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A while back my pharmacist saw my deadname on my profile and accidentially called it out, he corrected and deleted my deadname from the system so only my preferred name shows up now. There was a crowd of people behind me, so as he hands over the pills he apologized, in equal tone and volume as when he called my deadname and lied saying it's been a long day and he didn't mean to call out -his own- name. I quietly told him it was fine and he didn't need to do that for my sake.

His response: "No, it's my name now."

I went to the pharmacist yesterday, his nametag is my deadname. He informed me he's immigrating and in the process he's changed his first name to my deadname to have an English sounding name. That's why he's now able to get a reprint of his nametag to be my deadname. And repeated, with the intense seriousness of someone who is going to die on this hill: "It's mine now. Not yours. I'm taking." His tone indicated that decision is final.

Bro literally deadnamed me once, and has committed to flat out stealing my deadname. It's his now. Legally. Officially. I over heard his co-workers call him by the name.

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Yup. This is a picture of Greenway Halt:

A whole two carriages of platform, specially built on the tourist line to let tourists visit a major tourism destination (Agatha Christie's house)

I have never worked out how to get the trains to stop there or pick up from there. Lovely walk to the actual stations in either direction tho.

On the one hand incredibly frustrating. On the other at least there's still an attempt at a service. Town near me has platforms in good repair, the station will definitely re open soon! They've been saying that for twenty years now

Slow train journeys in rural England sure are an experience. You're going ten miles and it takes a day and a half because it stops at every lamp-post and the announcement says "The next station stop is Ferretley" or something and you think "I didn't know that was a place" and you get there and it isn't

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Of course she did. Just be grateful no one has ever suggested using you as a transhipment point for European sales ;-)

But yeah, been following Shep online in various places for over a decade now, the track record is impressive, this is all good advice (says the former marketing dude who had a breakdown and quit nearly two decades ago )

I've been meaning to write this down for some time because there are some fundamental errors that people keep making in crowdfunding/sales that shoot their campaigns in the foot. So here's a list of easy principles.

Who am I and why should you listen to me? I am a freelance chaos marketer who has raised well over $100,000 when totaling up various crowdfunding campaigns, mostly for aid to Afghanistan. In addition I've managed to successfully market everything from stuffed plush koalas to hydration salts. Why am I putting this out here for free? Because despite a years long track record of success in social media marketing no one will hire me because I don't have a college degree, so I might as well help people out who can't afford to hire full time marketing. 

If you'd like to hire me to help you evaluate your marketing and sales and teach you better skills on a 1 to 1 basis then hit me up, I am often willing to barter, esp with artists in a variety of mediums! 

Anyway on to HOW TO CONVINCE PEOPLE TO GIVE YOU MONEY:

TL;DR: use positive messaging that humanizes everyone involved and make it as easy as possible for people to give you money.

1. Shame and guilt are demotivators. They will not inspire people to give you money. “Why aren't people helping” “I guess people don't care” “This isn't getting enough shares/donations” etc etc. Online fundraising is often frustrating, heartbreaking, and will make you angry, especially when there's a humanitarian crisis involved. It is critical that if you are raising funds for someone else that you have a place to vent that is not the audience you would like to donate to the cause. 

2. Use motivating messages instead! “You can help!” “Even a small donation is important because it tells Recipient they're not alone, and people care” “We can't fix the whole world, but we can make this one thing right, and that means something”. Emphasize that this is a problem that the reader can help fix with even a small effort. With items for sale, tell a story. "I drew this thinking about how safe I always felt under a tree in my childhood backyard". "I chose the colors in this shawl to remind me of sagebrush and piñon pine in my favorite place."

3. Make it easy for people to give you money. Never talk about your product or cause without a link that leads directly to where people can give you money. They should be able to click one link on your post and land at the fundraiser or your shop. Every required click is going to lose people, so minimize the number of them required. This also means if you have a list of fundraisers for people to choose from the ones at the bottom will be neglected - people will hit the ones at the top. Be sure to take those off when they're met or periodically shuffle the list around to make sure everyone gets a chance to be in the first 5 spots. In online stores people will often only look at the first page or two of items so be sure to shuffle things around and remove out of stock items that are taking up prime real estate.

4. Humanize the recipient - this can be tricksy when raising charitable aid because you don't want to be exploitative. But to use my last Afghan campaign as an example, “We need to raise $500 for an Afghan family” is less effective than “This Afghan family's home was damaged in heavy rains that caused extensive flooding. They only need $500 to repair and rebuild so they can stay in their home and not become displaced.”  If possible, tell as much of the recipient's story as they consent to. Eg “Fred is seven and loves dinosaurs. His favorite is brontosaurus, and he carries a stuffed one with him everywhere. He wants to be a paleontologist when he grows up and discover a complete brontosaurus skeleton that he can give the same name as his stuffed friend. Unfortunately he's also a trans boy living in Texas and his family needs $1500 to rent a Uhaul and get to Colorado so he can grow up in safety and do that.”

5. If you're not the recipient, humanize yourself while you're at it! “I'd be really grateful if you all could share or donate” “This fundraiser really means a lot to me because…” “Thank you so much for any help, whether sharing or donating” 

6. Treat the audience like humans. Speak to them like they are people you're having a conversation with, not ATMs. This ultimately is the goal of not using shame/guilt and humanizing yourself and the recipient. 

7. Set low goals and bump them up when met. One of the weird things about people is they prefer to give to successful fundraisers. Yeah I don't know either. So you're more likely to get the full amount you need if you set a partial goal initially and then raise it when that's met. Raise it in small increments and raise it repeatedly as those goals are hit to keep momentum going. You can't always control this so if you're boosting someone else's fundraiser you can do it artificially via asks like “Hey y'all can we get together and put $500 on this?”

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There's being blown a bit off course then there's accidental France. Walking the Bosphorus would've been a bit of a challenge but the big problem was the loot, obvs

Just follow the coast around, no shortcuts, you'll be fine…

Was curious how far Ithaca was from troy today while listening to epic the musical and rereading the illiad and I found this map

I think odysseus would have been better just to walk😭

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No no no. That's the Count Mobile, Dragula looked like this:

Would love to see them race tho…

The Count in his Count Mobile.

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It gets even better. Is Jupiter big? Yup. Jupiter is so big that

Jupiter doesn't orbit the Sun!

Seriously:

An orbit has a barycentre. If that's inside a thing you're orbiting the thing. If it's outside? Both you and the thing are orbiting that point. Jupiter is so big it forces the sun to wobble in it's orbit around the Galaxy. NASA has a longer explainer here:

How cool is that?

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A performance by 蔡宏毅 (Cai Hongyi), whose specialty is sword dance.

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“ICEBERG , ICEBERG!”

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When house hunting, one of our major preferences was walking distance to a supermarket (it's what we call big grocery stores in England). 5 mins to Tesco, 10 to Sainsbury, 15 to Lidl and bonus 8 mins to the town centre high street. Mission accomplished

Despite this the staff are regularly surprised when I say I'm walking the shop home, and the layouts are distinctly unfriendly to pedestrians, even tho they're not meant to be

I miss stopping for a few essentials while changing bus for my commute home when I lived in Wimbledon and worked in Westminster, but I can, easily, pop to the shops —we can even have one of us grab a few things during a dog walk, as long as one of the things is dog treats. I do not miss owning a car, and love living somewhere that's an actual option

Part of the reason “We shouldn’t have to drive to the grocery store” is such a hard sell to Americans is because car culture has encouraged us to think of the grocery store as a place where you buy a trunkload of food and supplies once a week, or even less frequently. When someone goes “You should be able to take public transportation to the store!” we usually imagine ourselves struggling to carry our trunkload of groceries onto the bus, correctly conclude that it would suck, and dismiss the idea out of hand. It tends not to occur to us that people in other countries manage to stop at the market every couple of days for a small number of items.

That is actually one of the most interesting things about urban design, they way that it alters human behavior through things such as how often do you go grocery shopping and for how much, because that all has to do with how you get to the store

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Both are excellent, suspect 1491 is quite dated now and would love to read an updated or similar book —for a start pretty sure the cotton first hypothesis for Caral–Supe/Norte Chico agriculture is almost completely rejected even if it is fascinating

Today I discovered that the naming convention in Arkady Martine's series, Teixcalaan, isn't something she made for her books, but is from Mixtec (a Mesoamerican society)!

@specialagentartemis It might be a series you'd like. I'll bet you'd notice a lot more historical parallels than I did. Also, on a related note, I've been reading 1491 and it's good. (Not great, but solidly good for me as a layman.)

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Here is @lurchermumjennie with young Ridley sat with Alan. It's a lovely statue, easy walking distance from Manchester's main train station, and there's virtually always someone sat eating with him

you gotta be as gay as possible on the computer otherwise alan turing died for nothing

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The first episode of Red Dwarf has an important foreshadowing joke ruined without the right music —as the funeral casket is launched into the ether, George's chosen song is played: "See You Later Alligator"

On the Netflix stream, it's replaced with a generic "ere we go ere we go"

Which means the later invite for all crew to attend the Welcome Back George party doesn't hit as well

I was a kid at school when that was broadcast, I'll be 50 next month, but the VHS releases and repeats were limited for half a decade because some rights weren't negotiated properly

you know how you can go and watch a movie you watched a bunch as a kid and the version of a song in it is different? like they actually changed it since you were a kid? that isn't normal. we didn't do that until like, the last ten years. it's fucked up.

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Local lad was Big Daddy, just up the valley from us

Is the world ready for Big Daddy Milkers?