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eury--dice · 4 years

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history, huh?

chapter 3: propius

(check the rb for chapters 1 + 2 on tumblr + ao3 links!)

Adam was woken at 5 o’clock on the dot with a series of sharp knocks on his door. “Up and Adam,” Gansey’s voice called, making the one stupid dad joke that always set Adam’s blood to a boil. He was too tired to react, however.

“Kindly leave until a later time,” he called, his voice heavy with sleep. “I don’t have class for another three hours.”

Gansey opened the door anyway, striding in with more pep than anyone should have in the morning.

“You’ve made the tabloids, my friend. Your weekend with Ronan finally hit.”

“Did you sleep at all?”

“Nope,” Gansey said cheerfully. “‘From America, With Love: Ronan and Adam flaunt friendship.’” He turned on his heel once he’d crossed the length of the room, which Adam could never forget was formerly Malia Obama’s, and seated himself in Adam’s desk chair.

Adam had never been closer to considering strangulation. He elected to shove his hearing ear into his pillow instead.

Unfortunately, the muffled sounds of Gansey speaking still made their way in. “‘Photos: Adam’s Weekend in England,’ oh, that’s boring…ah-hah: ‘New Bromance Alert? Pics of FSOTUS and Prince Ronan.’”

Adam resigned himself to his fate and mentally promised himself a giant cup of coffee. “As long as I’m getting fewer death threats on Twitter, I’m happy,” he mumbled into his blankets.

Gansey ignored him. “Why are you so tired? It’s the hour of kings, time to be awake and alive.”

“I’d settle for dead if it meant I could sleep at this point, to be frank.”

“Please don’t be frank. Be Adam.”

Adam sat up, eyeing Gansey in his wire-framed glasses with disdain. “Any more puns and I suffocate myself with this pillow.”

“Please don’t,” Gansey said, but his eyes had already returned to his screen. While he read through the articles, he continued his line of questioning. “Working on the campaign late last night?”

“Not really,” Adam admitted. “I had a Press and the Presidency paper to write.”

“Just write ‘I’m Adam Parrish’ on a piece of loose-leaf paper to turn it in and you’ll probably get an A. You live it every day, for Christ’s sake.”

“And yet I still need to cite sources in Chicago Advanced.”

“You’d think nepotism would work out more in your favor.” He flicked to a fresh article, a gesture Adam only recognized from all the other times Gansey had done it. “Luckily, I think the press is eating this one up.”

Adam grimaced. “Fantastic.”

“Not-campaign-ruining, you mean.”

“That too, I suppose.” He wanted nothing more than to flop back against his pillows and get the sleep his body so desperately craved after being jet lagged for a week, but he fought the urge.

“That _ People _exclusive takes the cake, I think. I didn’t realize how much you cherished your relationship with Ronan.”

“Fuck off, please. Or end my misery.”

“No to both. Why are you even taking that press course?”

Adam slid out from under his blankets, rolling his shoulders to try and wake up more. “Curiosity, I guess. It never hurts to learn more of what not to do.”

Gansey looked up from his phone to level a glance at Adam. “And what have you learned so far?”

“…Don’t have a sex scandal?”

“You _ would _need someone to tell you that.”

_ “Hey,” _Adam said, affecting outrage.

Gansey lifted his thumb to run over his lower lip, tilting his head consideringly. “One of us three will probably have a scandal before your mother’s second term is up.”

“If there is a second.”

“Chin up, young padawan. With you working on it we’re guaranteed.”

“I don’t know, Gansey,” Adam replied. “I don’t think I’m the good luck charm you believe in.”

“Of course you are,” Gansey said. “We won the first time, no?”

Adam glanced exaggeratedly around the room and to the phone in Gansey’s hand. “I’d say so. That or we’re about to get questioned very thoroughly about the the events of last three years.”

“Don’t make me cut you off on the true-crime videos.”

His eyes narrowed, focusing on Gansey. “Don’t you dare.”

“Blue agrees, anyway,” Gansey said, successfully deflecting topics. “Said there’s a ninety-four percent chance you’ll get into a sex scandal before the general.”

“Both of you date more than I do, why am I the one who’s supposedly having a sex scandal?” Once his initial outrage passed, disbelief crept in at the time of day. “Did you just text Blue at five AM and get a response? How the hell did you manage that?”

“She’s been up,” Gansey dismissed. Adam stared at him for a moment, and then Gansey seemed to feel the weight of his stare. His eyes widened almost comically. “Oh, Christ, no, not that. Nate Silver asked for another set of eyes on the Superbowl predictions, and she’s trying to get a shoo-in with them before the primaries begin. I just brought her some coffee.”

“And you didn’t bring me any?”

“You’re the only one of us who hasn’t been up all night. You need coffee the least of all of us.”

“Don’t blame me for your bad decisions.” Adam squinted at Gansey. “Were you working on an article all night or something?”

He snorted. “Hardly. They’ve been blocking all of my pieces. Too far from my mother’s politics, too far from your mother’s, too controversial, too critical, all in that order.”

“Thought you were liking the _ Post _gig?”

“On paper,” Gansey dismissed. “I’ve defaulted to writing about Welsh history.”

“Sounds like it’s right up your alley, then.”

“Once again, on paper.”

“How do you even connect the Welsh to the hellscape of American politics?”

Gansey waved a hand. “‘Eternal spirit,’ ‘fighting for honor,’ ‘remembering Glendower and others who set a pristine model,’ et cetera, et cetera.”

“People read that? That just sounds like you in high school spouting off again.”

“Yes, Adam. People read it.” Gansey squinted at his phone again. “Twitter _ really _likes you and Ronan together.”

“We’re exciting,” Adam said dryly, reaching for his laptop. He scanned over his most recent paper while Gansey dramatically narrated replies to the gif of them on _ This Morning. _

“‘Either of them could stab me and give me one of those smiles and I’d thank them,’ Jesus Christ,” Gansey read, “They really love your fake smiles… ‘name a more iconic duo, I’ll wait,’ hm, maybe any other duo? ‘Oh my God, just _ kiss already.’” _

Adam choked out a laugh as Gansey punctuated the last one with a dramatic and uncharacteristic hand wave. “At least it’s working,” he allowed, shutting his laptop once he felt secure about his essay. “Now get out. _ Some _of us have places to be.”

Adam’s phone buzzed on his way out of his cursed Presidency and the Press course.

Somehow, the interest of those around him seemed to pique even higher when he looked at his phone instead of in front of him. It wasn’t a new sensation by any means; ever since starting at Georgetown, he’d felt eyes on him constantly, but the intensity increased tenfold each time his classmates thought he was too occupied to see them staring. He noticed every time, but of course nothing could be done about it.

The name _ HRH shitty bird boy _ popped across his screen. How strange - in only a week, he’d almost entirely forgotten that the name he had (quite maturely) given Ronan in his phone was… _ that. _As he swiped the notification open, he felt a certain amount of trepidation as to what a technology-averse prince would ever text him about.

His harassment and emergency fears flew out the window with the body of the text, simply a screenshot of their tabloid appearance with the added caption of _ youre the nerd and I’m the cool jock. _

_ Competitive yachting? _Adam asked in response, nearly tripping over his own feet while typing.

_ ffs i told them to stop writing that as my preferred sport. _

Adam felt his lips twist against his will.

_ I’m sorry, this is a common problem? _

_ you can’t even imagine. _

_ I appreciate that they consider competitive yachting a regal sport. _

_ status symbols and faux athleticism are the core of the monarchy. _

Adam blinked down at his phone, stopping short abruptly. Persephone, from behind him, adjusted accordingly.

He…hadn’t been expecting this. Any of it. The text, the almost-joking response, the casual statement about the monarchy being ridiculous despite him being in it. Their conversation ended there, and it was probably for the better. He resumed his pace, trying to get to his next class. He almost forgot about the texts, too; save for a rogue screenshot Adam sent him of speculation on Ronan’s presence in Majorca, nothing else went between them.

Sometimes, Adam could _ just barely _ get away with being on his phone during briefings with Maura. He hated to be distracted during them - they were _ important, _he knew that, but all the same occasionally she spent a particularly long time covering an obscure dignitary’s comments and he’d gotten too few hours of sleep to truly focus and someone or other was blowing up his phone.

Maura’s topic of conversation this week appeared to be a series of Buzzfeed articles run on the lack of pets in the First Family, complete with a power point dissecting their points

The glamorous side of politics, truly. Discussing a clickbait series in the West Wing briefing room.

_ iMessage chat to _ ** HRH shitty bird boy **

_ Resumed 30 October, 2019, 1:47 pm _

_ if you want a pet chainsaw dragged in a mouse the other day _

_ Ah yes, the mouse. A pet eternally beloved by constituents. _

_ we can’t all have a raven, that would be unfair _

_ Your heights of cool and goth are truly dizzying. _

_ im glad you agree _

_ Modest, too. _

_ it comes with the wealth and fame _

_ As long as you’re being straight with me, feel free to be as ‘modest’ as you like. _

_ i’m the prince of bloody england. i’m straight all the damn time _

_ That’s the biggest lhxemxlp_

His phone slipped from between his fingers, landing with a dull _ thud _onto the wooden floor. Adam stared helplessly at it, a sleek black rectangle hiding between types of oak. But Maura repeated his name, and he suddenly remembered what had made him drop his phone in the first place. He dragged his eyes up, staring at a spot on the sterile white wall just beyond Maura’s head.

“Adam,” she said a third time, but he refused to look her in the eyes. She conceded immediately. “What the hell?”

He felt his cheeks darken as blood found its way up. “I’m sorry.”

Her lips thinned just like Blue’s did, turning into a dark line on her brown face. “Do you even remember what I was saying?”

“Er…” he scrambled. “Don’t mention animals in any public setting?”

She looked at him for a long moment, then picked up a mug of coffee and took a controlled sip.

“Get out?” she said once she’d swallowed her sip.

“I-”

She pointed to the door. “I am impossibly busy. Take your phone and go laugh in private.”

He nodded once, finally, ducking under the table with his spine pressed against the bottom to grab his phone. His fingers closed around it, grip the edge of the wood, and he was up in a second.

He couldn’t regret it.

Because - well, here was the weird thing.

He wanted another text from Ronan.

_ iMessage chat to _ ** HRH shitty bird boy **

_ Resumed 31 October, 2019, 12:03 am _

_ it’s finally spooky day in your hell country _

_ Isn’t it 5 am in England? _

_ Do you ever sleep? _

_ bold of you to ask that question _

_ halloween, bitch _

_ it waits for no one _

_ I’m really going to have to advocate better habits. _

_ I understand, you’re enthused for Halloween. _

_ do you even care at all _

_ I enjoy halloween like everyone else. _

_ Though your level of excitement feels a little pagan? _

when the skeleton army rises Jesus will forgive me

_ appreciate this glorious day parrish _

_ I have enough fear in my daily life, thanks. _

_ I filed my own taxes all throughout highschool. _

_ And payed rent. _

_ The horrors of early adulthood. _

_terrifying _

_ terrible i’ll never deal with that shit _

_ You’re the prince, we know. _

_ Do you also not have enough horror in your life? _

of course i do

_ but parrish. listen. _

_ this is the one day a year all the monarchy and parliament dress as they are in life _

_ hideous monsters _

He laughed a little harder at that than he should have.

_ You’re telling me the monarchy plays dress up. _

_ ronan_frankensteins_monser_costume.jpg _

_ matthew insisted. did this on me an hour ago _

_ oh my god _

The makeup _ was _really good, and the monstrous look suited him, but hell if Adam ever said that to him.

He may have saved it to his phone, though, to glimpse Ronan’s green-paint covered skin and crooked, drawn-on stitch smile on his perfectly blank face.

Although Adam certainly didn’t intend to make a habit of texting the Prince of England, when he saw a funny bird or a stupid article or an obscure meme his first thought became _I should send that to Ronan. _And Ronan, clearly, was thinking along the same lines. The sheer number of sole emojis that seemed to tell a Ronan-centric story he received at all hours only affirmed that. And somehow, between all the pictogramme and jokes, he started to learn snatches of information. Declan was a better storyteller than Ronan, Matthew was the only person who could make Ronan attend family dinners ever since their father died, and his mother - the Queen of England, Adam had to remind himself sometimes - drew further away every day.

The problem became that he always wanted to know _ more, _and Adam didn’t know if that was due to his rampant curiosity or something else buried deep inside of him, and he was too afraid of what he might uncover by digging to look.

Adam had very few friends.

Most of that came with the territory of being part of the First Family; nothing made casual acquaintances drift away quite like being constantly surveilled by Secret Service agents and trailed by NDAs. Adam didn’t have time for small talk and coffee, a fact which he sometimes lamented and often loved. Part of this came from the type of friendship he became accustomed to with Gansey and Blue, the all-encompassing type of friendship that took over their minds in spare moments and forged ties stronger than steel between them. He’d probably forgotten how to have normal, casual friends, not friends an outsider would think he was completely in love with. And, perhaps more than anything else, it came back down to Robert Parrish and his heavy hands and ringing words. Adam’s memories of his first few years were scattered and inconsistent, but they filled up a too-large corner of his brain all the same. Blue, who entered his life at the tender age of 5, had won his trust with greater ease than their other peers, and Gansey had done the same in high school. They knew him and what he’d been through, and so they could (platonically) love him for all that he was. When campaigning and political office came into the mix, that full truth of Adam Parrish became a secret to guard like any else.

But, oddly enough, Adam had a third friend: Noah Czerny, the thirty-three-year-old baby of the Senate.

Noah and Adam met through an Aglionby networking event while Adam was a student and Noah a recently-elected congressperson, both green as grass in different ways. Adam, thrown neck-deep into a Presidential campaign, had questions, and most of the time Noah had answers. Although all of the professors had warned Adam to proceed cautiously with Czerny, Adam found nothing to fear. Noah had mellowed out quite a bit from his high school days, becoming a familiar face at political events and a surprisingly-wise piece of advice always at the ready. Despite Adam’s near hero-worship of this brand-new politician, half-Mexican just like him and just as frequent to lose sleep rewriting policies that unjustly taxed communities of color or defunded children’s education, they’d formed an improbable bond. The summer before his sophomore year, Noah let Adam closer to the politics process than even his mother had as he ran for the Senate, and Adam took to it almost at once. A politician twelve years his senior was perhaps not a conventional choice of friend, but Adam seldom remained conventional.

It wasn’t too out of the ordinary for Adam to arrive at Noah’s congressional office unannounced, either with business or without, and so when Adam rounded on Noah’s stark, bright, white office, he wasn’t at all surprised to see him ducked over an obscene number of papers.

“It’s Friday night,” Noah said without looking up, barely before Adam had even crossed into the office. As always, the tiny burst of color in the Pride flag deposited in a tourist mug drew Adam’s eye for a long moment before Noah himself did. All Adam could see of him was his brown curls, resolutely held in place even as bent over a desk. “Go party or something.”

“Damn, I didn’t _ think _ this looked like a frat. I knew something was off.” Adam slid into one of the seats across the desk. He had several inches on Noah, but he always felt smaller in those chairs across from the most important legislators in the country. “What’s got you here at eight PM?” Off of Noah’s brief, incredulous look, he amended to _ “this _particular time, I know. You’re salaried. Shouldn’t you…ever go home?”

“I’m trying to get something done so that there’s at least a hope of banning fracking in our lifetimes.”

Adam scoffed quietly, though not for lack of faith in Noah. “Let me know when you’ve cracked the code.”

_ “If, _but sure, I’ll be in contact. Now, why are you here?”

“You didn’t answer my leaving-the-building question.”

Noah’s eyes flickered shut briefly. “Jesus, Adam, I am salaried by the taxpayers of millions of Americans. I’m not going to slack on them.”

“Fine, but don’t make me drag Gansey in here to make you take a long nap and drink some hot soup.”

Adam’s phone buzzed, but he ignored it; despite it being almost 1 am in England, Ronan could presumably take the blame. Noah asked, “Did you catch the Fox town hall last night?”

Adam grimaced. He’d seen part of it, trying to multitask with his macroeconomics homework at the same time, but instead he’d fallen asleep with his head on the laptop screen. “Part of it. It was a shitshow.”

“You can say that again.”

“I honestly thought that Whelk would pull more support from the extremists. He just seemed desperate last night.”

“Oh, he definitely was.” Noah leaned away from his desk, appraising Adam as though considering his words carefully. “We went to school together.”

“Aglionby?” Adam asked. He knit his eyebrows together. “How did I not realize he went there?”

“The school doesn’t exactly love toting him.”

“He’s older than you, though, right?”

“Yes, Adam,” Noah said slowly. “I’m thirty-three. He’s already announced a bid for President. How old do you have to be to run for executive office?”

Adam scowled. “I just came from class, I can’t use my brain. He was a senior when you were a freshman?”

“Yep,” Noah replied. “We were paired in upperclassmen-lowerclassmen bonding.” His lip curled a little. “He outed me.”

“Wait, _ what?” _

“He outed me to the school,” Noah repeated. He looked back down to the papers on his desk, his voice softening to a barely audible level. “I trusted him, which was a dumb thing to do, but I was a really stupid freshman. Scared, too. He was a friendly personality.”

_ “Fuck,” _Adam said, pushing a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry, that’s…”

“Terrible?” A bit of Noah’s life returned to him. “Don’t worry about it, kid. It was years ago.”

“But then…Whelk, he was the reason you…?”

“He didn’t make my parents react the way they did. They did that on their own. But no, they wouldn’t have known without him.”

Adam shook his head. “I thought it wasn’t possible to like the guy less, if only because of his politics, but he’s done it.”

“Done what? Received the full wrath of Adam Parrish?”

“He very well may.”

“Don’t worry about him. Whelk will be out soon, believe me. I know him. He may have his parent’s money, but he’s barely old enough to hold office and he’s running on fumes.”

“If he’s not, I’ll convince Blue to skew stats until he is.” Noah knew just as well as Adam that that wouldn’t change anything, but it lightened the air anyway. “It seems kind of pointless to entertain any of them. Greenmantle is probably going to win no matter what.”

Colin Greenmantle: former antique collector, congressperson from Massachusetts, and millionaire with the funds to take over the Republican primary, and very possibly the whole election, before any papers were even filed.

“It’s early,” Noah said. “Too early to worry about it. Too early to even be _ talking _ about it.”

Adam slanted a half-smile at him. “Never too early to worry about an election.”

Noah looked back to his papers before broaching the next topic. “I hear you’ve got a job on your mother’s re-election campaign.”

“Once I graduate, and maybe a little earlier, yeah.”

Noah cast a glance around the office. “Are you sure this is the life you want?”

Adam knew he was referring to the constant bustle, the fear of disappointing and harming instead of helping, and the ever-evolving media scrutiny. He knew it was the closest Noah would give to a warning. “I’m sure.”

Noah sighed. “Fine.” He pointed to the door. “But I won’t let you throw your youth away, not this early. After you graduate, Parrish. Go get drunk and make out with someone.”

Adam stood, his frame unfolding and standing tall. “You are a terrible role model.”

“Can’t hear you over the loud music.”

“You and Blue and Gansey - if I die of alcohol poisoning, it’s all your fault.”

“Feel free to blame, so long as you’re out there and not here.”

“Alright, alright, Jesus. You’ve made your point.”

“Finally,” Noah called after Adam’s retreating form. But Adam could hear the amusement in his voice all the same.

For someone so allergic and averse to technology, Ronan sure seemed to share a lot with Adam.

_ iMessage chat to _ ** HRH shitty bird boy **

_ Resumed 13 Novemeber, 2019, 8:38 pm _

_ bird.m4a _

_ she wont stop nuzzling my head?? _

_ Picking for lice, probably. _

_ God knows you have so many. _

_ my scalp is perfectly clean _

_ Forgive me for abstaining from running my hands over it all the same. _

_ I’ll leave that to her. _

He didn’t always respond, though.

Adam tried not to read into it.

(He mostly succeeded.)

Adam never tired of stepping into the Oval Office. On the Wednesday right before Thanksgiving, he stepped in with the same amount of awe he always had, allowing himself a single moment to glance around at the wide windows and perfectly upholstered furniture. He sat on one of the couches without preamble.

His mother looked up from what was in front of her on the desk and smiled, albeit a tired one that frayed a bit at the corners; Adam had seen a few particularly troublesome foreign dignitaries be escorted away not long before, so he didn’t have to guess at the reason. Ana looked like she belonged to sit right there amongst all the history at that desk, from the sun dipping just beneath her halo of hair straightened within an inch of its life and her stick-straight posture. It might have been a lot at times, but seeing her was a reminder of all the good that came from her position.

She rose and walked to join him, her heels clacking lightly at the ground before she sank onto the cushion beside him and pulled him into a loose hug. Adam had overtaken Ana in height some years before, but there had been a long gap in there as he grew - like one day he was three and a half feet tall and wrapped tightly in her arms and the next he was off to Georgetown and several heads taller. She pulled away after a minute, slowly and bit-by-bit as though savoring her moments as a mother rather than a president. Her hand reached to muss his hair a moment later, and Adam ducked away instinctively before exchanging an identical grin with her.

“God, I forgot how light your hair looks in here,” she said, leaning back a little. “Almost golden.” She tilted her head as though examining him. “Nah. Still brown. But much lighter.”

“How could you forget? The photo here was in _ GQ, _the same article that first declared me the family golden boy.” At the corner of their conversation was the knowledge of where he’d inherited that hair color, as it sure as hell wasn’t from Ana. But he let the thought stay buried, patting the dirt back down with the shovel himself. Their relationship always had an absence in it, and he didn’t particularly feel like deepening it in the Oval Office.

“Ah, so that’s the one I have to blame for your big head,” she responded, reaching for a piece of fruit from the little coffee table. It was a familiar half-jest, borne from Adam’s constant contradicting confidence and imposter syndrome. Idiosyncrasies were just Adam’s style, never one to make things easy for himself. He sometimes wondered if so much of himself conflicted because he tried to walk the middle road so often, balancing his weight over all sides to minimize the damage if the rug was yanked from beneath him, like lying down on a bed of nails: a thousand tiny, dull pains over one sharp, potentially fatal puncture. She smiled again. “Is Noah doing well?”

“For Noah he is. He would barely look up from some new reports on fracking, seems hopeful he’ll be able to garner enough support.”

Ana snorted. “Good luck with that. I’ll be shocked if it reaches the floor for debate.”

“That makes three of us, then.” He nodded towards the desk. “Bad meeting?”

The frown lines on her face deepened. “Don’t get me started,” she drawled, falling back fully against the cushions. After only a moment, she _ did _ get started regardless of what Adam did or didn’t do. “We received the memo a few days ago that a delegation from Sweden wanted to be in contact, right? Fairly standard stuff, Maura gets back to them quickly because they worded it like it was an urgent matter, and there’s a back and forth for a while about scheduling and accommodations. We’re of the belief they won’t be out here until Monday at the earliest.”

Adam knit his eyebrows together. “It’s not Monday.”

“You fuckin’ tell me. Anyway, I’m halfway through a meeting with a few UN representatives when Maura has to interrupt. They arrived at the White House, claimed they had a meeting, and just…didn’t leave. Evan Maura couldn’t get through to them, which is the thing that scared me a little.”

“You should have put Calla on it.”

“Believe me, if she were here, I would’ve. But as it was, I had to hurry out the UN members to deal with decidedly more antagonistic foreign relations.”

“Why were they even here?”

“They wanted to discuss the military relationship between our countries-”

“What the hell?”

“Yeah, I don’t know,” she said, waving one hand in dismissal. “Any points they were trying to make went straight out the window when they started pulling out cue cards, to be honest. I might have to call Löfven to smooth things over.”

“Well, there’s never a dull moment,” Adam said fairly. His mother snorted.

“Sure isn’t. Anyway,” she said, glancing at her watch, “it’s now Thanksgiving, so no more meetings for twenty-four hours.”

“It’s Wednesday.”

She pulled a face in dismissal. “We take our patriotism seriously, darlin’. Don’t want our home state gettin’ too mad.”

“Of course.”

Ana checked her watch again. “The turkeys will be on their way to the Willard by now, so we’re not ruining any American traditions today.”

“Wait,” Adam said. “Where?”

She looked at him, her eyes narrowing. “The Willard. They stay there every year.”

“What? No. _ No. _You cannot give the turkeys five-star accommodations with taxpayer dollars. You’ve been doing this every year?!”

“It’s public knowledge, sugar. Every news outlet mentions it.”

“How did I not-” Adam cut off. “There is no way you can do that! They’re turkeys! It’s a waste!”

“It’s precedent, Adam. I’m not sure if there’s anything to be done at this point.”

Adam stood quickly, pacing back and forth, and his mother stood behind him. “It’s a _ blatant _waste of money, I’m shocked we haven’t already been-”

“Hon, every president so far has done the same-”

“Imagine the story if we broke the tradition! Even conservatives would have to applaud your frugality-”

“We can’t play games with tradition, you know they already call us disrespectful-”

“-we can’t be using _ taxpayer money-” _

“-by all means, if you have the time to find lodging for two forty-pound turkeys-”

“Put them in my room!” Adam blurted. His mother stopped short.

“You’re not serious,” she said. “We’re not putting the turkeys for me to pardon in your bedroom.”

“Yes, we are.”

“Adam-”

He shifted his feet, coming to a stop. He lifted himself up to his full height. Debate Captain Adam, six-time Best Delegate Adam, and First Son Adam converged into one. His mother barely looked phased.

“Oh, God,” his mother said. “I can’t listen to another sales pitch.”

“Madame President,” Adam began, “I’d like to echo the sentiments of the forebears before me-”

“Nope,” she said, making double-time back to her desk. “You’re not going to filibuster me.”

“In 2018 alone, at least forty-three articles in the Wall Street Journal accused the sitting administration of wasting tax dollars. This came on the heels of a tax increase for Americans making more than ten million dollars per year and the subsequent pushback from a more conservative electorate in Congress.”

“Fine!” Ana said, her hand falling to the desk with a thump. She brought it back up to her head to massage her temple a moment later. “I’m too tired to hear my own history read back at me. You win.”

He sat back down on the couch, crossing his legs primly. “Perfect,” he said, allowing himself to smile once again.

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dukeofriven · 5 years

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From An Old Internet Veteran: Go, and Sin No More

I wish I could explain to young people how wild the internet was as it went from the ‘weird niche thing for lame nerds’ irrelevancy of the early 90s and the “Boy This World Wide Web Thing Sure Is Nifty”-style painful optimism that describes 97% of Western Culture between 1994 and 2002 to the ‘Mad Max But Statistically Less Australian” culture that was the internet from 2002 to around 2010. I come neither to praise this era of internet nor condemn it. I merely want understanding. I cannot polish a lumpen pile of rape jokes, Chuck Norris glorification, “ironic” racism, and numa numa fat shaming and say that it’s misunderstood comedic genius. Trash is still trash even if it wins a bunch of Emmys. But at the same time I cannot take you with me back to the 90s and get you to feel, on a visceral level, what it was like to live in a place where Bart Simpson was both promoted as a real and present danger to the moral upbringing of the world’s children and was named by Time magazine as one of the most influential icons of the 20th century. And because I cannot do that I cannot get you to understand how freeing it felt to be on the internet in that Mad Max era. Ten years before a yellow boy shouting “Don’t have a cow” while doing a pathetic kick-flip on a chunky skateboard was considered the potential downfall of humanity’s children, but now you could make something so risqué that the old-guard stuffed-shirt in 1994 would have died on the spot, his brain unable to consider anything so outside his moral world view. I cannot easily make you understand a time when nobody just said whatever it was they wanted, not just because they had no platform to do so but because the rigidity of social convention was so strong. Nobody ever had hardcore lesbian sex on Northern Exposure on prime time television. Nobody on the X-Files ever died by having their head smashed in a car door repeatedly like a melon until viscera spilled all over the pavement. You could not have made Game of Thrones or Steven Universe in 1995. Forget the graphics, forget the budget, you simply couldn’t do or say any of that on television for either kids or adults. The Mad Max internet changed that - changed the very firmament of what was acceptable in media for every genre and for every demographic. Is this a good thing? Not particularly. Is this a bad thing? Not particularly. If this sound frustratingly ambivalent that’s because it is: were we to go back and do it all again, knowing all that we know now, would we do it the same way? No. But then, we would not know all that we know now had we not learned it by making the attempt in the first place.

This poor comfort for someone who dives into some 2006 webcomic with a reputation of a Legacy Touchstone and finds it full of ‘jokes’ about their gender, or sexual preference, or the liberal use of the r-slur, or a kind of hyper-suburban comedic racial ignorance. I am not here to argue that that had any value merely because it was transgressive. But the same space that opened-up to let such ugly things out also opened-up places for marginalized groups to made themselves known, groups who never before had such public voices.

Imagine an apocalypse. Imagine society rebuilding in the ashes. Imagine how many false starts and missteps there would be and you begin to understand just a little of what that period was like. It was embarrassing. It was cruel. It was childish and stupid. But in living through it we grew up. Or, at least, those of us capable of growing up grew up, and learned, and learned to be better - learned what better was. And then we built new places where other people could learn too - and spread the gospel of being better. One of the things that always irritates me when it comes to young people talking about the past is the unexamined privilege of knowledge being at your fingertips. It’s more than just everyone carrying a wireless-internet connected computer in their pocket at all times. It’s more than just a Wikipedia with hundreds of millions of articles and a reputation for fact sourcing. It’s more than just a Google that works. If you never experienced it you cannot imagine what using WebCrawler was like in 1995 against Ask Jeeves in 2005 against Google in 2015 - or even Google between 2005 and 2015. Most people don’t go around thinking about SEO and search engine algorithms but maybe we should because anyone who wants to go “this info’s been on the internet since day one so people have no excuse not to know it” disingenuously argues that information search and retrieval has been consistent across the decades. There was a time - not all that long ago - when to look something up on-line involved getting the tacit agreement of everyone in your household to lose the use of the sole telephone for as long as you were web browsing. There was a time - not all that long ago - when ‘looking something up’ was to burden everyone around you with inconveniences, and while you were doing your web searches there was no guarantee what you wanted could be found with the primitive technology of the day. Do you know how much I’ve learned since joining Tumblr in 2011? On a fundamental level, both about myself and the make-up of our species in terms of social conception? I recently went through a bunch of old posts, removing those with broken links and meaningless content, but also shit that just embarrasses me now - mostly opinions from a period where I hadn’t yet had a chance to learn because the spaces in which to learn it did not yet exist. It’s not just things like communities for [demographic X] - it’s things like “communities for [demographic X] with an ability to broadcast their voices and have platforms able to network their ideas and audience halls able to receive them and a search engine to guide people to that community and a basic understanding that the community even exists in the first place.” And this does not even begin to touch on internet access, something that even now is not a universal thing, and for which getting angry about people’s ignorance reflects a bias all its own. I say all this because I think that a core tenant of cringe culture is a myth of universal access to knowledge and universal awareness of one’s own ignorance. I look back on old posts of things I said and I cringe with self-hatred - cringe enough to rip them down and stuff them in the trash. “HOW DID I THINK THAT?” and “HOW DID I NOT KNOW?” But why should I have known - what, in my life, would ever have put better ideas across my desk? That I can meaningfully speak now about privilege and intersectionality and historiography is because between then and now I was put in a place to learn these things. I was exposed to ideas that I had never before been exposed to, and was given the grace to learn. I am tired of the expectation that every aspect of our past selves should be held to the same standard as the present. (Yes, to all the disingenuous bad-faith trolls out there, I obviously and of course am advocating for complete and total uncritical pardon for everything in the past ever. Were you a neo-Nazi ten years ago? Water under the bridge without question because that’s obviously, obviously, obviously the sort of extreme outlier case I am talking about good on you for being clever enough to notice.) But for the non-dipshits out there who understand how to read without injecting insincere hyperbole into every argument, I want us to be kinder to our past selves when we have learned to be better. It’s okay that you used to like Sherlock - there were genuinely fun things about it, and it’s okay that you didn’t possess an expert grasp of post-graduate feminist critical theory when you were 21. Or 31. Or 41. More concepts of academia have filtered into mainstream consciousness than ever before - and in saying that we should remember the corollary that ten, twenty, thirty years ago that was not the case. We knew less, had access to less, and were exposed to narrower viewpoints than we are today. It is unfortunate - but it was not our fault, and we cannot easily blame ourselves for it any longer. Nothing makes my blood boil more than seeing people taking umbrage that... oh, Farmer Joe McSmithHead of Buttnut, Alabama in 1963 was ignorant of internal Chinese politics and said some untrue things about Chinese Communism. But the only thing Farmer Joe had to tell him of the outside world was a radio that played country music, a TV with four channels and strict content guidelines to only show pleasant, moral, and god-fearing content, and the three books in the Buttnut library, two of which were the Bible. There have, and will always be, certain moral lines so obvious that people of any era should always be held accountable to them. But above that, in the more trivial space of media consumption, absorption, and critique, we have to learn to be more forgiving - to ourselves and to others, so long as in the present we have changed. Did you use the r-slur a lot because it was practically a form of punctuation on 4chan and that’s where you learned the ways of the internet? Did you learn the harmfulness of this practice and cease to do it? Then I do not condemn thee - go, and sin no more. Did you and your friends used to make jokes about how Mexicans smelled because you saw Seinfeld do that in his standup and the whole TV laughed as though it was funny? Did you realize one day ‘wait a minute that’s actually super gross’ and stop repeating it? Then I do not condemn thee - go, and sin no more. Have you gone back to a beloved childhood property and found it’s full of woman-beating and weird views on homosexuality? Did you find yourself able to critique this beloved thing and did not defensively double-down on shielding it from all harsh words? Then I do not condemn thee - go, and sin no more. I will not allow us to dismiss the cruelty and hurt of Mad Max Internet Culture with a flippant ‘well that’s just how it was back then” but nor will I allow anyone to condemn us all as being consciously unfeeling, willfully ignorant, purposefully hateful. Some of us were. But some of us did not know, could not have known, needed to learn - and we were lucky enough to live in a time before cringe culture and cancel culture where we were allowed to have that opportunity to learn and grow. We need that today, for all young people who think themselves as woke as can be and ten years from now will look back and blush with shame for things they said and did in total ignorance. The sin is choosing to never change, not failing to change sooner.

#cringe culture #cancel culture #4chan #mad max #internet culture #the simpsons #bart simpson #r-slur #x-files #game of thrones #steven universe #Northern Exposure #chuck norris #jerry seinfeld #Alabama #communism #long post

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redvelvetreel · 5 years

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Red Velvet Reel 11.2: Amorfino

Pairing: [Married] Spicyhoney (Underfell Papyrus x Underswap Papyrus)

Summary: Edge explains the PregHUD to Stretch, complete with a demonstration of it’s most annoying, well-meaning feature.

Characters: Stretch (Underswap Papyrus) & Edge (Underfell Papyrus)

Contains: Mpreg/Skelepreg! Mood swings! Lots of pseudo-magic-science fudging and videogame logistics! So many headcanons!

Rating: Teen and up! (I guess?)

Note: This is the PregHUD, the default menu of all Souling related things, from Edge’s perspective! C: Stretch’s HUD is a little different, hehe!

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What was this thing?!

This display was unlike anything he had ever seen before! For whatever reason, this one didn’t need to be locked on any one particular target to be used- it was just sort of this pop-up in front of Edge. Kinda like a stat menu, although Stretch didn’t think other people could usually see those. He could see Edge’s, sometimes, but that was only because their souls were literally linked. Was this the same thing or not?

Stretch carefully picked his husband up, depositing him on his feet in the middle of the room. This was way too exciting to sit down for! Edge could be cute later.

“This is so cool!” He made a circuit around his nonplussed husband, looking at the menu from all angles, “Why can I see it? Can anyone else see it?”

“Of course not!” Edge looked almost scandalized, “No one else is ever going to see this!”

“Yeah, okay,” Stretch nodded agreeably, squatting down so he was eye level with the Souling. That was a minor curiosity, he wasn’t willing to push for it.

Even through the thick fabric of Edge’s sweater, he could clearly see the bright, white glow. He lifted up the hem of his husband’s top, noting the Souling’s glow was the same underneath the fabric, too.

“Huh.” He let his hands drop as Edge batted them away, “I wonder why they’re glowing through the clothes-“ Oh! Duh! It was locked onto Pancake! He shot up so quickly Edge startled and nearly clocked him in the face, “HUDs are closest to a BATTLE setting, so it makes sense their soul would react the same way! Souls don’t typically glow in battle, but then again, we tend to have a physical form when we engage in battles! It all makes so much sense.”

Stretch rested his chin on Edge’s shoulder as he pulled his husband into a backwards hug, patting the ectomagic with a smile, “You’re a bright kid, huh? Taken a real shining to-“

“Enough!” Edge pushed him away by his face with an irritated huff, “Do you want to know how this thing works or not?!”

“Yes please! .... light of my life.” Stretch pressed a kiss to the side of his husband’s head, looking at the screen obediently... as he rested his chin on Edge’s shoulder, again. And pulled Pancake into another hug. “I’m listening. How do you use it?”

Rolling his eyes almost audibly, Edge pointed to the screen, “This is the main screen.”

It was like a mixture of an HUD with phone technology in an intangible, manipulatable rectangle. There was a big bar in the middle and over a quarter of it was filled in white. On one end was a picture of an upside down heart, and on the other was a percentage. It wasn’t labeled, but... that was obviously Pancake’s load bar.

“That’s Pancake’s-“

“Uh, why are our names in these tabs?” Seemed kind of silly to attach that information to the load bar. As though they, or the Souling, needed any reminders.

“They’re shortcuts to Pancake,” Edge literally waved his question off, “But the squares around it are more important!”

A shortcut to Pancake (whatever that meant) seemed plenty important, but what did he know? Around the load bar we’re a variety of boxes with small icons in them, some of which were gray and appeared locked.

“So, this first one is a general notes program-“

“Wait, so you click them and you can access different... programs?” He felt Edge nod, even as Stretch poked at a locked square. “And these are ones we can only access once were in the right quarter?”

“Yes, but you would know that if you stopped interrupting me!” Edge punctuated his annoyance by suddenly jostling his shoulder, which ow, point taken. Stretch rubbed at his chin quietly.

“So, that’s Notes, to remember everything important: dates, milestones, gifts, events, etc. That’s Information, which has manuals and explanations about monster pregnancy, including symptoms for non-pregnant partners.” Stretch pointedly avoided that look sent his way. “This is Family Health, which is like a CHECK for all of us and some extra information too. And that last one is Souling Theme.”

Edge pointed at each little square in turn, pausing on the first square at the bottom. It featured a little white heart surrounded by slices of all the base magic colors in a cool little heptagon. All the icons to the right of it were still locked gray. What was up with that? “And I don’t know what this one is. It unlocked itself recently, but it’s weird. It might be like a minigame? Oh, and I don’t understand the Souling Theme either. It just has a list of everyone we know. You can write things next to their names, but I don’t know why.”

“Oh, that’s probably for the Baby Band.” Stretch waved his hand, “That’s not until the last quarter, though, so we don’t need to worry about until later. Let’s ask Undyne about the heptagon though.”

“What? Baby band? Heptagon?” Edge looked confused and a little concerned, which was not good and the opposite of what he had been trying to do. That was supposed to be reassuring! Time for a topic change.

“This all seems unusually straightforward...” Stretch squinted at it, as though that made things any clearer. Monsters loved puzzles and complicating their lives. “You just click and it opens up the tools? What’s the catch? Aren’t there any puzzles anywhere?”

“Yes! These!” Edge started swearing something unintelligible, angrily jabbing at the first square. “Goals!”

Stretch rubbed his husband’s shoulders soothingly, watching a new, much more colorful screen pop up. It looked like a bunch of paper, with a nearby pencil poised and ready to write. Before he finished taking in the rest of it, some kind of mascot danced onto the middle of the screen.

“Hey, it’s the egg! Right? The one from the Dating HUD?” Stretch hadn’t even realized it had been missing! Weird, since he had started checking it daily while he waited for his husband to wake up from his little naps. “It got legs! And a little hat!”

“Yes, and it changes what kind of legs it has every! Time!” Edge glared at it for a few more seconds, before reluctantly tapping on it. A little dialogue box popped up below it.

「HELLO, PAPYRUS “EDGE”!」

“I am not your friend!” Edge snarled, tapping at it again, more aggressively than before, “I don’t owe you any explanations!”

「ARE YOU READY FOR YOUR DAILY CHALLENGE?」

“No!” Edge tapped on it again anyway, moving restlessly as the egg danced into a corner, starting to pull something out of its hat. “Don’t laugh- it’s not funny!”

Stretch angled his face so his smile was pressed against Edge’s shoulder instead, trying very hard not to laugh. His husband seemed to be having a difficult time not smiling himself.

「HERE’S YOUR PUZZLE!」

It was a word scramble, a lot like the Minor Mixup Stretch used to do as a kid.

「 RNDKI smeo LIKM!」

Edge made a sound between a groan and a growl, counting out the letters before starting to type his answer into the space below.

「QMCJH rldn KHJL?」

Huh? Stretch frowned as the egg started dancing sadly in the corner. Stretch felt sorry for it when if finally fell down. (And a little irritated at it for making Edge so obviously annoyed, of course.)

「TRY AGAIN!」

“I hate these,” Edge seethed, crossing his arms as he glared at the screen, “There’s never a pattern! How are you supposed to solve this without a pattern?! At least a hint!”

“That’s...” What was the best way of phrasing this? “I think it might be a word scramble, Babe.” Stretch pointed to the first string of letters, “Have you tried plugging the letters they gave you in a different order to make new words?”

“Like león- I mean, lion... kim- skim...?” Edge looked adorably confused, “There aren’t enough vowels!”

“How about word by word, then?” Stretch put his hand over the last two words, gently nudging his husband’s shoulder, “What word does「 RNDKI」look like?”

“I don’t know-“ Edge sighed impatiently, “Kindr, dinkr- oh!” He positively lit up as he tapped the right order into the keyboard, “Drink? Is it drink?”

“Yeah!” Stretch cheered, clapping his husband on the back, “Good job! The next should be a little easier-”

“How dare you make fun of me?!” Edge elbowed him in the chest, and Stretch staggered back with a gasp. That was gratitude for you. “The stupid egg never said it was a word scramble! It just said it was a puzzle- and word scrambles are difficult! I don’t care what Red says, crosswords are a lot easier than this thing- and you’re wrong if you think that too!”

“I never said anything about it not being hard or anything,” Stretch rubbed at his chest ruefully, but completely ignoring rational self-preservation, went back to leaning on Edge’s shoulder. “Just that I think the solution might be more apparent if you look at it like a word-by-word scramble. I didn’t mean to imply anything- I think crosswords and word scrambles use different skills and understanding, and can be very difficult in different ways.”

“Hm.” Edge looked at him suspiciously over his shoulder, before turning back to the screen with a frown. He grabbed his husband’s hand, repositioning the fingers over the final word, “So you think the next word is... some?”

“Try plugging it in.” Shrugging, he watched Edge type it in and get the font to change color.

“Hm...” Edge still looked far from convinced, but typed ‘milk’ into the last space anyway.

「 DRINK some MILK!」

#spicyhoney #underfell papyrus #underswap papyrus #skelepreg #fanfic #redvelvetreel

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the-prophet-lemonade · 5 years

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do you have any advice on getting a story to be seen? i made an ao3 account not too long ago so no one has seen my fic at the moment but i was wondering if you had any tips on that, or would i just have to wait?

hello! i can’t claim to know what makes a fic popular as it’s 99% luck, but i can speak for the remaining 1% that has worked ~reasonably~ well for me in the past.

i think there are three key elements to getting a fic “seen”: marketing, branding, and presentation, and they’re all very important. this post got very long, so please find everything under the cut! i hope it helps :-)

i. marketing

fic marketing may seem a bit narcissistic if you haven’t done it before, but trust me on this: it’s the best way to attract readers and you deserve to promoted your story as something you worked hard upon!

drumming up hype for a fic is great. you can do this by posting on social media, providing sneak peaks on your twitter, involving yourself in the fandom community and discussing your wips with other fans, and just generally being excited about what you’re creating. engaging with other people’s writing is also a great method to help boost your own stats … get involved with reading other work and leaving comments for other people, because they will be more likely to return the favour! when someone comments on my fics, i often go and check out their profile and see what they’ve written, as it’s highly likely we enjoy the same things!

making promos is one of my favourite ways to engage with people about fics. once i post a fic/new chapter to ao3, i also crosspost promo posts with links and graphics to my twitter and tumblr. you will need a good hook to get people interested, but also an eye-catching image that summarises the story pictorially can be a great asset (you don’t even need photoshop, just a nice moodboard will do!). when using images however, it’s always important to think how the image size will appear in tumblr’s dimensions and on your own blog … make sure it’s not stretched or the resolution too low, and create something with a good visual flow i.e. the title appears first, then the necessary information, then any teasers or extracts. you need to make your fic post stand out on someone else’s timeline, which may already be filled with a bunch of other fic posts, jostling for attention. make it neat, clean, informative, and professional.

make sure to use the tagging systems efficiently for your chosen social media platforms: only the first five tags count on a tumblr post, so choose them wisely (i.e. use the key fandom tags first and save your personal blog tags for after), and only two hashtags count on twitter before it’s marked as spam, so go for the ship tag!

creating your own fic tag on twitter can also be fun, and i’ve seen a lot more people doing it lately too. you can encourage people to tweet along with a specialised hashtag and then you can find their reaction and engage with them later, which once again expands your fandom circle and will increase engagement on tweets associated with your fic.

another trick i’ve learned is utilising time zones and understanding the demographics of the audience you’re trying to reach. i am very careful to post my fics at certain times of day in order to reach key people e.g. i will try to hit either europeans or americans during the evening, as this is when most people are home from work and wanting to read fic. as a european myself, especially involved in fandoms with high levels of european fans, i usually post during the early evening for CET time zones i.e. 7 or 8 pm and i tend to find this works for me.

with tumblr, i often delay my promo posts so that i post when it’s likely to get maximum interaction (you can see when your blog is most active using your tumblr analytics) … use your queue if need be!

i also take care in reblogging/retweeting my promo posts at certain times of day too. i will usually bump the post just before i go to bed, so as to grab americans in their early evening, and then i will bump it again in the morning when i wake up, to catch australians and west coast americans still awake. i then usually keep bumping my promos once a day for two or three days on my social media to cast a wide enough net to catch as many people who might be interested, as not everyone checks their timeline every day and social media swallows up posts so quickly, especially tumblr which is not built for original content creators to do well (lol). i will usually bump a promo post 5 - 7 times before retiring it and this is a model that’s worked well for me in the past, especially for droplets, which would get 500+ notes per chapter! if you’re anxious about this, know that most people will only see your post once or twice because tumblr moves fast and swallows posts up very quickly, and sometimes people need reminders to read if they decide to save things for later when they have more time

ii. branding

the benefits of branding mainly come from experience, so it’s a tricky thing to utilise if you haven’t published fic before … but there are still tricks worth trying!

certain fic writers will attract readers to new fics just because their name is attached to it, and people know the sort of story they’re getting, they know how it’ll be written, the sort of tropes that will appear, that sort of thing. obviously, building up this sort of brand requires publishing a lot of work, and so it must be said that practice makes perfect: the more you write and publish, the more your fics will be seen and your audience will grow. people will regularly see your username in the tags on ao3 and be more inclined to click on you as someone who reliably produces good content. it’s important to remember that everyone starts from the same place and works hard to improve their craft; success doesn’t just come overnight (unless you’re in the right place at the right time) and any creator will tell you that compliments to their talent aren’t what matters, but instead, it’s compliments to their dedication and hard graft.

another key thing about branding is how you present yourself online. the most important thing in my opinion is cohesion across your social media platforms e.g. having the same username on ao3 as you do on tumblr/twitter/wherever you promote your fic. having an easily navigatable blog with working hyperlinks and archiving of your fic work is also great. basically, building a clean interface for people to engage with your work is vital! having the same icon and username across all your social media makes it so much easier for readers to navigate between your fics and your promo posts … basically, the easier you can spell something out, the better

branding is mostly to do with how you advertise yourself, rather than the particular fic, although much of it overlaps. get your name out there by engaging with other writers and making friends and appreciating their work! this is often the best way to get inspired, plus you get to meet some amazing people. i recommend trying out for zines and big bangs and writing challenges, as these are good ways to show your work to already-established audiences. also, make yourself available by interacting with commentors or by opening up your inbox on tumblr to anons. try linking your social media and your inbox as hyperlinks in the authors note of your fic

iii. presentation

this is really fundamental and is often the main reason people will close out of your fic and not read to the end. people want to read fics that are easy to digest and have had care put into them. this includes a lot of things:

correct tagging i.e. are the tags coherent and not just rambling? are there appropriate trigger warnings in place? have you unnecessarily tagged every side pairing under the sun, rather than just the main relationship?

grammar and spelling. goes without saying … people are more likely to read things that look professional and have had care poured into their preparation. make sure you know how to use speech punctuation. revise how to use commas. avoid epithets (especially racially-aggravated ones). get yourself a beta if you’re worried, because betas are godsends!

paragraphing. so many people will close out of a fic if it isn’t correctly spaced. double spaced paragraphs look best on ao3 and i often won’t read a fic if the paragraphs are too long because it hurts my eyes to read. make sure you’re starting new speakers in new paragraphs. new ideas deserve new paragraphs. basically, every time the “camera” changes, you should be starting a new paragraph. not just a new line.

summaries. i see so many fics on ao3 with summaries that are either apologising for being bad at summaries or apologising for a fic being bad/being a first fic, and like … stop this! own what you have written, no-one else will have written it the way you have and you should be proud of it. if you’re saying in your summary that it’s a bad fic, i’m not going to click on it as a reader. instead, utilise your summary to get people hooked … good hooks can be written a load of different ways, but the best ones i see often involved a snippet from the fic as a taster, and then a couple lines of blurb. get people excited!

titles: i’m personally more likely to click on a fic where the title is either (a) correctly capitalised or (b) is clearly chosen for its aesthetic or meaning (i love long lower case titles with parentheses lol). choosing a memorable title is really helpful, especially one that can be shortened or abbreviated for social media (e.g. for hashtags)!

all this being said, traffic on ao3 is a crytpid at best and obeys little in the way of rhyme or reason. you can put blood, sweat and tears into marketing your fic, but sometimes, just being in the right place at the right time (writing for the right niche) is what does it, so being a fic writer requires a lot of patience. first and foremost, write for yourself. write what you want to read and enjoy doing it, because if you get sucked into obsessively checking stats, it’s only going to disappoint when you don’t achieve what you want to achieve.

just keep persevering and keep writing and appreciating each and every person who takes time in interact with your fic and its promos … because ultimately, all it takes it that one reader to fall head over heels in love with your fic for everything to change. for now, just be proud of your work and keep writing!

#lucy replies #writing

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boogiewrites · 5 years

Text

Choking On Sapphires 68

Title & Song: What Kind Of Man

Characters: Alfie Solomons x Genevieve (OFC)

Word Count: 9400+

Summary: Alfie breaks a promise to Genevieve, causing their worst fight yet. When she threatens real repercussions against him, he finds himself being the one doing the begging for the first time. Her need for control turns into a good old fashioned hate fuck. They find themselves a new way to solve their arguments and a new understanding of boundaries in their relationship.

Warnings/Tags: Explicit Sexual Content. Strong Dom/Sub roles and reversals.Bondage.Blindfold and rope Sub Alfie with a touch of Dom. Dom Gen with a touch of Sub. Fluff, Angst. Arguing/Fighting, yelling, forceful physical restraint and shoving while fighting. Emotional manipulation. They’re both unstable.But I love them and their flaws.

**Chapter song is What Kind Of Man by Florence + The Machine.**

Click on my icon then go to my Mobile Masterlist in my bio for my other works and chapters. (Had to do this since Tumblr killed links, sorry.)

Alfie had made some questionable decisions in his day. He was aware of this. But now those decisions involved you. Some you knew about, others you didn't, and on this day one that you did not know about, and for good reason, was going to cause a fight that would bring him to his knees.

He sat in his office, eyes miles away, fingers picking through his beard as his mind raced.

"You ain't 'eard from 'em?" he asks Ollie for the third time this hour.

"No, sir, they're set to call your office phone anyway."

"It's been too long." he grumbles, eyes moving to the silent phone on his desk. "She shoulda been outta that meetin' and on her way home by now." he slumps and rests his forearms on his desk.

"Maybe there was more to discuss than Abeille? Or another meeting after she'd added on?" Ollie offers, trying to be helpful.

"You suggestin' I 'ont know how to keep tabs on me own woman?" he glares over to the tall younger man, who now had eyes wide with fear and apologies.

"I wasn't-" he begins his head shaking back and forth when the phone rings.

Alfie doesn't take his eyes off Ollie, a low brow still berating him wordlessly. "'Ello?" he answers.

"Boss... uh... you should be goin' to the missus house as soon as ya can." the stuttered and rushed words of one of the men he'd sent to tail you around town for protection make him stomach tighten.

"Why?" he demands in a flat and authoritative tone.

"She knows about us." he says, catching his breath.

"And how the fuck would she know? What'd you do? What took you so long to fuckin' call?" he commands.

"It went south quickly. Roddy was shot and I had to take him to the hospital." he hesitantly answers.

"Fuckin' shot? What about her?" his eyes go wide with worry, his free hand placed on the top of his desk, body already wanting to dart for the door.

"She's fine. We got in in time to help her out. They had her outnumbered but... she fuckin' gave it to 'em that's for sure."

"What the fuck happened?" he asks forcefully.

"From what I gathered, with her screamin' at us 'n all. The people she's meetin' with saw us tailin' her. We didn't pull up 'til after she was in like you said. But they thought she was tryin' to ambush 'em and they went off on 'er. We heard gunshots and ran in. Then she held us by gunpoint and made us tell her who we were." he says in a fast and panicked way.

"You fuckin' useless wankers." he groans, rubbing between his eyes. "I told you not to fuckin' tell her who you were!" he shouts into the phone.

"She was gonna shoot us sir! She even cut me up a bit to get me to talk!" he says in a high pitched desperate voice.

"I 'ont care." he spits out. "That's what ya fuckin' hazard pay is for ya fuckin' lot 'a bellends." his voices rises and falls, knowing he was going to be met with the same fate now. "You two are back on fuckin' cleanin' duty when you get back 'ere. You understand?"

"Yes sir." he says with a sigh.

"Right. Now I gotta go deal with what you fucked up." he sits the phone done on the receiver like it weighed a ton. He shuts his eyes, takes a deep breath and rises to get his coat.

"That didn't go according to plan I take it?" Ollie asks.

"Ya got anymore daft fuckin' useless questions?!" he shouts in his face, shoving him out of the way to walk through the doorway.

Ollie shuts up and lets Alfie have his space before going back to work.

On the long drive to your place, he's left trying to figure out how to navigate this unfortunate turn of events. You would be furious. He knew that. He also knew he couldn't make you understand the reason he had men follow you in the first place. You were too precious a thing to him to lose. He wasn't going to let you get snatched up in broad daylight or attacked while you shopped at the market if he could help it. The tails had only been a way to keep you protected but he knew you wouldn't see it that way. He couldn't live without you and if he didn't do everything he could to keep you safe he'd never forgive himself.

"He's here." you hear Claire say with a heavy sigh as you're standing in the garden, fuming, thinking of all the things you wanted to scream at Alfie while you ripped him apart. You say nothing and walk briskly past her. "He's in your bedroom!" she calls out, shoulders hung low as she knows whatever is about to happy won't be pretty.

With no hesitation you move your overworked muscles towards your room, throwing your door open and slamming it shut behind you, your dressing gown shifting with your fast and certain movements. He sees your face and prepares for the onslaught coming his way.

"Genevieve I can explain." he begins, hands up in surrender as you stomp towards him like an angry bull. When you reach out and slap him open handed across his face it catches him off guard. His head stays turned, eyes wide as he processes the hit. He tried to keep his face indifferent but the pain made him want to fire back at you

"I almost DIED because of you!" you scream at him, brow low and hard, face set in a tight, furious expression as your eyes bore into him.

He turns his head, eyes shifting to you first to take you in, seeing scrapes and bruises he didn't expect. He had been told you were fine, and this was not the untouched story he'd been sold. "You should know that would never be my intention, pet." he tries to soothe you with pet names even though he knows it won't work.

"But it was your intention to lie, yes? To have me tracked like a fucking animal without telling me?" you shove him and his legs hit against the end of your bed.

"I wanted to keep ya safe, love, I-" he talks with his hands, punctuating his points.

"That's a load of shit and you know it!" you growl, leaning in closer.

"No it's not, yeah?" his voice finally rises,and your postures straightens, ready to hear what he had to say in terms of defending his stupidity. "I had them follow you to keep an eye on you."

"Because you don't trust me?" you cross your arms as your voice evens out, head tilted at him.

"Course not! I didn't want someone tryin' to snatch ya up or fuckin' trappin' ya in some fake meetin' because 'a ME." he sells the last word heavily.

"But you can lie to me? Funny how that reasoning works with you." you spit out.

"I didn't lie I just didn't tell you." he groans.

You shove him again. "You fucking horse's arse!" you shout. "So full of shit!" you ball up your fists. "Can't even take responsibility for your actions!" you look down your nose at him with digust.

"I am not ya fuckin hell cat!" he shouts back. "Come down off ya fuckin' pedestal and join the rest of us in the fuckin' real world Genny! I did it to keep you safe because there are men out to KILL YOU, RIGHT?! Because of ME! If somethin' happened to you that I coulda stopped, do you think I could live with that?!" he put his hands to his chest in defense of himself, his anger cracking to show the concern that birthed his lies.

"And I almost died TODAY because of YOU. They saw the men trailing me pull up, they asked me who they were and I didn't know BECAUSE OF YOU! They thought I was lying and I had a gun pulled to my fucking HEAD because I was left in the dark. YET AGAIN!" you scream and get in his face and he holds his ground against you.

"I ain't gonna apologize for tryna keep ya safe!" he barks.

"We've had this argument before Alfie. Don't you remember? The one where I threatened to fucking KILL you if you did it again?!" you ask with an eerie calm to your words, his chin dropping in control of his emotions.

"Of course I fuckin' remember! I-" begins with an already exhausted look on his face.

"THEN WHY DID YOU DO IT AGAIN YOU DAFT FUCKING MAN?!" you screech, shoving him. "Why must you continuously prove to me that you can't fucking listen? That you don't actually respect my abilities or my space. Because if you fucking respected me you would LEARN from your mistakes. You PROMISED me that night that you wouldn't pull this shit again and what did I tell you?" your voice is loud and has grown a crowd outside your closed door. Aggie is in tears and Claire's muscles have never been so tense.

He opens his mouth to speak and you cut him off.

"I told you not to make me regret my mercy." you snap. "And what have you done, huh?" your voice rises again.

"I'm sorry Genevieve... I-" he leans forward and thinks to reach out to touch you.

"OH NOW THERE'S AN APOLOGY!" you laugh wildly, turning from him with your arms in the air in disbelief of his actions. "I can't believe I fucking trusted you." you shake your head slowly before turning back to him. "Everyone was right about you weren't they? Don't believe a word he fucking says, they told me. And I thought you loved me and I was fucking stupid enough to fall for you and your lies."

"I do love you, Genevieve," he says with downcasted eyes and slumped shoulders. "I do love you, that's why I did it!" he states with an open mouth like it's the most obvious thing in the world.

"If you loved me you would've TOLD ME!" your resolve begins to break and your lip trembles before you can turn from him.

"I did it because I can't lose you, do ya not see that?!" his voice rises, giving away his desperation.

"If you were truly worried about losing me you wouldn't have had me tailed without my knowledge. Even putting today's events aside in which YOUR actions almost got me KILLED, your actions are grounds for me to leave you." your voice cracks.

"Genevieve you don't mean-" he shakes his head slowly.

"DO I NOT?!" you scream into his face. He reaches out to touch you and you smack his arms away. "Don't you dare fucking touch me." you growl and his face winces, jaw going tight. "If I killed you it would be too obvious. So the next step down is to leave you isn't it?" you bite out. You don't believe what you're saying, not really, but you want to hurt him as much as he's hurt you.

"Don't talk like that love." he says softly, shaking his head. "I only risked doin' that because if somefing happened to you that I could've prevented I couldn't live with meself." he says, chin down and eyes lifted up to yours, voice cracking as you watch the lump in his throat grow. "I can't lose you. I didn't want you hurt. Today was an absolute fuck up on my behalf, yeah? I never meant to make you think I didn't respect you. I was tryin' to take extra precautions to keep ya safe. It did not work. I'm sorry! You have to see that I love you, Genevieve, and that's why I did it." he leans his face towards you to sell his words to you.

"And your love includes going directly against anything I've ever asked of you?" your voice is raspy, fighting back emotion, hearing the surprising softness of his own in his pain. "Why would I stay with a man who would keep me in the dark? You say you had me trailed to keep me safe but do you not see how it also leaves me to believe you don't trust me?"

"I do trust you, love. I do. That were never a part of it, yeah? It was only for extra protection."

"Then you should have asked me!" your voice high pitched.

"And your stubborn arse would've said no!" he says loudly, his face slack and eyes wide, palms up in exhaustion. "Then I would've bloody gone 'n done it anyway wunnit I?" he shakes his head. "Because as long as you're mine, I will do anyfing and everyfing in my power to keep you safe!"

"So you're telling me that you would ignore my wishes?" you say, your disgust clear on your face.

"I thought it better to ask forgiveness than permission." he admits.

"My capacity for it has its limits. You fooled me once Alfie... you don't fucking get to do it twice." you scold, leaning in towards him.

"I'M SORRY, RIGHT?!" he shouts back, arms out at his sides. "I 'ont know how else to fucking tell you I did it because I fuckin' love you and I can't fuckin' live without you so I YEAH I would go against your wishes because you aren't always right, Genevieve." he barks back.

Your mouth falls open and you glare at him. "Get out." you whisper.

"No." he says defiantly.

"Get the fuck out of my house." you hiss, fists balled and eyes trying to hide your frustration with the situation. You wanted to hurt him, you wanted him to cry and hurt. Not be this controlled man you saw in front of you. You wanted to rip him to pieces. You wanted him to learn his lesson.

"Genevieve no... please..." he says with a heaving chest, moving towards you even though you smack his hands away as they touch you.

"Get out." you begin to cry. He reaches for you, holding you tight by the arms and you whimper. "Stop it Alfie." you continue to try to push him away but in your emotional state you can't fight him off. "You don't love me. You're mad. What sort of man acts like this when he's in love?" you choke out with a face showing your hurt. "You don't love me." you bite out at him.

"I do. I'm as mad as a fuckin' hatter for you, Genny, that's why I do things like this." he says softly, trying to bring the energy down. "I can't even think straight when it comes to you, love, I think of you as mine already, you know 'is." he nods his head to drive his point home. "I know you're hurt and I'm sorry. But I would be a shell of who I am now if I lost you." he says leaning in close to your face, you see in his eyes he means it. "I'll do anyfing, Genevieve, what do you want? What do you need from me because I 'on't fuckin' know." he asks quietly, seeing your face soften but your brow stays hard in defiance.

You swallow hard, taking a deep breath. You didn't want him to be without you as much he didn't want it. You wanted him to pay though. He deserved some sort of punishment for what he'd done. You say nothing and look away from him.

"Please, Gen, I'm sorry. Let me prove it to you, yeah? I'll work to earn your forgiveness." he takes your face into his hands and when you let him he feels a weight off his shoulders. "Let me show you I only react in such a way out of love." he says softly, a kiss to your forehead that your body reacts to. "Let this make us stronger, eh? We were due for a good fight weren't we? Two people like us can't go without blowin' up from time to time can we? You're too passionate to be contained, love 'n I know you're angry but can I do anything now, in this moment, to ease it? Just don't you dare talk about leavin' me." he finishes gently, thumbs rubbing across your cheeks.

You both fall quiet, an air of desperation hangs around you. "You did it because you're afraid of losing me?" you ask of him.

"Terrified." he whispers. "Only thing I'm afraid of." he shakes his head.

You take in a deep inhale. "What would you do if you lost me?" you ask.

"Burn down the whole fuckin' city to get to whoever did it. I'd be the most miserable fuckin' man anyone ever had the unfortunate chance to meet. I'd be left to get swallowed up in my hate cause I'd lost my love, wouldn't I?" you stare into his eyes and you find nothing but honesty there now.

"Do you need me Alfie?" your voice is breathy as you shut your eyes.

"Like air." he whispers.

"And you love me?" he watches over your soft face, your chest rising and falling slower now as you speak.

"Infinitely." he answers.

"And you're mine?" your brow furrows as you ask.

"I am." You feel the warm feeling wash over you.

"Tell me you're mine. No one else's." you shake your head subtly.

He gives to your wishes without hesitation. "I am yours, my love. There is no one else in my eyes but you."

You open your eyes again and he finds them dark and dilated. You feel a power come over you, hearing a strong man like him give in. You knew what you needed from him now. "Get on your knees." you say in a clear, flat voice.

He narrows his eyes in question, side-eyeing you for a moment.

"I'm going to have you earn your forgiveness," you state slowly. "Get on your knees." you say with more a command to your tone.

He lets your face go, eyes staying locked on yours as he kneels slowly, uncertainty clear in them.

You run your hand through his hair, looking over his handsome face. "Take your coat off." you tell him gently. He follows what you ask. You rake your nails from his scalp to his neck, hands rubbing his shoulders and resting on them. "Apologize."

"I'm sorry." he says quickly.

You move back to his hair, feeling the thick softness and humming. "Do you think I'm weak Alfie?" your voice inflects upward.

"No of course not." he says earnestly.

"But yet you behave as if I am. That would make YOU the weak one wouldn't it? Only weak men try to control their women." you pout. "My Alfie isn't weak." you state harshly.

"It is not weak to admit what I need, love." he says with a deep voice, a subtle shake of his head.

You give him a subtle smile, a gentle pat to the cheek. "I'm going to teach you a lesson, Alfie. I don't think you're going to be happy about it." you purse your lips down at him. "But then again... you might." you shrug.

He takes a deep breath, starting to understand what you were doing. He wasn't sure about it but he was willing to keep his word that he'd do anything. "Do what you want. If it's to keep you I'll take it with a fuckin' smile if ya wish." he gives a confident nod of his chin up towards you.

"That's a good boy." you pat his cheek and run your thumb over his lips. "Not going to get you out of being punished though." you give a sly smile and turn from him to walk to a trunk that sat against a wall next to your armoire. You open the lid and stand and pick your nails as you hum in thought. "What to do... what to do..." you say in a melodic tone.

He watches you with curious eyes, trying to keep his face indifferent.

"Seeing as it's your first time..." you speak to yourself, reaching down to take a soft, woven rope from the trunk and a ribbon of satin. "Hurting you physically isn't what this is about." you say, walking over to him with a swing to your hips, a look of superiority on your face. "Isn't even about sex. Not really." you say with a nod, running your fingers through his hair and turning them into a fist, giving it a firm tug. "Everything in the world is about sex, except sex itself. Sex is about power." you tell him with a cold appearance, pulling his head back. "And you are a powerful man. But you're going to yield to me." you state flatly, leaning down closer to his face, hand yanking on his hair.

"I told ya, I'm yours." he answers. You could never deny that he wasn't a smart man. He could've been the smartest you knew and never short on cleverness.

"You are mine. Now get on this bed." you give a sharp nod, tugging him up by his shirt collar and sitting him down. "You're going to do as I say. You're going to listen." you bite your words at him, smacking his nose like a scolded pup. "You're going to prove to me you can. You're going to give me your power and I'm going to use you and punish you however I please. Do we understand?" you stand up straight as you speak and unbutton his shirt.

"Yes, love." he sighs out.

"No." you give a stern smack to his cheek. "No love, no darling, no pet names. You call me Miss until I tell you otherwise. You haven't earned calling me yours again. I'm not yours again yet." you speak low and concise at him, his eyes blinking rapidly to try to subdue his instincts to talk back. When he goes without speaking for too long you twist on of his nipples and he flinches. "Answer me." you loudly demand.

"Yes Miss." he grunts out, wanting to rub the spot of sudden impact but you're roughly yanking his sleeves off his arms.

"Kick off your shoes." you order, taking his shirt and picking up his jacket, laying it over the back of a chair. "Much better." you exhale out, nails raking down his bare arms. You untie the sash around your waist, letting your dressing gown fall open just slightly. You see his nostrils twitch, his eyes move down your body and you grab him firmly by the chin. "You don't get to watch me do these things to you. This body is mine, not the other way around. You don't get to gaze at this feminine form while you're being punished." you shake his chin and put the satin ribbon across his eyes. "Have you ever been blindfolded Alfie?"

"No Miss." he answers with clear disapproval to his voice.

"That's surprising," you say out loud in reflection. "Has a woman ever tied you up before?" you ask with a sweeter tone.

"No. Never wanted to be put in a vulnerable position." he forces out in a stubborn mumble.

You let out a dark chuckle at his expense. "I supposed you should've behaved and kept it that way then, hmmm? Because you're going to be vulnerable for me." you coo, bending over the bed and encircling his elbows and wrists pulled together with the soft rope. You preferred the harder, rougher rope yourself but you didn't want to leave visible marks on him after the fact. "Have you ever heard of Kinbaku?" you ask while forming the intricate patterns across his forearms.

"No." he says softly.

You bend his pinky back as he's already forgetting the rules.

"Fuckin', MISS, No. Miss." he rushes out.

"He's learning." you say in a patronizing tone. "It's the art of tight binding with rope. It's about the beauty in the art of restraint. I learned from a very knowledgeable woman during my time in Berlin." you explain, knotting his arms together, forcing his chest out and his back straight as he grunted. "This isn't some sailors knot you boys brought home. You won't be getting out this." he hears the threat in your voice. "Go ahead." you say with a humourous lilt and you stand in front of him, hands on your hips, opening your dressing gown to expose your naked body underneath. "Try." you challenge him.

He grunts, jaw tight and shoulders shifting almost falling onto his side in his attempt.

"See? Not going anywhere," you say condescend, bopping his nose. "And what good news for me." you let out a slow, deep laugh, spreading his knees and standing between them, letting your hands roam over his shoulders and down his arms slowly. "Truly a shame you have to have such an appetizing body when you have such a habit of poor behavior." you sigh and pout, fingers dragging down his stomach to the tops of his trousers. "All I want to do is love and fuck you Alfie I don't know why you can't just behave and let me do that without having to do things like this." your voice is whiny and lazy, reaching and twisting his nipples as he flinches and grunts. "Making me deny both of us. Making me take time out of my busy schedule to fucking train you like some dog." you knock his chin with the back of your hand. "And such a stubborn mutt." you scold, a smack to both his cheeks. You change your tone and touch to sweeter, lighter to begin overwhelming him. "But he is so handsome. Except for all that sneaking he's a good pup isn't he?" you run your fingers through his beard.

"I fuckin' try, Miss." he answers gruffly, his frustration evident.

"Try harder." you command, slapping his chest firmly, making him press his lips together. "If you want to keep me you'll try harder." You put your lips to his and speak. "I will not tolerate this machismo shit that you're trying to pull on me. I won't. I don't care if I fucking love you, I'll live without you out of spite. I've built my whole life around spite and don't think you're immune just because I love your stubborn arse." He feels the more heartfelt expression in your voice as you speak closely and harshly to him.

"So you would still love me?" he says softly, you back away, his lips parted just slightly as he waits for an answer.

"I will love you until the day I die, Alfie. But don't think that means you can do what you want and get away with it. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Miss." he whispers.

"You will ask me before doing these things. Even if it means a fight. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Miss."

"Because I would rather you tell me and then do it, over not telling me. It's the transparency I need, Alfie. I won't have secrets that could hurt us kept between us." you lift up his chin to your face. "It's a matter of my safety and yours now. This isn't some young love where the only effects of our lies are hurt feelings. It's life or death now. Like it was today. And we might not be so lucky next time. I know you understand that."

"I do, Miss."

"So can you promise to tell me things, even if they hurt me? Even if I want to hate you? Because if you tell me the truth I will be able to forgive you eventually. Unlike now."

"I will. I promise, yeah? I hate seein' ya upset."

"I do not need coddled Alfie. I've said this before. I am not a child, I am not naive. You tell me the bad. Not only the good. I can take it. I might scream and lash out but wouldn't you prefer that to me leaving you?"

"I'd prefer anyfing to that." he sighs out and you're touched by the soft tone.

"Then let your actions show it. I don't give second chances Alfie, and here I am. My daft, softened heart giving way for you to learn a lesson without forcefully breaking yours."

"Thank you, love -Miss." he winces and waits to be hit but it doesn't come. "I promise to keep in mind you are not a fragile little thing to keep guarded in a box."

"Is that how you truly want me, Alfie? To be a kept little porcelain figurine on your shelf with no personality, no ambitions but to sit and be beautiful?"

"No, I love that you're fuckin' mad." he shakes his head and you see a charming grin come across his face. You slap his face and it stays. He can't see the entertained look on your face.

"Don't push it you hound." he hears the amusement in your voice. "You don't want someone so easily broken do you?" you ask softly, sliding your leg up on the bed next to his.

"I do not." his voice dips low, keeping a grateful softness.

"And neither do I." you hiss, straddling his lap. "But I'm going to try to break you today." you graze your nose against his. "I'm going to tease and hurt you and you're going to do what I say because you want me happy don't you? Wasn't that what all this lying was about? To keep me happy?"

"It was, truly, love. When you're upset I feel like I've failed you somehow."

"Oh you sweet pup." you scratch into his beard. "You're going to make me very happy right now then aren't you? Be a good boy for me and perhaps I'll be good to you. IF you earn it."

"I am, Miss. I want ya to be good to me. I wanna be good to ya." he says earnestly.

"In time." you say happily, glad he can't see the smile on your face. You let your dressing gown fall behind you to the floor and press your bare skin against his chest. His chest rises and falls dramatically as he comprehends what's going on. "Now I want to tease you." you say, lifting your breasts and rubbing your hard nipples against his chest. "You can't touch me with your hands like this. All tied up like a present for me. I know you must hate that." you laugh softly. "Having to imagine what I look like, completely naked and rubbing against you like this." You lift your self and press your breasts to either side of his face and he groans, moving his face to nuzzle against them. You sit down hard on his lap and he groans in pain. "I didn't say you could do that." your voice turns darker again and he swallows loudly. "This is for me, not you." you inform curtly. You rise again, batting him about the face with your breasts, knocking his head from side to side. "You love these big tits of mine don't you Alfie?" you purr.

"I fuckin' do, Miss." he groans, licking his lips.

"What do you like about them?" you keep pressing them to his face, your arms around his head from time to time, smothering him in them and going back to teasing your hard nipples to his bare skin.

"What's not to fuckin' like? Can I be crude, Miss?" he asks.

"You are learning and I am impressed." you chirp. "You may." you give him a good scratch to the chin for his behavior.

"They're fuckin' huge, love. I just wanna fuckin' smother to death in 'em. And the weight of 'em against me is just... I fuckin' think about 'em all the time. Want my mouth on 'em to show you how much I want you. The way they bounce when I fuck you and you ride me... fuck. When you're cold at night and I pull you against me and feel those perfect little brown nipples hard against me. And fuck me, the noises you make when I suck on your tits, love, it makes me so fuckin' hard I can't think 'bout anyfing else." he lets out a long exhale.

"Keep talking like that and you'll be rewarded." you give him a single chaste kiss to the cheek. "You want them in your mouth?"

"Fuck, yes, love." his shoulders slump.

"Open your mouth." and he does as you command. "But DON'T you dare move your lips." you say, placing one of the hard peaks, tracing it around his lips and he pants, shoulder shifting as he wants to touch you. "I bet you wish those big paws of yours were free to pull me into your mouth don't you?" you purr.

"Yes, Miss" he groans.

"Too bad." you state flatly. "Stick out your tongue." you rub your nipple against the warm, wet surface and hum. "I do love it when you suck on these big tits Alfie. It makes me so wet." you whisper, a taunting smile on your face as you watch him try to not struggle against his bindings. You lower your hips down, taking them away from his mouth. "And it makes you hard doesn't it?" you state as you move your hips against his, feeling him growing beneath you.

"It does." he groans, his mouth and tongue stuck out searching for your skin.

"You want me to let that fat cock of yours out to play?" you whisper into his ear, dragging your tongue up the shell of it.

He groans with a clenched jaw. "Yes, Miss."

"So he does like this." you say cheerfully, fingers teasing under his waistband. "But have you earned getting to feel me against you?" you ask rhetorically as you rub him over his trousers.

"Let me." he rasps out.

"You're not in the position to be asking things of me." you scold, giving his hardening cock a slap and he hisses. "Just for that I'm going to tease you more." you announce proudly, making quick work of his trousers and pants and leaving him bare on the bed. "Now look at you. Not even your pants to give you any friction." you deign. "So let's make it worse." you smile, taking the blindfold off of him. "Hello there my blue-eyed dog." you give him a scratch to his chin.

"'Ello..." he slurs out, eyes looking over your naked body cause his cock to stir.

""ello?" you ask, a slap to the underside of his cock and he turns his head and winces.

"Miss. Bloody miss, 'Ello Miss." he grunts out and diverts his eyes.

"Better." you say harshly, taking your breasts again and hitting him in the face with them. His groans move from pained to pleasurable quickly as you make his pillowy lips pucker with the squeezing of his face. "Not perfect but what should I expect from a man?" you patronize and his face shows he doesn't care in the least. You pull away from him, leaning down as if you were going to put your mouth on his cock, but hesitating, letting your hard nipples graze up his thighs, dragging them up on either side of his cock, a brief wobble of your chest to tease before hitching a leg up to drag them up his chest. "Open your mouth again. Don't make me tell you not to move again." you hiss, once again tracing his lips and tongue with the stiff peaks, the contact and the power from his helplessness making you wet. "Such a gorgeous mouth, truly." you coo. "Now suck." you command. He doesn't pause for consideration, eyes closing and mouth enveloping your breast as much as he could, grunting into it, harsh rhythmic sucking, watching the muscles in his neck tense from his enthusiasm. "What filthy whispers I've heard from them. Unfortunately also what lies." you tsk and pull them away, rising off of his body quickly, leaving him with fluttering lids and an open mouth.

You turn around, looking around the room for inspiration for a moment, you hear a familiar grunt as he wants to bury his face into your peachy arse. "I hear you back there." you smirk. "You like my arse too?" you ask with a cheerful tone, placing your hands on his knees, running yourself up against his balls first then feeling him rest between the valley of your arse.

"Yes, miss." he groans, you feel his thighs shifting beneath you.

"Is there any part of me you don't like?" you laugh, bouncing yourself against him, causing him to pat heavy against you as you did.

"No, miss." he whispers, nose twitching from the contact.

"Right answer." you say, bouncing your cheeks at him with your hands underneath them, before bending over slowly, no longer touching him, letting him get a view of you. He could see the glimpse of soft hair and pink lips between your thighs as you bent, and his cock twitched at the sight, balls tightening with need. "And do you love this cunt?" you ask with a sweet tone, reaching behind you to spread yourself apart in front of him.

"Unggg Yes, love - Miss." he corrects.

"Tell me." you say, running your hands over the swell of your ass and down your thighs.

"I fuckin' love that perfect little cunt of yours, Miss."

"Good boy." you say in reward, moving to a chair that sat not far from the edge of the bed, pulling it closer by bending over and backing towards him, giving him a good view. Out of reach, but close enough to see you, you spin and sit on the edge of the chair. You caress your chest and down your thighs, spreading them, kneading the soft flesh up to your center. Hitching a leg over the arm of the chair, you begin to tease around your lips. "Have you ever seen such a pretty little puss Alfie?" you ask with a smile, fingers now pressing against your slit.

"No Miss." he groans, eyes fixated.

"Such a soft and pink little thing isn't she?" you purr affectionately, looking down at yourself, fingers sliding between your lips, holding them open for him, causing him to groan. "And expert at taking your cock."

"Yes she is Miss" he groans, licking his lips.

"You are so lucky Alfie. To get the privilege to fuck such a well cared for and maintained cunt you know? I keep her tight and soft and wet for you don't I?"

"Yes Miss you do." he whines.

You begin to rub your clit, humming in pleasure, hips starting to shift back and forth. "You want it don't you?"

"Fuck yes I do miss." he pants.

You throw your other leg up, leaning back on full display. "I can tell from that cock of yours." you grin, biting your lip and continuing to rub, closing your eyes and giving him a show, moaning and shifting, rubbing fast then slow and back again. "I'm so wet, Alfie." you moan, opening your eyes to find him standing at attention for you, your give a few firm slaps to your center and he lets out a deep grunt. "You're licking your lips, do you want a taste?" you tease.

"Yes Miss." he nods, eyes not leaving you.

You slide your fingers inside you, a showy moan and throwback of your head. You stand quickly, strutting over to him and sliding your fingers into his mouth. "Taste it." you whisper, letting him suck your fingers, his tongue lapping away at them inside his mouth and let out a content hum of appreciation. "Good boy," you say, putting the wet fingers back between your legs and moaning. "Such a good boy." you rasp, throwing your leg over him again, a strong grab and slap to his hip before you take hold of his cock and slide it against your wet center.

His mouth drops open as he swears, lip twitching at the contact before his eyes swing back up to your face.

"I feel you throbbing for it." you taunt, sliding yourself against him.

"Yes Miss." he wheezes, lips hanging open and wet, eyes looking up at you.

"Look at you, panting for it with those puppy dog eyes." you hold his cheek with your free hand, grazing your nose against him. "Would you like a kiss, pup?" you ask softly.

"Yes, Miss." he nods.

"Such a soft thing." you purr before teasing him again, licks and grazes of your lips against his before giving in after taking in his strung-out face. When you let him kiss you, he moans. A moan into a kiss was something new and you were thrilled by the arrival of the deep noise, it meant your teasing was working. You give into for a bit, kissing back with tongue and teeth as he pushed against you, starving for more contact. Not having his arms free was extremely frustrating and that annoyance was only making his blood pump faster and make him want you more.

You rise off him to stand between his legs, keeping your kiss intact before hiving him a hard, tight tug and he grunts, breaking the kiss. "Too rough?" you ask with a tilt of your head, another hard tug from the base, jerking his hips forward.

"Mmmph." he answers at first, hesitant to tell you now, fearing he might receive worse. "Yes Miss." he answers sheepishly.

"Oh he doesn't like a rough wank?" you taunt, giving him a few more and watching him wince. "Shame, that." you sigh. "Guess I'll have to be nice to this cock won't I?" you pout. "I'll need it throbbing hard to fuck me right, won't I?" you keep rubbing against him, drawing out a moan. "And I do plan on having you fuck me right, Alfie." you sigh out against his lips. The sound of his name makes him grunt, forgetting the rough grip on him already. "If you can be a good boy."

"I can Miss."

"You want to be a good boy?" you ask, letting him go, a playful pinch to his inner thighs before you turn and bend over again, reaching back to stroke him.

"Yes Miss."

"You want to fuck me?" you tease, rubbing his head against your wet slit.

He groans and shifts "Yes, miss."

"Then come get it." you say, letting him go, hands on your ankles in front of him. "Fuck me if you want to so badly." you say in a harsh, bossy tone.

You feel his legs try to move him in a way to get to you, scooting to the end of the bed but he can't get the leverage without his arms in use.

"Fuck me, Alfie. C'mon." you bounce your ass at him and laugh. "Oh can the poor pup not manage?" you pout, looking back at his red and drawn face. "Poor baby." you laugh, bouncing your ass at him with your hands. You turn back, moving quickly to straddle him, connecting in a kiss he didn't see coming. "You don't get to fuck me unless I let you. This cunt isn't yours, it's mine." you bite his lip. "But this cock." you nod and reach between your legs to wrap around him again. "This cock is mine. It doesn't go anywhere or do anything unless I give it permission. You understand?"

"Yes miss."

"Tell me it's mine." you growl

"It's yours miss." he sighs.

"And you. All of you. Is mine." you growl, rubbing yourself against him, your fingers light against the head of his cock. "Tell me." you demand, grabbing him roughly again.

"I'm yours. it's all yours Miss"

"You are mine. All mine." you coo, your switching of mean to sweet making his brow furrow as he tried to anticipate what you would do next but he didn't know and it made his heart race. "Do you want me to be yours, Alfie?"

"Yes, Miss."

"You want me to stay with you? Always? Do you want to keep this little cunny happy?"

"Yes love, please. Miss, yes."

"Do you need me Alfie?" you taut him with a soft voice.

"Yes, love, I need you. Miss." he rushes out, forgetting himself as he sees your body rising and falling in a serpentine fashion against him.

"Will you be a good boy and behave? Listen to what your misses says? Do as you're told?"

"Yes miss." he groans, voice more desperate.

"Are you going to act like the grown fucking man I know you are? Because that's what I want Solomons. A grown. Fucking. Man." you bite out against him. "I don't need a boy who lies. I want a man to face the consequences of his actions. One that will fuck me proper and love me even harder. Are you that man, darling?"

"Yes, love I am. I'll prove it to you. I love you, Gen and I'm mad about you. Let me show you, love. Let me keep you." his eyes are wide and you see the sincere feelings behind his words.

You lean in to kiss his flushed face. "Desperation for me does look so delicious in your eyes, Alfie." you kiss his cheek. "I won't leave you. You silly beast." you whisper into his ear, nuzzling against his face. "Not today anyway." you huff out a laugh. "Since you said please. And I am absolutely soaked and aching for your cock I suppose it's time to reward you for this good behavior." you run your tongue up the side of his face. "Does a good boy want his misses to fuck him?"

"Yes, fuck, please, Gen. Me balls are fuckin' purple from this, love."

"Does it hurt?" you say condescendingly.

"Yes, it fuckin' does love. I've never needed someone as badly as I do you right now." his voice is raspy and urgent and you give another lick to his lips, a happy groan from you.

"I'll let you inside me. But I'm taking what I need from you first. I'll be fucking you, not the other way around." you tap his nose in punctuation as you slide off him and onto the bed. "Come now. Use those sturdy legs." you instruct, grabbing his arms and hauling him up onto the bed. His wide eyes show his surprise for your strength and you give him a cheeky smile. You even give him pillows to let his arm lay in a less painful way as you push him down and straddle him.

Moving fast, keeping him on his toes, you slide down onto him, his head falls back and he lets out an open-mouthed moan.

"That's what I want to hear." you purr, slapping your hands down onto his chest and starting a fast pace, bouncing yourself against him, a quick slap of skin, broken with grinding down hard on him, rubbing yourself against him. "Look at me love. Watch me take your cock." you say breathily, leaning back with your hands on his legs and riding him as hard as you could. His eyes are dark and half-lidded, watching himself pump in and out of you. Eyes wandering over your thighs as they slam into him, your tits bouncing and ribs shifting under your skin as your moans grow louder.

"Fuck, Gen I-

"DON'T YOU DARE FUCKING COME!" you shout, leaning forward and slapping him hard across the face. "Don't even fucking think about it. I'm coming all over this cock first. You can't come until I want you to. This cock is MINE." you growl, pounding him as hard as you can, holding his throat firmly. "Fuck me harder and make me come, Alfie. I want us both soaked to our thighs after I'm done with you. Make me come all over that fat cock, you dog."

He grits his teeth and prays, planting his feet as best he could and using his stomach to push back into your assault on his hips.

"That's it. Fuck me Solomons." your growl continues, one hand on his chest now, leaning back and rubbing your clit. "Show me this your cunny. Make it yours. Make me come." you demand, starting to lose the fight against the oncoming orgasm. Your hips falter and your nails dig into his skin making him hiss. Your eyes roll back dramatically heading falling back as you let loud, body folding moans up toward the canopy of the bed. "Good boy. Such a GOOD. FUCKING. BOY." you growl and shout, grinding against him as you snarl, eyes fluttering back open to meet his, yours looking black against your flushed face as they glared down at him. "Now if I untie you will you make me come again? Fuck me like a good boy, hmmm?"

"Yes, fuckin', GAH let me at you love, fuckin' christ." he squirms as you laugh loudly at his desperation.

"There's my man." you lean to bite his lip before swinging your leg off of him and rolling him to his front. "Don't struggle so much, or it'll hurt more." you say, your knowledgeable fingers working against the ropes as quickly as they could. He moans and groans into the bed as the grip loosens, his fingers moving again as you watching the veins pulse underneath his flushed skin. "Come now, on your back, slowly." you say, giving him a rub between the shoulder blades.

"Fuckin' 'ell." he grumbles rolling back over.

"Let them readjust first. Eager." you smirk and rub his shoulders.

"I'm gonna make that bossy little cunny mine as soon as me fuckin' arms work." he groans, a hint of playfulness in his voice at his inability to pounce.

"Good. That's what I want. A man who can take AND give." you whisper, licking your lips and rubbing his forearms. You place his hands on your breasts. "Play with them, it'll help." you wink and giggle, and he grabs them tightly, tighter than you thought he might be able to but you loved the thrill of it. He gives one a slap. "Oh! So rough." you taunt and grin.

"Gonna show you fuckin' rough." he growls, no tease in his voice now, only need. He grabs you and slams you face first into the bed. A hard slap to your arse first, followed by another, then you hear a hungry growl followed by a hard bite to the same area.

"C'mon you big dog, fuck me." you say, getting up on your knees.

Without a word he slaps over your slit, a stinging and not playful hit. He pushes into you, only breathing and wordless noises, he had embraced the beast you'd been calling him and let it out. Having been teased for longer than he ever had before, he needed a fierce release at your expense.

He comes at you hard, your brace against the headboard, hand wrapped around the edge as his nails make tiny rivulets of blood run down your thighs he holds you so tightly. You love this urgency you feel in him, this raw need you wanted to feel. You wanted it to hurt, to be hard and bruising to fuck the anger out of you.

He slaps your arse over and over, red and welting as he grunts and growls, a hard pounding into you. He scratches his way up your back, hand gathering your hair, making a messy fist of it to yank your head back, then pounding into you as he slapped your arse and thighs and held you up by your hair.

"Yes you fucking beast, make this cunny yours, Solomons." you cry out, eyes in the back of your head and your shame nowhere to be seen. "This is why I let you act like a fucking fool. Because you can do this. This is why I let you do this because you give me what I need. You're such a good fucking boy all red and angry, aren't you?" you demand and he pushes you down on the bed, his full weight on you. "Fuck yes, take me like a fucking beast, Alfie, yes." you cry out.

"Such a fuckin' slag for this cock, little Genny." his breath hot and heavy in your ear as he lets out every bit of negative emotion against you. "You aren't fuckin' leavin' me. You can't. You couldn't live without this cock you little fuckin' tart." he slaps your cheek, hand in your hair and pressing your face into the bed. "No one's gonna fuck you betta than me you fuckin' posh little cunt." he bites at you. "You ARE mine. You'll ALWAYS be mine. Do YOU understand?" he shouts and you nod and gasp, your mouth opening and shouting as his words brought on another orgasm. "That's it, pet, fuckin' come around your beasts cock. This what you want yeah? To treat me like an animal then get fucked like one? You filthy girl." he groans and shouts, losing himself as you squeeze around him. "Feels so fuckin good, little one, such a tight cunny for me and so fuckin' wet you little bossy bitch." he slaps your arse again and you squeal, he sees the unfiltered delight across your face. "Fuck me you are fuckin' filthy. You like those crude names, pet?"

"Yes, fucking tell me how bad I am." you moan, drooling out onto the bed.

"My perfect little misses like being called a dirty fuckin' slag? Fuckin' 'ell." he moans, resting his head against your back for a moment to catch his breath.

"I'm your Madonna and your whore, Alfie." you cry out helplessly. "Take this cunt, love, fill me up and make it yours."

"Gonna." he gruffs out, holding you down by your lower back, pounding into you, bringing on another orgasm at the new deep angle. "Again? So fuckin' hungry for it, pet." he scolds, a growing growl in his chest begins, and you're swimming in your own bliss inside your head, convulsing under him and being hit hard and heavy into. "Ah, fuck, Genny. Gonna have me drippin' outta you for fuckin' days with what you caused." he barks through gritted teeth, pushing into you as far as he could, his mouth opening and letting out a loud, wanton moan that caused you to shudder against him. "Fuck me." he pants out, dropping to his elbows first then letting his body rest on top of yours. You feel his heaving against you, and you hum contently, shutting your eyes. "Alright love?" he mumbles out against your sweat-soaked skin.

"Mmm Hmm." you nod. "Perfect." you sigh out. You stay there for a little while, catching your breath, enjoying the warmth of him against you, the weight making you feel safe and secure. His words making you feel satisfied with the punishment you gave and took.

He lifts himself off of you, arms shakey as he rolls to his back, legs limp and hands on his stomach. You move with a soft grunt, although slowly. "Covers, love." you manage out, pulling them down and he grunts and groans, letting you pull them out from under him without grace and cover you both back up.

"Feel like a bath is due now with what filth that was." he lets out a deep, lazy chuckle.

"What beautiful filth it was." you sigh, snuggling against him your happy expression and kitten like mannerism such a shock after what transpired.

"You really okay with what I called you?"

"That was the best hate fuck I've ever had and if we're angry you could call me almost anything and I'd be perfectly accepting of it. I like the pain and the punishment after giving it out. Exhausts me mentally and physically. It's what I need."

"And are you worn out, love?"

"Entirely." you hum.

"So you ain't mad now?"

"Not right now no."

"Have I found a way to keep you from fuckin' killin' 'n leavin' me?" he grins.

"Perhaps." you laugh and kiss his chest. "Just be honest with me. Fuck me right and be sweet afterward and we'll have no problems."

"So if we fight... we'll just have us a good hate fuck and work it out the old fashioned way?" he smirks, eyes shut and hand stroking your hair.

"Yes, sir." you giggle.

"Oh. Almost felt me cock stir on that one." he chuckles. "Can't wait for you to be naughty and have to tie you up and you call me 'at."

"Knowing me it will be sooner than later won't it?" you laugh and look up at him, his face at rest, a soft smile on his face.

"Yes it will my filthy little girl."

@fangirlfreakingout @jaegeeeeer @cosettewinchester @lookuptheskyisfalling-blog @brianaisasongbird @cry5t4l-w4rri0r @iliveonchocolateandnetflix @jess2464 @hardygal69 @thegarrisonpublichouse @a-flock-of-angry-pigeons @pootle @negansdirtygirl22 @musingsby-night @wtf-is-wrong-with-this @shine-dont-shadow @inkinterrupted @vale0413 @lafayettes-baguettes-1 @sxlomons @aphnxrising @emerald-bijou @elaenom @give-jack-a-lightsaber @anrm1 @ultrablackwidower @tinastarkandco @arrowswithwifi @marvelgirl7 @they-are-not-just-stories @ugly-crying-over-bucky-barnes

#Alfie Solomons #Peaky Blinders #Alfie Solomons x reader #alfie solomons fic #alfie solomons imagine #alfie solomons angst #alfie solomons imagines #alfie solomons x ofc #alfie solomons fanfic #alfie solomons fan fiction #alfie solomons fanfiction #alfie solomons au #peaky blinders au #peaky blinders fic #peaky blinders fan fic #peaky blinders fanfiction #peaky blinders fanfic #peaky blinders fan fiction #tom hardy

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boobdolan · 6 years

Text

a review of melodrama (2017) by lorde

hey what’s up it’s your boy b-dawg. the b is for boobs as in breasts. this post is a track-by-track review of melodrama, the grammy-nominated sophomore studio album by ella yelich-o’ connor (aka lorde), a new zealand singer-songwriter who likes to dance funny and eat onions. her first album was pure heroine which was pretty big bc i think people (angsty teens) related to her songs about being an angsty teen.

i’m gonna keep it real with you chief. when i first heard green light (the lead single from the album) i thought it was pretty ass. but you know what. i’m an ass man despite my username. so eventually by some karmic circumstance i was reintroduced to the album and i realised: “hey! this is pretty dope! 😎” and then i ended up writing a 4000-word extended essay on it for the IB. but that’s another story.

green light is also the first track on the album, and it’s a hella effective one. with its intro bringing listeners acapella ella™️ over sparse piano chords, it kicks open the door to the sound of melodrama and immediately subverts any expectations for a pure heroine 2.0. as the song progresses we get additional elements of new and old - the boom-bap drums recall the hip-hop influences that permeated pure heroine, while her high-pitched backing vocals in the chorus introduce listeners to new vocal stylings from a singer who was previously known for being a Cool Bean who was Too Cool for all that stuff.

as the maximalist bop green light ends, listeners are thrown even further away from the sound of pure heroine with sober. personal note: sober was the song i most liked on the album upon first listen. and I can see why. it’s because i’ve got good taste! from the spacey uber-processed backing vocals to the bongo beat to the horns in the chorus, the song’s really unlike much else in the pop scene today. i especially like the “night, midnight, lose my mind” intro because when i first heard it i was like “wtf???? cool ��” anyway, point is, ella and her bf did well on this track.

at this point one might think, “this girl has a thing for acapella intros to her songs”. and she does! homemade dynamite starts, like an action movie, in situ, with its musings about top gun and the house party that the album is conceptually based around. one thing i love about the song is its synths. the 80s inspiration is obvious, with the synth pad emulating the iconic Fairlight sound on kate bush’s running up that hill. however, the moodiness of the synth pad is contrasted with a sprightly riff that comes in every now and then, emphasising that Potent Teenage Mix of Emotions™️ that the album is focused around. lorde also uses contrast in her lyrics, pairing wordy, literary, stream-of-consciousness style verses with almost childish phrases like “know I think you’re awesome, right???” it’s things like this that really encapsulate the state of being teenaged to me - that uncertain transitional period between adolescence and adulthood.

the following song starts with a very indie-sounding guitar, which is an unconventional sound for a lorde song. but the louvre is so typically lordey in that it shows off one of her greatest skills - the ability to create memorable, quotable lines with unique phrasing. who else would think of stammering the line “i overthink your punctuation use”?? who else would think of using a spoken “broadcast the boom boom boom boom and make ‘em all dance to it” as a hook??? another thing of note in this song is its extended U2-esque instrumental outro, courtesy of jack antonoff. sometimes when i listen to it, i understand why ella is banging him.

jack then mumbles the intro to the next song and starts playing the piano. after a few bars, ella joins him and her voice basically has sex with his tinkling on the ivories. liability is objectively great. lyrically, she reaches mind-bending extremes that many of her contemporaries can only dream of achieving. there’s a verse where she goes “home, into the arms of the girl that [she] loves” which is very interestingly constructed - it hits listeners with the initial shock of “oh wait is ella coming out” and just Leaves It for a few lines. and theN BOOM!!!! she’s actually talking about herself. that’s pretty cool. one other thing is her rhyme scheme in the line “the truth is, i am a toy that people enjoy ‘til all of their tricks don’t work anymore” which has a devastating effect that always gets me, even though it greatly takes advantage of her bananies voice.

now the listener is halfway through the album, and at this point they’re likely as hard as the feelings in the title of the next song. hard feelings/loveless brings us back into the world of electronic drums and synths after the minimalism of liability, and it does so excellently, providing an ambient atmosphere with its muffled beat and echoey distorted guitar. this song used to be one of my least favourites on the album because I thought the L O V E L E S S chant in the second part sounded kinda dumb and edgy. but then i watched lorde’s performance of the song for VEVO and ?????? WtF????? it really shines with a small choir and a boombox. fantastic. i also appreciate the little paul simon sample that bridges the two parts together - it’s a rare example of lorde wearing her influences on her sleeve for this album. also paul simon is one cool mf. i pop my pussy to graceland 24/7. 😎👌

taking a note from jack antonoff’s albums, the next song is a reprise, which have been used by many artists after the beatles to say “hey look my album is cohesive!” even though the only reason why it’s cohesive is because it’s cohesively shit. that’s not the case with sober II (melodrama), which functions as a response to the first sober. the parent song’s repeated calls of “can you feel it?” are immediately countered in sober II’s first line: “you asked if i was feeling it, i’m psycho high”. that’s cool because it reinforces the house party concept of the album. however, while i think the strings and trap drums combo sounds cool on paper, this production choice is the album’s first misstep because it sounds like jack put together 2 apple loops on garageband that didn’t quite fit.

luckily, before lorde turns into one of the migos, we’re treated with another piano song - writer in the dark. a word about lorde’s vocal performance in this song: WOW!!!!!!!!!! 😃😃😃 good stuff! in the verses, her raspy, imperfect voice highlights the intimacy and personal nature of the lyrics. in the chorus, she double tracks her voice and sings with a more round tone, which gives the eerie effect of sounding a bit like kate bush. it’s ok. i’m a bush man too. jack does a little production trick in the outro where ella sings the hook progressively louder as he fades out her vocal and lets the song be overtaken by strings. while it’s cool, i feel like he quite obviously snagged it from the outro of david bowie’s “heroes”, where a similar trick was achieved by the production god brian eno. jack then did it again on the song slow disco by st. vincent later in the year. side note: i’m still kinda pissed about what he did to st. vincent’s masseduction. more on that another time.

the next song, which should’ve been a single, features the metaphor of a supercut. i’m not sure how i feel about that because, on one hand, the term feels very millennial, like a better-written version of katy perry’s save as draft. you know what i mean? like those songs that aged fast - crazy in love with its pager reference, and payphone with its..... payphone reference. on the other hand, a supercut is pretty timeless, as montages have been used in cinema since the french first figured out how to make moving pictures. and the word sounds cool, so it’s ok i guess. but that’s beside the point. the song’s really nice, with some very interesting moments. one notable instance is lorde’s phrasing and the instrumentation in the prechorus - “in your car, the radio on”. the instrumentation just stops for a beat after ella sings the line, in a genius move that makes the song Even More Boppable!!. another moment is how the beat changes during the final choruses - from mellow, with her voice sounding like it’s coming out of a cassette player, to full, regaining all the instrumentation of the original choruses. then the song ends with a weird echoey vocal outro that’s a fantastic moment for me, especially after the intensity of the final choruses. boner time!!!!! 😃 one last cool thing about the song is that i feel the line “so I fall into continents and cars” is an Excessively paul simon thing to say. it’s one of those abstract things that just sounds GREAT, like “fat charlie the archangel sloped into the room” from his song crazy love, part II.

speaking of part twos, the end of supercut transitions into the bassy, atmospheric synths of liability (reprise). unfortunately, i still haven’t gotten round to fully appreciating this song. to me, it’s the biggest misstep on melodrama. don’t get me wrong - it’s a nice enough song, it’s really chill, but it feels slight because of its association to the majestic, melodic liability. apart from their lyrics, there’s not much that links the two. i feel that liability needed no reprise; it’s a work that stands on its own. i felt the same way about yandhi when kanye west announced it. yeezus doesn’t need another album associated to it! it’s perfection by itself. also, someone pointed out that the drums on liability (reprise) are the same as those on taylor swift’s call it what you want, and the last time taylor and jack screwed up a great indie artist’s work was fast slow disco, which we don’t talk about in this house.

finally, we come to the end of lorde’s house party with perfect places. and what a brilliant ending it is. there’s something so stirring about the drum beat, with its crunchy, decisive snare. there’s something equally moving about the synths and chord progression in the chorus, which give me chills like loud organs echoing in a church. when put together, they sound industrial, menacing, as if they move into your soul and alienate you from your own body. but at the same time, they’re an emotional release, a source of comfort like bruce springsteen’s cathartic 70s and 80s albums. another cathartic element - the use of the word “fuck” in the chorus. i could write a whole essay on it tbh. to me, it represents an intensely freeing release of the bad vibes and negativity in one’s life - for lorde, perhaps, her failed relationship and the state of the world in 2016. you know how studies have shown that when you shout “FUCK!!!!😡😡” after hitting your toe on furniture, it helps ease the pain? it’s like that. so while saying something taboo on the record is such an edgy angsty teenage thing to do, but also reflects lorde’s release from her pain. or maybe i’m reading too much into it.

the album ends as it begins, with ella’s bare vocals, reminding us that she is once again the Queen of Indie Pop. overall, melodrama gets a

9/10

for being really cool. peace out bitches. 🤠

#lorde #melodrama #review #music #music review #album #album review

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fantroll-purgatory · 6 years

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Lycosa Robess - College Student Communist

@chaoticevilfantrolls

I’ve been considering making her a purpleblood, rather than a tealblood. I’d love some ideas for tying that into her re-design, if possible!

Reading her profile, I’m definitely interested in making her a purpleblood. So I’ll absolutely address that as we continue! I think linking her back to teal a little bit may be reasonable, though, given the setting.

Planet: Alternia, AU where she plays SBURB and as well as the age of being shipped of planet is 10 sweeps. Also, caste traits can be mixed up thanks to linked traits and genetic weirdness (like with Vapula).

Name:Lycosa Robess - Lycosa: From Lycosa tarantula, the animal originally known as the common tarantula. Ties into her lusus, horns, and just about everything else relating to bugs in her theme.

- Robess: From Maximilien Robespierre, one of the most prominent figures of the French Revolution. Connects to her ‘revolution for the sake of it’ ideology, as well as her typing quirk (As the two numbers she replaces are also part of the year of the beginning of the French Revolution).

Oh man… I used to be a bit of a French Revolution nerd. I adore this connection to her revolution for the sake of it ideology. Robespierre was a really chaotic man who was willing to go to some incredible extremes. Nice link!

Age:Typically between 8-10.

Strife Specibus:chainKind. Her iconic weapon is a Kusarigama with a hammer on one end and a sickle on the other.

I See Your Joke And I Love It.

Fetch Modus: Hive Modus. All items are stored within a hexagonal grid, forming rings around a core item. Only items on the current outermost row can be accessed, and each row needs to be completed before items can be added to the next layer. She picked up this modus when she was still really in her bugs phase, which she kind of regrets now that she’s going for a cool hip college communist aesthetic.

Just inconvenient enough to be fun. I also like that even though it harkens back to her old bug interest, it’s also a modus based around the structure of a communal species, making it still count for a reasonable communism reference.

Blood color: Currently Teal, though I’m thinking about making her a purpleblood (maybe a defector from the cult? Especially because her rebellious nature is taken to an idealistic extreme- she doesn’t have a moral end goal, she just wants things to change.)

I do think that a purpleblood defector is a great thing to do. It ties into her theme of a desire for change and development to have her rebel against a structure like that. And even if we change her, we can still link her back to this tealblood root a little bit. See, a desire to change Can be her moral center. Her view of right and wrong can be ‘anything goes as long as it is in the name of change.’ She can have a judicial nucleus built around the conception that change is the ultimate right.

Symbol and meaning: It kinda looks like a bug? I don’t necessarily want to go with an extended zodiac sign, because her symbol is technically from the same family as Vapula’s. Maybe a small adjustment to match the teal sign language would be good, if not changing the symbol to something else entirely (if she ends up as a purpleblood).

Oh yeah, I’ll definitely give her a custom sign. It fits teal sign language well enough that I might leave it mostly untouched even when I change her to a purple.

Trolltag: malcontentMarionette - Malcontent: Someone who is displeased with their current situation

- Marionette: I feel this would tie in well to making her a purpleblood? She ends up as a sort of puppet, controlled by the violetblood in her session and becoming the leader of his consort army. Additionally, a marionette would tie into the inherent circus theme of most purplebloods, and her status as a mind player (controlling choices in some form).

Oooh I love this… It expresses her original feeling of being malcontented with the state of things and feeling like a puppet of her institution while also acting as foreshadowing for her story… And if she’s a purple, it Does indicate the general clown theme as Well as the chucklevoodoos. And if we do make her a time player (I’m on the fence there… Maybe. Mayhaps), it’s a good reference to that too.

Quirk: Actually has two different quirks, although they’re not used simultaneously.

Originally, she typed in all caps, replacing b with 8 and t with 7, representing insect eyes and mandibles. She would use horizontal emoticons with two sets of eyes (oOwOo) to represent a jumping spider’s face. She also wouldn’t use much ending punctuation, instead sticking to commas to denote pacing.

“MM: 7HE QUICK 8ROWN FOX JUMPED OVER 7HE LAZY DOG oOwOo”

As time goes on, her quirk becomes much more ‘refined’, cut back to proper syntax and grammar, with a distinct lack of emoticons. She maintains the symbol replacements out of some deep, in-borne spite, but that’s about all.

“MM: 7he quick 8rown fox jumped over 7he lazy dog.”

I like it a lot!

Special Abilities:Nothing in particular as a tealblood. As a purpleblood I’ve considered giving her chucklevoodoos that incite feelings of outrage, overconfidence, and anger, which can cause riots and rebellion. Additionally, being able to manifest insects (ala Gamzee creating Lil’ Cal, on a much lower level).

That’d be pretty neat, because chucklevoodoos are said to be a way for purples to keep the lowbloods in check/keep them in line. Her abilities having the direct opposite impact could be good… Maybe her abilities naturally started as an ability that influenced individuals to cause infighting, inducing rage against companions and manifesting visions of insects to get people to swat at each other and exacerbate fights? But she’s been actively teaching herself to move away from that ability because she does not want to be a tool of the system or a tool of control. Of course she could then try to utilize it as a power for unifying feelings of anger and giving it motivational direction.

Lusus: A jumping spider the size of a kitten at most. A sweet, gentle lusus whom Lycosa most definitely doted on when she was younger. Her lusus will knit you sweaters out of web silk.

Oh I love… If we make her a purple, we could just shift that to a sea spider probably. The silk’s still fine. Make some fishing nets out of that silk, little cute spider.

Personality: Lycosa, as a person, is fundamentally unhappy and ill-at-ease, banking on rebellion and change for the hell of it to fill some sort of thing that she can’t seem to place. She doesn’t care about the morality of the change she’s advocating for, as long as it happens, and as long as it soothes whatever emotional turmoil that is bubbling inside of her.

She tends to let herself get swept away on flights of emotional fancy, elaborate stories of ‘what if’ that eventually become ‘it will’. Her belief that she can find all of the answers to her disillusionment in the form of others, or in the form of external relationships is one of those things. She ends up clinging far too much to a fellow player in her session, who uses her fancy to manipulate her into becoming his second-in-command, and an essential puppet under his control.

She also tends to hold back any signs of her old interests, and any traits she has that others might not like. When the violetblood in her session expresses distaste in her interest in insects, she drops any signs of interest besides the most minimal, retaining only her quirk in some subconscious spite, justifying the lack of change as simply matching his.

A big part of her story line is learning to cope with her general malcontent with life in a way that doesn’t involve deep-throating molotovs for revolution, or clinging to the first person who offers her some sense of stability no matter how much they’re using her for their own gain.

The relationship clinging is another of those little teal traits that I really like shining through in her. Picking someone that is bad for her and committing too powerfully to him… With the added purpleblooded fun of the dedication.

I definitely love her. I love her a lot. She’s a very detailed and thorough character with a lot of story growth potential. She has a wonderful character arc here… And she has so many aspects that she’s throwing around that you can develop her in a million directions…

Interests: Lycosa’s interests are few and rather simple, often shoved to the side in favor of mimicking whatever interests her current lover or friend happens to possess.

She spent most of her youth obsessed with bugs, from their physiology to their behavior. She knows how to manage just about any insect, from wasps to butterflies to mosquitos, and she has a deep fondness in her heart for arachnids as well. She can draw detailed drawings of them from memory (which ends up becoming relevant at a point in her quest),

Lycosa also has a deep and involved interest in illegal histories and recovering the names of banished and excised revolutionaries, recovering propaganda, symbols, and techniques they used to further their causes. Not out of any legitimate desire to bring those ideals to fruition, but because they’re a personal aesthetic and something to devote herself to.

Lycosa has a secondary interest in improvised weaponry and field first aid, which she learned as part of her research into revolutionary tactics.

God these are good interests… You’re great at picking a theme and sticking to it STRONGLY. Just to tie into that last bit, you should include interest in guerrilla warfare tactics, laying traps, Disarming traps… Just a little additional information that she could brag about having for theoretical revolutionary purposes.

Title: Her session already has a Void, Doom, Life, and Light player, so unfortunately those are off the table. I’ve been leaning towards Rogue or Thief of Mind or Heart, though.

Rogue of Mind might work for her over-abundance of options, which she has difficulty coping with. Thief of Heart would better show how she takes parts of herself from others, mirroring them more than showing much of herself in a relationship.

Okay… I’m definitely struggling to make a decision here. Right now I’m between Mind, Heart, Rage, and TIME.

Rogue of Mind works for sure. She needs to learn redistribute and allocate all of those choices, needs to learn to balance them out and move them around. To find the right decision among all the crap. And also to take back her own mind, her own free will, her own actions. She’d be able to redistribute logical thought and action. Her inverse is Knight of Heart, which would mean she could actively utilize the strength of her personal will, her emotions…

If she were a heart player, I’d argue she’s a Page of Heart. She’s someone who has a weak identity. She cares so much about her aesthetic and what others think of her and moving herself to their whim instead of being capable of defining her own identity and having her own self confidence. This would leave her in a really malleable and endangered position. She would have to break out of this mold and reach her potential and figure out her identity and confidence in order to start utilizing her power, her soul, to its full capacity. With the inverse Thief of Mind, she’d also be able to steal back the right to action for herself, steal the options and activities while utilizing the strength of her will…

Rage references strongly her malcontent and her firm desire for a little chaos, a little mess, a lack of care for whether something is right or wrong and just a strict need for MOVEMENT. If I were to recommend this I’d probably say Prince of Rage? Someone who is actively destroyed by all this pessimism and this need for everything to be torn down, but who is then able to learn to use this to destroy the systems around her…

And time of course discusses her struggle, her want for social development. But it would also challenge her to engage in active struggle instead of passively accepting things as they come and taking a backseat goal. It would make her need to find a goal to focus on and strive towards it instead of vaguely aesthetically aligning herself with real struggles. I’d probably recommend Page of Time here for the reasons I detailed in the heart segment…

God but it’s really hard to pick. She has so many possible routes… I think I’d personally recommend Page of Heart, but it’s really up to you to decide.

Land: Land of Streetlights and Discord

I almost joked about changing it to Land of Lit Streets and Discord so the acronym would be LOLSAD. But that feels a little rude. I might actually recommend something that implies control/a search of identity more? Maybe Land of Streetlights and Nevron. Nevron is the greek word for string and harkens back to the word for puppet, nevróspastos. It literally means “muscle” as well as sinew/tendon/string, which is a nice reference to the heart if you go with the heart title.

Dream Planet: Derse

Very suiting, especially considering her tendency to hide her interests because of what others think.

Now design fun!:

Hair: Because I moved her to a purple I decided to make her hair a little bit wackier. Not too much, but just a couple more flips and bits.

Horns: I gave her some longer horns. I didn’t really see a reason for her to have two sets since she doesn’t have much link back to goldbloods? So I created a sprite with just one set and a sprite with two sets for your selection convenience.

Glasses: I just edited them a bit darker because they looked awkward at that middling shade.

Eyes: I changed them to purple, obviously. On the right side I also gave her a little facepaint? I knew she’s defected from the cult but it still does at some rebellious visual interest. And it hints casually back to her old insect interest. I additionally added some bags under her eyes because she is exhausted.

Shirt: I changed her jacket to a lighter shade to provide contrast because of some of my other changes. I also lightened her outline on her shirt.

Symbol: I decided to mostly keep it the same. I deleted like a single pixel between the two connecting lines to make a set of four open arc. It matches the teal sign language more than the purple, but I think it’s still at least tangentially similar enough to purple visually to be acceptable.

Pants: I know that fashion is considered an object of consumerism and a lot of communist rhetoric frowns upon it, so I kept the rest of her outfit really simple. But I wanted to use some level of patterns on her clothes, since she’s a purple. So I used the Iconic Communist Yellow Star.

Shoes: Just edited to purple and given some laces.

I love her! Thanks for sharing.

-CD

#chaoticevilfantrolls #lycosa robess #lycosa #robess #tealblood #purpleblood #review #redesign #cd review #submission

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livinginlandmarketing · 3 years

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“Asian Lives Matter.”

Those three words — spoken loudly and emphatically by a Black pastor — moved Hyepin Im to tears.

“I felt chills going down my spine,” recalled Im, who leads Faith and Community Empowerment, a nonprofit based in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, which works to connect Asian American faith leaders with the community at large. “I was so grateful. I’ve waited a long time to hear this.”

Im and the Rev. Mark Whitlock, who spoke those words, have had a professional relationship and a personal friendship that has spanned three decades. Whitlock, a longtime Orange County pastor, now leads one of the nation’s largest Black congregations at the Reid Temple in Maryland. He gave a toast at Im’s wedding

Despite that connection, they said, speaking openly about lingering tensions between their respective communities was uncomfortable. It remained a chasm too painful to bridge until March 16, when a gunman opened fire in three Atlanta-area spas killing eight people, six of whom were Asian women.

That incident motivated Whitlock to reach out to Im and start the conversation afresh, Whitlock said.

“The reality is that Asian and Black communities in America have a lot more in common than in contrast,” he said. “We both deal with the evils of white supremacy. We both deal with systemic racism, economic challenges and losing jobs because of the color of our skin.”

Their candid conversations have now expanded to include other faith leaders in Southern California and beyond. Though efforts to build solidarity between Black and Asian communities are not new, there’s an urgency to the work after the past year — the racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd compounded by the disproportionate decimation of communities of color by the coronavirus pandemic and an unprecedented surge in anti-Asian hate crimes.

The discussions have been thought-provoking, and the participants vulnerable, honest and empathetic, Im said, giving her hope the work will lead to lasting, fruitful partnerships between members of both communities.

Hyepin Im, left, director of Faith and Community Empowerment along with Bishop Kenneth Ulmer as a group of faith leaders from Southern California are leading a partnership between Black and Asian faith communities on a national level, after a number of recent high-profile videos that showed Black people committing violent hate crimes against Asian Americans. Instead of pitting these two communities against one another, this group of faith leaders has started a conversation and dialogue between the two communities with the hope for healing and solidarity in Los Angeles on Friday, July 9, 2021. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/ SCNG)

History of unity and tension

Black-Asian solidarity has a long history in the United States. In 1869, civil rights icon Frederick Douglass gave a speech taking a stand against restricting Chinese and Japanese migration to the United States. At the turn of the 20th century, African American figures like Henry M. Turner and Ida B. Wells spoke out for Filipino freedom fighters and against American colonization in the Philippines.

In the early 1960s, an unlikely bond between Malcolm X and Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese human rights activist, helped each other develop global perspectives on human rights.

And in 1982, Black civil rights leaders including the Rev. Jesse Jackson joined forces with Asian American activists to demand justice for Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man who was mistaken for a Japanese man and beaten to death in Detroit by two White autoworkers who blamed Japan for the decline of the U.S. automotive market.

These moments of unity, however, have been punctuated by conflict.

Tensions between the two communities boiled over in early 1991 in Los Angeles after convenience store owner Soon Ja Du, a Korean immigrant, shot to death an African American customer, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins. Evidence in that case showed Du had no reason to shoot the teen from behind as she attempted to leave the store. Du was sentenced to 10 years in state prison, but the sentence was suspended and she was instead placed on five years probation with 400 hours of community service, a $500 restitution and funeral expenses.

The lingering anger and resentment in the Black community over Du’s light sentence exploded a year later, in April 1992, after a jury acquitted four Los Angeles Police Department officers charged with the use of excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King. Widespread riots in Los Angeles resulted in more than 50 deaths and 1,000 injuries and caused about $1 billion in property damage, approximately half of which was sustained by Korean-owned businesses. Those tensions have since eased, and over the past year, there have been renewed efforts to build solidarity between the two communities, largely led by faith leaders and grassroots activists.

After the May 2020 death of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of a White police officer in Minneapolis, Asian Americans along with White people, Latinos and other communities of color rallied around the Black Lives Matter movement and the racial reckoning that followed. According to a survey of Asian Americans conducted by AAPI Data, about 67% of Korean Americans, 59% of Asian Indians and 51% of Japanese Americans said they believe Black people face “a lot” of discrimination “in our society today.”

Related links

Asian Americans in Southern California rattled by fatal Atlanta spa shootings

Surge in anti-Asian hate crimes raises fears in Southern California

In combating anti-Asian hate incidents, a growing debate in Southern California over law enforcement’s role

In the wake of George Floyd’s death, many struggle to begin racial reconciliation

When black lives matter to everyone: A new generation leads call for change, sparked by the killing of George Floyd

Healing the divisions

The surge in anti-Asian hate illustrates the pain that Black and Asian communities have in common, said Bishop Kenneth Ulmer, senior pastor at Faithful Central Bible Church in Inglewood. High-profile videos of Black people attacking elderly Asians have led some observers to reduce anti-Asian violence to the trope of Black-Asian conflict that was also perpetrated during the LA riots, he said.

“The truth is there has been no real, meaningful relationship between Black and Asian communities,” he said. “But now, as we see our Asian brothers and sisters being attacked, we’re simply saying: Wow, you too. We’ve seen pictures of Asian men and women minding their business, walking on the street and getting attacked. As Black people, we know what that’s like.”

The first step toward achieving solidarity is to start the conversation, Ulmer said.

“So long as we don’t do that, Koreatown is Koreatown and Watts is Watts,” he said. “For us, the encouragement for the conversation is the common ground of our faith and the recognition that it transcends color, ethnicity, language and neighborhood. Faith is the gathering place. The challenge then is how we go from here to the individual directions we take when we leave that common ground. How can we effect significant change and progress?”

For some faith leaders, efforts to build relationships between communities are not new. Pastor Dave Gibbons, who heads Newsong Church in Santa Ana, said his multi-ethnic congregation has had Black people in leadership for many years now and even planted a predominantly African American church in Culver City more than 20 years ago. Yet, Gibbons said, he has always been careful not to be political. Floyd’s death changed that, he said.

“I felt I needed to say something and I decided to take a stand,” Gibbons said. “I’ve always stood up for the Black community and for anti-racism, but I felt what I say needs to be clearer, more pronounced and articulated.”

Pastor Dave Gibbons, left, of the Newsong Church and Darryl Brumfield, right, a teaching pastor at the church and an advisory board member, stand in the sanctuary on Wednesday, June 30, 2021, in Santa Ana. (Photo by Mark Rightmire, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Reconciliation is part of Newsong’s DNA, said Gibbons, who was born to a Korean mother and an Irish American father. Feeling pain is part of the hard work of reconciliation, he said.

“You have to let people sit in that pain and listen to one another,” Gibbons said. We need to step into the tension as a listener, a learner and a lover.”

Lessons in diversity and stereotypes

For Darryl Brumfield, a teaching pastor at Newsong who has enjoyed a 20-year friendship with Gibbons, a logical first step is to acknowledge that “white systemic racism was not an injustice on any one minority, but on all minorities.”

Brumfield is an African American man who grew up in Compton in the 1950s, in a time when White people were moving out of the city and Asians moving in. Asians were mostly store owners and Black people were their customers, he recalled.

As a child, the only view of “Asian life” he had was through his neighbor’s window. He saw the family eat together. The children studied as Brumfield watched television and his mother would ask him: “Why can’t you be more like those Asian kids and pick up your books?”

“I stereotyped them as the model minority too, which I learned later, was not right,” Brumfield said. “I was the same as people who marginalized and looked at me as one-dimensional. I’ve learned about the rich diversity within the Asian community and how there are connections and walls within that community.”

This is true for African Americans as well, Brumfield said. His wife is a Black woman from Costa Rica. His brother-in-law is from Nigeria and his best friend is from St. Lucia, an island in the Caribbean.

“People might just see four Black people at the table,” Brumfield said. “But they all have different stories. When I came to Newsong, I saw that same rich diversity in the Asian community.”

While a young Brumfield worked in an Asian-owned store in Compton, the Rev. Walter Kim worked a summer job in high school at his uncle’s clothing store in New York City’s Times Square where most of the employees and clientele were African American.

“That was a formative experience for me because I learned about some of the challenges that African Americans faced historically, which we weren’t always privy to in the Korean American world,” said Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals. “I learned not from a history book, but from a community that was vibrant, active and engaged.”

Kim has been engaged in conversations recently with groups of faith leaders convened by Im and Whitlock. He said he has learned from this group that it is pain that first draws Black people and Asians together.

“It’s powerful to see the depth of hurt and suspicion and wariness of the Black community toward Asian Americans,” he said. “These are not isolated incidents, but numerous persistent conflicts. It’s a hard thing to hear, but also so important to hear.”

The friendships he is developing through this group are precious because their honesty is refreshing, Kim said. He has been struck by the impact the “model minority myth” has had on Black Americans and the education system as a whole.

“It’s one thing to read about it in a newspaper or journal,” he said. “But to actually hear that from a Black person who experienced disadvantage because they were compared with Asians — that was very painful. It’s no longer a statistic for me. It’s a story. It’s real now.”

Challenges and pitfalls

Im’s presentation to a group of Black faith leaders about disadvantages that Asian Americans face in terms of access to health care, education, jobs and housing was “eye-opening,” said Barbara Williams-Skinner, CEO and co-founder of the Baltimore-based Skinner Leadership Institute, which trains faith leaders.

“Organizations should start building (solidarity) into their priorities,” she said. “It wasn’t a priority for us before, but it is now. We need to reach people where they are so we can stop hating and start connecting. The alienation is real, but we have a lot more to gain by coming together than we do by continuing with that alienation. We need combined voices articulating the need for solidarity. We can start by getting our churches across the racial divide.”

It is important to focus these efforts at solidarity on mutual understanding so it is sustainable, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, founder of AAPI Data and director of UC Riverside’s Center for Social Innovation.

“It’s not just about focusing on areas of common interest, but actually making change in communities,” he said. “For example, when people hire in ethnic enclave economies they tend to hire family members or friends. They could think about hiring local. Building solidarity is not just about lowering prejudice, but to figure out what the economic and policy interests are, and to support that.”

Also, if part of what brought communities together is crisis, they may not stay together once the crisis recedes, Ramakrishnan said.

“That’s where leadership and funding play a role,” he said. “It’s hard to keep communities together if there is no funding to staff that solidarity.”

Learning each other’s history and stories is a crucial part of understanding each other, said Jemar Tisby, deputy director of narrative and advocacy at The Center for Anti Racist Research housed in Boston University and led by Ibram X. Kendi. One of the pitfalls in this type of work is the tendency to collapse distinct narratives into a single narrative, Tisby said.

“People of Asian descent have their own stories and history when it comes to racial oppression, triumph and struggles,” he said. “Similarly, (Black people) have our own story. We shouldn’t lose the specificity of each of our stories in an attempt to foster solidarity. The challenge is to maintain your unique history and identity while partnering with others.”

While Black people cannot claim to own all social movements, Tisby said, history shows that whenever Black people were able to make progress, other racial groups benefited as well.

“In the midst of long-overdue cooperation, we are never to forget that the main vector of division in this country is between Black and White,” he said. “This is not to say any other group is not important. But if you want to cut off the head of the snake, you have to address anti-Black racism.”

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Speaking up

Faith leaders’ voices can be particularly impactful in this push for understanding and solidarity because both Black and Asian communities have strong connections to their churches, Im said. In the Korean community alone, about 75% are churchgoers, she said.

“It’s powerful to hear Black leaders acknowledge for the first time that they may have overlooked other communities of color in the fight for social justice,” she said. “It’s been heartwarming to see such support from Black leaders who have used their voices to speak up for the Asian community.”

Im hopes this model of using dialogue and storytelling to build solidarity helps take the two communities further down the road.

“It’s not based on explaining away things saying it’s a cultural difference,” she said. “It’s about truly understanding that we’re all human beings and that we’re on the same team. My hope is that faith leaders who have the power to influence can also let go of their preconceived notions and completely engage in this effort.”

Whitlock said Black faith leaders must have the courage to say those three words that moved his friend, Im, to tears.

“Asian lives matter, and they matter on their own,” he said. “I will acknowledge that I took my Asian brothers and sisters for granted. I was floored to hear (Im) talk about challenges they had with home ownership, unemployment and criminal justice. I would not have been as insensitive as I was, had I known they were being treated as badly as we are. I saw Asians as White people before. All of a sudden, now, I see the truth.”

Asian Americans are not the model minority, but they are an “invisible community,” Whitlock said.

“We must see their pain, anxiety, tears and depression,” he said. “I had to criticize myself because I was sweeping these issues under the rug. We must talk about it and share our own biases. We must see we have more in common than not. Silence is not acceptable.”

-on July 09, 2021 at 10:52AM by Deepa Bharath

#riversidenews

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condensed-theorem-shop · 7 years

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a love letter to the Constellation

This one's for @marrinikari and @throne3d.

Constellation, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I don’t think I mention enough how much I love the Constellation.

I started glowficcing at the very end of its being on Dreamwidth, a little while before the Constellation sprang into being from Marri’s head, like Athena from the head of Zeus. So I only had a little taste of glowficcing not on the Constellation, and that was quite enough.

I am genuinely unsure whether I’d have ended up getting into glowfic if it weren’t for the Constellation -- doing it on Dreamwidth was that unwieldy. I know I’m not the only one to have expressed this sentiment. If we’re counting up our Very Large Numbers of glowfic, T’Mir style, I think Marri should get a significant cut of every new thread made.

On Dreamwidth, switching between characters involved logging out of one account and logging into another, every time, keeping track manually of all your accounts. When you had two or three characters in a thread and were rotating between them, this got unimaginably annoying -- the login process wasn’t that bad, but going through it for every single two-word reply frequently made me want to punch through the screen.

On the Constellation, switching between characters takes two clicks. Click to bring up the list, click to pick one. You don’t even have to scroll up to the top of the page, the way you did on Dreamwidth; it’s right there next to the reply box. You don’t even have to type in the name of the character to search the list, or scroll through it; characters who have previously appeared in the thread get their own section at the top of the list.

This is incredible. I love it. I can have a separate account for each NPC, instead of running them all out of a main account and only making separate accounts for important characters, because it’s that easy to swap between them. I can write long conversations between two of my characters, without getting frustrated and resorting to putting all their dialogue in the same post and relying on my readers to keep track of which is whose. I can be replying to half a dozen threads at the same time without having to swap between characters for each of those.

Switching characters is one of the Constellation’s most basic features -- I don’t think I’ve ever commented on it, except to request that it be made even more convenient in one way or another -- but I can’t overstate just how huge a quality-of-life improvement it is.

Another huge improvement the Constellation makes as part of its basic structure: everything is linked to everything else.

Click on a character, and you can see its template. Click on a template, and you can see all its instances. Click on an author, and you can see all their threads. And so on and so forth.

Again, this gets so easy to take for granted, because it’s how things obviously should work, but it’s this huge boon which I rely on constantly. I can’t remember what I established as canon about a certain character? Click on their name, go to the list of threads they appear in, check those. Can’t remember who one of Lintamande’s endless Elves is? Click on the character, go to their template, switch to icon view, recognize the face of one of the instances even though I can’t keep track of their names.

And I remember what a pain it was not to have these features that Marri built us. The first time I read through Effulgence, it took me forever to figure out which characters were whose -- multiple re-reads, usually -- I still occasionally realize that I assumed wrong about the moiety of some minor character. Now, I can just ... look at the author name.

I remember struggling to figure out what template a given character was -- which can be fun, sometimes, but as a new reader who’s trying to get all these characters straight it’s more overwhelming than fun -- and sometimes not being able to figure it out at all, especially if the thread was a short one. (I hadn’t yet gotten over my shy lurkiness enough to ask the authors.) Now, I can just click through to the character page and go “ohhh, it’s another Serg.”

I remember when I finally fell in love with Mileses. It took me a while; I wasn’t familiar with the canon, and combining that with the twins and triplets and the fact that there wasn’t a way to check templates so sometimes I couldn’t even figure out which triplet was which, and with the fact that they have an identical twin who has a half-alt who also comes with an identical twin but a different one -- okay, so I found Mileses too confusing to enjoy properly for a while. But eventually it clicked, and I promptly wanted to read all the Miles threads, and there ... wasn’t a good way to do that! I couldn’t go from an instance to the threads they were in; I couldn’t even find all the accounts of Miles instances; there wasn’t any master-list of Kappa’s glowfic; even within Effulgence, there wasn’t an easy way to see which threads would have Mileses in them. Alicorn’s list of her glowfic helped some, the glowfic Dreamwidth comm helped some, and for the rest I resorted to increasingly desperate googling. (And I still missed some.) Now, of course, if I want to read all of the Miles threads on the Constellation I can just go to the template page. And since that’s the sort of thing I want to do pretty frequently, the Constellation is an incredible gift.

Let’s talk about icons.

Starting with the obvious: remember Dreamwidth, with the fifteen-icon limit? Yeah, I don’t know how people even worked with that. I’m pretty sure my average Jean-instance has more than fifteen variations on “empty, broken gaze into the middle distance, too shellshocked to bother crying” alone. And that’s before you start in on “struggling not to cry” and “openly sobbing” and “frightened, but in a tired way because of constant hyperalertness from trauma” and “bitter laugh” and “hysterical laugh on the edge of tears” and... So the Constellation is a vast improvement just by virtue of letting me have as many icons as I want. Now I can have all the shades of Jeantrauma with appropriate pictorial representations!

And what’s more, I can use the same gallery on more than one character, and more than one gallery on the same character! So I can have a standard gallery of my most ubiquitously useful Jean icons -- and a specific gallery for each instance with icons that only that instance uses, to establish some visual distinctions -- and a whole gallery of extra sad icons for extra traumatized Jeans -- and a gallery for instances who are particularly involved with running their underground organizations -- and a gallery for instances with long hair.

(And I am aware that all this is ridiculous and over-the-top but I like doing it and now I can! And it makes creating new instances so easy, too, when I can just start them out with one or two of the general-use galleries and go ahead and thread like that, and it’s super easy to later go add a gallery of icons specific to them. Because the Constellation is so good.)

It’s easy to build those general-use galleries, too, because the Constellation has a feature that lets you scroll through all your icons, divided by gallery, and select the ones you want to add to another gallery. (Icons can be in more than one gallery!) So if I’ve been just doing individual galleries for each instance of a template, and then they end up becoming more prominent than I expected and it’s starting to get out of hand, I can just browse through all of those and make up a default gallery for the character with the best icons from all of the galleries.

Oh, and it’s easy to figure out which icons are the most useful to have in a default gallery, because you can click on the icon and go to a stats page that will tell you how many times you’ve used it! And what’s more, it provides you with handy links to all of the replies where you’ve used it, which I use in a ridiculously self-indulgent and clearly-not-intended way, finding a favorite phrase from one of those and setting it as the icon’s keyword once I’ve been using it for a while. And this makes me super happy every time I use the icon, and it seems to entertain other people, and the reason I can do it is the Constellation is so wonderful.

And then there are all the tools the Constellation has for fixing one’s own stupidity with icons. If you’ve been using an icon for months and suddenly you realize there’s a glaring blemish that you can’t unsee, you have so many options for fixing this. You can replace the link to hosting with a link to a fixed version! You can go to the list of replies-with-that-icon and change each one to a different icon! You can delete the icon, if you decide you’d rather just have no icon on those posts! All this as opposed to Dreamwidth, where your options were ... let me count ... right, literally nothing.

Or if, like me, you’re prone to putting an icon in a gallery and failing to move it out of your “unassigned icons for X character” gallery (which I can have! because Constellation!) and then completely forgetting about this and adding it obliviously to another gallery, and being annoyed that you’ve got the same icon in more than one gallery: no problem! You can go to an icon’s page and see a list of all the galleries it’s in! And you can remove it from those galleries safely, too, you’re not going to break all of the icons in replies where you’ve already used it, not unless you delete the icon altogether.

And then there’s how delightfully permissive the Constellation is with icon keywords! I can have my ridiculously long quote-keywords, because there’s no length maximum! I can have punctuation! I can have upper and lower case without them all getting made the same! I can have arbitrary unicode characters! I can have more than one icon in the same gallery with the same keyword! Yes of course I have used all of these I am the literal worst edge-case user!

Or here’s one: the facecasts page.

Marri did not, like, need to make a facecasts page. She didn’t need to do any of this, but she extra didn’t need to make a facecasts page. No one was going to look at the glowfic website and go “you know, this is pretty good, but why is there not a page listing all of the facecasts which have been used, and the corresponding characters and templates and authors?” This is not a core feature. If I had written up specs for a glowfic website (which I didn’t, because I am not as awesome as Marri), it would not have occurred to me to put in a facecasts page.

And yet there it is, quiet and functional and present since the very beginning of the website. And you guys, it is so useful? Especially for new glowficcers, it is wonderful if you are a new glowficcer and terrified of stepping on toes and haven’t learned all of everyone’s million characters yet and what if you pick a facecast that already belongs to the character of someone super important and everyone judges you? (This is not, to be clear, a reasonable worry, but in my experience brains are rarely reasonable.)

You don’t have to worry about accidentally taking someone else’s facecast anymore. Not even if you are terrible with faces (as I am) and find yourself squinting at Pretty White Male Actor With Dashingly Ruffled Short Brown Hair #47865 and going “.....have I seen them before somewhere? might it have been glowfic? is that literally boy-Bell? I have no idea!”

No; now you can just go to the Facecasts page on the Constellation, and ctrl+F for their name, and there you are. I do this every time I pick a new facecast: hollow art open in one tab, the Facecasts page in another, and I can rule actors out before I fall in love with them and start picturing the character with their face.

And, like -- on the one hand it’s super simple? But on the other hand it’s not only super useful, it’s something that can only exist because of the huge amount of work that’s gone into the Constellation. It works because the create-a-character page is conveniently enough designed that people actually, reliably fill in the “facecast” field. It works because there is a “facecast” field, because this is a website designed for glowfic, we aren’t sticking that in character descriptions or icon credits or somewhere else equally makeshift. It works because there’s an easy way to view a list of all your characters, with their various information in a neat table, so that you can spot ones where you forgot to put a facecast. It works because it’s easy to edit characters, to go back and put in that facecast you forgot. And, on a fundamental level, it works because the Constellation is good -- because it’s so good that glowfic completely migrated to it, so now we have it all together in one place, which means that the Facecasts page can actually pick up all of the facecasts.

Or there’s the Tags Owed page. I suspect I rely on that even more than most people (and most people, I think, rely on it a lot), because of the ways that my brain is terrible.

(And that’s another wonderful thing about the Constellation; it’s designed while explicitly taking people with terrible brains into consideration. And there are probably all sorts of social-justice-y things to say about that -- and that’s not meant to be dismissive, I’m sure many of those are worth saying, I’m just not the one to say them -- but on a basic level, it seems like empirical proof that when people with terrible brains build their own community, magic things happen. Things which mean that they can function in the community. Social model of disability!)

But back to Tags Owed -- first of all, it means that I can glowfic even on days when I cannot people. I don’t have to have gchat or IRC or anything else available for pinging with replies; I can just refresh Tags Owed once in a while. No human interaction required. Without that, I suspect I would glowfic something like 10-25% as much as I currently do.

Then there’s the fact that it keeps track of all your threads for you. On Dreamwidth, you didn’t have a nice way to do that, let alone an automatic way. I mostly wound up leaving tabs open with all of my active threads. I’m sure other people had other methods. But with Tags Owed, Pedro can have his two dozen active threads, and the rest of us can have our large-but-not-quite-that-large numbers, and we don’t have to work to keep track of all that, the Constellation does it for us. We can just go to Tags Owed and work down the list until (if we have Hard Work And Determination) there aren’t any left waiting for us. (And right there, Tags Owed is already so much nicer than just a list of Active Threads You Are In; it’s obvious at a moment’s glance whether you owe tags and what in, and you get that wonderful sense of satisfaction when you clear it out and don’t owe any.)

And then there’s the ability to hiatus threads, which I cannot praise highly enough. I’m sure I drive plenty of coauthors up the wall with my thread-dropping ways; but the ability to hiatus threads is fairly key to my ability to function as a glowficcer. If all the threads in the intersection of {haven’t tagged in some time and don’t expect to in the immediate future} and {not ready to declare totally dropped} were constantly on my Tags Owed page, I can tell you right now what would happen, having lived with myself for a couple of decades: I’d feel anxious and guilty about it, so I’d avoid looking at them, so I’d avoid opening my Tags Owed page, so I’d tag less in all my threads, so I’d feel more anxious, and it would spiral downwards until I was glowficcing zero. Having the ability to hiatus threads means that I have the room to say “okay, this is not something I can do right now, but I don’t want to give up on it either.” (Which is, like, a really good thing to be able to say, mental-health-wise.)

And it also means that, even if I can’t tag a thread for a while, it’s not lost to the ravages of time. Back on Dreamwidth, if I stalled on a thread for a week and then picked it back up, my cowriter would usually need me to message them the link so that they could find it again; and that was when I usually only had one or two threads and so could keep track of them, so I had the link on hand and remembered to keep checking if my brain was up to tagging in it. With just a few more threads, I’d have inevitably ended up putting a thread aside for a while and then completely forgetting it existed (and my cowriter probably would, too). Now, though, if I can’t tag in a thread for a week, I keep remembering to try, because I see it every time I open my Tags Owed. And when I have a particularly good brain day, I can go to the list of all my threads and browse the hiatused ones and see if there are any I’m up to picking up again.

I love my Tags Owed page. I love, love, love, love, love it. It’s so useful, and it’s a thing that feels so right to have. It feels bizarre to think about glowficcing without it.

The Favorites page. The Favorites page! I have eight links on my bookmarks bar (for recreation; I use a separate browser for work), and two of them are Tags Owed and Favorites. It means I can conveniently keep up with all the threads I’m following; and, on the other side of the coin, it means that at least there’s only one page I’m addictively refreshing, instead of all the threads I’m reading. It means that when people ask me for glowfic recs (as happens fairly regularly), I can easily browse through some of my favorite threads, ongoing and completed, and pick out a couple appropriate to the situation.

I think the Favorites page is emblematic of one of the greatest achievements of the Constellation. As far as I can tell (I was around-but-new during the crucial times) there was a huge boom in glowfic at about the same time as the exodus to the Constellation. (I’m not sure of the causation, there -- Dreamwidth getting unwieldy with that much glowfic? The convenience of the Constellation meaning people glowficced more, and more new people got into it? Coincidence? A bit of all those?)

In any case, the Constellation handled that boom with incredible aplomb. There was a sudden need for all these new tools -- and most of the time it wasn’t clear what tools, exactly, just that what we had wasn’t working -- and Marri, and later Throne, stepped up to the plate and hit a home run.

With only a couple of authors, it worked fine to follow their personal indexes or blogs to keep up with new glowfic; with only a relatively small amount of glowfic happening, it was feasible for them to maintain those indexes. Daily reports could happen manually; people could announce new threads; it wasn’t really a system, but it worked fine. Things weren’t very transparent to new people, but there weren’t a lot of new people.

And then: ridiculous amounts of glowfic. And somehow, the Constellation -- despite being tiny and under development and run by Marri-and-Throne-in-their-spare-time -- despite the boom happening while it was still on shaky metaphorical toddler legs -- the Constellation kept up. The Constellation made dealing with that possible, so instead of drowning we got to stretch out on the lovely sunny beach by our new ocean and sip iced drinks.

The Constellation gave us Favorites; and Unread, not just “threads with unread posts” which was already wonderful but also “unopened threads” as its own page, and as a visual distinction on other pages; and continuities as an actual functionality; and a search feature; and the ability to do things like favoriting an author or a continuity, or hiding a thread or a continuity from unread, or finding all threads with a given character or author, or just plain seeing all of the glowfic right there in one place.

And, like -- I know I have muttered about filters, and whether hiding things should mark them read, and subcontinuities, and so on, as much as anyone. But, at least this once, I would like to register not only how incredibly grateful I am for the tools the Constellation gives us for managing the flood of glowfic, but how amazed I am at Marri’s and Throne’s ability to build headache-inducingly complex tools (which don’t induce headaches on the user end), and have them work, and to do this under conditions roughly equivalent to building a spaceship while it hurtles through the atmosphere, spurting jets of flame, escaping from an imploding planet with a black hole at the center.

Another thing that feels too trivial to mention until I actually stop and reflect on it: editing.

Dreamwidth doesn’t let you edit comments which have been replied to. This is probably reasonable in a blogging site! It means that you can’t go back and change something you said, in response to an objection, and then have people reading the thread later on assume the other person is just a jerk objecting to something completely reasonable. It means you can’t edit something and then deny ever having said it at all. In general, it means that you can’t change the meaning of someone else’s comment by altering your comment which it was a reply to.

However, when the site is being used for glowfic, this is a lot less reasonable. You couldn’t do something as simple (and easily taken for granted) as fixing a typo. (Which could be just annoying, if it was something silly that distracted from a dramatic moment, or actively confusing, if you accidentally mis-indicated who was talking.) If someone clueless, or a spambot, replied to a thread, and someone else trying to be helpful replied to suggest they not do that, you were then stuck with that in the middle of your thread. Certainly you couldn’t go back and fix that throw-away remark in reply #6 that ended up contradicting a key detail of the events of reply #733.

The Constellation lets you edit your replies, which is already wonderful enough. I don’t have to be bugged/shamed forever by my own spelling errors or typos or brain malfunctions. (You don’t even know how many times in one for sorrow, two for joy I had to go back and edit a post where I called Iliar “Jean.”) If my cowriter notices my error, they don’t have to wait to reply until I’ve fixed it, they can go ahead and tag me back and mention the typo at the same time. When I’ve got one of my characters into a delightfully terrible situation and someone in chat says “wait, didn’t you mention three pages ago they had a gun,” I can go back and edit in a hasty “which they left outside the door” and be all no I don’t know what you’re talking about I never make continuity errors pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain.

But it’s not just the little stuff that the Constellation makes possible! I know of multiple instances -- some mine, some other people’s -- where a thread went off course and ended up somewhere completely unfeasible and the authors looked at it and went “....yeah, okay, that is not the thing we want;” and in each case, they could just delete the last dozen or so replies, alter the point of divergence, and proceed forward in a saner fashion. And not only is this possible on the Constellation, the unread and favorites pages of people following the thread handle it gracefully! There is absolutely no spontaneous combustion!

Or there’s the “replace character” and “split character” tools, which -- guys, I cannot get over the fact that the Constellation devs made these for us. Any sane person would have looked at those requests and gone “uh, that sounds like a ridiculously complex thing you want, and the occasions where you’ll need it are totally on you, and this is not the sort of thing you can reasonably expect a website to offer, I think this is a you problem.” I cannot believe that our devs actually made them for us. They are insane and I do not know what they were thinking and I love them so much.

There’s the fact that even though there’s no easy user-side way to split threads, Marri will do it by hand on request. Would do character replacement by hand, before that was an actual user-accessible tool. Again, this is the behavior of a madman or a Miles (okay, redundant); any normal person would say “sorry, we don’t have that functionality in place.” Any normal person would say “have you seen the list of requests lately?” But no. Not our devs. If it doesn’t work, they will make it work.

A search function. Have I mentioned the Constellation has a search function? That actually, you know, functions? This one I manage not to take for granted, if only because so many huge professional websites don’t. And not just Tumblr, The Flaming Death Pit, either. Dreamwidth doesn’t. Facebook doesn’t.

The Constellation does.

I can search that neat little phrase in my head to see if I actually just came up with it, or if I read it in another glowfic and it lodged in my brain, or if I came up with the exact same clever phrase three pages back. I can find that thread where I don’t remember the title or the authors or the characters but do remember that particularly clever retort that someone-or-other made to I-can’t-quite-remember-whom. I can find that one reply where someone summed up a bunch of important stuff I need to refer back to, and I’m pretty sure it was either in Room of Requirement or one of the later threads in Silmaril.

The search function is great for avoiding continuity errors. I can check if I already explained vampires in this thread, or if that was a different one. I can check if my characters should already know something or if it hasn’t come up yet. I can check which amusing pseudonym Jean introduced himself as. I can remind myself for the twentieth time if that minor character of my coauthor’s is named Janet or Janice. I can remind myself of what number I calculated for the approximate population of a planetary settlement.

When I’m feeling particularly writer-anxious, I can check how often I’m using “mutters” versus “murmurs” versus “mumbles.” When I realize I’ve been inconsistent about an NPC’s last name, I can find all the occasions where I used my less preferred option and fix them. When Lintamande pulls yet another character out of her watch-carefully-nothing-up-my-sleeve, I can check if they’re supposed to be mysterious or if we met them earlier in the thread.

A search feature is so useful to have, especially for something like glowfic which is prone to information overload. But they’re nontrivial to implement, and lots of websites don’t have them, or they have searches which work in annoying unintuitive useless ways. The Constellation has a functioning search.

Or -- aliasing. Aliasing is amazing precisely because it’s such a tiny thing -- the option to display a different name for your character on a particular post. That’s, what -- one, two words, plain text? Hardly anything. Not something you need constantly, either. Not something you really really need, when you do need it. Not having aliasing wasn’t preventing anyone from making a thread they wanted to make, or reading something they wanted to read, or understanding what was going on.

So we could have made do just fine without it. We would have, on Dreamwidth -- or under basically any other circumstances, really. We could have put the alternate name in the character’s screenname field. We could have put it in quote marks in their name field, nickname-style. We could have used a specific icon to indicate it. We could have made a second character instance with a different name. We could have posted from a general “[Name’s] characters” account. We could have just mentioned it in the text somewhere. It would have been fine.

But we don’t have to, because the Constellation has aliasing. Because we have the best devs. Because they went ahead and made it for us anyway, even though they totally could have just not. (Even more so than they could have just not done any of this.) And so now characters can be mysterious even while posting from their proper account; the Elves can switch among all their various names; characters who peal can display their nickname instead of their name, for convenient reading; people can even run a character and their daemon out of the same account just because they find it more conceptually fitting.

Or the Many Worlds Forum. This is on the Constellation now, and that has to be a huge pain in the neck for the devs, because all of a sudden everyone is using their beautifully-designed, custom-tailored glowfic website for something totally different, and then demanding it support that. (And “everyone” there totally includes me.) And, like, it is totally fair for them to find this annoying, and if they end up deciding to throw up their hands and say “if you are determined to use the Constellation for this, on your own heads be it,” I will consider them entirely justified.

But even aside from the fact that I’m pretty sure the devs should be beatified on the spot for not snapping and using their mysterious time travel powers to prevent all our parents from meeting -- I think it also illustrates just how great the Constellation is. The Many Worlds Forum is a forum; it’s right there in the name, it’s the whole concept, half the point is that it’s something you can actually have, so even if it isn’t really populated by denizens of various dimensions it looks just like it is. It’s LARP for the internet. And yet, when the reboot was being planned, and people discussed where to host it, and whether it should be on the Constellation or on a forum -- the Constellation won. Because it is just that much better than anything else. More convenient, more user-friendly, more flexible, more streamlined, prettier.

(Like Daedalus, they invented a marvelous device, the Constellation; but like Icarus, the devs soared too high, and brought about their own downfall...)

(*cough* Sorry. Continuing.)

While I’m praising the devs’ patience -- I have to be the absolute worst, most demanding, nightmare edge-case stress-test of an end user. Ways I have abused both the Constellation and the devs’ patience include but are not limited to:

writing half a reply in English and half in Hebrew; complaining when the right-to-left text format failed to properly reflect punctuation

relying heavily on the Constellation’s private messaging feature, even though, like, literally why would anyone do that

filling every input box I could find with random unicode characters

accumulating [counts] 2,853 icons; proceeding to complain that the “add existing icons” page was slow to load

setting a single icon to randomly display one of half a dozen images every time the page was reloaded

complaining that I couldn’t message “<3” to people because it broke the HTML; rejecting “don’t message ‘<3’ to people” as a solution

setting my own thread to “hide from unread;” subsequently complaining that it no longer showed me the latest unread post

repeatedly making the same error in filling out forms; proposing that this be solved by making the Constellation smarter than me

re-organizing the aforesaid 2,853 icons at least half a dozen times; requesting support not only for each new configuration, but also for the process of transitioning between them

wanting a thread un-hiatused despite not having replied to it in months; being unwilling to achieve this by replying to it; eventually settling for making and deleting a blank reply, messing up daily reports & unread lists & probably all sorts of other things in the process

putting deeply excessive numbers of warnings on threads, including “#torture #so much torture #i’m serious about the torture guys” and “#i can’t believe there are now six jean-related warnings”; complaining when this overfilled the text box for warnings and made them less than optimally easy to read while entering them

The short and the long of all this being: I’m pretty sure Marri and Throne deserve a special accolade just for continuing to put up with me.

Speaking of which: have I mentioned just how awesome the Constellation support is? Because the answer is -- so very. It is so very awesome. (And not just for the part where they haven’t yet gone back in time to prevent my existence, though that too.)

I mean, there’s the time travel. I don’t need to explain why that’s awesome. And there’s the fact that, as far as I can tell, they will make literally anything happen if a large enough proportion of glowficcers ask for it. (Have we tried asking them to cure malaria yet? We should do that.) There’s the fact that they didn’t take one look at that To Do list of theirs and run away screaming and gibbering.

There’s the fact that the Constellation -- doesn’t go down? It did, once in a while, for a couple of minutes, when it was very new. Once that I can remember for more than an hour. And then it, uh -- stopped? Which (in addition to being a great relief to those of us who are Utter Glowfic Addicts) seems super impressive. Big serious professional websites have scheduled maintenance! And they still go down sometimes! And Marri and Throne don’t (I’m pretty sure) even have a testing environment, they are just being super careful, and it is working. Despite the fact that they are also constantly adding all these changes we demand.

And beyond that, like -- they have just completely spoiled me for any other tech support ever. When I’m on other websites, I constantly find myself responding to some minor inconvenience by starting to formulate a post in my head asking Throne and Marri to fix it. And this is for things where -- if it were the Constellation, they would. But these enormous professionally-built websites with significantly more than two support staff haven’t.

I’m not just talking about, like, tumblr, either. We all know tumblr is terrible. But I’ll be posting on facebook and thinking hey, Marri, the new feature where short posts get put in enormous font is annoying, can we at least have a box by the text entry we can manually uncheck if we don’t want that? Or on my university’s website thinking so Throne, the professor’s name shows by the course in the search results, but if you click through to the course it has a bunch of information but not the professor’s name anymore -- could you fix that?

(And then, of course, I remember that neither Mark Zuckerberg nor the state of Texas is likely to respond to me with actually, we’ve had that feature in place for a couple of weeks! Look in the upper right hand corner, and I sulk and go write some glowfic instead.)

Of course, it’s not like they’re getting paid for any of these I-don’t-even-want-to-think-about-how-many hours of work. There’s a donate button on the Constellation, but that doesn’t even go to tips for Marri or Throne, let alone compensating them for the work they put in; it goes towards the expenses of running the Constellation. Which Marri otherwise covers out of pocket. Which means she is getting paid negative money for all this, which is completely nuts.

I don’t have the faintest idea how Marri and Throne do what they do. Marri has, you know, a job; Throne is a college student (sorry, he’s British -- a university student); they both have, to my certain knowledge, lives. And significant others. And, I assume, sleep from time to time. (I consider all this further evidence in favor of the time travel hypothesis.)

Basically what I’m trying to say here is: to whoever is writing Marri and Throne: I know glowfic is big on overpowered characters, but have you tried at least giving them challenges more appropriate to their power level? I don’t think running a website is cutting it. Maybe they can go fight a Sauron or something.

Even beyond all this, though, there’s something special about the Constellation that’s hard to sum up. (As evidence for the difficulty in summarizing, witness the length of this post.)

It’s made by glowficcers, for glowficcers -- and this I think must be what some older fanfic writers feel about AO3. It’s ours; it’s made for us. We’re this weird little community out on the fringes of the internet, full of weird people with weird brains and weird opinions and weird interests, we have the most ridiculously high-context hard-to-explain hobby; but we’re not stuck squeezing in at the edges of sites that weren’t meant for us, working in frameworks that were never meant to fit us. We have a home now, and it fits us, and we belong here, and it’s ours.

And it’s made with love. That’s the thing that always gets me, about the Constellation: the amount of love in the tiny details. I mean, I’m familiar enough with programming to guess that most of the tiny details were probably kicked into functioning at three am with Marri or Throne growling at their screen and cursing the code and its descendants yea unto the seventh generation -- but that’s not incompatible with love (as anyone who has crooned ~go the fuck to sleep already~ to a fussy baby in the wee hours of the night knows).

It’s called the Constellation, for goodness’ sake. It has “starry dark” and “starry light” themes. Because it was made by glowficcers for glowficcers, and so it has these lovely aesthetically delightful little tributes to glowfic traditions. Characters have screenname fields, even though those serve absolutely no practical function, because people remembered them fondly from Dreamwidth and wanted to be able to keep adding that little extra quote or pun or reference. It even supports moieties, even though those are completely ridiculous at this point, because we love them anyway.

Every time I look at the little icon in my Constellation tabs, with the three stars for Alicorn and Kappa and Aestrix -- in the appropriate colors, no less -- it makes me smile.

I love the Constellation. I don’t say it enough. I expect I will continue not saying it enough, and instead pointing out ridiculously tiny things which I feel could be improved upon, and ridiculously elaborate features which I would like to have.

But, at least once, I wanted to say it properly:

I love the Constellation.

#glowfic #glowfic constellation #long #like ridiculously long #mine

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bizmediaweb · 6 years

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Instagram Hacks: 57 Tricks and Features You Probably Didn’t Know About

Master these Instagram hacks and start posting like a pro.

Table of contents

General Instagram hacks

Instagram hacks for photo and video sharing

Instagram Story hacks

Instagram bio and profile hacks

Instagram hashtag hacks

Instagram direct messaging hacks

Bonus: Download a free checklist that reveals the exact steps an adventure photographer used to grow from 0 to 110,000 followers on Instagram with no budget and no expensive gear.

General Instagram hacks

1. Stop seeing posts and/or Stories from specific accounts you follow

Mute annoying users without the risk of offending them with an unfollow.

How to do it:

Tap the … icon in the corner of a post from the account you want to mute

Click mute

From there, you can choose whether to mute posts, or mute posts and Stories from the account

You can also mute posts and Stories by pressing and holding on a Story in your tray, or from a profile

2. Rearrange the order of your filters

Put your most-used filters up front for faster posting.

How to do it:

When posting a photo or video, go to Filter

Scroll to the end of your filters and tap Manage

Press and hold the three line icon next to each filter on the left-hand side of the screen to rearrange the order of your filters

Check or uncheck the circles next to each filter on the right-hand side of the screen to hide or unhide filters

Click Done to save your settings

3. See all the posts you’ve liked

Looking for inspiration? Why not review what’s already inspired you.

How to do it:

Go to your profile

Tap the gear icon on iOS or the three dots on Android to go to Options

Tap Posts You’ve Liked

4. Clear your search history

Don’t let anyone who has access to your phone know how obsessed you are with your frenemies.

How to do it:

Tap your profile image icon to go to your profile

Tap the gear icon on iOS or the three dots on Android to go to Options

Scroll to the bottom, then tap Clear Search History

5. Hide specific search queries

Permanently remove specific searches (accounts, hashtags, places, etc.) from appearing in the search bar.

How to do it:

Tap the magnifying glass icon to visit the search page

Tap the search bar at the top of the screen

Tap and hold the search you’d like to hide from your history (below Top or Recent), then tap Hide

6. Get notifications when your favorite users post new content

Never miss a post from your favorite people and brands!

How to do it:

Visit the the profile page of the account you’d like to get notifications for

Tap the three dots icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen

Select Turn on Post Notifications

Note: If you’ve changed your mind, the option to turn off notifications lives in the same spot.

7. Add and manage multiple accounts

You don’t need to log in and out to switch between accounts.

How to do it:

Tap the person icon at the bottom of the screen to visit your profile

Tap the gear icon on iOS or the three dots on Android to go to Options

Scroll to the bottom and select Add Account

Enter the username and password for the account you’d like to add

Once you’ve added a second (or third, fourth, or fifth) account, the profile icon in the navigation bar will change from the silhouette of a person to your profile image

To switch between accounts, go to your profile

Tap your username at the top of the screen

Tap the account you’d like to switch to

Note: You can add up to five accounts.

8. Pin your Instagram post to Pinterest

Pinterest isn’t listed as one of the network choices when sharing a post from Instagram, but there are workarounds for both Instagram mobile and desktop.

How to do it on mobile:

Go to the post you’d like to Pin

Tap the three dots icon located above your post to the right

Select Copy Share URL to copy the post link to your clipboard

Open the Pinterest app on your mobile device

Tap on your profile image icon to visit your profile

Tap the plus sign icon at the top right of the screen to add a new Pin

An “Add a board or Pin” menu will appear, select Copied link

Pinterest will automatically open the link saved to your clipboard

Choose the image you’d like to Pin and finish posting as usual

How to do it on desktop:

Visit Instagram.com and find the post you’d like to Pin

Right click on the post and select Open Link in New Window

Use the Pinterest browser button to choose the image you’d like to Pin and finish posting as usual

9. Delete comments

Whether you need to hide an offensive comment or erase a typo, deleting comments is easy.

How to delete your own comment:

Tap the speech bubble icon beneath the post you commented on

Find the comment you’d like to delete

Swipe to the left over the comment

Tap the trash can icon

How to delete another user’s comment on your post:

Tap the speech bubble icon beneath the post containing the comment you’d like to delete

Swipe to the left over the comment

A partial swipe will bring up a trio of options, allowing you to reply, flag, or delete a comment

Tap the trash can icon—or continue swiping to the left—to delete the comment

10. Filter and block comments based on keywords

Dealing with a social media troll? Comment controls allow you to filter and block comments containing specific keywords.

How to do it:

Select your profile image icon to visit your profile

Tap the gear icon on iOS or the three dots on Android to go to Options

Choose Comment Controls

Toggle the Hide Offensive Comments option on

This feature will hide comments that contain words or phrases that are often reported as offensive

You can also choose to add your own list of custom keywords that you’d like hidden from your posts

11. Turn off comments on a particular post

How to do it:

Begin posting a photo or video as usual

When you reach the screen where you add a caption, location, and other tags, select Advanced Settings

Toggle the Turn Off Commenting option on

Note: you can change this setting even after a post has been published by going to the post, tapping the three dot icon above it, and selecting Turn On Commenting. You can also turn off comments on a previously published post by following these same steps.

12. Save and organize posts where only you can see them

The perfect hack for squirrelling away bits of inspiration. Or use this feature to keep tabs on your competitors.

How to do it:

Go to a post you’d like to save

Tap the bookmark icon underneath the post you want to save

Add the post to an existing collection or tap the + icon to create and name a new one

To see your saved posts and collections, visit your profile and tap the matching bookmark icon (next to the Photos of You icon) to go the Saved tab

13. Remove old posts from your profile without deleting them

This is possible thanks to Instagram’s archive feature.

How to do it:

Tap … at the top of the post you want to remove

Select Archive

Tap the Archive icon in the top right corner of your profile to review all archived posts

If you want to restore content to your public profile, simply tap Show on Profile at any time and it’ll show up in its original spot

14. Zoom in on a post

How to do it:

Go to the post you’d like to zoom in on

Pinch using two fingers and slowing the pull them farther apart

Enjoy the details

Starting today, you can pinch to zoom on photos and videos in feed, on profiles and on Explore. Dive into an adorable puppy’s smile or into every detail of your friend’s new shirt. Over the past six months, you’ve seen many exciting changes come to Instagram, from a new icon to longer videos and even a new way to share everyday moments with Instagram Stories. And as things change, we’re still focused on improving the core parts of Instagram. Zoom is available today for Instagram on iOS. Zoom will be available on Android in the coming weeks.

A post shared by Instagram (@instagram) on Aug 31, 2016 at 8:00am PDT

Instagram hacks for photo and video sharing

15. Make your captions more readable with line breaks

If you favor the long-form caption a la National Geographic, this hack will make your posts more readable.

How to do it:

Edit your photo and proceed to the caption screen

Write your caption

To access the Return key, tap the 123 key on your device’s keyboard

Use Return to add breaks to your caption

Note: The breaks will start a new line, but not create the white space that you would see between two paragraphs. If you want a paragraph break, write out your caption in a note app and copy it to Instagram. To break up lines further, consider using punctuation, such as bullet points or dashes, to hold the place of an empty line.

16. Schedule Instagram posts

Too busy to post at a time when your audience is active on Instagram? Use Hootsuite to schedule photos direct to Instagram.

How to do it:

Note: Check out our guide to scheduling posts on Instagram to learn how to do this from a personal account.

17. Use individual photos to make a larger one

Get creative and have fun with Instagram’s grid format.

How to do it:

To share a #triplegram, simple share three related images consecutively so that they take up an entire line with a single unified look

To share a grid post series, try cropping a single image into nine (apps like these can make the process easy) and share them in quick succession

Image via Reynolds Kitchen on Instagram.

For a closer look at how brands have made good use of the grid layout, check out 7 Lessons Brands Can Learn from the Most Creative Accounts on Instagram.

18. Adjust the intensity of filters

For those who want something close to—but not quite—the #nofilter look.

How to do it:

After uploading or taking a photo, tap the filter you’d like to use

Tap the filter again to open edit options

Use the sliding scale to adjust the intensity of the filter

Tap Done to add the filter to your post and continue your edits

19. Upload or capture a post with multiple scenes

It’s an Instagram Story that never disappears!

How to upload a post with multiple photos and video clips:

Tap the + icon in the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen

Tap SELECT MULTIPLE on the Library tab

Choose the photos and videos from your camera roll that you want to include in your Story

Choose and edit your filters (you can choose a different filter for each photo or video or make it consistent across the entire post)

Once you’ve selected your videos, you can tap to trim them or press and hold to reorder

To delete a clip, drag it to the centre of the screen

Finish your edits as usual and share your masterpiece

How to record a video with multiple clips:

Tap the + icon at the bottom of the screen

Tap Video

Tap the circle icon to begin recording

To take multiple clips, lift your finger off the circle icon to pause, then press and hold it when you want to begin recording again

To delete a previous clip in your video, tap Delete, then tap again to confirm

20. Share videos without sound

If the audio is bad and/or doesn’t add to the viewing experience, you may as well remove so it’s not a distraction.

How to do it:

Tap the + icon at the bottom of the screen to select the video you’d like to upload

Tap Next

Tap the volume control icon at the top of the screen to mute the video’s sound

Note: This can also be done in Instagram Stories. After recording a video, simply tap the volume control icon at the top of the screen to mute.

21. Save drafts for later

You’ve snapped the perfect shot and edited it to perfection, but the perfect caption eludes you. Save the post as a draft—with all your edits intact—and come back to it later.

How to do it:

Bonus: Download a free checklist that reveals the exact steps an adventure photographer used to grow from 0 to 110,000 followers on Instagram with no budget and no expensive gear.

Get the free checklist right now!

Tap the + icon at the bottom of the screen to shoot or upload a photo or video

Edit the post as you like, adding filters, captions, tags, or a location

Hit the < icon in the upper left-hand corner of the screen to go back to the editing screen

Hit the < icon again

A pop-up menu will appear, select Save Draft

When you’re ready to continue with your edits and share your post, tap the + icon, then select Library

A new DRAFTS section will now appear above CAMERA ROLL

Tap your desired post, or select Manage to view all of your saved drafts

Select a post, edit, and share as usual

Note: To delete a post from your saved posts, select Manage to go to Drafts, then tap Edit. Select the posts you’d like to get rid of and tap Discard Posts at the bottom of the screen, then tap again to confirm.

22. Blur the background on a portrait photo

How to do it:

Open the camera and select Focus among the options under the record button

Take a selfie or switch to the rear-facing camera to snap a photo of someone else

The subject will stay in focus while the background blurs

Note: this feature is only available on select Android devices, iPhone SE, 6S, 6S+, 7, 7+, 8, 8+, and X.

23. Request to join another user’s Live video (or encourage followers to join yours)

Brands can use this feature when partnering with other businesses or influencers for announcements, Instagram takeovers, and the like. Or, encourage your followers to join a live Q&A you’re hosting.

How to request to join a live video:

When watching a live video, tap Request in the comments section

You’ll see a confirmation when the user accepts and you’ll have a moment to prepare

Once you’re live, the screen will split in half

You can leave the live video at any time

How to accept a request from a follower to join your live video:

When hosting your own live video, you’ll see a notification for each request in the comments section

Tap View and then choose to add the requestor or cancel the request

The icon with two smiley faces will have a red number showing how many requests you have

Tap the icon, and you’ll see both requests and current viewers

You can either accept a request or invite any viewer to join you. You can remove a guest and add someone else at any time

24. Save your live video

How to do it:

After your live broadcast ends, tap Save in the upper right corner

After saving, tap Done and your live video will be saved to your camera roll but will no longer be available in the app

Instagram Story hacks

25. Record video hands-free

How to do it:

Swipe right from your home screen to open the Instagram Stories camera

Swipe through the options at the bottom of the screen—normal, Boomerang, etc.—and stop at the HANDS-FREE recording option

Tap the record button at the bottom of the screen to begin recording

To stop recording, either let the maximum time run out or tap the capture button again

26. Add as much text as you want to posts in Stories

How to do it:

Swipe right from your home screen to go to the Instagram Stories camera

Snap an image or record a video

Tap the screen to add text OR tap the Aa icon in the upper right-hand corner

Write your desired text

Tap the > icon

Repeat as many times as needed to add more text

27. Change the color of individual letters or words in your text

How to do it:

Swipe right from your home screen to go to the Instagram Stories camera

Snap an image or record a video

Tap the screen to add text OR tap the Aa icon in the upper right-hand corner

Write your text as usual

Press and hold on a word or individual letter to select and highlight

Choose your desired color

Continue editing and share as usual

28. Add multiple stickers to an Instagram Story post

How to do it:

Swipe right from your home screen to go to the Instagram Stories camera

Snap an image or record a video

Tap the smiley face sticker icon in the upper right-hand corner

Choose your desired sticker

If desired, tap the sticker to cycle through multiple options (for example, with the temperature sticker you can choose between celsius and fahrenheit)

Resize and place your sticker as desired

Repeat steps 3 through 6 as many times as you want

29. Change the colors or info displayed on a sticker

How to do it:

Select a sticker to add to your post

Tap it for different color options, or, in the case of things like the temperature sticker, you can choose between celsius and fahrenheit

30. Share someone else’s post in your feed on Instagram Stories

The Instagram Story version of a regram—great for sharing user-generated content or giving a shoutout to another relevant brand or influencer.

How to do it:

Click on the paper airplane icon below the post you want to share

Tap Add post to your story

The post will appear as a sticker with a custom background

You can rotate, scale, move the sticker, and tap it to explore other styles

Once you’re happy with how it looks, tap the Your Story button to add it to your post. The post will show original poster’s username. When someone taps the post, they’ll be able to see the original post and more content from the person who created it.

Note: You can only share posts from public accounts. If you don’t want your posts shared on Instagram Stories by other people, you can opt out in settings.

31. Share a song or album from Spotify on Instagram Stories

Show off how hip your brand is.

How to do it:

Open the Spotify app

Find the song or album you want to share

Tap the three dots to open the options menu

Scroll down and tap Share

Tap Instagram Stories

This will open the Instagram app and you can add a sticker, text, or doodle to the image of the album you’re sharing (if you’re sharing a specific song, the app will still display the album it’s on)

Then tap Your Story to add the song

32. Mention other accounts in your Story

For brands, this is great way to give a shout-out to another business or showcase an influencer in a takeover.

How to do it:

Swipe right to open the Instagram Stories camera

Take a photo or video

Tap anywhere on the screen OR tap the Aa icon in the upper right-hand corner to add text

Use your keypad and type the @ symbol immediately followed by the username of the account you’d like to mention

Select the correct account from the menu

When you mention someone, they’ll get a notification letting them know they’ve been tagged, as well as a direct message from you that includes a preview of your Story

33. Save your entire Story to your camera roll

In case you want to publish it on a different channel at a later date.

How to do it:

Open your Story

Swipe up on the screen

Tap the arrow in a circle icon in the top right corner of the screen

Note: You can also save individual posts from your Story as you upload them by tapping the downward arrow icon in the bottom left corner of the screen. If you’ve already shared it, go to the photo or video you’d like to save, tap the three dots icon in the bottom right corner, and select Save Photo.

34. Share your Story to your profile

If your Story’s hot and you want everyone to see it—even those who don’t login during the 24 hours that it’s live—publish it on your profile.

How to do it:

Open your Story

Tap the three dots icon in the bottom right corner of the photo or video you’d like to share

Tap Share as Post

Edit—add filters, tags, a caption, etc.—and post as you normally would

35. Find out how your Story’s performing

Want to know how your Story’s doing? Check out this little-known feature to find out who’s watched it.

How to do it:

Open your Story

Swipe up on the screen

Instagram will display the number of views as well as the names of people who have seen each photo or video in your Story

36. Zoom in and out on videos with a single finger

How to do it:

Swipe right to open the Instagram Stories camera

Hold down the capture button with one finger to begin recording video

Slide up or down with the same finger to zoom in or out

37. Hide your Story from specific users

How to do it:

Tap the person icon in the bottom right of your screen to go to your profile

Tap the gear icon on iOS or the three dots on Android to access Options

Tap Story Settings below Account

Tap Hide My Story From

Select the people you’d like to hide your Story from

Tap Done

Note: You can also choose to hide your Story from people as you’re looking at who’s seen your Story. Just tap the three dot icon to the right of the person’s name and select Hide Story From [Username].

38. Pause, skip, and go back when watching Stories

You don’t have to watch Stories in a strict progression if you don’t want to.

How to do it:

While viewing a Story, tap on the left side of the screen OR swipe right to go back to the previous photo or video

Tap on the right side of the screen OR swipe left to skip ahead to the next part of the Story

Tap and hold on the screen to pause a Story

39. Upload multiple photos and videos to your Story all at once

How to do it:

Open Instagram Stories and tap to upload new media at top right corner of your screen

Select up to 10 photos and videos from your camera roll

On the edit screen, you’ll see a preview of all the media you’ve selected lined up at the bottom, you can tap each one to edit individually with stickers, text, etc.

When you’re happy with them, you can preview the content, which will appear in the order you selected it

40. Add a text-only post to your Story

A picture says a thousands words, but sometimes you only want to say a few words.

How to do it:

With Instagram Stories open, select Type under the capture button

Tap the screen and write your message

Click the button at the top-middle of the app to cycle through the various styles

Choose a background color and text color(s)

Press the > icon when you’re happy with the design to post it to your Story

41. Share any size photo or video without cutting anything out

Now you can share that wide-angle company photo without cutting out Gary from accounting.

How to do it:

Upload your large photo or video and pinch to zoom out to share the original dimensions

Any extra room will be filled with a custom color gradient that matches what you’re sharing

42. Pin your best Stories to the top of your profile

Brands can now keep their best Stories on their profiles for as long as they like with the Instagram Stories Highlights feature.

How to do it:

Tap the New circle at the far left on your Instagram for business profile

Choose any Stories from your archive (note: Stories from business profiles are automatically saved to the archive when they expire)

Select a cover icon for your Highlight and give it a name

Your Highlight will appear as a circle on your profile that plays as a stand-alone Story when someone taps it

To edit or remove a Highlight, tap and hold it on your profile

Note: Highlights stay on your profile until you remove them, and you can have as many Highlights as you’d like. Check out these free Highlights cover icons to make sure yours really stand out.

43. Easily share your Instagram Story to your Facebook Story

You can do this for individual post, or set it up so all your Instagram Stories automatically our published on Facebook as well.

How to do it for a specific Story:

Start creating a Story, then tap Next

Tap Your Facebook Story

Tap Share

How to set up automatic Facebook Story sharing:

Go to your Instagram profile and tap the settings icon in the top-right corner

Tap Story Settings

Toggle on Share Your Story to Facebook

44. Share a replay of your live video on Instagram Stories

Another feature available to business accounts.

How to do it:

When you finish broadcasting a live video, simply tap Share at the bottom of your screen and the video will be added to your Story. Note: The recording will be available for 24 hours. While it plays, it will display all the comments and likes from the original broadcast. Brands will also be able to see exactly how many people watched the video—both live and in Stories.

Instagram bio and profile hacks

45. Include a hashtag or profile link your bio

You can now link to a hashtag page or another account in your bio.

How to do it:

Tap the profile icon to go to your profile

Tap Edit Profile and go to the bio section

Type # or @ and then a list of recommended hashtags and accounts will appear

Once you select the hashtags and accounts you want, they will linked to in your bio

Note: When you mention someone else’s profile in your bio, they will receive a notification and can choose to remove the link. Their profile will remain in your bio but without a link.

46. Hide photos you’ve been tagged in (or remove the tag entirely)

Has your brand ever been tagged in an image that you’d rather not be associated with? There’s ways to remove it from your profile.

How to do it:

Tap the person icon to visit your profile

Tap the person in a box icon beneath your bio to go to the Photos of You tab

Tap the photo you want to remove from your profile

Tap the three dots icon in the upper right-hand corner and select Photo Options

Select Hide from My Profile or Remove Me From Post if you want to untag yourself

Pro Tip: You can also choose whether or not you’d like tagged photos to appear on your profile. To do it, go to the Photos of You page, tap the three dots icon, select Tagging Options, then choose either Add Automatically or Add Manually.

47. Add line breaks in your bio to make it stand out

If you’d like to break up the block of text that is your bio, this hack is for you. Line breaks are a great way to include info in a visually appealing way.

How to do it on mobile:

Open up a notes app and write out your bio as you’d like it to appear—line breaks included

Select all the text and choose Copy

Open the Instagram app

Tap your profile image icon to visit your profile

Tap the Edit Profile button

Paste the text from your notes app into the bio field

Tap Done to save your changes

How to do it on desktop:

Visit your Instagram profile on the web

Select Edit Profile

Space your bio as you’d like it to appear

Click Submit to save your changes

Note: Whether edited via mobile or on desktop, profiles viewed on desktop will appear without line breaks.

48. Include a link in your bio to drive traffic

Your bio is a great place to drive traffic to your website or another social channel with a link.

How to do it:

Tap your profile image icon to visit your profile

Tap the Edit Profile button

Enter in the link you’d like to share

Tap Done to save your changes

Pro tip: Include UTM parameters in the URL to track how much traffic is generated by the profile link.

49. Switch to a business profile to run ads and get analytics

If you’re a brand and still don’t have an Instagram business profile, you’re missing out on key features and insights. Make the switch now.

How to do it:

Tap your profile image icon to visit your profile

Tap the gear icon on iOS or the three dots on Android to go to Options

Select Switch to Business Profile

Tap Continue at the bottom of the screen

Instagram will ask you to connect your Facebook account—you must connect a Facebook account to set up a business account on Instagram

Once you’ve chosen the Facebook Page you want to connect, fill in the information requested by Instagram—you must provide a phone number, email, or physical address for your business

Tap Done to save your profile and settings

For more tips on how to optimize your profile, check out our post of Instagram Bio Ideas for Business.

Instagram hashtag hacks

50. Find the best (and most relevant) hashtags

Because using the right Instagram hashtag will make your content more discoverable and allow you to grow your audience.

How to do it:

Select the magnifying glass icon to visit the Explore tab

Type in a keyword and tap the Tags column

Choose a hashtag from the list

This will take you to a page of posts bearing that hashtag

Above the “Top” and “Recent” portions of the page, there appears a small bar labeled “Related.” Next to this, Instagram will display a list of relevant hashtags that you can swipe through for inspiration (and further research)

51. Follow your favorite hashtags

Great for content inspiration!

How to do it:

Select the magnifying glass icon to visit the Explore tab

Type in the hashtag you want to follow

On the hashtag page click the Follow button

52. Save hashtags for future use

If you often use the same hashtags for every post, save them in a note to save time.

How to do it:

Create a new note in the notes app on your mobile device

Add all of your most-used captions to a running list

Whenever you’re sharing a post, navigate from Instagram to the notes app, copy your text, then paste it in your caption

53. Hide hashtags

Don’t clutter your captions. Hide your hashtags to keep the reader focused on what’s important.

How to do it—method No. 1:

One easy way to hide your hashtags is to simply leave them out of your caption altogether and put them in a comment below your post

Once you’ve got another comment, your hashtags will be safely hidden in the comments section

How to do it—method No. 2:

Another method is to separate your hashtags from the rest of your caption by burying them beneath an avalanche of line breaks

Simply tap the 123 key when composing a caption

Select Return

Enter a piece of punctuation (whether a period, bullet, or dash), then hit Return again

Repeat steps 2 to 4 at least five times

Instagram hides captions after three lines, so your hashtags won’t be viewable unless your followers tap the more option on your post

Bonus: Download a free checklist that reveals the exact steps an adventure photographer used to grow from 0 to 110,000 followers on Instagram with no budget and no expensive gear.

Instagram direct messaging hacks

54. Turn off your activity status

If you don’t want your followers to know when you were last active on the app, you can turn off activity status within Instagram Direct Messenger.

How to do it:

Tap the profile icon at the bottom right of your screen

Tap the gear icon on iOS or the three dots on Android to go to “Options”

Scroll down and select Activity Status under “Settings”

Toggle off activity status

55. Send disappearing content to other accounts

You can send a disappearing photo, video, or Boomerang to another account or a group of friends using Instagram Direct Messaging.

How to do it:

From the home screen, tap the camera icon at the top left of the screen. Or swipe right to open the camera. Or open Instagram Direct by tapping the paper airplane icon at the top right of the screen, then tapping the camera icon in the top left

Shoot a photo, video, or Boomerang

Edit it as desired

Tap the > icon at the bottom right of the screen

Choose your recipient OR tap New Group to send your message to several people in a single group chat

Tap Send at the bottom of the screen

Note: If you select multiple recipients without creating a group, each user will be sent the same message separately.

56. Send a live video

You can send your own live video or one you’re watching to a user or group of users.

How to do it:

When shooting a live video, tap the Direct icon (paper airplane) at the bottom of the screen and send your live video to friends (you’ll also have this option when going live with a friend)

Once sent, the recipient will see your live video in their Direct inbox. Friends can only view your video if you’re currently live

57. Edit a friend’s photo and send it back to them

How to do it:

When viewing a photo message from a friend, tap the camera icon at the bottom and capture a reply

Your reply includes a sticker of what you’re replying to

Move and resize it, and add your own twist with stickers, text and drawings

Manage your Instagram presence alongside your other social channels and save time using Hootsuite. From a single dashboard you can schedule and publish posts, engage the audience, and measure performance. Try it free today.

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The post Instagram Hacks: 57 Tricks and Features You Probably Didn’t Know About appeared first on Hootsuite Social Media Management.

Instagram Hacks: 57 Tricks and Features You Probably Didn’t Know About published first on https://themarketingheaven.tumblr.com/

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fadingfartconnoisseur · 7 years

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How To Pick a Travel Blog Name

We literally get hundreds of emails asking us how to pick a travel blog name and it’s understandable why. Before you start a travel blog, you need to think long and hard about what it will be called.

The name of your blog (also known as Domain Name) is the bit that goes between the “www” and the “.com” of your website URL, but it’s so much more than that. The name will become your brand, your business, your income and your means for travel, so it’s one of the most important aspects of a travel blog.

But you shouldn’t let picking a name stop you from buying your domain and getting started with travel blogging.

Bluehost has an excellent feature where you can purchase a domain and choose to pick a travel blog name later, that way you can start to build your blog, design the style and find a direction in your content and then choose a perfect name a little later down the road.

To learn how to start a blog without choosing a name first, check out our How To Start a Travel Blog post.

If you have a name in mind already, you can use the domain checker below to see if it’s available in the domain registry. There’s no need to search hundreds of different domain registries because they all pull from the same database.

If it’s not available at Bluehost, it won’t be available anywhere else. If your name is available, I recommend buying it right away. I once had the perfect domain name that I wanted to purchase and within a week it was gone. You never know. It’s very cheap to purchase domain names and some people buy dozens of them

In this post I’m going to show you how to pick a travel blog name by using concrete data of what works and what doesn’t. There are certain absolute no-no’s when it comes to buying domains and there are quite a few things to think about for brandability, SEO (Google traffic), and overall design.

Names To Avoid

In order to show you how to pick a travel blog name, I need to first start with the no-no’s of a travel blog name because these are pretty cut and dry. By listing names to avoid, it will help to narrow down your list of possible names for your travel blog.

Don’t be cliché

Your name needs to stand out in a market of millions of travel blogs, so it’s best to avoid the cliché terms that you see pop up in 75% of travel blogs.

Try To Avoid These Words

Nomadic

Nomad

Backpacker

Backpacking

Budget

Vagabond

Wandering

Wanderer

Adventurous

Global

Travelling

World

Unless you can think of something extremely clever and unique using the above listed words, I would avoid them altogether. Your name needs to stand out in the crowd and by giving it an overused, played out name, you’d be starting off on the wrong foot.

Avoid Dashes, Symbols, Numbers & Periods

Any post online about how to pick a travel blog name will tell you the same thing. Don’t use numbers, hyphens or symbols.

For pure branding and SEO reasons, you should always avoid using these characters in any blog name. Our good friend Johnny Ward of OneStep4Ward is a great example.

He regrets using this name because every time he tells someone his blog he has to say: “It’s one, step, then the number 4, then ward”. This makes it so much harder to remember the name of the blog.

Similarly, your blog shouldn’t have a dash in it because every time you tell someone your name, you have to say “dash”. When they go back to their computers later and try to remember your blog, they may forget where to put the dash, or that there’s a dash altogether. It’s just confusing.

Lastly, it’s just not good for SEO to have numbers, symbols or punctuations in a name because in some cases, your name could reflect a search term that someone is typing into Google.

If your name has random numbers, dashes and symbols, it could dampen the exact match possibilities for those searching terms similar to your name. Make your name as easy to remember as possible and don’t use hyphens, numbers or symbols.

Purposely Misspelling

Keeping on the “easy to remember” domain name theory, don’t create a blog that purposely misspells words to sound cool. WorldTravelz would be a horrible name choice because it would force you to explain to every person you tell that the word travels is actually spelled with a “z”, and Google wouldn’t rank you for any terms including “travels” because you misspelled it.

On top of that, Google algorithms hate misspelling and grammatical errors because it shows unprofessionalism in content. You’d literally be damaging your blog if you purposely misspell the domain name.

Too Long

There are so many reasons not to have a really long domain name.

They’re much harder to remember

It’s hard to fit a long name in a logo or header area of a website

Domains are limited to 63 characters anyways.

The most common domain name length in relation to .com registrations is around 12-13 characters; and containing 2 words. This can give you a bit of an idea of how long your domain should be.

GoatsOnTheRoad is 14 characters and 4 words, which is a bit long and cumbersome. The saving grace for our name may be that it’s easy to remember. If you have the perfect name that’s a little bit longer than 13 characters, go for it. As long as it’s easy to remember.

Still, I wouldn’t choose a name with more than 18 characters and 4 words.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that Twitter only allows you to have 14 characters in your handle, so if you want people to easily be able to search and find you, it’s a good idea to keep your name under 14 characters so that it can be the exact same on Twitter.

What a Domain Name Should Be

Now that we’ve covered things to avoid when thinking about how to pick a travel blog name, it’s time to go over some things to keep in mind that can help you choose the perfect name. Keep in mind that the domain name is a reflection of your brand and what you’re looking to share with your readers. Take your time and use these points to think up something great.

Always Go With .com

First and foremost, you need to pick a travel blog name that is available in “.com”. You can choose .net, .org, .travel, .tv, or .info, but .com is by far the most commonly used and thus, easiest to remember suffix possible in a domain name.

It won’t affect your SEO if you choose another ending, but it will definitely be harder for other people to remember. You can buy all variations of your name if you want to, but .com should be your primary focus. Click Here to check and see if your domain name is available in .com.

Check Social

When you’re starting a new travel blog, you’re also going to have to start all of your social media accounts. At the very least, you should be able to have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube using your name.

I’ve covered a lot about how to pick a travel blog name already, but if it’s already been taken on the most popular social media channels, then you may want to consider another name.

To check and see if your social media username is available, you can head to NameChk.com and type your proposed username in the search field at the top of the page and click enter. Then you’ll see certain social media logos fade in the table below and that will tell you they are unavailable.

The Dark Blue Icons Are Social Media Accounts That Aren’t Available For “goatsontheroad”

As long as you can get Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram and (if you plan to create videos) YouTube, then you don’t need to worry too much about the others.

Your Name Should Describe Your Blog

A great name should easily describe what your blog is all about. Goats On The Road does a terrible job of doing this, but again, perhaps because it’s quirky and memorable, it worked.

But choosing a name that has nothing to do with the content you’re going to create is an absolute no-no. ThePlanetD openly admitted that they regret choosing that name. It’s simply because they both have names that start with “D” (Dave and Deb) and they were going for a Lonely Planet type idea.

Luckily, they still made it in the industry, but their name is not the ideal example of a descriptive blog name. Some great examples are sites like Expert Vagabond, Cheapest Destinations Blog, Art Of Scuba Diving and Neverending Voyage. These all do a great job of explaining the brand and the niche within the name itself.

Using Your Own Name

There are loads of blog names out there that use the founders name, like Nomadic Matt, Nomadic Samuel, Wandering Earl, Travel With Bender etc. While I wouldn’t recommend following the basic formula of “Nomadic + Name”, it’s still possible to think of a clever name using your own name and make it memorable.

A lot of people have a blog name that simply is their name, like YeisonKim.com. This is a very professional way to create a blog name, but it’s not overly catchy in most cases.

Many people start a self-named blog as a secondary portfolio for photography, videography and personal growth, after they’ve already created a successful online business elsewhere. That’s not to say that a self-named blog can’t be a great one.

Keep in mind that if you’re starting a travel blog as a solo traveller, that’s great, but one day you may find that you hire more writers, you find love on the road or you start blogging about other things besides your personal travel adventures.

Unless you’re sure that you always want your blog to include at least some aspect of your personal story, and you’re always going to be the sole contributor, then you may consider avoiding using your name in the title.

Every blog name needs to have longevity, which brings me to the next point.

SEO Driven Domain Names

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a term that you’ll become very familiar with as you grow your blog. It basically means “make Google happy”.

Many things that we do as bloggers is with SEO in mind. We structure article titles and content with SEO in mind, we add keywords and link back to our site using SEO tactics, so why not start off on a good SEO foot and choose an SEO based name.

If you’re going to be writing on a specific topic and you know that many people are going to search Google for that topic, consider naming your blog that key term. For example, if you’re going to write strictly about backpacking in Central Asia, then your domain could be BackpackingCentralAsia.com.

This would immediately give you an upper hand when competing with other websites for search terms including “Backpacking Central Asia”.

Many people create new niche sites using domain names based solely on a keyword term they found in Google that has many searches per month.

Maybe “How to pick a travel blog name” gets 10,000 searches per month in google, then it may be a good idea to buy the domain “HowToPickaTravelBlogName.com” and see if How To Pick a Travel Blog Name is available on all social networks.

Choosing an SEO friendly name and creating a niche site based around it can be a great way to get a lot of traffic quickly. Just keep in mind that if you’re going to start a blog based on a specific term, you better make sure that you’ll be able to create hundreds of articles around that term and you’re not going to limit yourself too much by choosing an SEO name that’s too narrow.

Names With Longevity

Do not choose a name that you could grow out of. TwentiesTraveller.com may sound cool, but it’s definitely a name that you’ll grow out of. What happens when you turn 30? Sure you can still write about what it was like to travel in your twenties, and you could hire writers who are still in their twenties, but it’s better to choose a name that can grow with you.

Similarly (and I can’t stress this enough), I wouldn’t recommend using words like “budget”, “broke”, “cheap” and “poor” in your name.

At first, you may be able to lock down a niche of budget travel and you may see yourself travelling on a budget for a long time, but as your site starts to earn more money, you may find (as we have), that it’s nice to get a midrange hotel sometimes and sleeping in a dorm isn’t sustainable long-term (10+ years). Your travel style may change.

You can technically change your name and rebrand yourself down the road, but it’s a pain in the ass. It can take forever to change your social media names, you’d have to start a new domain from scratch and redirect your old one and it’s just not worth it.

Try to think of a name that doesn’t pigeon-hole you into one particular niche, travel style or age range, unless you’re 100% confident that you’ll always be writing on that topic.

Destination Based Names

If you know that you’re always going to be writing about Southeast Asia, then you may consider something like SoutheastAsianTraveller. Similarly, if you’re focusing your niche even finer, you could be the ChicagoFoodBlog.

Narrowing your domain name down to a specific region, country or even city can be a great way to nail down a niche location. But keep in mind that if you travel to other areas and you want to write about them, it won’t really fit under your blog name.

Memorable Names

This has been a common theme throughout this article, but I need to highlight that one of the most important parts of how to choose a name for a travel blog is making it memorable.

I’ve already mentioned in this article that you should choose a name with longevity, it should describe your blog, it should be the perfect length etc., but when it comes to figuring out how to pick a travel blog name, all of those rules play second fiddle to coming up with a truly unique and memorable name.

If you have a name in your head that you think people will remember right away, it’s unique, clever and easily brandable (thinking about logos and niches) then you should go for it. Goats On The Road goes against many of the name rules that I’ve listed in this post, but I believe that it worked because it’s very memorable.

You’ll Also Need a Great Tagline

On our Home Page you’ll see our logo at the top with our name, and directly below that you see our tagline: “Turn Travel Into a Lifestyle.”

This simple 5 word sentence does a pretty good job about explaining what our blog is all about. Learning how to sustain travel so that you can turn it into a life, rather than a holiday.

Your tagline should be a similar length and explain exactly what your blog is about. It can take a really long time to think of a good tagline, but don’t worry, you can keep working on it as your blog grows.

Narrowing Your Names Down

The best way to come up with the perfect name is to use a mind map. Get a big piece of paper or a whiteboard and start mapping out what your blog is about. Who is your target audience? What topics will you cover? Where will you be blogging about? What are your core values?

Use the words that you see in this mind map to start a list of potential names. Then go through those names and slowly scratch out the ones that don’t seem quite right. Ask friends and family if you need to and also check if their available by using the domain checker below, if they’re already taken, scratch them out.

Once you’ve narrowed it down to two or three names, it’s time to make the final decision. Keep in mind that you can start a blog without choosing a name and after you’ve written some posts, designed parts of the website and found a direction, you may find it easier to come up with a final choice for your name.

Ready To Start Your Blog?

Now you know how to pick a travel blog name. I’ve given you the information you need to choose the perfect blog name. Using the points in this blog post, you should be able to come up with a unique and memorable name that has longevity and is good for SEO.

But remember, even if you can’t think of a name, you can still start building your blog today.

Check out our How To Start a Travel Blog Guide to easily (and cheaply) start your new travel blog in just minutes. If you can’t think of a name, don’t worry, we’ll show you how to easily start a blog without a name, and then you can pick one at any time down the road!

How simple is that? As an added bonus, for a limited time we’re giving away our $20 eBook on how to create a successful blog absolutely free for anyone who starts a blog using our guide. What are you waiting for?! Now is the perfect time to start a travel blog and change your life forever.

Who knows, by this time next year you could be getting paid to travel the world. Go for it.

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george-crocker-fmp · 7 years

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Final Evaluation - Final Major

The amount of research that I have done for this project I feel definitely exceeds the requirements and have spoken in detail about the sort of research I have done, why I researched the specific topic or person, and what impact that they have on my final major project

My whole project is based on this we can’t or rarely get to see and experience. Within this, I used light photography to create some really captivating and interesting images using steel wool, torch on some string and a light-up hula-hoop. Another aspect was macro photography, showing off what we are surrounded by but we always take for granted. The third way that I had shown off things we don’t really see was from underwater photography, as we can’t really take cameras in water often as they are electrical so getting the chance to take the camera underwater with protective casing was a blessing.

While looking for what to do my project on, I came across light photography which I have researched before. My first part of the research was based on Michael Bosanko who is a famous light photographer who has a range of different styles of light photography from abstract to recreating icon frames from films. II had a made a comparison between Michael Bosanko as Lightmark, who is another light photographer. While Michael Bosanko uses light in an extreme, colorful way, LightMark likes to use light photography in a subtle and minimal way.

In my opinion, I do believe that I have researched in depth and have found a satisfaction amount to base my project around. I have looked on social media such as YouTube, Artist portfolios, Flickr and went to a few exhibitions I found some tips and tricks into how to create some good effect when shooting light photography. Flickr and other forms of media such as artist portfolios also inspired me as I could see what people can create and I can try to either do my own thing with the technique they used or recreate what they have done so I can get used to the technique, learn and practice from. Concept

My work is about showing things that we can’t normal see. I focused on Light photography and macro photography due to the fact that light photography requires you to leave a shutter open to capture the light. Macro photography focuses on the small, minute detail of the world around us which I want to show off and give more of an insight to what is around us, as well as shine light on small things and the beauty of taking the time to look around us.

My Initial idea was to go with Light photography mixed in with some Urbex photography as I looked into Rebecca Lilith Bathory who specialized in urban exploration and environments. She has been to a few places such as schools, prisons, and factories which she has documented and photographed. One reason this idea didn’t quite get to be part of my final project was due to the area am in, transport and locations, it’s hard to find places that are abandoned or not in use that we can go in because the council owns the majority of them which means gaining entry would either be hard or illegal.

My other idea was to go with an underwater themed project which would be hard due to getting the correct equipment for the shoot, I managed to get one shoot in but I have decided not to include these as final images due to the images not reflecting what I want my project to be about. I felt like that if I did include these image into my project, they wouldn’t have worked, they wouldn’t have a place due to only having one shoot and not many good images.

Communication between the reader and the artist need to be clear, so showing what I am trying to achieve is my main goal. I have spoken about what my aims are and what I want to achieve and have also visually represented what my outcomes were. I am hoping the reader understands what I am trying to get across as I want people to know that my project is all about small things and exposing what we can’t see or even things we may take for granted. I want my work to inspire other people and show them the world around us which would ideally make them think more about their day. For example, getting on the bus in the morning and noticing the detail on the stop button or the aesthetic of a stop sign. The best outcome would be that I can get the reader to also start doing what I have been doing and get then into photography and shooting light and/or macro photography.

Core skills

With some of my shoots, I had to fill out risk assessments for the safety of myself and others. Knowing this will show me the dangers I need to try and avoid or reduce the chance of injury, conflict, and damages to equipment. I had also added an evaluation on my posts so the reader knew what the images, videos or links were and they understood how relevant it is to the project. 3/4ths of the way through the project I peer assessed someone’s work so they could get feedback on their blog. The communication between me assessing and the person receiving the feedback needs to be strong so my grammar and punctuation needs to be to a high standard so they can identify what I am asking them to look at and review to improve. If this isn’t clear to the other person, then they aren’t going to understand what I am trying to help them with.

More grammar and punctuation was used when talking about a client brief which I received to help Mt.Edgcumbe receive more attention and get more recognition so that they can receive more income to keep the place open and available to the public. This is showing us what kind of things we need to do when we get a client brief when we go into our own profession. Things like how much will you as a photographer charge per hour, how much editing and post-production will you do and how long will that take.

Maths is a key part when taking any photography due to the fact you have exposure, aperture, ISO, you can have the distance between the model and the lights, light meters also help you identify when settings would work best for the correctly exposed image unless you want slightly over exposed or under exposed. For the current general election, we found some statistics on who voted in the 2015 general election and I found out that 43% of 18-24-year-olds didn’t vote which means almost half of the population didn’t vote and get their say in what sort of government we run.

Technique

Techniques that I have used in my FMP have mainly been focused on Light photography. This involved leaving the camera open for long periods of time on a tripod. Calculating how long I want to the shutter open for and how I am going to use the light to make a decent image. Light photography is hard because you can’t see what you are working with until you see the image that you’ve taken due to the camera capture the light trail which we can’t see with our eyes. This makes this type of photograph a lot harder as you can’t see what you’re doing.

One thing I learned with Photoshop is that it’s not very keen on light imagery. I am able to change colors and make it more vibrant but when it came to the editing like ‘spot heal’ or ‘content aware tool’, I noticed that it doesn’t like light trials as a lot of the time, it messed up the images. My main thing with Photoshop is I prefer the original image when it comes to light photography because you can’t see it normally, therefore I think what you capture is truly a unique thing, no one else can create what you created.

Macro photography was another technique which I decided to try and use as my final project. Macro photography really relies on depth of field and detail. If the object(s) or subject(s) that you are photographing have a lot of detail, you are then in control of the depth of field which means you decide how much detail you want in the shot to some extent. Like all photography, light, aperture, exposure and ISO are still factored in.

When photoshopping with macro images, the first thing I like to do is play with the clarity and saturation as this brings the detail out and the colors jump out at you. I then go to the Black and white slider and see what works and what doesn’t. Usually, blacks work better as the detail is seen with shadows and darker colors. Shooting the macro and light images in RAW also gives you more options to work with when editing which you can always go back to if you open it as a smart object. You need to be able to see what things are around you that are interesting to look at when you get in close, for example, a flower, you can see the detail is the petals and the center area of the flower. I think this is interesting as people don’t see this often.

Another style that I tried was Urbex photography, this was challenging and in the end, I didn’t get the chance to get any images, therefore, I cut this from my FMP. The main challenge was actually finding places to visit and explore to then take pictures off. As I can’t travel, it’s hard to get to places even if I could find somewhere. As I was very interested in this and still am, I want to be able to do this in the future with transport and a few locations planned.

The final technique I experimented with was underwater photography. I went to a local pool with cameras and full waterproof casing. The hard part was because it was a pool with chlorine in, the flash also picks up the chemical as spots in the water making the image very dotty and doesn’t look very clear.

When it came to editing the underwater images, the first thing that I found out was that the spot heal tool was very useful to get rid of the specs. The second issue was that out of about 50 images, I only liked 2, which still needed a lot of heavy editing. I don’t mind editing images but if you over-edit an image, I find that the image loses what it captured and turns out a lot worse than if you left it unedited.

Underwater Photography Is something I would like to do more of but it’s a very expensive style as you need the right casing and protection for your equipment. Other than that, I would definitely do more.

This project I definitely can say that I’ve gone out my way to try more things such as underwater, light and macro photography. If I push myself, I know I can get really good results and great images. I feel like everything came down to the past 3 months, everything I’ve worked towards, learned and put into practice needs to be perfect and clean, and I feel like I have executed this in the best way I can.

I learned a lot from people around me, I got feedback from friends and lectures on how to improve my work, my composition, a way of displaying my work and other small things. The main thing people liked about my work as the colors and vibrant feel to the images, steel wool on fire people felt warm, my light spirals images, people felt. Their feedback has helped me develop my ideas and create stunning final images. Character development

As a person, I have grown a lot through this project as a person and photographer. I have learned a lot more techniques with cameras and using other instruments to aid me in capturing amazing images. I have learned more about myself and what I am capable of. I have had things out of college going on which have had a negative effect on me but I hope that my work still stands strong and it had no effect on my project. It’s been hard but I have noticed an increase in work performance and determination to get things done now I haven’t been distracted much by things going on in my private life.

Working with other people has been an important part of my project as I have needed to use people to help me produce my images. My steel wool images needed someone to spin the wool while I take the photo. Communication also comes into his as it all depends on what you tell your model to do while spinning, for example, spins the wool while walking forward or spin the wool above your head. If you don’t have any communication, you aren’t going to have that connection with your model and you won’t feel much in common with the final images.

Deadline are a tough thing for me and trying to get work done for a certain time can be hard as I can work hard and get a lot done, but as soon as someone says it needs to be done to this date, I start to panic and worry that I am not going to get the work done. Once I panic, my mind goes into a constant mess and I then have a harder time to try and get work done as I forget what I have done and what I haven’t done. I feel like I have got better with deadlines and are now able to manage myself and be able to complete on time and think clearer. It helps when I plan things out in a diary or date-by-date format so I know what I need to do on what day before the deadline hits.

Considering the fact, I have got better with my stress, I think I have worked very hard to produce what I have produced. I am happy with my final outcome and would happily give this to a client if this was work for someone.

My presentation I have tried to keep tidy and clean so people can clearly see what images go with what explanation. This way, it makes it easier for people to look at and still get different feelings from my work. Enjoyment and Engagement

As this was a project that we could choose anything that we are interested in I have enjoyed 90% of the project. From coming up with ideas as I had no ideas, I always had something in mind and set them as goals. I haven’t enjoyed some of the written tasks such as talking about the general election and I didn’t enjoy going to one exhibition which, to me, had no use as it wasn’t relevant to my project.

My shoots, explaining my shoots, editing, and research I have actually enjoyed as its all based around a topic I like. I like to talk about my work as I get to express what I feel I want people to try and get from my work. I know what they mean and getting my audience to feel or get the same message is what I aim to do with my explanations but hopefully, they get a good sense just from the visual representations.

One factor which has given me the motivation to engage more in my project was that another student and a year 2 student were doing very similar photography, so this has driven me to try and top their work and push myself to make something better or as equal as their images.

High and Low points

The best part of my project has to be spinning the steel wool for the second time which to this day remain my best images. They were the most fun to actually take and make. The images, when shown to friends and family, got a really good reaction. They were impressed with how they turned out and couldn’t believe how it was done or that it would look like that. This had given me hope and made me feel proud to continue to work on this project and see what I could really achieve.

The low points, what I am least proud of my progression work for unit 9. Unit 9 was all about looking into the future like uni courses and jobs. As I am not sure what I want to do at uni, yet Computer Science is my first option, I am not 100% sure if it’s the right decision. I want to carry on looking and hopefully I can decide on something which I really love, like photography or computer science, but for now, I am unsure.

What did the audience think?

During group crits, we have feedback on other people’s work on how good it was, what it made us feel and what we could improve.

My light spirals were mentioned during one of the crits we had. People spoke about the images and asked what are they, how did I take them and are they edited. With light images, I’m not a fan of editing them as it can really mess them up so I like to try and keep close to the original as I can.

I asked family and friends what they thought about my project too, they all liked what I had so far and given me ideas to what I could do next to help my project improve.

I did get one bit of constructive criticism which I’m glad I got. One image I put in for a crit got the response of “I’m not sure what I’m looking at” which sounds harsh but if people don’t know what it is, then I have to try harder to get what it is across to the person viewing it.

I do appreciate that comment as it shows I need to work harder into showing off what my project is about and that work needs to be recognizable without explaining it. This way people can see my work and know what it is easier.

I and another person did talk about our projects as we are doing similar things so we shared ideas and got to see what each other are doing for our projects. This gave both of us more ideas for our projects and different ways we can incorporate different styles of light photography into our work.

Calculating how much time spent on our project.

18 hours in half term – 3 hours a day for 2 weeks. 175 hours – Monday and Tuesday for 10 weeks 35 hours – Wednesday for 10 weeks Total = 228 Hours spent on the project.

Time spent on: Research and developing ideas: 28 Hours 28/228*100 = 12.3% Planning, organising, and production: 25 Hours 25/228*100 = 11% Practicing skills, equipment, and software: 53 Hours 53/228*100 = 23.3% Taking pictures: 22 Hours 22/228*100 = 9.6% Editing pictures: 50 Hours 50/228*100 = 21.9% Posting, blogging and uploading: 50 Hours 50/228*100 = 21.9%

I feel like these times are a rough idea of what I have worked on but they seem to be fairly even when looking at the pie chart it by hours, it’s very different.

If I charge £15 per hour and I spent 22 hours taking photos and 50 hours editing, that means 22+50=72 hours. 72*15 = £1080. I feel for the price over 3 months, this is very cheap and I should charge more for my time considering the time period.

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