#aimed at the community in general its fine for a specific post to be about one thing

[cascadianights]

I dare someone to tell me on that last post that trans men actually have it way better once they transition and def aren't excluded by far more from our own community than trans women lmao fucking try me "queer womxns space for femmes and nonbinary people!!" asslickers

[thecomfywriter]

🤖Writer Questionnaire Tag🤖

Thank you for the tag @the-golden-comet! I read through it and WHOOF she's hefty so buckle in and let's get into it.

｡ ₊°༺❤︎༻°₊ ｡

How long have you had your writing Tumblr/Writeblr? A fast and loose estimate is fine!

I started this blog during the pandemic, I believe? Early 2020, or maybe spring.

What led you to create it?

I had finished the 4th (and blasphemous) draft of ToV and, at the time, I was super convinced that was THE draft, so I wanted to find beta readers. Happened upon tumblr's writing community, decided to write a couple of writing tips that I had learned over the years. The posts garnered traction and the rest is history.

What’s your favorite thing about the Writeblr community?

THE VIBES. THE ATMOSPHERE. I LOVE THE PASSION IN THE AIR. In all seriousness, I truly do love seeing the preservation of art without the need to churn things out like its content. Tumblr just feels like hangout spot in general vs a social media, and the writeblr community feels like an after-school writing club, which I absolutely adore.

What’s one thing you’d like your mutuals to know about you?

My submissions? Inbox? DMs? Always open. If you guys need advice or have a question, are curious about something book related or writing related, you are always welcome to shoot me a message. I am a full-time student and i do work 2 jobs, but i WILL get to your ask. And if I feel like its going to be delayed, I'll let you know. But i love questions. I love being able to help people with specific writing concerns, especially since I have dabbled in so many different genres of writing since i was six bro. I gotchu. Also, we're all friends here. It's all lax. If you just want to shoot a random DM like, "bro do you want to be writer friends?" I WILL BE DOWN. I miss the community tabs on tumblr from 2020. I was in a writers groupchat and its where I met so many friends I still talk to. So yes. DM whenever, even if its just to ramble and yap. I too am a yapper.

Is there anything you’d like to see more of on your dash?

oc pictures or random scenes. I don't care if its the goofiest sketch alive. give it to me. also, more chill rambly style posts? even if its a small little update like: "yoohoo! starting a writing session. aiming for 3k words" YES.

WIP it Good

Which Works-in-Progress (WIPs) or writing projects are you noodling about, lately?

I had to search up what noodling meant lmao Honestly, CoS. I feel like the amount of attention editing ToV requires + school has stagnated my writing progress with CoS, which is fine, but also I really just want to binge read the entire series already???? Also, TIS. I've been casually outlining it but also binge-listening to the playlists (i make character playlists and book playlists with spreadsheets for what scene each song is a soundtrack too, fyi lmao). god, i love those playlists. they play like a movie in my head. OH! AND AONAS. AoNaS only exists in outlines, first drafts, quotes, sketches, and my fantasies. BUT MY GOD. It's the way I deadass quoted a line from the villain bearing his heart out to the heroine of that story in my speech at a NASA CONFERENCE. Not me deadass quoting MYSELF 😭

How long have you been working on them?

ToV -- since I was 7. CoS -- since I was 13. TIS -- since I was 5 (YEAH. IT PREDATES TOV) AoNaS -- 4/5 (she was the blueprint for all stories, truly)

Do you remember what inspired them/what got you started?

ToV -- I could not tell you what dark events inspired 6-year-old me to write such a sugar-coated gruesome tale, but I will assume it was my obsession for dragons CoS -- a poem and my personal life events. I wanted to write a character that made me feel hopeful again TIS -- my doll games (again... babes what....) AoNaS -- my role-play imaginary friend adventure games (think 'the floor is lava', but on steroids)

How much time, in your best estimation, do you spend thinking about them?

Unhealthy amounts. Copious amounts. I had a friend tell me once that she didn't like talking to me sometimes because it felt like my book was my entire personality 💀 Needless to say, I don't talk about my book to people in my personal life anymore unless they ask or they are my best friend. I just let it live in the background of my mind 20/24 hours in a day :))

When someone asks the dreaded, “What do you write about,” question, what do you usually say?

High political fantasy, but I dabble in a bunch of different genres. Name a genre and I probably wrote a story for it.

Let’s Rotate Blorbos

Name any characters you created.  Side characters, protagonists, antagonists, characters who’ve never been written, the first original abomination you ever pulled from your ass; whomever you’d like!

Ain't no way I'm doing the whole cast. I'll do ToV, CoS, and TIS Book 1's main characters, and that's it. For everyone's sanity's sake. The casts are simply too extensive. ToV: Alan, Caramel, Cara, Morreial, Hilbert, Markum, Shah, Jervee Iyzela, Jervee Revenold, Amara, Pietro CoS: Evan, Elenfa, Fawn, Riyzela, Raheer, Vaza-Ek, Qatya, Noctem, Aiyana, Alan, Caramel, Nyla, Mirza, Glamis, Morreial, Cara TIS Book 1: Her Highness Queen Naliya, Kiamu, Selven, Blaire, Ashely, Gyanste, Prince James, Kiya, Zeena, Leah, Katerina, Nicole, Brandon, Amaka

Who’s the most unhinged?

ToV: Caramel (little miss. 'accidentally commits arson more times than she can count') CoS: Evan (mr. 'i was explicitly told NOT to do this, so i did it anyways, and now i accidentally exploded a mountain and caused an avalanche') TIS: Zeena (little miss. 'i had to learn shapeshifting to assume different identities to escape my legacy of crimes')

Who comes the most naturally for you to write?

ToV: Alan or Caramel CoS: Evan TIS: Naliya

Do you ever cringe at them?

Listen... They have their flaws and sometimes they give me secondhand embarrassment with their poor decisions. Amaka literally has a whole ARC dedicated to self-sabotaging which is informally named "the secondhand embarrassment arc". So yes. They make me want to crawl into an ant-hole and disappear sometimes because babes... this is not how you represent the family name STOP

How much control do you feel you have over your characters?  AKA, do they ever “write themselves,” refuse to cooperate, or do things you didn’t expect? To what degree? Are some less cooperative than others?

No. These bastards are the most disobedient children I have ever parented. Autonomy this, Independence that! Look where that got you, folks! Traumatized, crying, throwing up, afraid, and having canon 'secondhand embarrassment arcs' GET UP AND LET ME HELP YOU PLS 😭😭😭I'm tired of watching y'all ruin your lives on the sidelines

Do you enjoy people asking questions about your characters? And do you have a preferred means of receiving said questions? For example, as Asks, as replies, as reblogs, as tag notes, as comments on AO3, etc.

Yes. Please do it more, it's never enough. I literally started a mockcast in 2019 with over 500 episodes now, all because I had so much I wanted to ramble and yap about when it came to my book, but I didn't want to bother my friends. So yes. Always. My inbow/submissions/DMs are ready. I have no preference. Give it all to me.

On writeblr engagement

What makes you want to follow another Writeblr account? Do you follow ‘em as you see ‘em, or take time scoping out the blog to make sure you align with its content? Do you follow based on WIPs, or vibes?

I like to do some mild stalking of their recent posts, and then whatever their pinned post is to get a general vibe of them, their writing style, their genres, their personality, the posts they engage in, and their wips. If I enjoy it and it entices me, I follow. Sometimes, I follow for the vibes, and by vibes I mean I see a follower notification and I'm like, "bet" and follow back. It honestly depends on my mood lmao.

What makes you decide against following?

If its a dead account with no interaction for a long duration of time. If the vibes are iffy. if they post or repost harmful rhetoric or promote non-inclusive spaces. Off-vibes and its a yuck yuck bye bye from me.

Do you interact with non-mutuals often?

If its cool and it shows up on my explore, I'm interacting. I don't really look at if I'm following or not following, or if they're following me. I take it on a post-per-post basis. The mutuality of our relationship doesn't take precedent as much as the content does. That being said, I don't get tagged in non-mutual posts a lot? And whenever I interact with a non-mutual, we end up becoming mutuals within the hour lmao. So do with that what you will.

Do your mutuals’ characters occupy space in your noodle?

I am once again confused by the noodle lingo 😭 If you mean if I think about my mutals' ocs, then yes! Tag games are so fun to participate in, but SO SO SO fun to read too. And reading little excerpts and whatnot from other writers is such a lovely experience to see where people's passions lie. But yes. Someone pls explain the noodle to me, I'm so lost.

｡ ₊°༺❤︎༻°₊ ｡

Thank you for the tag again @the-golden-comet! I'll be tagging the regular degular gang below. GO BUCKWILD GO CRAZY

TCW Tag squad: @satohqbanana @mysticstarlightduck @harps-for-days @the-golden-comet @did-i-do-this-write @aalinaaaaaaand @drchenquill @honeybewrites @paeliae-occasionally

Ask to be added. Demand to be removed. Both are your TCW community rights 😤

Happy Writing!

[freelancefuzion]

How Social Media Marketing Works?

Understanding Social Media Marketing: How It Works to Boost Your Online Presence

In today’s digital age, social media marketing has become an indispensable tool for businesses aiming to expand their reach, engage with their audience, and build a strong online presence. Whether you’re a small business owner, a marketer, or an entrepreneur, understanding how social media marketing works is crucial to your success. This guide will break down the mechanics of social media marketing, explaining its key components and offering insights into how you can leverage it to grow your brand.

For More Digital Marketing Tips Click Here

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing involves using platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others to promote your products, services, or brand. It’s a strategy that allows you to connect with your audience where they spend a significant amount of their time—on social media. By creating and sharing content tailored to your target audience, you can increase brand awareness, generate leads, and drive sales.

The Core Components of Social Media Marketing

Content Creation:

Content is the foundation of social media marketing. To captivate and engage your audience, you need to produce content that speaks directly to their interests and needs. This can include a variety of formats such as posts, videos, stories, and live streams. Effective content should not only be visually appealing and informative but also consistent with your brand’s voice and core values. The goal is to create material that resonates with your audience and encourages interaction

Audience Engagement:

Social media is more than a platform for broadcasting your message; it’s a space for meaningful interaction. Engaging with your audience involves actively responding to comments, joining conversations, and addressing their concerns. This two-way communication helps build trust, strengthens relationships, and fosters a sense of community around your brand. By showing that you value and listen to your audience, you enhance their connection to your brand and encourage ongoing engagement.

Social Media Advertising:

Paid advertising on social media platforms allows you to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors. This level of precision ensures that your content reaches the people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services. Social media ads can take many forms, including sponsored posts, carousel ads, video ads, and more.

Analytics and Metrics:

To understand the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts, it’s essential to track and analyze key metrics. These might include engagement rates, reach, impressions, click-through rates, and conversion rates. By analyzing this data, you can fine-tune your strategy to achieve better results.

How Social Media Marketing Works to Boost Your Brand

Building Brand Awareness:

Social media platforms offer a broad audience that can significantly enhance your brand’s visibility. By consistently sharing high-quality and relevant content, you can effectively increase your brand’s presence and make it more recognizable to potential customers. Regular engagement and strategic posting help to build a strong brand identity, making it easier for your audience to remember and recognize your brand amidst the digital noise

Driving Traffic to Your Website:

By sharing links to your website on social media, you can drive traffic to your site. Whether it’s a blog post, product page, or landing page, social media is an effective channel for guiding users to your website, where they can learn more about your offerings.

Generating Leads and Conversions:

Social media marketing is a powerful tool for lead generation. By offering valuable content, promotions, or exclusive deals, you can encourage your audience to take action—whether that’s signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or contacting your sales team.

Enhancing Customer Loyalty:

Regularly engaging with your audience on social media helps to build a loyal customer base. By providing excellent customer service, responding to feedback, and showing appreciation for your followers, you can create lasting relationships that lead to repeat business.

The Importance of Strategy in SMM

Success in social media marketing doesn’t happen by accident; it requires a well-thought-out strategy. Here’s how to create one:

Define Your Goals:

Clearly outlining your objectives is crucial for effective social media marketing. Decide what you want to accomplish—be it boosting brand awareness, generating sales, or cultivating a community. Setting specific, measurable goals will provide direction and focus for your strategy, ensuring that all your efforts align with your overarching business aims and deliver the results you’re aiming for.

Know Your Audience:

Gaining a deep understanding of your target audience is essential for creating compelling content. Examine their demographics, interests, pain points, and online behaviors to develop a well-rounded profile. This insight allows you to tailor your content to address their specific needs and preferences, making it more relevant and engaging. By aligning your content with what genuinely matters to your audience, you foster stronger relationships and drive more impactful interactions.

Choose the Right Platforms:

Selecting the right social media platforms is key, as each one serves different functions and reaches distinct audiences. Determine which platforms are most popular with your target audience and align with your business objectives. For instance, Instagram and Pinterest are excellent for visually-driven content and are ideal for brands focused on lifestyle and consumer products, while LinkedIn is better suited

Create a Content Calendar:

Establishing a content calendar is crucial for ensuring consistency and aligning your posts with your overall marketing strategy. By scheduling your content in advance, you maintain organization and provide a regular stream of engaging and relevant content to your audience. A strategic content calendar also allows you to synchronize your posts with important dates and promotional events, enhancing the effectiveness of your social media efforts.

Monitor and Adjust:

Social media landscapes shift rapidly, so it’s crucial to stay adaptable. Regularly evaluate the performance of your posts and ads, using data to gauge effectiveness and pinpoint areas for improvement. Stay agile and be prepared to adjust your strategy based on these insights, ensuring your social media approach remains relevant and drives optimal results.

Conclusion

Understanding how social media marketing works is essential for anyone looking to grow their brand in today’s competitive digital landscape. By mastering the core components—content creation, audience engagement, social media advertising, and analytics—you can build a robust online presence that drives results. Remember, the key to success is a well-defined strategy that’s continuously refined based on insights and feedback. With the right approach, social media marketing can be a powerful engine for your business growth.

[rishiaca]

ChatGPT and Machine Learning: Advancements in Conversational AI

Introduction: In recent years, the field of natural language processing (NLP) has witnessed significant advancements with the development of powerful language models like ChatGPT. Powered by machine learning techniques, ChatGPT has revolutionized conversational AI by enabling human-like interactions with computers. This article explores the intersection of ChatGPT and machine learning, discussing their applications, benefits, challenges, and future prospects.

The Rise of ChatGPT: ChatGPT is an advanced language model developed by OpenAI that utilizes deep learning algorithms to generate human-like responses in conversational contexts. It is based on the underlying technology of GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), a state-of-the-art model in NLP, which has been fine-tuned specifically for chat-based interactions.

How ChatGPT Works: ChatGPT employs a technique called unsupervised learning, where it learns from vast amounts of text data without explicit instructions or human annotations. It utilizes a transformer architecture, which allows it to process and generate text in a parallel and efficient manner.

The model is trained using a massive dataset and learns to predict the next word or phrase given the preceding context.

Applications of ChatGPT: Customer Support: ChatGPT can be deployed in customer service applications, providing instant and personalized assistance to users, answering frequently asked questions, and resolving common issues.

Virtual Assistants: ChatGPT can serve as intelligent virtual assistants, capable of understanding and responding to user queries, managing calendars, setting reminders, and performing various tasks.

Content Generation: ChatGPT can be used for generating content, such as blog posts, news articles, and creative writing, with minimal human intervention.

Language Translation: ChatGPT's language understanding capabilities make it useful for real-time language translation services, breaking down barriers and facilitating communication across different languages.

Benefits of ChatGPT: Enhanced User Experience: ChatGPT offers a more natural and interactive conversational experience, making interactions with machines feel more human-like.

Increased Efficiency: ChatGPT automates tasks that would otherwise require human intervention, resulting in improved efficiency and reduced response times.

Scalability: ChatGPT can handle multiple user interactions simultaneously, making it scalable for applications with high user volumes.

Challenges and Ethical Considerations: Bias and Fairness: ChatGPT's responses can sometimes reflect biases present in the training data, highlighting the importance of addressing bias and ensuring fairness in AI systems.

Misinformation and Manipulation: ChatGPT's ability to generate realistic text raises concerns about the potential spread of misinformation or malicious use. Ensuring the responsible deployment and monitoring of such models is crucial.

Future Directions: Fine-tuning and Customization: Continued research and development aim to improve the fine-tuning capabilities of ChatGPT, enabling users to customize the model for specific domains or applications.

Ethical Frameworks: Efforts are underway to establish ethical guidelines and frameworks for the responsible use of conversational AI models like ChatGPT, mitigating potential risks and ensuring accountability.

Conclusion: In conclusion, the emergence of ChatGPT and its integration into the field of machine learning has opened up new possibilities for human-computer interaction and natural language understanding. With its ability to generate coherent and contextually relevant responses, ChatGPT showcases the advancements made in language modeling and conversational AI.

We have explored the various aspects and applications of ChatGPT, including its training process, fine-tuning techniques, and its contextual understanding capabilities. Moreover, the concept of transfer learning has played a crucial role in leveraging the model's knowledge and adapting it to specific tasks and domains.

While ChatGPT has shown remarkable progress, it is important to acknowledge its limitations and potential biases. The continuous efforts by OpenAI to gather user feedback and refine the model reflect their commitment to improving its performance and addressing these concerns. User collaboration is key to shaping the future development of ChatGPT and ensuring it aligns with societal values and expectations.

The integration of ChatGPT into various applications and platforms demonstrates its potential to enhance collaboration, streamline information gathering, and assist users in a conversational manner. Developers can harness the power of ChatGPT by leveraging its capabilities through APIs, enabling seamless integration and expanding the reach of conversational AI.

Looking ahead, the field of machine learning and conversational AI holds immense promise. As ChatGPT and similar models continue to evolve, the focus should remain on user privacy, data security, and responsible AI practices. Collaboration between humans and machines will be crucial, as we strive to develop AI systems that augment human intelligence and provide valuable assistance while maintaining ethical standards.

With further advancements in training techniques, model architectures, and datasets, we can expect even more sophisticated and context-aware language models in the future. As the dialogue between humans and machines becomes more seamless and natural, the potential for innovation and improvement in various domains is vast.

In summary, ChatGPT represents a significant milestone in the field of machine learning, bringing us closer to human-like conversation and intelligent interactions. By harnessing its capabilities responsibly and striving for continuous improvement, we can leverage the power of ChatGPT to enhance user experiences, foster collaboration, and push the boundaries of what is possible in the realm of artificial intelligence.

[croakings]

SO. sorry this is going to be deranged i'm not proofreading this

so i've been writing a lot recently, and this particular project involves a language and culture i'm making up. and it's got me thinking about language, and communication, and lying.

and this is probably a very autistic realization, but it's hit me that usually when people lie, what they are trying to convey— and like, we're ignoring the ethics of it, this post is devoid of judgement one way or another, i'm just examining this thought— is a request for an emotional response from someone that the truth is less or unlikely to get across as effectively or as easily.

like, normal example, totally excusable: "my wife is in the hospital," when it's your girlfriend in the hospital. factually untrue! but what one wants people to hear is "someone i love and want to spend the rest of my life with is in dire straits and therefore so am i, please excuse anything in my behavior that may be caused by this," essentially. or like you can swap wife/girlfriend with sibling/best friend or aunt/neighbor or whatever. what you're trying to get across is the magnitude of the relationship rather than communicating the nature of the relationship itself.

we have words for that! like, yes, it's lying to use the wrong words, technically, to "trick" someone into understanding how close whatever given person is to you, and how much their condition is affecting you, but! also, i do have to say, in that particular instance i do have to say that, the primary goal of language being communication...... it's interesting! the facts are untrue. but the gravity of the circumstance was conveyed clearly with intention, which is to say, the emotional impact was increased by sacrificing literal clarity. this is basically what hyperbole does!!!!

most lying does that, doesn't it? most lies that i can think of are in some way in service to emotion above like, anything else. someone wanting to spare themselves someone else's emotion ("i'm fine", "i didn't do that", "i don't want this, you take it") and this is....... in a way, strictly speaking, effective communication. it's. hm.

like, for the record, i'm not pro-lying, and also, to reiterate, it's also ineffective communication, because it's factually untrue, which means again that however much an aim was achieved or a meaning conveyed you do it at the expense of one whole half of the venture. but it's interesting, isn't it? how much lying is usually angling for a specific impact, or to gain some form of ease and/or expediency.

i feel like i'm probably getting this across poorly which is also like, really funny, but what prompted this is like......... language is an imperfect tool! we know this. speaking (or whatever) is always an act of translation, and in translation something is always lost. like, even if that thing is only time. one is never able to express anything exactly as quickly as the original; thoughts take time to parcel up and deliver, or come out poorly if not mangled if at all recognizably. when going from one literal language to another, you have to decide whether you want to be more accurate literally, in impact, or in delivery, so respectively and with the simplest example you have to decide if when you translate an idiom you do so verbatim, or with an equivalent, and then whether or not you explain your choice and/or its value. because like, in an unattainable "perfect" translation, you could communicate both the meaning and the trappings of its delivery seamlessly and simply in about the same space as it was originally given more or less immediately. instead, because we can't do that, you can sacrifice to some degree either the original words, their original impact, or the original delivery, by again respectively changing the words altogether, losing the impact (generally also altogether), or losing the directness/straight forward nature of the communication by inserting an info blurb. and of course any kind of translation needs some extra degree of time, even just in its delivery. you lose things! you have to decide which things are most valuable to you to allow you to be "truest". like, which part of any given sentence is most important ? it varies, right? and sometimes one can effect another, like, what if brevity is important to the impact? or conversely, what if something specific has to be communicated in a long-winded and round-about way to have the same impact, but it's tricky to manage doing so without losing the clarity? what do you sacrifice? the meaning, the impact, or the delivery? does that make sense? and you're probably always going to lose time.

so, lying!!!!! it's sacrificing meaning for the other two, is what i was trying to say earlier. it's an imperfect translation!!!!! in one sense!!! but it is a translation!!!!! isn't that interesting?? actually no, sorry, most ethically speaking it's 2 sacrifices; meaning and delivery. like, as i kept saying, the facts are untrue (meaning), and at some point for the sake of clarity it'll be necessary to be like "oh no, sorry, actually it was [the factual truth], i just said [x] because [some form of expected expediency/ease], [explanation of that choice]." (<- delivery.) but y’know with lying with ill intentions you do get to skip that part, and in that case the lack of correcting by revisiting/extending the delivery is part of the communication, whereby you are implicitly saying something like "fuck you, also". or possibly "fuck me," idk, lying can contain multitudes. which!!!!!!!! isn't that interesting??? talking!!!!!!!!!!!! communication!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! how and why and in what ways we say things........... the choices we make and the reasons we make those choices....... the sacrifices that are and are not acceptable to make, and in which contexts, in order to come across as you intend to...........

idk i'm just turning this around like a shiny rock in my hands. like, also, i do know that lying is done with the intent to deceive, and also that lying (derogatory) is done maliciously, with either the intent to harm or at least a lack of intent of care, but. hm. isn't it interesting, what you can learn when you look at how people lie, and how those things can change based on why you think they were lying? they still communicated effectively!!!!!!! they did it on purpose!!!!!!!!!!!!! they made those choices for a reason. that still..... tells something!!!!

even imperfect communication can, in its flaws, tell us something!!!!!!!! does someone sacrifice time, meaning, impact, delivery? why? in what contexts? with intent? for what purpose? isn't it interesting????????????????

[spacemakerr]

Digital Marketting

Digital marketing is the use of online platforms and technologies to promote products, services, or brands to a targeted audience. It involves strategies like search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media engagement, and email campaigns to drive traffic, build brand awareness, and generate leads or sales. By leveraging digital tools and data analytics, businesses can reach their audience more effectively and measure the success of their marketing efforts in real time.

The Power of Digital Marketing: Transforming Business in the Modern Era

In today's fast-paced digital world, marketing has evolved far beyond traditional methods. Digital marketing, the use of online platforms and technologies to reach and engage with consumers, has become a cornerstone for businesses aiming to thrive in the 21st century. Its dynamic nature and wide array of tools offer unprecedented opportunities for brand growth, customer engagement, and market penetration.

Understanding Digital Marketing

Digital marketing encompasses various strategies and channels, including search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and more. Each of these elements plays a crucial role in crafting a comprehensive digital strategy that can drive measurable results.

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO is the practice of optimizing your website and content to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). By improving elements like keyword relevance, site structure, and user experience, businesses can enhance their visibility and attract organic traffic. Effective SEO practices ensure that your brand is easily discoverable by potential customers actively searching for relevant products or services.

2. Social Media Marketing: Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn offer unique opportunities for brand engagement. Through targeted advertising, regular posts, and interactive content, businesses can build a loyal community, drive traffic, and foster relationships with their audience. Social media marketing allows for real-time communication and provides valuable insights into consumer behavior.

3. Content Marketing: Content marketing involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant content to attract and engage a target audience. This can include blog posts, videos, infographics, e-books, and more. High-quality content not only establishes your brand as an industry authority but also nurtures relationships with potential customers by addressing their needs and interests.

4. Email Marketing: Despite being one of the oldest digital marketing channels, email marketing remains highly effective. Personalized email campaigns can drive conversions, build customer loyalty, and keep your audience informed about promotions, new products, and company updates. Segmenting your email list and crafting compelling messages are key to maximizing the impact of your campaigns.

5. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising: PPC advertising allows businesses to display ads on search engines and social media platforms, paying only when users click on the ads. This model provides a cost-effective way to drive targeted traffic to your website. PPC campaigns can be finely tuned to reach specific demographics, interests, and behaviors, making it easier to achieve a higher return on investment (ROI).

The Benefits of Digital Marketing

1. Increased Reach: Digital marketing allows businesses to reach a global audience, breaking geographical barriers that once limited market potential. With the right strategies, even small businesses can compete on a larger stage.

2. Cost-Effectiveness: Compared to traditional marketing methods, digital marketing often requires a lower budget and offers more precise targeting options. This efficiency ensures that marketing dollars are spent effectively, reaching those most likely to convert.

3. Measurable Results: One of the greatest advantages of digital marketing is the ability to track and measure performance in real time. Analytics tools provide insights into campaign effectiveness, allowing businesses to adjust strategies and optimize for better results.

4. Enhanced Customer Engagement: Digital marketing channels facilitate direct interaction between businesses and consumers. This engagement fosters trust, builds brand loyalty, and provides valuable feedback that can inform future marketing efforts.

5. Flexibility and Adaptability: The digital landscape is constantly evolving, and digital marketing allows businesses to adapt quickly to new trends and technologies. This agility is crucial for staying ahead of competitors and meeting changing consumer expectations.

Crafting an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

To harness the full potential of digital marketing, businesses need a well-defined strategy. Here are key steps to developing an effective approach:

1. Define Your Goals: Identify what you want to achieve with your digital marketing efforts, whether it's increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or boosting sales. Clear goals will guide your strategy and help measure success.

2. Know Your Audience: Understand who your target audience is, including their preferences, behaviors, and pain points. Tailor your marketing messages and channels to resonate with your audience and address their needs.

3. Choose the Right Channels: Select digital marketing channels that align with your goals and audience. Each platform offers unique benefits, so focus on those that will provide the best return on investment for your business.

4. Create Compelling Content: Develop content that is relevant, engaging, and valuable to your audience. High-quality content will drive traffic, build credibility, and encourage interactions with your brand.

5. Monitor and Optimize: Continuously track the performance of your digital marketing campaigns using analytics tools. Analyze data to identify what's working and what needs improvement, and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is a powerful tool that can transform how businesses connect with their audience, drive growth, and achieve their goals. By leveraging the diverse range of digital channels and strategies available, companies can navigate the complexities of the modern market and establish a strong online presence. Embracing digital marketing is not just a choice but a necessity for success in today's interconnected world.

[jcmarchi]

BrushNet: Plug and Play Image Inpainting with Dual Branch Diffusion

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BrushNet: Plug and Play Image Inpainting with Dual Branch Diffusion

Image inpainting is one of the classic problems in computer vision, and it aims to restore masked regions in an image with plausible and natural content. Existing work employing traditional image inpainting techniques like Generative Adversarial Networks or GANS, and Variational Auto-Encoders or VAEs often require auxiliary hand-engineered features but at the same time, do not deliver satisfactory results. Over the past few years, diffusion-based methods have gained popularity within the computer vision community owing to their remarkable high-quality image generation capabilities, output diversity, and fine-grained control. Initial attempts at employing diffusion models for text-guided image inpainting modified the standard denoising strategy by sampling the masked regions from a pre-trained diffusion model, and the unmasked areas from the given image. Although these methods resulted in satisfactory performance across simple image inpainting tasks, they struggled with complex mask shapes, text prompts, and image contents that resulted in an overall lack of coherence. The lack of coherence observed in these methods can be owed primarily to their limited perceptual knowledge of mask boundaries, and unmasked image region context. 

Despite the advancements, research, and development of these models over the past few years, image inpainting is still a major hurdle for computer vision developers. Current adaptations of diffusion models for image inpainting tasks involve modifying the sampling strategy, or the development of inpainting-specific diffusion models often suffer from reduced image quality, and inconsistent semantics. To tackle these challenges, and pave the way forward for image inpainting models, in this article, we will be talking about BrushNet, a novel plug and play dual-branch engineered framework that embeds pixel-level masked image features into any pre-trained diffusion model, thus guaranteeing coherence, and enhanced outcome on image inpainting tasks. The BrushNet framework introduces a novel paradigm under which the framework divides the image features and noisy latent into separate branches. The division of image features and noisy latents diminishes the learning load for the model drastically, and facilitates a nuanced incorporation of essential masked image information in a hierarchical fashion. In addition to the BrushNet framework, we will also be talking about BrushBench, and BrushData that facilitate segmentation-based performance assessment and image inpainting training respectively. 

This article aims to cover the BrushNet framework in depth, and we explore the mechanism, the methodology, the architecture of the framework along with its comparison with state of the art frameworks. So let’s get started. 

Image inpainting, a method that attempts to restore the mission regions of an image while maintaining overall coherence has been a long standing problem in the computer vision field, and it has troubled developers and researchers for a few years now. Image inpainting finds its applications across a wide variety of computer vision tasks including image editing, and virtual try-ons. Recently, diffusion models like Stable Diffusion, and Stable Diffusion 1.5 have demonstrated remarkable ability to generate high-quality images, and they provide users the flexibility to control the semantic and structural controls. The remarkable potential of diffusion models is what has prompted researchers to resort to diffusion models for high-quality image inpainting tasks that align with the input text prompts. 

The methods employed by traditional diffusion-based text guided inpainting frameworks can be split into two categories, Sampling Strategy Modification and Dedicated Inpainting Models. The Sampling strategy modification method modifies the standard denoising process by sampling the masked regions from a pre-trained diffusion model, and copy-pastes the unmasked regions from the given image in each denoising step. Although sampling strategy modification approaches can be implemented in arbitrary diffusion models, they often result in incoherent inpainting results since they have limited perceptual knowledge of mask boundaries, and unmasked image region context. On the other hand, dedicated inpainting models fine-tune a image inpainting model designed specifically by expanding the dimensions of the input channel of the base diffusion model to incorporate corrupted image and masks. While dedicated inpainting models enable the diffusion model to generate more satisfactory results with specialized shape-aware and content aware models, it might or might not be the best architectural design for image inpainting models. 

As demonstrated in the following image, dedicated inpainting models fuse masked image latent, noisy latent, text, and mask at an early stage. The architectural design of such dedicated inpainting models easily influences the masked image features, and prevents the subsequent layers in the UNet architecture from obtaining pure masked image features due to the text influence. Furthermore, handling the generation and condition in a single branch imposes further burden on the UNet architecture, and since these approaches also require fine-tuning in different variations of the diffusion backbone, these approaches are often time-exhaustive with limited transferability. 

It might appear that adding an additional branch dedicated to extract masked image features might be an adequate solution to the problems mentioned above, however, existing frameworks often result in extracting and inserting inadequate information when applied directly to inpainting. As a result, existing frameworks like ControlNet yield unsatisfactory results when compared against dedicated inpainting models. To tackle this issue in the most effective manner possible, the BrushNet framework introduces an additional branch to the original diffusion network, and thus creates a more suitable architecture for image inpainting tasks. The design and architecture of the BrushNet framework can be summed up in three points. 

Instead of initializing convolution layers randomly, the BrushNet framework implements a VAE encoder to process the masked image. As a result, the BrushNet framework is able to extract the image features for adaptation to the UNet distribution more effectively. 

The BrishNet framework gradually incorporates the full UNet feature layer by layer into the pre-trained UNet architecture, a hierarchical approach that enables dense per-pixel control. 

The BrushNet framework removes text cross-attention from the UNet component to ensure pure image information is considered in the additional branch. Furthermore, the BrushNet model also proposes to implement a blurred blending strategy to attain better consistency along with a higher range of controllability in unmasked regions of the image. 

BrushNet : Method and Architecture

The following figure gives us a brief overview of the BrushNet framework. 

As it can be observed, the framework employs a dual-branch strategy for masked image guidance insertion, and uses blending operations with a blurred mask to ensure better preservation of unmasked regions. It is worth noting that the BrushNet framework is capable of adjusting the added scale to achieve flexible control. For a given masked image input, and the mask, the BrushNet model outputs an inpainted image. The model first downsample the mask to accommodate the size of the latent, and the masked image is fed as an input to the VAE encoder to align the distribution of the latent space. The model then concatenates the masked image latent, the noisy latent, and the downsampled mask, and uses it as the input. The features that the model extracts are then added to the pre-trained UNet layer after a zero convolution block. After denoising, the model blends the masked image and the generated image with a blurred mask. 

Masked Image Guidance

The BrushNet framework inserts the masked image feature into the pre-trained diffusion network using an additional branch, that separates the feature extraction of masked images from the process of image generation explicitly. The input is formed by concatenating the masked image latent, noisy latent, and the downsampled mask. To be more specific, the noisy latent provides information for image generation during the current generation process, and helps the framework enhance the semantic coherence of the masked image feature. The BrushNet framework then extracts the masked image latent from the masked image using a Variational AutoEncoder. Furthermore, the framework employs cubic interpolation to downsample the mask in an attempt to ensure the mask size aligns with the masked image latent, and the noisy latent. To process the masked image features, the BrushNet framework implements a clone of the pre-trained diffusion model, and excludes the cross-attention layers of the diffusion model. The reason is the pre-trained weights of the diffusion model serve as a strong prior for extracting the features of the masked image, and excluding the cross-attention layers ensure that the model only considers pure image information within the additional branch. The BrushNet framework inserts the features into the frozen diffusion model layer by layer, thus enabling hierarchical dense per-pixel control, and also employs zero convolution layers to establish a connection between the trainable BrushNet model, and the locked model, ensuring the harmful noise have no influence over the hidden states in the trainable copy during the initial training stages. 

Blending Operation

As mentioned earlier, conducting the blending operation in latent space resizes the masks that often results in several inaccuracies, and the BrushNet framework encounters a similar issue when it resizes the mask to match the size of the latent space. Furthermore, it is worth noting that encoding and decoding operations in Variational AutoEncoders have inherent limited operations, and may not ensure complete image reconstruction. To ensure the framework reconstructs a fully consistent image of the unmasked region, existing works have implemented different techniques like copying the unmasked regions from the original image. Although the approach works, it often results in a lack of semantic coherence in the generation of the final results. On the other hand, other methods like adopting latent blending operations face difficulty in preserving the desired information in the unmasked regions. 

Flexible Control

The architectural design of the BrushNet framework makes it a suitable choice for plug and play integrations inherently to various pre-trained diffusion models, and enables flexible preservation scale. Since the BrishNet framework does not alter the weights of the pre-trained diffusion model, developers have the flexibility to integrate it as a plug and play component with a fine-tuned diffusion model, allowing easy adoption and experimentation with pre-trained models. Furthermore, developers also have the option to control the preservation scale of the unmasked regions by incorporating the features of the BrushNet model into the frozen diffusion model with the given weight w that determines the influence of the BrushNet framework on the preservation scale, offering developers the ability to adjust the desired levels of preservation. Finally, the BrushNet framework allows users to adjust the blurring scale, and decide whether or not to implement the blurring operation, therefore easily customizing the preservation scale of the unmasked regions, making room for flexible adjustments and fine-grained control over the image inpainting process. 

BrushNet : Implementation and Results

To analyze its results, the BrushNet framework proposes BrushBench, a segmentation-based image inpainting dataset with over 600 images, with each image accompanied by a human-annotated mask, and caption annotation. The images in the benchmark dataset are distributed evenly between natural and artificial images, and also ensures even distribution among different categories, enabling a fair evaluation across different categories. To enhance the analysis of the inpainting tasks even further, the BrushNet framework categorizes the dataset into two distinct parts on the basis of the methods used: segmentation-based, and brush masks. 

Quantitative Comparison

The following table compares the BrushNet framework against existing diffusion-based image inpainting models on the BrushBench dataset with the Stable Diffusion as the base model. 

As it can be observed, the BrushNet framework demonstrates remarkable efficiency across masked region preservation, text alignment, and image quality. Furthermore, models like Stable Diffusion Inpainting, HD-Painter, PowerPaint, and others demonstrate strong performance on image inside-inpainting tasks, although they fail to replicate their performance on outside-inpainting tasks especially in terms of text alignment and image quality. Overall, the BrushNet framework delivers the strongest results. 

Furthermore, the following table compares the BrushNet framework against existing diffusion-based image inpainting models on the EditBench dataset, and the performance is comparable to the one observed on the BrushBench dataset. The results indicate the BrushNet framework delivers strong performance across a wide range of image inpainting tasks with different mask types. 

Qualitative Comparison

The following figure qualitatively compares the BrushNet framework against existing image inpainting methods, with results covering artificial intelligence and natural images across different inpainting tasks including  random mask inpainting, segmentation mask inside inpainting, and segmentation mask outside-inpainting. 

As it can be observed, the BrushNet framework delivers remarkable results in the coherence of the unmasked region, and the coherent regions, and successfully realizes the awareness of the background information owing to the implementation of the dual-branch decoupling approach. Furthermore, the untouched branch of the pre-trained diffusion model also provides the advantage of covering different data domains like anime and painting better, resulting in better performance across different scenarios. 

Final Thoughts

In this article we have talked about BrushNet, a novel plug and play dual-branch engineered framework that embeds pixel-level masked image features into any pre-trained diffusion model, thus guaranteeing coherence, and enhanced outcome on image inpainting tasks. The BrushNet framework introduces a novel paradigm under which the framework divides the image features and noisy latent into separate branches. The division of image features and noisy latents diminishes the learning load for the model drastically, and facilitates a nuanced incorporation of essential masked image information in a hierarchical fashion. In addition to the BrushNet framework, we will also be talking about BrushBench, and BrushData that facilitate segmentation-based performance assessment and image inpainting training respectively. 

[universalinfo]

A Closer Look at Carbon Black: Quality You Can Count On

When it comes to the intricate world of industrial products and materials, few components can claim their significance and widespread use as carbon black. This fine black powder plays a crucial role in numerous industries, from automobile manufacturing to the production of inks and paints. As such, partnering with a reliable carbon black supplier is paramount to ensure consistency and quality. In this post, we’ll delve into the critical attributes that make a carbon black supplier truly dependable and why you should never settle for anything less than the best.

The Importance of Purity and Consistency

Choosing a carbon black supplier who prioritizes purity and consistency is a game-changer. Carbon black, in its essence, should be free from contaminants to perform optimally. Industries that use carbon black in their processes or products need to be confident that the material they receive is of consistent quality, batch after batch. Any deviation can have repercussions, affecting the quality of the end product. For example, in tire manufacturing, a slight inconsistency in carbon black can compromise tire strength and longevity. Therefore, always opt for a supplier who has stringent quality control measures in place and who understands the pivotal role of purity in carbon black applications.

Responsiveness and Efficient Delivery

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While carbon black is undeniably essential, it’s equally important to consider its impact on the environment. An outstanding carbon black supplier does not just focus on the product but also its larger impact. Sustainable practices, such as recycling or using energy-efficient methods, show a supplier’s commitment to a greener future. Moreover, ethical practices in sourcing and production ensure that the carbon black you’re procuring is not only of top-notch quality but also produced without exploiting any resources or individuals. Always partner with suppliers who are transparent about their practices and are committed to making a positive difference.

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Flexibility and Customization

The vastness of industries that utilize carbon black, from rubber compounds to pigments, means that one size doesn’t fit all. A premier carbon black supplier understands this variability. They don’t just offer a generic product but aim to understand your unique requirements. For instance, the carbon black used in a high-performance tire might differ from that in a printer cartridge. The ability to offer bespoke solutions, cater to specific particle sizes or grades, and even adapt to changing requirements demonstrates a supplier’s expertise and commitment. This adaptability can be a crucial factor, especially when your production needs evolve or when you’re innovating a new product.

Technical Support and Knowledge Sharing

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Conclusion

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Learn More:Organic Filler Materials

Carbon Black Fillers

[felidthing]

there is a weird attitude around special interests. for the most part people are fine with whatever specific thing youre into, and you get varying results on how much someone will listen to/exist around any prolonged talking about it. most people will accept that your "special interest" is "thing i really really like. favorite thing" but that isnt the full scope of what restricted interests are.

im mainly thinking about this because ive remembered again that almost all books ive read outside of school, for as long as i can remember, have been the warriors series. ive read and enjoyed other books when i havent had access to warriors, but absolutely nothing compares to the hold warriors has on me. this is a series aimed at preteens that ive been reading since i was 8. im almost 22. i havent read most classic literature or YA novels or much of any fiction actually aimed at my age group. i have read even less nonfiction. i read warriors. i talk a lot about warriors. i only care about warriors.

im aware its a crying shame that i dont read much. sometimes i wish i read more than warriors. but i extremely do not appreciate it when people make posts about how bad it is that people arent reading more, or arent reading the right kinds of things, as if its a moral failing or the sole reason there are bad opinions online (sometimes straight up saying or implying this). i dont appreciate it when these posts come onto my dash. people arent bad or failures because you dont think theyre doing reading right. i know that a lack of experience/exposure to Critical Thinking that certain books make you do can have negative impacts on how someone thinks or communicates/interacts, but i really dont think its helpful to give this unsolicited advice with all its implications and generalization and assumptions

this is specifically about special interests so i havent gone into the other reasons people dont/cant read in a satisfactory way to internet strangers but boy howdy it gets messy when this unsolicited advice generalizes so hard

[rantrambles]

Ever get so upset you make a Tumblr account to vent?

I haven’t even listened to The Penumbra Podcast yet but it’s on my list because it’s insanely popular and the cosplays I’ve seen are hot as hell (A+ to all the cosplayers I’ve seen you’ve done great work). Now, with the recent news surrounding the podcast, I’ll wait till it’s done if I ever do get into it. I’m Asian and part of the LGBT community but I’m not nonbinary so I can’t say much about the trans represention in the art but I wanted to add my two cents on the matter as a person of color and someone examining the situation from the outside. Also, before I get deeply into it, I’m not the only person of color with opinions on this matter so if people have their own frustrations and criticism with the racism in The Penumbra Podcast and/or the new artist they hired, definitely listen to them too. These are my own personal opinions, and I’m sure other people will disagree and that’s fine. We’re all going to have different views on this so bear that in mind. Also, feel free to correct me or add anything if I’ve missed some information. Here’s a great breakdown of the whole situation for those that don’t know what happened. Finally, I was very hesitant to post this, but I felt it was important because I make a statement at the end on how race should be presented in a podcast format so if you are interested in making a podcast and want to have a diverse range of characters, please skip to the end to read those thoughts.

I’ll start off by saying, I’m not even that upset with the new artist that The Penumbra Podcast hired. I know that statement alone is controversial but I don't personally know them, and I’m not going to judge who they are as a person by a few pieces of art they’ve made. They are the least of the problems that I have here. Since the announcement and the backlash, I’ve been scrolling through the artist’s Instagram account and I can tell why people find the designs offensive, but I’m also comparing the designs to the artist’s other work, and I honestly believe that’s just their style. They’ve exaggerated the features of just about every character they’ve made, regardless of race or gender. From what I’ve seen the sharp angles and overly round curves in the anatomy that make some of the character’s features more jarring are how they prefer to draw. I’m sure they’re capable of drawing more realistic proportions but for the most part they’re art aims to call attention, be bold, and create distinguished features. Not inherently a bad thing on its own.

And yeah I’d understand the issue if this were a scenario where the artist heard how these characters acted in the podcast and thought “hey, obviously this character is a black woman because they are super strong and therefore must have big muscles, no other woman could look like that” or “hey, this character has to be Asian because they act super seductive sometimes better draw them as such.” But from my understanding the race was already decided by previous official artists and a general description of the characters were already generated by the audience, similar to how The Magnus Archives leaned towards drawing scrawny Jon with black, greying hair and dark skin. The new artists couldn’t really change those features even if those features aren’t described in canon because a depiction that strayed too far from popular fandom interpretation would make the character’s unrecognizable to the fanbase. 

I think the reason this became such a big issue for most people is because the new Penumbra artist used their exaggerated art style when making these characters and people of color and nonbinary folks already see themselves drawn as these exaggerated caricatures all the time (with those images being used to further discriminate against them). I’m sure the artist didn’t mean for their art to be offensive, but that of course doesn’t change how it was received. 

According to some, the poses and expressions the artists chose did not fully represent the characters entirely and only served to further perpetuate harmful stereotypes, and I’ll have to take their word for it because I still haven’t listened to the podcast so I have no idea how the characters act. But again much of the criticism is based on the one line-up and doing a deeper dive into the artist’s work I managed to find artwork that was much less offensive. Here some art where Vespa is depicted in a non-violent pose and one where Vespa is in a threatening pose but not an overly violent one. Here is Peter drawn in a non-seductive pose. Hopefully, the artist truly does keep the criticisms in mind as they work on the new official art. I’m just not the type of person that wants to get the pitchforks out and cause this particular person to lose a job they seemed really excited about over their old character line-up, especially when that person is also part of a marginalized group.

Again, that’s just my opinion on that particular artist. Those who are offended by their art are still valid in how they feel, and the artist should absolutely take their criticism to heart to better how they represent the characters.

What I’m more upset about is that I think The Penumbra Podcast should never have released official art for their characters in the first place and that’s their mistake that they refuse to own up about. They have made it clear that the story was never meant to portray characters of colors, a fact emphasized by the fact they hired mostly white actors from the start. They only started releasing art of the characters to get a profit. And the thing is they know what they did was wrong. All I had to do was search Penumbra Podcast racism and there is a note on their website saying that they archived some old official art.

“We have discontinued all Penumbra merchandise that uses the original character designs, and in the meantime, any profits on the sales of that merchandise will go to the For The Gworls project. We also realize that the depiction of these characters as POC, while not appropriate for us to use in our marketing and merchandise, has nonetheless become personally meaningful to many POC listeners. For that reason, and because we do not wish to distance ourselves from our mistake, we are keeping these images on our website for archival purposes. Though we do want to make it clear that many of the main/featured voice actors are white and that we did not write the characters to represent any specific POC experience, you are, as always, free to imagine these characters in any way that you like.”

I went to their shop and they still sell posters and pins with the character’s faces on them, but they are donating it to a good cause so hopefully that stays the same. However, I still find it a little uncomfortable that they are still selling character merch and have plans to continue selling character merch. They have no right to dissuade the fans that already found representation in the characters, but they also have no right to profit off the representation that was built, regardless if they made the story. 

Let’s compare this to another piece of popular media. I love Avatar the Last Airbender and, I liked the ATLA voice actors just fine but there should have been more people of color doing voice acting behind the screen too. The voice actors for that show were mainly white too, however, the creators knew that they would be making poc characters. That’s what makes the difference. Did they still choose to go with mostly white voice actors? Yes. Could they have done better and pay more people of color? Also yes. But I’m not as furious at them because they did their research on the cultures they were basing the ATLA world off of and intentionally gave us a show where Asians could see characters that looked like them represented on the screen. The Penumbra Podcast did not do any of that. Again, they openly admitted that it was never their intention to make the character’s people of color when they made the podcast so that goes to show no research was made to properly represent specific cultures. The color of the character’s skin in their official designs therefore became more of aesthetic choice rather than representation, and it wasn’t even their aesthetic choice to begin with!

Race isn’t a color you can just throw onto the character because you feel like it. So I want this to be a lesson to anyone that wants to make a podcast: if you want to include poc characters please do some research into the cultures you plan to represent the way you would with any other form of media. Just because the audience can’t see the characters and just because it’s harder to smoothly introduce the character’s appearance doesn’t mean you’re allowed to be lazy on how you present the characters. Do research before you start writing the first episode and take the time to hire poc actors. Hiring poc actors is actually the least that can be done to show representation. Also, since the audience cannot visually see the race of the characters on a podcast and it can’t typically be described the way you would in a book, you’ll have to be creative. It’s not my job to say how, but my suggestions would be, before the fans come up with their own image of the character, you need to establish race in the first few episodes or release character profiles on a website so that the fans know you canonically intended the characters to be of a certain race even if you aren’t able to mention it in the actual podcast. If you are unwilling to do any of these then the best route is to avoid stating race at all and allow the audience to build their own representation into your form of media. However, once this happens, you are not allowed to profit off popular fan interpretations. You lose all rights to create official art or images of the characters. You cannot use “we have a diverse cast of characters” when you market your story. It doesn’t matter whether you created the content or not, you did not create the representation for those minority groups.

It’s one thing for fans to build their own inclusivity into a form of art like a podcast, but it’s another thing for the creators who never worked to make the representation happen to take advantage of the representation that the listeners built for themselves. Thank you for attending my TedTalk.

[madam-agony]

Hello. I am Madam Agony. (sometimes I go by "Karimei")

I am, unfortunately, the person stuck in the conflict with pro-shippers vs antis on Twitter. More specifically, the Amberlotl situation.

I decided to write this post because I want to express my point of view, what I think about this whole drama, and what are my personal feelings. I want to do this here because on Twitter I couldn't.

I'll explain firstly how this happened at the very beginning.

If you still want to read, then be my guest.

I come from the fandom of "Madness Combat". Being in this fandom made me understand what kind of people I was getting myself into. The fandom is hypocritical and chaotic, careless and indifferent with other people's feelings.

They were perfectly fine with gore and other horrible crimes, but they always drew the line at any other immoral topics.

Seeing how people in the fandom behaved pissed me off disgracefully. I saw the way pro-shippers were being treated and how much hate was on their backs. Then it hit me... What if I wrote problematic fanfiction about two Madness Combat characters? One of them being a minor and the other an adult.

I wanted to be the person who represented the pro-shippers community inside the Madness Combat fandom. I wanted the fear of getting harassed over fiction to be over. It was so frustrating and saddening seeing how people were too scared to post their creations online for the fear they could get harassed.

I acknowledged I was only one individual and didn't have that much power, but I knew if I dared to do something about it then I could perhaps make a difference.

The moment I posted the fics I took responsibility and understood that I will get tons of death threats and harassment. And the result was? 100+ comments in one day, 90% of them were hate comments full of atrocities.

Little did they know, none of the comments made me back up on my decision, so I decided to write even more... Until one night, a kind-hearted person announced me in the comments that some individuals were planning on doxxing me.

At first, I was confused, but only the thought of it made me shiver. I refused to believe it had come to the point where people can't share their works or thoughts online because some people would consider it "immoral".

I discussed with the person in Discord DMs about the problem. They showed me multiple screenshots as proof of what those people were planning on.

I didn't post all of the screenshots on Twitter, only the ones who showed what they were planning on. The other screenshots that weren't posted were showing them being straight-up jerks, talking about how pro-shippers should die, etc.

You could just imagine.

The things shown in the screenshots were so disappointing. They were describing how they wanted to punch me in the throat. All of this because I wrote fanfic they didn't like.

The person who announced me and a couple of other individuals reported them that night, and thankfully, they got banned.

The day they got banned one of my friends showed me how one of the people who tried doxing me was complaining on Twitter about how their Discord account got banned due to some "stuff" they refused to talk about.

I looked at the replies to their complaint and then, at that exact moment, something snapped in me. I'm not even going to exaggerate, something fucking snapped inside me.

The disgust I had for that person. They had the balls to complain about their account getting deleted while ignoring what they were intending to do. People were fucking babying them in the comments acting like nothing happened.

Then I did it. I made a new account just to show the fandom how their so-beloved popular artist was capable of even considering doxing someone.

I was intending only for the Madness Combat fandom to know about this, but. the fact that most of the people feeling bad about me were pro-shippers from other fandoms. The people in the intending fandom didn't even care! They were only saying "Ewww I hate pro-shippers and I don't support them like what the actual fuck! but MAYBE this was a little too far... 🤡". That's all they were capable of saying.

I am truthfully disgusted by this fandom. I love Madness Combat and all of its characters, but the fandom is not gentle with your emotions and it doesn't respect nor care about you. Of course, generalizing might look a little exaggerated as there are people I know who are decent and civilized, but that's the Madness Combat fandom.

Sweet, don't you think?

I don't regret any of this happening. I don't want to be seen as that "one kid who got doxxed" but as a person with an experience that people can learn from. This is the result of people refusing to take other perspectives. The ideology of antis and their wicked way of thinking.

No words can reward what victims of this kind of stuff go through daily. And even to this day, people are still hating on me, wishing bad things to happen to me, but I don't care.

I know what I am aiming for and I'm determined to go through all of the bullshit antis and frustrated people throw at me. I am strong, and I will never doubt my strength.

I will continue supporting pro-shippers and hopefully be the shoulder they can lay on. I'm not a carpet you can just walk on, I am more than that.

And you, the one reading this, pro-shipper or anti. Please, think firmly before you do something because it might come back to you in the shape of an angel or a demon, depending on what you did.

Receiving one comment of support/love surrounded by hate comments made me realize how much it means and how you have the power of making someone's day just by being kind to them.

I wish I could say more, but I want to remain on my point and not deviate from the subject, so here you go.

Additionally, if anyone wants to ask me something, vent to, or even just chat with... Then you can have my Discord: Thiccy#0001. Or you can message me here if you'd like.

With that being said, I wish you a nice day/night.

Did I mention it went to the point where a Discord staff had to message me to help me because the situation was getting out of control? I am thankful they did it though, it means a lot.

[do-a-reference-properly]

AO3′s users alert! Unauthorised fanworks copying

26/09/2019. Important update on this mess: we found a way to delete fanworks via take down request to the hosting provider. Please check it here https://do-a-reference-properly.tumblr.com/post/187926459079/finally-some-good-news

Dear AO3 users,

We would like to bring your attention to an ugly situation with unauthorized copying of works posted on AO3.

A lot of works from AO3 have been copied to fanfics.me (we’ll call this site FFM for brevity’s sake) and are still being copied right now, either:

— automatically by a code specifically created by FFM’s owner for this purpose, or

— by unaware or unscrupulous FFM’s users via semi-automatic method (by inserting a link to a work from AO3 into a web-worm on FFM).

All works from AO3 — with a few exceptions (I’ll elaborate on this below) — can end up on FFM without authors even noticing. Even fanarts or podfics.

FFM doesn't comply with DMCA which means that such reposts endanger fanworks' creators in case the copyright holder demands to delete the fanwork.

Authors of the copied works do not have any control over them; if the work is edited it won’t be updated on FFM until someone manually updates it.

Additionally FFM’s owner makes money out of reposted free fanworks from numerous Google and Yandex ads on each and every FFM’s page by having people go to this site when searching for fics on Google etc. So we recommend using an Ads Blocker when visiting this site in order to prevent the owner from earning more. Ghostery or Adblock Plus work just fine, but you can use any other Ads Blocker that is convenient to you.

Oftentimes FFM even shows up before the original post with the work on Google search results.

The owner’s e-mail: refery@fanfics.ru.

The owner at AO3.

We are trying to bring AO3’s users attention to this situation and help authors with taking their works down from FFM.

 Briefly about the website and its owner

Let me start from the very beginning as it will bring into the light the nature of FFM and give a good example of its owner characteristic behavior.

At first, some person with nickname Refery created FFM as a web archive where authors — mostly from Harry Potter fandom — could publish their fanworks.

Time passed, the site grew and added some features (blogs, pre-moderation and etc.), and all was good and well up till the moment when Refery decided that it would be a great idea to copy to FFM fanworks published on other Russian fanfiction archives — among them from the biggest and most known site ficbook — without asking authors for permission. Even those works that had “Ask me before posting the story somewhere else” mentioned in its text or summary were copied.

For some time nobody noticed, but when finally and inevitably this came out the authors were outraged. It took a lot of time to finally persuade Refery to at least not to copy fanworks bearing a special tag “Уточнять у автора” (Ask the author first).

But after some time Refery — without giving any notice — violated his own promise and resumed copying to FFM fanworks that had the agreed upon tag. The authors complained again, so very reluctantly and after many painful discussions this feature was reinstalled.

So FFM has been notoriously known, mostly amongst Russian fandom, for claims on re-posting fanworks without the consent of the authors.

We're mentioning this situation just to give you a detailed portrait of a person we are dealing with here.

Not only fanworks are copied to this website, but original works, too. Even those which were already published. There were all 7 of Harry Potter novels (both original text and translation), The Hobbit: There and Back Again (translation) and Vorkosigan Saga (translation) available for everybody to read and download. They were taken down only recently due to the attention this whole situation had drawn, but nothing ever goes away once it’s posted online and you can access the proof via Internet Wayback machine. We know for a fact there are other books on FFM and some actions have been taken in this regard, but still it takes time to find published books on this site.

Recently Refery decided that Russian archives are not enough for him and started copying all fanworks into FFM without any permission from the authors from numerous sites, like AO3, fanfiction.net, fictionpress.com, fanfiktion.de and likely other web-archives.

Moreover, the authors of these works can not delete their works from FFM and/or manage them. The site is in Russian only and, hence, we strongly believe that non-Russian speaking authors even do not know that their works are reposted somewhere else.

As a Russian fan-community, we have tried to stop such activity of FFM many times; however, we have not been successful in achieving our goal completely. Our most recent achievement is that the FFM’s owner implemented the "Don't copy to another site" tag created specifically for AO3 (here is the link to FFM’s owner post on his personal blog regarding this tag. Please use Ads Blocker!). This tag should be added to each work presented on AO3 in case the author does not want their works to be copied to FFM.

We are of the opinion that no work should be taken without permission in the first place, but this tag is all we’ve got.

Please note that it seems that some time ago there was similar case of unauthorized copying with other site. Please check this link, they give useful advice.

How to prevent copying from AO3

If you check AO3 you may notice that "Don't copy to another site" tag has hugely emerged in the recent weeks, but mostly amongst Russian users and there is a good reason for this: the owner of FFM announced this tag only in Russian and only on his private blog, so naturally there is no way for non-Russian speaking AO3 users to know about this — albeit non-satisfactory — solution.

There are no guaranties that the FFM’s owner won’t change the rules again as has already happened numerous times before (few examples we described above) and that works with this tag won’t be reposted in the future, but for now it’s the only quick and working solution besides making your works visible only to registered users, which is not ideal. 

This situation is highly unpleasant, but we ask you not to delete your works from AO3, because if the work is deleted from AO3 it will be nearly impossible to delete it from FFM: we won't be able to refresh it manually and remove the text.

Please note that adding this tag won’t work for texts that have already been copied. Only users who have accounts at FFM will be able to delete them. Each work needs to be deleted manually.

However, the Russian fandom — except for the owner of FFM — strongly condemns reposts without the consent of the author, so feel free to contact our volunteers (through DM or Ask on our tumblr page) providing the links to the works stolen from AO3, so we could delete them for you.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to cover all authors and works manually. So, we contacted AO3’ Technical Team with the aim to bring their attention to this situation and inform about it all AO3 users, and hope that AO3 team will find a general solution to resolve this problem, possibly, in collaboration with the AO3 lawyers.

We are trying to warn as many authors as possible and recently started spreading this information via comments on AO3; but considering the number of works copied to FFM informing all authors will take considerable time, and we can easily miss someone, especially since the copying is still in progress and new works from AO3 are appearing on FFM every day.

Please help us spread the word!

 We tried to make a comprehensive FAQ about this. Feel free to ask if anything is unclear!

FAQ

Q: Can I check if my work was copied to FFM?

A: Yes, you can.

FFM makes money on Google and Yandex ads, so we recommend turning on the Ads Blocker of your choice before visiting this site.

Please follow this link, insert the title of your work or your AO3/other web-archive nickname into the field containing the words "insert-title-nickname" and hit "Искать" (Search).

For works rated Mature or Explicit you will be able to see only the caption "Текст произведения доступен только зарегистрированным пользователям старше 18 лет" ("The text of the work is available only to registered users over 18 years old"), but FFM users are able to read and download the story.

Q: My work from AO3 was copied. How can I take it down?

A: First of all add the tag "Don't copy to another site" (without “ “) to the stories you want to be taken down.

Actually we would recommend adding this tag to all the works you don't want to be copied.

Contact one of our volunteers (through DM or Ask on our tumblr page) providing links to your works or send an e-mail with your deletion request directly to the FFM owner at refery@fanfics.ru or at AO3. 

There is a third option: to register on FFM and delete the work yourself by hitting the refresh button, but considering that the site is in Russian we do not think it will be very convenient to those who do not speak Russian language.

Q: I got the message that my work has been deleted. How can I check if it is true?

A: You can go to FFM, search for you work, click on its title and scroll down.

After the summary there is a field that should look like this for those fics that have been deleted.

Basically it says that the author of this particular work has forbidden its copying and that only the information on its title, author’s nickname, rating, pairings, summary and the link to original post on AO3 are available. 

For works that are still available on FFM this field looks like this (if the work is open for non-registered users).

Q: My work copied from AO3 was deleted, but FFM still shows some information on it. Can it be deleted?

A: Even though the text of the fic is not going to be on FFM anymore after it has been deleted, the fic's title, author's name, rating, pairings, summary and link to original post on AO3 will remain there.

The deletion of this leftover information can be done only by the site owner himself.

Some Russian authors tried to make him to delete it, but in most cases the FFM’s owner refused them mentioning that publication of such information is in line with fair use concept and doesn’t violate authors’ rights.

We are yet unsure how to delete this leftover information. In case you need it as well, try contacting the FFM owner at refery@fanfics.ru or at AO3. Maybe e-mails of a large number of authors will work, but unfortunately we can’t guarantee anything. In case you need it, we can provide Russian text for you to send by e-mail (please contact our volunteers through DM or Ask on our tumblr page).

Q: My work from fanfiction.net/fictionpress.com/fanfiktion.de/other web-archives was copied to FFM. How can I take it down?

A: Unfortunately, there is no possible way for us to delete from FFM the fanworks that are copied from web-archives other then AO3. Only FFM’s owner can delete these works, please try contacting him at refery@fanfics.ru or at AO3. In case you need it, we can provide Russian text for you to send by e-mail (please contact our volunteers through DM or Ask on our tumblr page).

Please do not delete your works from the web-archive it was stolen from, because if the work is deleted it will be nearly impossible to delete it from FFM.

Also it seems that some time ago there was similar case of unauthorized copying with other site. Please check this link, they give useful advice.

[sevilemar]

hi! i read that both bird and snake primaries can look like each other—a bird with a snake system, and a snake looking for things to do once they and theirs are safe. as someone wrangling the difference between the two, how do i figure it out? thanks!

According to the original blog post for Ravenclaw primary, snakes often use bird-like structures because they are so very helpful, but there is a difference:

Slytherins don’t have this need for things to be true. Instead, a Slytherin’s system tends to be either more flexible or more self-serving. It will often still allow for long-term decisions and values, but Slytherin Primaries lack the passion of ideology and the desire for truth that is such a motivator for Ravenclaw Primaries. Slytherins tend to build a system in order to fill a void and to satisfy themselves. A Slytherin system is more likely to focus on just that person’s interaction with the world, often without a caveat of how others need to come to their own decisions about their system. Its aim is function and not general or even personal impact.

And apart from the slightly negative language, it rings true for me. I don't really care if my systems are true or even 100% consistent, as long as they are useful. If they are not useful anymore, I either research what I got wrong, or I let them go, even if they are still true systems. I need them to be mostly true, but that is more because if they aren't, they do not work and therefore they are are useless. Or I just have them for fun, and move on when I want to, never thinking about it again.

I have this distinction in my mind between what's right and what's brainwork. What's right is what I know to be true, no questions asked. Brainwork is everything else. It's sometimes important and sometimes fun, but never as immediate or as needed as what's right. I don't know if that's just me, though, because I have no idea what a true bird primary model feels or looks like for a snake, or vice versa. I have a few questions that might be interesting to ponder, though:

How did you arrive at the point where your people are what you value most? Was it more of an "I always knew it, thanks for making me see" or "I have thought long and hard about it and this is what's true (for me)" thing?

If I convinced you that caring only about a few people was harmful and wrong, could you eventually accept it given enough time and space, and find your happyness elsewhere? What would ring more true then, a burned field with a new house on it, or a tree that was so thoroughly pruned it felt like it was dead, but you made new branches grow and it was fine again?

Do you doubt yourself constantly? And does it feel more annoying, like "I know this, so why do I still poke and prod at it all the time?" or more like something good and healthy and necessary and right?

What do you want to be, a snake with a bird model, or a bird with a snake system? Why do you want/need to figure it out conclusively? What do you need/want from a conclusive sorting, what do you want shc to do for you/be for you?

As my friend (who happens to be a bird) reminded me yesterday: Sometimes it is very important to remember that shc is still a sorting system based in a specific culture, created and developed in a specific community but trying to sort the mess that is human life. As good as shc is, it has its limits. And ultimately, shc is a tool you can use if it helps you, and drop again if it doesn't.

[twistedapple]

On Pomefiore

[Note: Tumblr being Tumblr, I’ll put the links and due credits in a reblog; also, partially under the cut because it’s a bit long]

This post is something that has been brewing for a while now – my more observant followers will know when it started based on a certain tag. To preface this write up, I’d like to precise that I have been motivated in working on it because of the way Pomefiore was being received when I joined the fandom. Since then it has been followed by certain beliefs that – while being qualified as headcanons, which is perfectly fair and fine in itself – tend to be treated as actual gospel. It’s not a thing specific to the Twst fandom mind you, it happens in most fandoms – heck I still keep an eye on the KHR fandom and there are still people regularly making posts about mischaracterisation, and that fandom has been around for at least ten years. So I’m not here to preach, but to clarify a few things regarding what Pomefiore represents as a dorm, as well as provide a comprehensive commentary on its associated characters.

First belief: Pomefiore is the shallow dorm of pretty people.

But is it? The very first thing we learn about Pomefiore is that it’s the dorm of Hard Workers and other Overachievers, right in the prologue. This dorm is presented as built on the hard work of the Fair Queen, and she’s regularly taken as an example of how one should conduct oneself – especially by Vil, who expresses a lot of admiration and respect in his lesson chats, and clearly treats her as a model to follow in order to reach perfection.

Now you may think “but Crow, the very first thing we learn about the students is that they look impeccable and polish their appearance”. And you would be right; it is indeed how the students of that dorm are presented. However, let me expand a bit on this thought by making something clear: there’s what the dorm is defined as, and then there’s the path each dorm leader decides to follow. To give a few examples, we see Riddle follow the rules of the Queen of Heart to the letter, and dole out punishment whenever these rules are broken – to the point it impedes the students, who can’t use their magic in an environment where it is required. We see Leona applying the Might is Right type of thinking, which leads to Savanaclaw students being often depicted as bullies (and let’s not talk about the Magift tournament...). Azul, under the pretence of benevolence, is actually ruthless in the way he binds people to his contracts – it’s also shown that the Leech brothers act as his enforcers, either by forcing people into deals (during exam periods, as shown at the start of Episode 3) or by reclaiming the due payment of the contract in more or less pleasant ways (Jade being the local master manipulator, while Floyd canonically states that he finds the breaking of bones a more efficient method). Are you seeing where this is going? As a dorm leader, Vil applies his own views on his fellow Pomefiore students; his views happen to include appearances because he aims to be perfect in every way and has a professional background that justifies it. Is it fair to go as far as he is going when it comes to pressuring other students? Of course it isn’t, it’s the whole point of showing him slapping Epel for what he deems an inappropriate behaviour (see Epel’s Ceremonial Card). It sets the conflict of the dorm – and I personally dig how this major narrative bit is hidden in a story... Which brings us to the other point, the meta aspect of Pomefiore. It’s based on Snow White, a story that relies heavily... On appearances. Now let me ask you: is it really surprising to have a dorm based on such story have a focus on appearances as well? And we even get to see different aspects of it: Vil focuses on the tiniest details to be as polished as possible, Rook has a deep love for change and fleeting moments, Epel can turn something nobody wants into something highly desirable (carving damaged apples to sell them better). Pomefiore is the dorm of transformations – both literal and metaphorical -, a fascinating concept in my opinion and a brilliant idea for a solid narrative arc.

Second belief: Vil is a horrible, narcissistic person, but he will also play dress-up/makeup

Let’s sit for a second there, because there are many things to unpack. Now, what do we know about the fairest of all dorm leaders? Well, quite a lot, for someone who has yet to properly appear in the main story! The very first thing we learn about him is that he has a whooping 5 million followers on Magicam – which is massive and not a number you reach while sitting on your hands and waiting for something to happen. This is such an impressive number that we even get to see various reactions to it, from being very impressed to trying to use that fame for personal purposes. Through reading the stories in which he appears, we get to learn some interesting things about Vil: generally speaking, he fits perfectly the image of the consummate professional. In Jade’s SSR story, we get a solid peek into his life and the man has a busy schedule. He juggles daily with his duties as a student, a dorm leader, an influencer and a professional model – these things take time and he manages to go from one duty to the other with both the ease of someone who’s used to it and the precise organisation of someone with a solid head on his shoulders as well as an incredibly strong work ethic and drive. Speaking from personal experience with the modelling part and an informed opinion on the influencer part, these two fields alone aren’t easy to handle at all. Being an influencer can be very cutthroat (as a certain beauty community has been demonstrating since last year...), and being a professional model requires a lot of drive and dedication, as well as major self-care in regard to both your body and your mental health, because those are the tools of your trade as a model. In consequence, Vil as a dorm leader focuses on appearances as a result of heavy intellectual work to honour the Fair Queen he so highly respects (he says so in his voicelines: “True beauty is determined by strong intellect. You can always doctor your looks, but your true colors will still shine through right away.”), but Vil as a person is also extremely focused on his appearance because he’s doing his job. It’s not narcissism, it’s professionalism. And with his Ceremonial Robes story, we even get to learn that he was ostracised in his hometown for being a performer, yet he kept going and working to reach his goals. For someone who’s only 18 years old, this is an exceptional display of drive, discipline and maturity.

Vil has the highest standards for himself, but because he comes from pretty damn far, he also expects other people to be capable of showing the same degree of determination to achieve their goals. He expresses that in various ways, from being openly displeased with Leona’s general negligence (with Ruggie doing all the work in the background – see Leona’s school uniform story and Ruggie’s lab coat story), to being unimpressed by the new Pomefiore students and getting ready to whip them in a shape he’ll deem desirable as soon as he lays his eyes on them. He’s also highly critical of people going for the easy way out: in his school uniform story, he not only criticises Cater for trying to use him for his own five seconds of fame by buttering him up, but he also emphasises the fact that his services aren’t free. Emphasis on that: Vil isn’t a charity. He isn’t the sort of person with whom you’ll mutually brush your hair while sharing smoothie recipes. Rook is more likely to be the one up to that sort of thing, because Rook is nice and a good senior (see: Rook’s ceremonial robes story). Vil, on the other hand, encourages a lot to try and learn on your own, to use your own head in order to create your own brand (see his lab coat voicelines). He’ll be more enclined to help only after you started doing a part of the job independently and showed you can think and act for yourself. And even then, he’ll likely kick your ass to push you to keep up, because behind all the sparkles and lustre Vil is very much depicted as an overbearing Drill Sergeant. Like I pointed out earlier, it’s heavily hinted that he didn’t get where he is by waiting for good fortune to come by. He works for his success daily and expects other people to do the same. Does it seem like a rather unfair treatment? Sure, but at the same time it provides a great learning opportunity for those willing to put up with it, and Vil offers it in a surprisingly selfless manner: there is an open concern about the way people present themselves, and how they can do it to be their best self at all time.

Interestingly, it creates a peculiar dynamic with his vice dorm leader, Rook. There’s a constant sway between them, with Vil bluntly telling him he can be easily replaced if he fails in his duties, while still relying on him more than Rook relies on him in return – in fact, Rook pretty much follows his own path, and Vil happens to be a very nice view along that path so Rook decided to stop and hang out for a bit, but he still checks his surroundings for other nice views. So while Rook puts up with Vil’s tight requirements (see Rook’s ceremonial robes story, where Floyd cleverly observes that he doesn’t seem that fond of the perfume Vil created for him and forces him to wear during ceremonies), he’s also the one taking actual charge of the new students (see when he checks on Epel in his ceremonial robes story, or when he offers his support during the Ghost Marriage event) and trying to smooth things out when Vil is being too rough (see Vil’s ceremonial robes story). Interestingly, it leads to a communication issue between these two, fueled by what looks very much like a unilateral dependant relationship on Vil’s part, no matter how much he denies it. He rejects Rook through threats of replacing him, yet fully trusts his eyes and sincerity, yet this very sincerity is the reason why Vil doesn’t fully open up to Rook (see Vil’s lab coat story, he goes to Trey to vent about Rook’s lack of consideration) and uses a Harsh Commanding Queen attitude to hide his own insecurities from the eyes of the person who can see them best. It’s likely not helped by the fact that Vil is aware that he needs Rook more than Rook needs him – it’s obvious when reading the latter’s profile: Rook likes his privacy, and while he keeps putting his nose in other people’s business (not out of malice, but genuine curiosity), he’s notoriously deemed annoying by characters like Leona and Malleus because of his overly curious yet inconsiderate nature. There’s a selfishness in Rook which protects him from getting fully controlled by Vil, I’ll repeat myself here but I’d rather insist on that: Rook willingly decided to follow Vil, it means he has the power to refuse him as well (which is very much like... Oh, the Huntsman in Snow White – though in his case specifically, there’s also variations in which his family is held hostage and all, while Rook makes his own decisions).

This entire situation is heavily fueled by Vil’s need for control. As aforementioned, he focuses on the tiniest details and holds complete control over everything that makes his life what it is: from the type of makeup he picks to every single component used in the meals he prepares himself, Vil has a clear need for full control, and it’s reflected in the way he interacts with other students, as well as in the way he handles even his club activities. Vil isn’t just a model, influencer and even actor, in the film study club he works as a director and in one of his stories (lab coat), he’s even shown to create the special effects himself, because only he can provide for his own desires in the most exact fashion. This is where his little “I can replace you easily” becomes funny, because it translates his need for control without really holding since Rook is the one with the most agency in the relationship. In comparison, in Silver’s PE uniform story, Silver is treated like a pawn and Vil even berates Malleus in front of him because Silver dares deny him (how dare he have his own agency instead of being a nice prop who should feel honoured to be selected). Interestingly, Silver also compares Vil’s way of doing things to something martial. AhemDrillSergeantVilahem. In this story, the interesting point is that things finally start working well when Vil stops considering his own vision and decides to look beyond it a bit: taking Silver’s actual abilities into consideration, he finally has a scene that works. It works because he loosened the control a bit – while Silver went along with it but remained vocal the whole time about where his own skills lie.

While the relationship between Vil and Rook, as well as Vil and the rest of the Pomefiore dorm, have been holding through a quietly tense status quo, there is one pebble - dare I say, one potato - who is more than willing to challenge the whole situation through open defiance and a strong will: Epel. He has been set by the narration to be the catalyst to an incoming breaking point, because he wants to live his life to the beat of his own drum, yet remains a teen still in need of a journey of self-discovery. It’s illustrated in how he misunderstands the point of Pomefiore by only looking at the surface - something Vil reproaches, which is why he even talks about his need for more self-awareness in the lesson chats. Of course, Vil uses his own language (beauty) to get his point across, but the underlying point is that Epel has yet to reach a certain degree of self-realisation - such as the fact he is free to try and work hard to become beefier (Vil wouldn’t object as long as he puts in the necessary efforts), or that he is a good fit in Pomefiore because he has the drive to reach his goals and gives himself the means to do so (high awareness, anyone?). Basically, he’s the example of Vil’s communication issues: Vil’s martial nature tends to drown the actual meaning of his motivational speeches. Paradoxically, when dealing with someone like Epel, it actually fuels the teen through spite, which is both comical and quite impressive given Epel’s results (reminder of his own lab coat story, in which he manages to impress Crewel, a man made from the same fabric as Vil, with his formidable results through hard work). However, this form of motivation isn’t healthy, and just like with Rook, a good, long talk is needed to create a better understanding - instead of forcing his Tyranny of Beauty on others.

Bonus point, because I really want to address it

For some time now, I’ve been vocal about my personal feelings regarding the reception of Pomefiore and its characters. While it became more positive since June, it still tends to miss the point for a reason I’d like to address: the Not Like The Other Girls mentality and how it specifically affects the way Vil and his own femininity are perceived.

While I am not invalidating this thinking as part of a larger growth process, I think it has been unfairly used against Pomefiore. In a way, it’s very much the way Epel reacts: it’s just a Pretty People Dorm led by an Annoying Pretty Boy, and Savanaclaw is cooler. However, this is not only superficial, it puts a judgement of value that means that one has to be put down for the other to shine. In other words, Vil as a character is undervalued because his way of life - which matches traditionally feminine occupations, hell he’s even using a feminine pronoun - has been associated with vanity, narcissism, and superficiality by the fandom. To get my point across, let me provide you with quotes from some of our most brilliant minds:

“Woman wants to be independent […] this is one of the worst developments in the general uglification of Europe. Woman has so much reason for shame; in woman there is concealed so much superficiality, petty presumption and petty immodesty – one needs only to study her behaviour with children!” - Nietzsche

“What is truth to a woman? From the very first nothing has been more alien, repugnant, inimical to woman than truth - her great art is the lie, her supreme concern is appearance and beauty” - Nietzsche (again)

“A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.” - Oscar Wilde 

“All the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, but in all of them a woman is inferior to a man.” - Plato

“As regards the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject” - Aristotle

Do you see where I’m going with that? Because he has an occupation focused on appearance, something historically associated with women, Vil should be… Less? Should be negative? Even though he is quite vocal about it being a mere result of a much deeper work on himself, throughout his voicelines, lesson chats and personal stories? It’s not vanity, it’s not narcissism. It’s Vil expressing himself through the age old art forms of fashion, skincare and makeup. How, and why it being focused on something external should be less? It’s especially obvious when you stop and consider Vil’s own testimony: he has been ostracized by his own community for being a performer. His appearance is as much a mask as it is a proof of everything that preceded it – him saving himself with his own means and work. It’s both a protection and a result that he proudly brandishes – and he absolutely can afford the arrogance to do so, considering his achievements at such a young age (reminder, again, that he’s 18 years old, despite being very disillusioned with life already). Why should it be less that? Vil’s inclination towards appearances is both his truth and his fiction, that’s what the narrative tells us - and there’s nothing bad about that.

I guess I’m especially tired of this point because I’ve had to deal with that thinking pattern myself irl, for evolving in similar fields/similar hobbies, and it’s frustrating to see that sort of close mindedness. It’s infuriating. So, that’s a more personal aspect of my rant... But here we are.

[tortoisenottortoise]

Am I the only one who likes seeing muscular women in media more than muscular men?

Alright so, this one will probably end up much shorter and a little more ranty than I'd like, but this is kind of personal so be fairly warned. 

 Recently I've seen a few complaints about the new He-Man show and honestly, I fully understand and empathize with them. Whilst I haven't fully seen the show, from what I've viewed I can personally speaking agree (or at the very least understand) where most criticisms come from. I think it's incredibly shitty that the writer basically lied to his audience about how the show would run. Now normally I'd be fine with a twist such as He-man dying, but he's an important part of the show and the way the marketing & merchandising for it was running kind of comes across as him basically using He-Man's name to get people into the show. I also feel like it's fine to view Teela as obnoxious and annoying, nothing about her personality-wise seems likable to me. I also heard a few complaints about Orko's (I think that's his name, don't crucify me) backstory and how his character was handled.Yet as the title suggests one that didn't stick with me was the criticism of Teela and a general trend towards the criticism of women in media as being "masculine". 

I've heard over and over that Hollywood representing strong women by giving them masculine traits is a bad thing and yet... I kind of don't get it? It feels odd to say, almost like I'm the dumbest man alive for admitting something which most people on the internet seem to be so sure about, yet I just don't understand where this is coming from. I've seen this thrown at She-hulk, Wonder Woman, Abby, and many other characters, yet when inquired it usually loops back around to, "Yeah they have muscles", and that's about it. This type of criticism in specific seems to overly focus on the appearance of said characters. It's the one critique I just can't get behind and it feels like at best it's a shallow criticism that fails to get its point across, and at worst it's actively demeaning to women who desire to or show masculine traits. But first, let me break this down into sections.

Section 1: Muscles =/= Masculinity (In my opinion at least)

Oh boy, I feel like this is a section that might rustle some feathers, but I'm going to try and explain myself best as possible. I simply do not view muscularity as a feature that is inherent to or should be inherent to men. I'm not going to pretend as if muscular men aren't more saturated in media and art, nor as if they're societally treated as masculine, but one of the reasons I fail to understand this criticism is that I see muscles beyond the horizons as being just a masculine trait. 

I believe that muscles should instead be seen as a sign of hard work and determination. As someone who's currently trying (and struggling) to stay healthy and fit, it's much harder than a lot of media portrays it to be. It's a test where you push yourself to the limits, not just for the sake of doing it, but so you can improve as a person. Whenever I go to the gym and see a muscular gal or guy walk by, my immediate thought isn't, "how masculine" or anything like that my thought is, "wow! They worked hard to get like that, I should work hard as well!". 

This interpretation tends to feel like it's just simply taking a piss on people who actively work hard to achieve higher levels of strength. Especially when society places and enforces these unrealistic standards onto people. If you don't have a six-quintillion pack nor can bench press a fucking house then you're worthless, of course, that is unless you actually attempt to pursue said standards which in that case you're automatically dismissed as cheating your way to gaining your muscles instead of putting any work in. And that's just for men who often don't have to deal with traditional idiots who are stuck in the year 1950 where I can't walk on the same street as them. My skin crawls when reading tweets from older men talking about how weightlifting women are "ruining their fertility" and I absolutely hate it when people in my life treat these women as if they're mythical creatures from a fairy tale, or when females who have trained to such a degree are simply dismissed as being inferior. 

Obviously, I don't think the people who say this are like that, but whenever I hear this type of critique I can't help but think of the culmination of all these experiences I've gone through. But then again, this might honestly just be because I'm personally attracted to muscular women.

  Section 2: Body type diversity

  Another reason that I tend to like muscular women in media over muscular men is simply due to the sheer oversaturation of muscular men. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem if anybody likes muscular men. I totally get wanting to shove your face in between some man titties or get inspired by their physiques. In all honesty, almost everything I said earlier can directly apply to men, but one of the reasons I bring up body type diversity is that there tend to be much less muscular women than men. I

f anything, I'd have to say that muscular men are almost treated as the default when it comes to things like superhero comics, movies, video games, anime, etc. In a similar vein, the default for women tends to be slim and curvaceous, you get the drill. Whenever someone who doesn't fit into either body type shows up and isn't treated like a joke/gag or a character to rip on, I can't help but be happy about it. As much as I have no clue wtf is going on with TLOU2, I can appreciate that Abby's portrayal doesn't seem to exist solely as a joke meant to demean women for working out. I'm excited when an anime protagonist is a fat character who can go beyond just being a "fat guy" and is treated the same way a normal person would be.

 Regardless of what you think about whatever trait you're criticizing, there's probably someone out there who fits it. If you're not into it or dislike it, then that's fine, but I'd rather have that expressed than it being actively made out as a harmful trope as opposed to just literally another body type that some women have.

  Section 3: Muscular women inspire me more

Ok so, we've now blown into a full-on personal experience, buckle up boys, girls, NBs, anything in between, and I feel like I'm forgetting someone so apologies! But yeah, muscular women in media tend to be a lot more inspiring than people seem to give them credit for. This comes down to a mix of both the qualities I outlined earlier in what makes the characters inspiring but also plays into the idea of body diversity. 

One of the traits that make amazons seem more inspiring is their inherent rarity/lack of screentime. As I stated earlier, whilst I do enjoy my fair share of man-titties, it kind of gets to a point where it's more depressing than inspiring when all you see is just super-models shoved in your face whenever you walk into a theater. If for every Goku I could find ten other guys who were on the chubbier side then I'd be able to take more from when I see Goku and other characters with his body type, yet it's so saturated that it no longer becomes something to aspire to, but simply the norm.  It's not that you can work to become muscular or skinny with hard work and effort, you have to be muscular or skinny unless you want to be deemed a failure. Being chubby often isn't presented as a starting point but just treated as a defect. As someone who spent years battling with my own self-perception, that's just not a good message to get across.

Now, this obviously isn't to say that people can never make muscular characters. After all, it's their story so they can put whatever they want in it. The aim of the game isn't to stop people from making a specific type of character, but to encourage a diverse set of people to make a diverse set of characters. This is the reason why I view muscular women as so inspiring. Instead of coming across as just "the norm" or "the standard" they stand out from the crowd and despite knowing what they have to deal with, are still ready and willing to work out and improve their bodies. They had a goal in mind and set time aside to achieve said goal, that's something I can get behind.

  Conclusion:

This will be another short section, but I just wanted to mention it because it caps off my thoughts on this post in general. What originally started as me just not getting the reason why people disliked Teela's design somehow turned into a passionate rant and I'm A) not sure if it fits on this particular subsection of the community, B) scared I'm going to get ripped to pieces, and C) somewhat unsatisfied with all that I said. At the end of the day, this probably won't be seen by too many people, but to those who do see it, I hope you have a wonderful day. I just wanted to talk about something that was near and dear to my heart and hoped that I made it clear why I view things the way I do. 

P.S: Can we stop having this double standard where we act like women whose arms show the slightest hint of definition are "unrealistic" whilst men can look like tree trunks and be considered normal and healthy? please and thank you!