Toumazou’s firm as a requirement for a PhD. Mr Purushothaman additionally claimed he was later bullied by way of emails and cellphone calls into ending his involvement with DNAe.
In a single electronic mail from September 2008, seen by the Monetary Instances, Prof Toumazou says “together with your permission I’d wish to proceed with out your signature [ . . .] if I don’t hear from you by Friday will assume that is OK.”
Labour MP Stephen Timms raised the exploitation of post-graduate college students in parliament, saying their IP ‘must be protected’ © PA Archive/PA Pictures
Imperial School, which holds shares in DNAe, rejected the claims, and supported Mr Toumazou, who stated he had a “very constructive relationship” with Mr Purushothaman at Imperial. “These unfounded allegations from greater than a decade in the past have been investigated and there’s no case to reply,” the college says, including that Mr Purushothaman “gave no indication of discontent or coercion on the time”.
DNAe additionally defends the communications between the events. “As the corporate grew and Dr Purushothaman refused all contact with Prof Toumazou, DNA Electronics’ attorneys wanted a number of signatures from Dr Purushothaman to progress,” it says. “Throughout this era, Mr Purushothaman refused to signal paperwork agreeing to new funding that the corporate wanted. This was why Prof Toumazou despatched messages urging him to signal; in any other case the corporate’s future would have been jeopardised.”
DNAe added that Mr Purushothaman was urged by Prof Toumazou to retain his shareholding. “Whereas I’m disenchanted by his unfounded allegations towards me, I proceed to want him all the very best,” says Mr Toumazou. A spokesperson for DNAe says that its success comes from a subsequent household of patents, not the one Mr Purushothaman labored on, however Mr Purushothaman claims his work underpins DNAe’s achievements.
Stephen Timms, Mr Purushothaman’s MP, took up the matter with Imperial on his behalf and raised it in an adjournment debate in parliament on the finish of July.
“Professor Toumazou’s behaviour has been a shame, however has led to him being showered with wealth and honours. And I’m sorry to say that Imperial has facilitated a shameful cover-up,” Mr Timms stated in parliament. “College students’ IP must be protected.”
‘The overview course of is damaged. Professors are pals with one another. So a variety of the time it’s swept below the rug’
Mr Purushothaman contacted his MP after attorneys suggested him that he can be financially unable to tackle a well-endowed college and firm in a authorized battle. It’s a widespread problem — as soon as an establishment helps the professor, taking the case to court docket is pricey for many college students.
“In the end, the one place these disputes might be sorted is the Excessive Courtroom [of Justice],” says Ross Anderson, a Cambridge educational and campaigner for mental property rights. However the price of exterior litigations typically means it’s a menace, reasonably than a consolation, for the scholar. “The implied menace of the Excessive Courtroom is how a lot of this bullying goes on,” Mr Anderson stated.
Ms Harbin says monetary penalties are usually not the one drawback for college students who’re exploited.
“Practically everybody I converse with stays traumatised by their experiences,” she says. “I can’t inform you what number of instances I’ve heard about how one thing like this fully ruins folks’s lives, psychologically and career-wise.”
Others want to not say something. In conditions the place the educational division is small and the place there’s a lack of impartial committees, if a pupil does complain they might typically be addressing their complaints to somebody who’s an in depth colleague of the topic, if not the topic themselves.
Graduates at Rutgers College in New York. In 2017, Allison Harbin accused her supervisor on the college of utilizing her work with out acknowledgment © AP
“With PhD college students, there’s such a stage of patronage concerned in pursuing your educational profession. A variety of it’s right down to your supervisor relationship, so that you’re not essentially going to talk up,” says Ms Thompson, on the UK’s college and faculty union.
“The overview course of may be very damaged,” says Mr Krook. “Professors are pals with one another, the concept you’re going to throw your good friend below the bus and get them in big inner or authorized hassle . . . nobody goes to do this. So a variety of the time it’s swept below the rug.”
After Ms Harbin printed the blogs, she was sued by her supervisor for damages. Ms Harbin needed to file for chapter, which finally led to the case towards her being dropped.
“It’s too threatening to the people who have a variety of energy within the system,” Prof Martin says. “When one thing is threatening to folks in energy, they don’t prefer it researched.”
Final month, in collaboration with a graduate pupil at Queen’s College in California, Ms Harbin launched one of many first research investigating the expertise of and impression on college students who’ve unfavourable educational encounters with supervisors at graduate stage.
She can also be compiling the analysis found from the tales shared in response to her weblog right into a guide because of be printed in 2022. Although Ms Harbin is dedicated to altering the established order, she is conscious of how mammoth the duty forward is. “I don’t see this drawback being fastened in my lifetime,” she says.
Psychological well being: Analysis pressures take toll on postgraduates
There’s one other disaster brewing in academia — pupil’s psychological well being. Aruna Dias, a good friend of Sunil Purushothaman’s, describes how after excitedly beginning his PhD in 2000 his good friend — a “light man who by no means will get indignant” — quickly started to speak about how a lot stress he was below.
By the summer season of 2002, Mr Dias stated Mr Purushothaman had gone “incommunicado, completely introverted, we wouldn’t hear from him in any respect”. Mr Purushothaman’s sister, Sunnie, fearful about how a lot work he was doing. She started to go away packages and messages outdoors his room at Imperial School London when he wouldn’t reply to her knocks on the door.
Mr Purushothaman’s expertise tallies with the outcomes from a lot of research which have revealed what the Instances Greater Training has known as “a psychological well being disaster” in academia.
In 2014, a research of 790 postgraduate college students on the College of California, Berkeley, discovered that 47 per cent met the factors for a analysis of melancholy. A bigger 2017 research in Flanders, Belgium, discovered that out of three,659 PhD college students, one in two skilled psychological misery and one in three was vulnerable to a standard psychiatric dysfunction. In 2018, Nature Biotechnology surveyed 2,289 college students and located that “graduate college students are greater than six instances as prone to expertise melancholy and nervousness as in comparison with the final inhabitants”.
In an nameless touch upon a survey by Cambridge college’s graduate union this yr, which reported that 67 per cent of 1,803 respondents reported recognized and undiagnosed psychological well being issues, one pupil wrote: “I feel the most important problem the college wants to beat with postgraduate psychological well being is addressing supervisor-student relationships.”
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CRISPR culture
CRISPR is a way of changing and replacing parts of DNA using enzymes like a pair of molecular scissors (of course things are more complex than this!). This new technology for ‘editing’ DNA, genes or genomes began to attract public attention between around 2012 and 2015. When I started to write about metaphors used to make CRISPR public (for example, here and here and here), in around 2015/16, I was surprised by how little resonance CRISPR and gene editing seemed to have in wider culture (which was, one has to admit, just then engulfed by other major preoccupations). This was, I thought, quite different compared to what happened during the emergence of, say, cloning or nanobiotechnology, which caused something of a cultural ‘effervescence’ after 1997 and after about 2003 respectively, with lots of stories and images circulating widely.
CRISPR novels
Things seem to be changing now. To see what’s going on, the first thing I did was google. I searched for ‘CRISPR novels’ and got this (11 March):
I was somewhat surprised, as I had not regarded A Crack in Creation (Doudna and Sternberg, 2017) as a novel, despite the use of some fictional characters, such as unicorns. And Modern Prometheus (Kozubek, 2016) was not a novel by Mary Shelley. These two books are written by scientists/science writers not novelists. They deal with reality, not fiction and I have written about them here and here.
I then searched for ‘CRISPR scifi’. That proved more fruitful. I found a very useful webpage on CRISPR in movies and on TV. I’ll come back to movies in a minute. I also asked on Twitter whether people knew of some CRISPR inspired novels. At first, people were a bit stumped, but then I got a few hints.
There seems to be one real CRISPR thriller, namely Change Agent, by Daniel Suarez (2017). As one preview said: “It’s a sci-fi thriller about a topic few non-nerds would normally consider thrilling: Crispr (short for ‘clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats’).” It engages with the science, summarised on the first few pages, as well as with upcoming ethical dilemmas, also flagged up, in a relatively unsubtle way, on the first few pages. Here goes:
We are introduced to a couple trying to produce a genome edited child. They talk to a counsellor: “The husband again placed his hand on her knee. She shook her head. ‘It seems against Nature.’ The counselor spoke softly. ‘This is the very same process Nature follows to eliminate viral DANA in bacteria. The same process used under the UN’s Treaty on Genetic modification.’ ‘Yes, but to cure deadly genetic defects, not to tailor-make a child.’ The husband shook his head. ‘We are not tailoring our child. We are correcting genetic weaknesses. Is not a weak memory fatal to a future doctor or attorney?’ ‘Where does this sort of thinking lead us, Neelo – eugenics?'” And so on…
Other novels mentioned by my Twitter correspondents were: Helix by Marc Elsberg and Intrusion by Ken MacLeod. There are probably more out there. Netflix is currently looking into turning Change Agent into a movie.
CRISPR movies
Many movies have dealt with genetic engineering, and some are listed on the webpage I mentioned above, such as GATTACA, of course. However, it seems that only one movie so far has taken up the CRISPR challenge directly, and this is Rampage (2018), directed by Bad Peyton. There is also a TV Show Luke Cage (2016-present), which engages with CRISPR and, the, perhaps better-known, series Orphan Black (2013-2017).
Many of these movies and series pose thought-provoking questions about human nature and personhood. However, there is also the temptation of using facile ‘TV tropes’, one of which is called, by some observers, ‘LEGO genetics’: “With LEGO Genetics, you can fiddle with DNA wherever you like, intentionally or accidentally, and all the cells will change overnight (if that). Just wake up and presto! Wings! Fur! Gills! Hulking muscles! Giant brain! Stem cells! You don’t even have to eat the equivalent of your entire body mass to create all those new body parts; the old cells and the new ones are just cobbled together like LEGO bricks.”
Audiences, players, consumers etc. will probably be well aware of such tropes and know how to deal with them; and if they are not, there are fictional characters that tell them how to. For instance, Prokhor Zakharov, a character in a computer game, says: “”Remember, genes are NOT blueprints. This means you can’t, for example, insert ‘the genes for an elephant’s trunk’ into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There are no genes for trunks. What you can do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals. For instance, we can in theory splice the native plants’ talent for nitrogen fixation into a terran plant.”
Before exploring documentaries, where one would expect such lessons, I have to mention, of course, Captain Marvel – with her marvellous superpowers… Here is a great blog post about Marvel and CRISPR. I only quote one paragraph: “Films about the Marvel universe are all the rage right now, showing off characters with truly amazing abilities that humans can only dream of having. The introduction of the CRISPR gene editing technology has left people wondering if they could gain ‘superhuman’ powers. From a scientific standpoint, CRISPR researchers have made it quite clear that the scientific community does not support creating humans with enhanced abilities. ‘The talk about designer babies is ultimately a big distraction,’ says Carl Zimmer, science journalist and award-winning New York Times columnist.”
Well said! We all welcome debate, but the debate should at least be well-informed. Can documentaries provide that information?
CRISPR documentaries
A feature documentary about CRISPR was released on 10 March called “Human Nature”, and other documentaries are in production. Grant Jacobs wrote a quick blog post about it and points out that: “The film features a star cast of scientists working on genome editing. Alongside them are experts representing law, bioethics, environmental and commercial interests. The listed cast includes Jill Banfield, David Baltimore, Rodolphe Barrangou, Alta Charo, George Church, Jennifer Doudna, Antonio Regalado, Fyodor Urnov, Luhan Yang, and Feng Zhang. (If I had a criticism, it’d be that the cast is very USA-oriented, but then it’s produced in the USA.)”.
Watch the trailer! I haven’t seen the documentary, but some say it strikes a good balance: “It’s hopeful about CRISPR’s ability to help us fix diseases that have plagued humans for millennia, while also questioning if we’re ready to make genetic changes that’ll affect us for generations to come.”
One of the more gang-ho voices heard in the documentary is George Church. If you want to know more about his views, you can look at this interesting piece entitled “Five conversations with biology’s Captain Marvel, George Church”! The subtitle of the article brings us back to LEGO genetics: “When it comes to tinkering with the stuff of life, George Church is the equivalent of a Lego master builder.”
CRISPR and popular science writing
Nessa Carey has just published a popular science book that brings the CRISPR story up to date (after Modern Prometheus, 2016, and Crack in Creation, 2017). She uses more conventional metaphors in her book title: Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures (2019). Having just read the book, I can say that Carey uses the hacking metaphor really creatively in the book to draw readers in and hook them. If you want to be well-informed and ready to debate CRISPR knowledgeably, this book is a great start.
Of course, popular science writing doesn’t only happen in books. Au contraire! One should also look at newspapers, podcasts, blogs, journals, twitter and more! …
CRISPR art
And finally, there is also CRISPR inspired bio-art, some of which has been surveyed in this blog post under the title “Who is afraid of CRISPR art?”. There is an article in Nature entitled: “Love, death and CRISPR: An artwork”. There is also an artwork that I actually saw, by Anna Dumitriu, and an article on CRISPR art I couldn’t see in The Crispr Journal. I bet there is more….
CRISPR the board game
And, before I forget, there is even a board game based on CRISPR on the horizon! “Players are members of a team whose missions entail delivering specific CRISPR-edited products to users. To succeed, players must: solve puzzles; communicate about their work to indispensible [sic] support professionals and the public; overcome obstacles; foil would-be underminers; and recover from setbacks. See more detailed game features here.”
Cultural horizons
Discussions about CRISPR, like discussions about cloning or stem cells for example, happen against a well-established cultural horizon. When studying the issue of ‘designer’ or ‘donor’ babies in the year 2000, I called this ‘cultural precognition.
I pointed out that new developments in genetics throw up fresh ethical questions almost every day. Doctors, scientists, policy makers, the media and the public are ill-equipped to find answers to these questions on scientific, legal or moral principles alone. They therefore often take recourse to metaphors and narratives to fill this ethical void. Popular culture talks about space-rockets before there are space-rockets, clones before there are clones and artificially created babies before there are artificially created babies. When scientists do anything new, there is often a ready-made public perception of how good or how bad it is going to be, derived from social, linguistic, literary and cultural preconceptions.
So, when genetically edited or ‘crispred’ babies happened (if indeed they did), I was not surprised to find the following observation about popular culture in the context of Rampage, Change Agent etc: “A scientist in China has dominated headlines this week with the claim that his research team has successfully created the world’s first genetically-edited babies. If true, the experiment raises a lot of difficult ethical questions—ones that mainstream films and TV shows have been exploring for decades. The topic of genetic engineering is so prevalent in pop culture that it’s practically a genre unto itself. At the heart of these science fiction depictions is the issue of whether the benefits of genetic engineering—that is, potentially curing diseases—outweigh the colossal risks, which range from eugenics to unintended mutations.”
A sub-genre of the genetic engineering genre is ‘biopunk’, to which some of the CRISPR movies and novels belong. I bet there will be more biopunk in the future. Another cultural tradition that holds a mirror to science and society and there to be explored.
Keeping an eye on CRISPR culture
Future work on the language and culture of gene editing should chart changes and shifts in social and cultural perceptions of genome editing over the last two decades or so from around 1998 (Dolly, BSE, GM, stem cells etc.) to now. Such a diachronic analysis could be based on comparing two books, published twenty years apart.
In 1998 José van Dijck published a book entitled Imagenation: Popular images of genetics, in which she explored the crucial role that cultural images played in the popularisation of genetic knowledge, especially cloning.
In 2017 Everett Hamner published a book entitled Editing the Soul, in which he stresses that we need to pay attention to the “cultural mythologies” by which we frame our public debates about genome editing. The stories we tell are shaped by science and culture alike, including the metaphors created by scientists themselves: “We should consider carefully how these mutual narratives double back and colonize the research and applications that find private and public financing.”
Science always happens against an established cultural horizon, but it also feeds into and transforms it. This then also changes social and ethical perceptions and actions. If ever we manage to establish something like a ‘global observatory for gene editing’ (a rather ambitious project!), this needs to include the observation of cultural developments! Only then can we grapple with ‘public engagement’ in a well-informed way.
Acknowledgement: I’d like to thank the second referee of an article for making me dig deeper into the cultural ramifications of CRISPR!
Image: Pixabay
The post CRISPR culture appeared first on Making Science Public.
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Tumblr announced Monday that it would be banning many categories of adult content across its platform, including “photos, videos, or GIFs” displaying explicit material, as well as “illustrations that [depict] sex acts.”
The controversial change will take effect on December 17; existing posts flagged by Tumblr’s censors as violating the new policy will be automatically set to private, meaning that no one will be able to see them other than the blog’s creator.
Debate is raging about what Tumblr’s userbase will even look like at that point, given how much of the community involves erotica and the use of explicit imagery. Discussion of the ban consumed social media throughout Monday evening, and Tumblr users responded with a mixture of outrage, worry, and hilarious memes.
On the one hand, it’s easy to see why Tumblr, now in its 11th year as a social media platform known for “reblogs” and image-heavy content, made this move: it seems very likely that its hand was probably forced by Apple. In November, Apple banned Tumblr’s official app from the IOS store because of reported child pornography on the platform. This led to a sitewide crackdown on pornography that left many users complaining that their NSFW blogs had been unfairly purged in the sweep.
Yet despite last month’s initial purge, the app has still not been restored to the IOS store, in what seems to be a clear ‘fix this or else’ ultimatum from Apple that has almost certainly prompted the current crisis. As Motherboard wrote on Monday in its breakdown of the Tumblr situation, “Apple has repeatedly leveraged its unprecedented power over millions of smartphones to sanitize the apps that are available on iPhones.”
In an email response, a Tumblr spokesperson directed Vox back to the staff announcement, including the staff’s acknowledgment that “filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.”
But on the other hand, many users are outraged over what they see as an attempt to disrupt the entire culture of Tumblr and its community, where erotica and NSFW artwork and storytelling have thrived and flourished — and where marginalized communities who have built safe spaces may now be newly vulnerable.
“According to marginalized and vulnerable people, this change in policy will directly hurt them,” wrote geek icon and power user Wil Wheaton, in a reblog of an inappropriately flagged post which featured nothing more offensive than shirtless men kissing. “And that’s indefensible.”
What’s at issue is not only the question of whether Tumblr can survive its own purge — it’s the question of who Tumblr’s core users are, and what will motivate them to continue building their communities on a platform that seems to be devaluing them and their vital contributions to building Tumblr culture.
Though Tumblr was born alongside most other modern social networks, it’s long been associated with a certain countercultural deviance. Founder David Karp launched it in 2007 when he was just 20, and his much-vaunted hoodie-wearing ethos helped give the site a permanently youthful attitude — even an air of “millennial narcissism.”
Tumblr’s younger, digital-savvy denizens made Tumblr into a center of internet culture, churning out memes and cultivating subcultures from fandoms to study bloggers to digital art collectives. But despite all this, the site has long been plagued by an unfairly dismissive cultural reputation that reduces the entire vibrant platform to a vast repository of porn, and not much else.
The association of Tumblr with porn is part of a longstanding media narrative that has perpetually dismissed the site and its userbase for its relative youth, its progressive politics, its fandom leanings, and its predominantly queer and feminist userbase.
“Every time I make the mistake of opening Tumblr at work I end up seeing a stray boob,” Akila Hughes joked in Splinter News.
This reputation further reduces the community that gave us “Tumblr activism” — the disruptive but progressive political force that grew into a loud generation of real-world activists — down to that of a bunch of women who are only there for porn.
And even the porn itself gets mischaracterized. The fact is that the erotic and NSFW imagery on Tumblr includes everything from fanart to sex education, and is a vibrant and much-valued part of the community. And while data analysts have uncovered that, yes, there is a lot of porn on Tumblr, it’s coming from only a tiny fraction — about a tenth of one percent — of the site’s creators.
And the producers of this pornography are not active members of the Tumblr community. Most of the producers of pornography on Tumblr are pornbots, automated accounts set up to specifically generate NSFW content, much of it designed to lure users to third-party paid content sites.
Still, because pornbots don’t always stay in their lane, it’s easy for users reading random “normal” tags to be exposed to them. The site has tried multiple times to deal with porn in its midst. Users have even tried to help, organizing spontaneous organic pornbot-banning campaigns. But the site’s efforts haven’t been enough to keep it from running into trouble with third parties — most notably, Apple, which, in its ban of anything “overtly sexual,” is not attuned to the blurry lines between porn, erotica, and other types of racy content.
Tumblr has long sagged under the weight of doubt regarding its longterm sustainability. The site plateaued its growth in 2016 at just 23 million users, less than half that of Twitter at the time and a third that of Instagram, which has since ballooned exponentially.
Since the exit last year of its longtime chief David Karp, and the sale of the site to Verizon, rumblings that Tumblr is finally finished have abounded. Meanwhile, Tumblr users have been increasingly at odds with Tumblr’s corporate side, as the business tries to balance potential money-making opportunities with its unruly yet thriving corner of internet culture. Unfortunately, the short-term solution seems to be a pivot away from that grassroots culture towards more rigidly controlled content — which opens the door to a whole new set of problems.
One of the biggest questions on the minds of Tumblr users is whether Tumblr can effectively carry out this policy without nuking everything in its path. The consensus so far, based on both past experience with Tumblr as well as other algorithmic censorship attempts, as well as the abundant reports of posts that are already being inappropriately flagged under the new change: not a chance.
Welp, my Tumblr blog is marked NSFW, bc I curse like a sailor and occasionally I reblog fanart, fine art, and protest art that contains nudity. (Yes, including FEMALE-PRESENTING NIPPLES.) So I guess my Tumblr blog will be on the chopping block too.
So where we goin’ next, y’all?
— N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) December 3, 2018
It’s important to note that Tumblr is attempting to explicitly draw a dividing line between its users’ creative content and the more hardcore stuff. Tumblr’s new policy defines “adult content” as “primarily includ[ing] photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations—that depicts sex acts.” That doesn’t necessarily include many types of erotica, which may be sexual and evocative without explicitly depicting sex. And Tumblr is only banning “photos, videos, or GIFs,” not text-based erotica or artwork — except when that artwork portrays sexual acts.
The platform is also trying to differentiate between explicit porn and non-sexual nudity — a tricky bit of semantics that led the site to go with language banning “female-presenting nipples” while protecting “exposed female-presenting nipples in connection with breastfeeding,” among other things. The new policy also specifies that nudity for the purposes of sexual education and other contexts is okay. That should be comforting to the thriving community around sex work on Tumblr, as well as to those who are concerned about its increasingly important role as a de facto sex education site for millions of its users.
But all of these attempts to separate the wheat from the porny chaff raise the question of whether Tumblr will be able to accurately police along these dividing lines without committing overreach and becoming censorship-happy, thus silencing many vital blogs and users.
In the wake of the passage of FOSTA, the anti-sex trafficking bill that has raised internet-wide concerns about censorship, many Tumblr users have spoken out about their anxiety that Tumblr will become a platform of broad and ill-defined censorship which will silence some of the most important parts of Tumblr. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time; in 2013, Tumblr attempted to ban NSFW tags and wound up censoring queer content before backtracking.
And how does anyone, let alone Tumblr’s automatic censors, draw the line between illustrations that depict sex acts and illustrations that simply “feature” nudity?
These questions have alarmed many Tumblr users. Many fanartists and original artists create explicit art alongside non-explicit art as a matter of course; some, like the well-known artist Siij, whose NSFW blog was banned in the November purge, have already been targets of Tumblr censors.
In addition, some users have reported that entire tags are currently being scrubbed of content and hidden from Tumblr’s search; for example, searching for the NSFW tag no longer generates any content. And users who’ve already started receiving emails about their flagged content under the new policy are reporting that their content is being flagged incorrectly.
One Twitter thread compiling reports of incorrectly flagged Tumblr posts collected everything from benign art and fanart to cave photos, safe-for-work vintage photos of black women, and even a reblog of Tumblr’s own announcement:
On a superficial level, this is all hilarious — and, to many of us, hilariously familiar. (More on that in a moment.) But on a deeper level, the giant outcry over this decision reflects a larger anxiety from users — a fear that Tumblr is cracking down, not just on porn, but on the very essence of Tumblr culture: unruly, unsanctioned, and in many ways, united by the very spirit of deviance that Tumblr is trying to kill.
“The reality is that for a lot of the LGTBQ+ community, particularly younger members still discovering themselves and members in extremely homophobic environments where most media sites were banned (but Tumblr wasn’t even considered important enough to be), this was a bastion of information and self-expression,” wrote one Tumblr user in a widely reblogged post. “For a lot of artists too, this was a great place to come and post NSFW work and get traction that became Patreon pages that became honest jobs.”
What’s frequently lost in the reductive equating of Tumblr with porn is that, as on LiveJournal before it, much of the platform’s erotica is community oriented — and essential to the vibrancy of that community.
For instance, entire fanart traditions have sprung up around cheeky erotic illustrations and the frequently NSFW artists who produce them. Tumblr also birthed the phenomenon of popular fandom blogs featuring porn stars who look like various fictional characters, peddling erotic content specifically through the lens of shipping. Modern-day Tumblr artists have entirely revived the long-dormant tradition of professional-quality fanzines, many featuring subversive queer content and explicit content.
Then there are the many, many queer and genderqueer and marginalized users who found in Tumblr a positive, identity-affirming community space that simply doesn’t exist on most other social media platforms. As Tumblr users grappled with the news, many spoke out about the degree to which the banning of explicit content could impact untold numbers of individuals who lack the ability to safely explore their identities and their sexualities, on other websites or in real life.
“This is a mistake,” wrote Tumblr user caitercates in a widely-distributed response to the Tumblr staff post. “You say you’re all about “sex positivity” while banning all adult content of any kind? … You are actively deleting a majority of your account base. … your solution is to bleach your site until it’s unrecognizable.”
Not to mention the countless artists and writers who are about to lose their viewer/readership. I understand erotica will still be allowed – but what about the relationships that are fostered between artists and writers? There are so many of us who make fanart of our favorite fics, and a lot of the time that involves smut. This ISN’T A PROBLEM. This is creativity at work, and sex positivity, like you claim to support.
Change this.
EDIT your site. Make positive changes that we as the community have asked for – don’t blanket-ban the content that, tbh, most of us are here for at least in part.
It’s extremely significant that Tumblr users are fighting for Tumblr to walk back this change, because Tumblr has traditionally had a primarily harmonious relationship to its userbase, despite its users increasing distrust of its motives and interests. With the exception of Reddit, which is mainly community-run, Tumblr has given its users more freedom than any other platform in shaping and making the site into what it is.
This is partly due to the fact that Tumblr was never intended to be a grassroots haven for the misfits of the rest of the internet. But that characteristic is part of what has made Tumblr uniquely quirky and offbeat among social media spaces — and it may be the trait that saves it.
There’s a legitimate argument to be made — and one that I, as a longtime Tumblr user, would admittedly like to be true — that people who think banning porn on Tumblr will kill Tumblr really don’t know that much about Tumblr’s core users. Despite the mainstream media narrative, Tumblr has never, ever, been about porn.
Tumblr was built around community, around fandom, around viral absurdist meme blogs and street fashion bloggers. What other social media platform annually sends amateur bloggers to Fashion Week? It was grown from arty hipster landscape photos whose wistful aesthetics were deposited straight onto the collected works of the Chainsmokers. Tumblr has given us feminist art galleries and digital art collectives pushing online art movements like vaporwave, seapunk, and glitch art while showing off, bar none, the best GIF artistry on the planet.
Tumblr’s deliberately hyperbolic language fueled everything from “all the feels” to the rise of One Direction. It’s been called the progenitor of Neo-Dadaism, the wellspring of a vast amount of absurdist millennial humor that’s pushed out of its niche Tumblr basement to hit the mainstream corridors of the internet. Mic shamelessly built its brand by exploiting Tumblr’s politics while Buzzfeed shamelessly built its brand by piggy-backing off Tumblr’s content. It’s the place where angry feminist clapbacks and “your fave is problematic” exist alongside hungover owls and “Mmm Whatcha Say?” — that is, it’s as marvelous, and marvelously frustrating, and deeply surprising, as the internet itself.
It’s tempting to argue that while core Tumblr users will grumble about the site-wide crackdown on porn, they’ll recognize that while they can get the porn from other sites, it will be impossible to replace everything else that makes Tumblr what it is.
That said, the very quirky nonconformity of Tumblr’s users may, in fact, push them to leave. Some users see the site’s push to ban adult content as echoing the downward spiral of LiveJournal, the once-popular early blogging platform which was highly admired for its open-source ethos, its laidback moderation style, and its positive sense of community.
In an infamous pair of 2007 incidents that became known as “Strikethrough” and “Boldthrough,” LiveJournal famously destroyed the trust of its userbase overnight when its own attempt to ban certain types of explicit content resulted in a ban on fanart and other innocent and creative types of content.
The relationship between the site and a userbase that had, until then, been ride-or-die, never fully recovered. In the wake of LiveJournal’s steady overtaking by Russia, many of those users migrated to Tumblr, where they joined the much-larger stream of millennial and Gen Y and Z users who have relied on the site’s user-friendliness and openness to many types of erotica as they built their communities.
A side effect of the ban involved a renewed appreciation for the Archive of Our Own, (AO3), a nonprofit, censorship-free website run by fans which is explicitly set up to archive fanworks in the event of major content crackdowns like this one. Among the other more serious responses to the ban has been a litany of fandom history and advice posts being shared for the benefit of younger Tumblr users and others for whom the overnight implosion of their digital home was a new experience. Especially prominent have been recommendations for alternative sites to Tumblr.
Many users, desperate to recapture the deep sense of community that once existed on LiveJournal, have been advocating for a retreat to a new social platform called Pillowfort, a site which very overtly attempts to combine the best characteristics of LiveJournal and Tumblr with a more laidback old-school approach to fandom and content moderation. That platform, which is currently in beta, is currently down for planned security upgrades. On its Tumblr in response to the news about the Tumblr ban, Pillowfort stated that it plans to “allow NSFW content with very few restrictions.”
Still others looked to Dreamwidth, a blogging platform built on LiveJournal’s open-source code that was originally built in 2008 in response to LiveJournal’s demise. Its owners, too, were ready to welcome the Tumblr diaspora with open arms, just as it welcomed the LJ diaspora a decade ago. Other sites like MeWe also responded to the news by welcoming potential Tumblr refugees.
For many Tumblr users and onlookers, however, the simplest solution seems to be a return to the spirit that built Tumblr culture: when all else fails, make memes.
It was inevitable, for example, that there’d be at least one reference to DashCon, the notorious 2014 Tumblr fan convention that turned into a viral disaster, typified by this famous forlorn image of the “DashCon ball pit:”
At the top of the list of agenda items was the phrase “female presenting nipples,” which received the lion’s share of hilarity from Tumblr users.
free the female presenting nipples. robbieross/Tumblr
Of course, all of this won’t really help answer the larger question of what’s next for Tumblr. But ironically, in response to the news, Tumblr’s userbase has reminded us all exactly what a valuable and irreplaceable role Tumblr has played in the evolution of modern internet culture.
All of the wry humor, the trenchant memes, the progressive social commentary mixed with genuine care for Tumblr’s marginalized communities that Tumblr users have deployed in response to the adult content ban — all of that is a unique combination that’s grown out of Tumblr culture. When it’s gone, there’s no guarantee it will return on another website in the same form. And it definitely won’t be accompanied by the same fabulous GIFs and fanart.
Still, there’s no guarantee that Tumblr’s profit-driven side will prioritize keeping that culture sustainable, even if it does somehow manage to ban adult content and retain its core membership. If that’s the case, then it’s a loss not just for Tumblr users, but for the entire internet. Like Vine before it, another irreplaceable cornerstone of our online world that should have been better appreciated all along, Tumblr might be fated to be loved best only after it’s gone.
Original Source -> Why Tumblr’s adult content ban is about so much more than porn
via The Conservative Brief
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Swedes debate period-proofed workplaces
New Post has been published on http://funnythingshere.xyz/swedes-debate-period-proofed-workplaces/
Swedes debate period-proofed workplaces
Image copyright Petter Hägg/mensen.se
Image caption MENSEN says menstrual issues are a matter of being considerate of people’s different needs
People in Sweden are debating a new government initiative to provide a supportive environment for women during their periods.
The new Gender Equality Agency has given a grant of 530,000 kronor ($58,400; £44,900) to an organisation called MENSEN (Menses) to “break the taboo around menstruation”, with period-friendly workplaces receiving a certificate.
MENSEN calls for toilets, sanitary bins and hand-washing facilities to be available in all working environments, including for professionals outside the office space, like construction workers, plumbers and bus drivers.
‘Not a matter of shame’
“We risk treating menstruation as an illness rather than a normal bodily function,” Josefin Persdotter, a sociology researcher at Gothenburg University told the Arbetet labour movement weekly.
“Sometimes you are hungry, sometimes thirsty, and sometimes you have hormone fluctuations affecting your work,” she said.
Other advocates want employers to supply sanitary products at work just as they provide toilet roll.
Image copyright Mensen.se
Image caption “Menstrual knowledge is power”
Around the world, women struggle to have a dignified menstrual experience. Some women are excluded from social life during that time of the month. Others lack adequate hygiene products due to poverty.
The issues are all part of the same core problem, Swedish period advocates believe.
Sweden is known for its gender equality programmes – the government has even launched an instruction manual for feminist foreign policies. Menstrual rights feature not only in the media, but also on stage and in public spaces.
There has been “Period – The Musical” for schools, a stage play, comic books, exhibitions and a podcast, not to mention artwork on the Stockholm metro by prominent graphic novelist Liv Strömquist.
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The latest campaign has divided public commentators.
“Why should my boss know when I’m having my period?” asks a columnist in the leading daily Svenska Dagbladet, in response to a suggestion that staff should log their periods in Excel sheets.
Another writer in the tabloid Expressen asks the campaigners who “want to highlight our hormones and mood swings whether they are aware that these have been used throughout history as an argument to deny women voting rights, power and important jobs?”
But supporters of the MENSEN campaign say it’s important that periods should no longer be a matter of shame.
“I remember how embarrassing it was in school,” said a presenter when the issue was debated on Swedish Public TV.
“More information is needed in schools, as research shows it is not enough for parents to teach their children”, Klara Rydström, the vice-chairwoman of MENSEN, told Swedish TV.
‘General working environment issue’
The workplace certification idea also has its supporters.
Josefin Eklund of Forza Football App, a company working on a pilot project with MENSEN, told the Aftonbladet tabloid that a certificate would be proof that her company cares about the working environment for women.
Three female bus drivers agree, telling Arbetet “many think it’s silly and stupid, but we don’t – we have no toilet on the buses”.
They recounted embarrassing situations, like having to change pads behind a bush while passengers waited on the bus, or leaving the driver’s seat stained in blood. “This is general working environment issue,” they concluded.
Image copyright mensen.se
Image caption The campaign seeks to engage the whole of Swedish society
Reporting by Matilda Welin
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Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-46221883
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New Post has been published on Vin Zite
New Post has been published on https://vinzite.com/essential-seo-techniques-that-your-website-should-be-using/
Essential SEO Techniques That Your Website Should Be Using
Search Engine Optimization is such a hot topic at present. How do you acquire your internet site within the very first page or two of the search engines? Exactly how do you improve your Google web page rank?
There are companies who dedicate themselves full time to doing SEO at a pretty penny. Something a bunch of people cannot essentially pay for to spend for or spend the time on.
There are some simple things you could do when creating your website that will help enhance your possibilities of having excellent results. In no specific order, listed here are 8 of these items…
1. Meta Tags
There are two main meta tags in regards to SEO– the summary and the key phrase tag. It’s debatable whether the online search engine uses the description tag as for ranking your outcomes. Nonetheless, it is among the more important tags since it is specified in your search result– it is exactly what individuals read when your web link comes up and exactly what makes them determine whether or not to click your web link.
Make sure to consist of a couple of pertinent keywords in this tag, however, do not stuff it with keywords either. The description tag must read through like a natural sentence– not a key phrase listing.
Because of “keyword stuffing” many search engines now totally disregard the key phrase tag. It is not virtually as vital as it was years ago, however it does not harm to feature them in your resource code.
When making your keywords listing, you’ll wish to think about the particular terms people will key in when seeking a website like yours. Just do not overdo — a lot of duplicates are not a benefit (as in “internet designer” “web developers” “custom internet developer” “HTML internet developer” “your state listed here internet designer”– you realize). Those are all essentially the same, so choose a couple of variants at the most and relocate onto the upcoming keywords.
2. Title Tag
Near the really leading off an internet site’s resource code, you’ll apply for numerous meta tags– the typical ones being the Title, Description, and Keyword tags. The title tag is technically not a meta tag, though it is frequently connected with them. The title tag plays such a huge function in the indexing of your website, that it is considered the most important of the 3.
A page title is a very first thing an online search engine will consider when identifying simply what the page has to do with. It is likewise the initial thing potential visitors will see when considering your online search engine listing.
It is necessary to include a key phrase or two in the title tag– yet do not overdo it– you don’t want to do what’s referred to as “keyword padding” which is not really doing anything but make your internet site look like spam. A lot of individuals will certainly include either the firm name or title of the page listed here, as well.
3. Effective Use of Heading Tags
This is a critical element to consider when drawing up your site copy. Use of heading tags assists users, web browsers and online search engine alike understand where the significant crucial points of your copy are.
Your major page title ought to use the <h1> tag– this reveals exactly what your page has to do with. Usage of extra tags, such as <h2> and <h3> are just as important by helping to digest your copy. For one, you’ll see an aesthetic break in the text. But as far as the search engines are concerned, it will automatically know exactly what your topics are at a page. The numerous heading tags provide a top priority to the material and help index your website properly.
4. Title Attributes on Links
Featuring title features on links is one more crucial step that any type of great website will have. That’s the little “device suggestion” that turns up when you place your computer mouse over a web link. These are specifically vital for photo web links but similarly helpful for content hyperlinks.
As a note, you should use detailed content for your web links. “Go to below” doesn’t really inform a person– or others importantly, the online search engine– what the web link is. At the very least put a title tag that will certainly explain that “Go to Below” truly suggests “Internet Layout Collection”. Even better yet– make the main hyperlink content something like “View my web design portfolio”– this will certainly give some worth to the hyperlink revealing that the resulting page relates to internet layout collections.
5. Pertinent Content
Having material pertinent to your principal web page or website topic is maybe the most essential Search Engine Optimization aspect of a web page. You can put all the keywords you prefer in the meta tags and alt image tags, etc– but if the actually legible text on the page is not appropriate to the target keywords, it winds up primarily being a futile attempt.
While it is important to include as several key phrases in your page duplicate as feasible, it is similarly as vital for it to flow and read well and make good sense. I am certain we have all seen keyword stuffed web pages created by SEO companies that honestly don’t make much sense from the reader’s viewpoint.
When producing your site copy, just write naturally, discussing whatever information you’re reviewing. The key is to make it relevant and to have it make good sense to the visitor. Also if you fool the online search engine into believing your page is excellent– when a prospective consumer reaches the website and cannot make heads or tails of your info and it just feels spammy to them– you can wager they’ll be selecting the upcoming internet site within seconds.
6. Hyperlink Building
We’ve possibly all heard of Google Page Ranking– it seems to be every website owner’s goal to have as higher a page rank as possible. While the formula for establishing page rank includes a lot of components and is frequently changing, one item is the variety of links pointing to your website.
Now, you’ll be inclined to steer clear of link farms and other spammy attempts of obtaining backlinks associated with your business. Nevertheless, there are a lot of trusted and niche directory site business that you could make use of to submit your website, or certain blog post guides too.
With genuine material– especially if you have a blog– you’ll be able to generate related blog sites, as well. It’s rather of an offer and takes, in that if you connect out to other sites, you’ll discover websites connecting back to you– and hopefully see your page rank going up!
7. Social Media
Technically not SEO, Social Media is such a growing factor in getting your web website discovered, that it’s an essential aspect to consist of in your strategy.
Social media ranges from social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn– to social bookmarking websites such as Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and lots of others. There is a whole lot of relationship building involved, however as you develop your very own networks and build quality content on your web website or blog post, you’ll see web traffic to your internet business improving.
As with any relationship, it is a share. Do not simply anticipate to sign up with a site like Twitter for the pure sake of pressing your content. That simply won’t fly– your true intentions will certainly protrude like an aching thumb and not doing anything yet transform individuals off.
Also if you are on the website simply for networking reasons, the secret is to make buddies. Assist participants in your network if they request a “retweet” or Digg, give valuable insight if asked, and so on. You’ll see the same in return.
If you compose a wonderful blog post and have built significant partnerships with peers in your niche, you’ll commonly find that good friend will submit your blog posts and give you votes on the social bookmarking websites. The, even more, ballots you obtain, a lot more likely your article is to be seen by others and shared about, commonly causing additional link backs from other blog sites, etc
8. A Few Search Engine Optimization Don’ts– Flash and Splash
Along with any type of listing of Do’s come the Don’ts. As far as Search Engine Optimization is concerned, two of these items are splash pages (frequently consisting of a flash computer animation) and all flash website.
Yes, flash is beautiful! The full flash website can, in fact, be fantastic to check out– their very own bit of interactive artwork. Sadly the search engines don’t get along well with Flash. There is the talk of possible development in this location, however, the bigger part the search engines still not read Flash.
Everything excellent content that you wrote for your business will certainly not be seen by the search engines if it’s embedded into a Flash website. As far as the search engines are concerned, you are all flash website might also be undetectable. And if the search engines cannot see your site material, an excellent piece of potential clients will certainly miss out on what you need to provide, also.
Equally as “pointless” are splash pages. When very popular, the splash page needs to not be a vital component of any sort of site. While splash web pages used to serve as an introduction into a website (usually with a flash computer animation), it is no longer considered as useful, and many times might actually frustrate site visitors.
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