#How to Brand Yourself

[starry-bi-sky]

realizing i have. a lot of untapped trauma potential for clone^2 danny because i just Fully Processed Four Months Late the fact that his parents were capturing and torturing ghosts in the basement before he became Phantom. and the fact that he was on house rest for 2 weeks. during that time period. and he wasn't really leaving the house. he could hear their screaming through the floorboards

*points at clone danny* i can give you suuuuuuch a bad time babe ahaha. i've got two untouched years before you meet damian what fucks you up before then

[todaysbird]

I still think it’s incredible that people blindly accept big brands = unquestionably good when regarding pet care. If you can accept that human care products have been at times poorly researched or downright harmful (and with the brand’s knowledge) like in the Johnson & Johnson scandal, why do you not believe that a brand would mislead or lie to you when it’s regarding your pet?

[aftg-random-fun]

It’s been a bit since I have read the books and don’t recall if Neil spoke about how he came up with the last name Josten, but I have a theory. What if he got last name Josten from seeing fliers for the senior graduation rings at one of his high schools while on the run. There is a pretty big company called Josten’s that does caps+gowns and rings so it would also be a hoot if they had to order their graduation gear from the company at the end of his college years.

[noisytenant]

[wholetabirdin]

“You wouldn’t be cold if you wore long sleeves” “you need more then just a cape and gloves Robin”

It’s called a brand and I plan on sticking to mine.

[finalgirlminamurray]

one of my dark secrets is that i used to be an avid watcher of the nostalgia critic. in my defense i was like 13 when i started but i watched his stuff for longer than i should have. (i'd stopped before the infamous wall review destroyed whatever reputation he had left after the channel awesome document came out, at least.)

anyway i unfortunately do still find a lot of his earlier videos to be genuinely funny at times, if lacking in actual insightful media criticism and mixed in with plenty of bad jokes, and there are a number of lines that still stick in my head. including one from his review of the terrible 1999 remake of the haunting, because whenever i see something about any bad adaptation of that story i can't help thinking "what is the haunting [of hill house] about?" "it's about family!" "NO, IT'S NOT-- (deep breath) no it's not."

[severefartoholic]

i fucked sergei

[whentherewerebicycles]

man oh man i have so many thoughts about how insistently (and i think kind of blindly/uncritically) my university pushes us to frame absolutely every type of learning experience we offer to students in the language of "career readiness" and "career-connected learning" and "professional development." i totally get that we have a large first-gen student population who are making a big investment of time & money in a college degree and who want to be sure that doing so will grant them access to greater socioeconomic mobility. and i DO think it is important for us to think about like, ok, long-term, what comes after these experiences or after this four years in college, and what can we be doing to set students up for success as they transition out of college and into the rest of their lives. but like. idk man. i find it really bleak sometimes. just this relentless messaging that the only thing that matters in your adult life is how competitive you are on the job market. and i also think it pushes us to just like, kind of warp or distort the things we are offering students to make them fit under that rubric, or that particular framework for valuing things? like if we want to convince a student to study abroad we can't be like, living abroad is one of the most amazing things you can do. it's so fun/scary/exhilarating/awesome and it will expand your horizons in ways you can't even anticipate and it will expose you to different ways of seeing the world and you will get to interact with people whose perspectives have been shaped by totally different cultures & contexts and it will help you become more independent and more confident in your ability to handle unfamiliar situations and it will give you stories you will remember all your life and you will build strong friendships with the people you meet and you will take cool pictures or buy little knickknacks that remind you of those experiences in your daily life forever and it will motivate you to travel more and when/if you have kids of your own you will probably make it a priority to travel with them if you can or to encourage them to study abroad when they're older because you know how amazing that experience is and you want them to have access to those kinds of life-changing opportunities. like instead of saying any of that we have to say oh this will develop your skills in time management and project management and professional communication with your supervisors and it will give you something impressive to talk about on your resume or in job interviews and blah blah blah. or even if you use a more capacious definition of career readiness that focuses more on habits of mind (like, in the workplace you will sometimes have to navigate complex situations where expectations are not fully clear! you will also likely have this experience living abroad!), it's still just like... idk man... i find it so reductive lol like yeah sure but "get a skill that applies to your job as a project manager or an IT professional or whatever" just feels so much... Less... than the more humanistic appeal to like, this will enrich your life in so many ways, and you will, through these experiences, just become an all-around more emotionally mature, confident, and interesting human being who has engaged in an experience that challenged you and helped you grow. but then i am all in on the humanities and humanism in general so maybe i am biased here and someone who wants to be a software engineer or whatever would be wholly unmoved by that kind of appeal. idk. anyway. it looks like our team is going to be subsumed into our career center in the next year or two so like. what can you really do except to inwardly say "wow i kinda hate this"

[ryssabrin]

bruh.

[gatheredfates]

I vented about this on my bluesky but I also wanted to express it here a) because it's my blog and I can but b) just see if I'm literally not the only one experiencing this emotion. It's a rare negative post? idk. It's under the cut. I'll probably delete it later.

I'm basically just going to post what I wrote on bluesky first and then kind of try to elaborate here.

I don't tend to express it very often, but trying to 'be the change you want to see in the world' as far as breaking through insular roleplay communities is hard when that's just what they are. Insular. And that's not really the fault of the players as it is decentralisation away from main hubs (forums, tumblr, etc) to secular discords. It's the inherent distrust that other people don't have your best interests at heart, or that they're going to be abusive/predatory/etc, that keeps people from reaching out. It's something I try to unlearn but also find is triggers the moment someone crosses a light boundary, even if it's not an obvious one? Idk. I feel like I used to be able to reach out to people much easier than before. That I could log into a game, go to an RP hub or event, and feel like I can interact with people other than those staffing. I don't know quite how to describe it, other than I feel like I'm sometimes pushing against a wave of people who crave interaction but won't/can't give it back. It's strange in a hobby that's supposed to collaborative.

I've just been finding it so exhausting lately. It feel like so many roleplay communities are tucked away on discords that are not easy to advertise or locate. It feels like, if I go to an event, the only major interactions outside my circle of friends are from staff members at the event and not other players?

Let's not even talk about how much the userbase of tumblr has decreased, as well as this weird social stigma that's two parts 'reblogging this diminishes the aesthetic of my roleplay' or 'what if people think I'm weird if I constantly like/reblog their stuff'. It's not even me. I see things where I'm like 'oh that's so pretty i bet it has a lot of notes!' and it has like... twenty.

idk. I feel like i'm the old man yelling at the cloud. I feel like it was so much easier to find roleplay a few years ago whereas now it's clawing through communities and trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. It's weird as hell.

[crymeariveronceagain]

[swan2swan]

Unlocked a can of worms because I wanted this to be simple, but now this fic also needs to have that underlying current of "Tomorrow and Who Knows How Many Days Afterward Is Gonna Be a Nightmare"..

[scionshtola]

something i thought was weird in dt was everyone acting like they had never before heard of the concept of remembering someone after they died

[horrorsequel]

it's so funny to write a story abt something and torture a character in some way and then life goes "something is going to happen to you in your life that will starkly reveal to you why you wrote that" and also it pisses me off

[here-there-were-dragons]

as a general rule, on average, if americans consistently complain about a food being conceptually weird, gross, and scary, then it probably tastes amazing. or at least inoffensive.

this is because in my experience americans for the most part (give or take a few exceptions by region) think eating literally anything other than beef, chicken, bread, eggs, peanut butter jelly sandwitches, ketchup, and disgusting cloyingly artificial brown sludge soda is insurmountably weird, gross, and scary.

[quillkiller]

pandora doing regulus makeup for cheerleading, like a smoky eyeshadow and a nude lipstick that makes regulus eyes pop out more and lily watching from the bleachers in her ugly band uniform, wanting so desperately to go up to him

see this is so cute and i can get behind it but…. my pandora thinks reg’s cheerleading is so lame unfortunately :/

all of the skittles do but they show up to support him anyway because they’re all codependent on each other and loyal to the bone even while disregarding each others boundaries on a regular basis (re: the skittles have a book club where they meet up every week to go through regs diary…)

also my pandora doesn’t use makeup!! it would make her appearance too different from evans and neither of them would ever want that. makeup doesn’t make any sense to her and she knows absolutely nothing about it. she’s the kind of girl who would look down on people getting plastic surgery because the idea of changing yourself is insane to her <- heavily connected to her needing to be as similar to evan as possible. <- doesn’t include gender affirming surgeries and both her and evan discuss at length if one of them should transition so that they’re the same gender. they’re so silly and their main character trait is their bone deep need to be the same person

anyway…. went off on a tangent sorry… but my reg is also most often masc!! so he doesn’t really see the appeal of makeup either i’m afraid :/ he likes the glitter and putting it on his face before cheer practice and what not but that’s as close to doing his makeup as he gets. my dyke reg looks and acts almost exactly like he always did except that there’s this calm vibe coming off of him now. something a little more free and content. instead of the aristocratic clothes he wears big shirts and big pants. maybe he grows his hair out a little longer than before… but other than that he looks the same mostly <3

however i love the idea of pandora throwing glitter at his face before cheer!!!! i think she would love that and i think reg would let her. he doesn’t really care about how it looks, just wants glitter on his face !! and i imagine lily seeing them and being SO jealous and upset and misunderstanding the whole situation…. SHE wants to be the one to throw glitter all over regulus .. and then lick it off even if its probably gross……