#build brand better

[sonu360]

Other Services New Delhi, For businesses and brands, negative, defamatory, or libelous content give a devastating effect. This can impact customer...

[elftwink]

to preface this post i am anti-advertising i think we should explode the entire industry but it's sooo funny when you people make posts like "and they don't even work!!" like. sorry to be the bearer of bad news but yes they do. that's why we have to put up with so many despite everyone hating them and thinking its annoying. because they actually work really well and make a shit load of money

[foldingfittedsheets]

I used to worry people wouldn’t like my silly nsfw stories if they followed me for cute long gay comics and now that two of my sex shop stories are blowing up I’m fretting all the new followers will get annoyed about the long gay comics.

Repeating my mantra: this is my blog and I post what I want to.

[cuddlesdotgif]

The way everyone is feeling about the Nickelodeon documentary is exactly how people are going to feel about exploitive ‘family-bloggers’ in less than 10 years once those kids are old enough to speak out on it.

We have seen it with the TLC Kate plus 8 and Duggar bullshit already.

This abnormal culture of celebrity worship and the perpetuation of this ‘sponsored by late stage capitalism’ lifestyle as one of the only means left to secure a comfortable living is unconscionable.

We banned circus freak shows in like the 20s and it took less than 100 years to rebrand them - except instead of a desperate man biting the head off a chicken to shock a crowd, now we scare small children for engagement on reaction vids on your FYP.

[bmpmp3]

dave :)

[lolly-dolli]

Here's what you're gonna do.

You're gonna go down to your local Aldi's, buy a 24oz bag of frozen mango chunks, a bag of rice, and two cans of black beans.

If you don't already have them; salt, lime or lemon juice and cumin; maybe some meal prep tupperware. Pouch tuna if you like that stuff.

Once home, put that bag of mango chunks in a bowl full of warm water so they defrost. Don't pen it. The bag needs to stay closed. This'll make sense later.

Prepare enough water in a pot to cook two cups of that rice. Make sure the pot's big. Big enough to hold way more rice than you expect there to be. Add a teaspoon of cumin, two tablespoons lime or lemon juice, salt according to preference. Pat of butter.

Boil. Make sure the butler's melted. Stir to combine.

Add your rice. Cook according to rice bag.

If you have a protein, you can cook that now. 20-30 minutes at your disposal. If not, that's why we got the second can of beans for.

I recommend Aldi's tuna steaks - quick to defrost, 5 bucks for 2-3. Lean protein. Real nice. Creme de la crumb's tuna marinade also works real nice if you have the energy.

A pouch of tuna's just as good functionally.

Less mercury that way.

You can mix it in that if you want, too.

Strain your beans. Conserve a little bean water for the rice if you want.

Your rice is done.

Add your beans. Twice as many if you're feeling like it'll be a bad week. Two or three pouch tunas too if you want a little extra.

If you have the lemon pepper kind you can probably nix the citrus juice.

Now we go back to your mango. If all's worked correctly, the warm water should've thawed them somewhat, the heat warming the air in the bag.

Dump 'em in, turn the burner to low heat. Stir until well combined.

Portion out into Tupperware.

You've got a good couple meals right there. Even more as side dishes if you have the energy to cook chicken nuggets or fish or veggies or whatever.

Lunch. Breakfast. Dinner.

Carbs to keep you awake and moving.

Protein to fuel your muscles.

Bit of fiber to push it all through your guts easier.

Citric acid to avoid the scurvy.

Can be eaten hot or cold, and the shit's good, too.

You're gonna have something tasty to eat whether you can operate a microwave or not this week.

That's what you're gonna do.

[wreckedhoney]

a while ago on the discord i brought up the "which desk at the station is forrest's desk" question when the answer should probably have been obvious. he's been at the job for approx. one week, so it's the desk with all the unpacked boxes. it just didnt occur to me because thats Frankly A Lot Of Boxes and my first thought was this is where all the storage and junk are piled on, but no. it's all stuff forrest brought (/hc). he's a heavy packer. he spite packed all the stuff he didn't want his old job to keep even if he doesnt need or even like them all that much but now that he's blacklisted then no one in the entirety of chicago can have them

[glambots]

So, most Daycares typically look after kids ranging from 1-to-5/6 years old, which means that Sun and Moon aren't just looking after babies. Mans looking after Baby-Babies. At least 10+ of them a day. That makes me wonder what their limit is. Do they have a waitlist for the Daycare?? Did they ever have Daycare assistants?? Or just a daytime security guard who watched from behind the desk? I want to know how the ins and outs of this place worked man!!

[orcinus-veterinarius]

I’m starting to feel like it’s a legitimate possibility that Wikie and Keijo will end up as the very first orcas to be transferred to a sea sanctuary. Combine the untimely deaths of Moana and Inouk and a financially troubled park with the blocked transfers to Japan (and the new park has already started taking in whales from other Japanese facilities, so I don’t think they’re waiting for them) and a government that’s eager to offload its cetaceans, and you’ve got the perfect recipe.

I hope it works.

[nokingsonlyfooles]

Ya know, if they ever want to crush me, they will...

This is what allowing a corporation to distribute your shit gets you. Sony crushes a local makeup brand with impunity, and they don't even have to win the case. The legal fees are too expensive. It doesn't matter how you navigate Kafkaesque situations like being asked to prove your makeup does not resemble a cow because the song lyrics in the background mention a cow, and if you're basing your cow makeup off these lyrics that we own, you owe us $18 million. You can't even afford to argue. There goes all your work.

Are the artists who made the music going to get any of that money? No. They got paid when they sold the rights. Maybe a small slice in royalties, but not so much that they don't have to keep cranking out new music and giving it to their contract holders to remain active in creative spaces.

"There are lines" says the legal expert. Yeah. Well. I'm pretty sure the only line you need to cross is: a corporation notices you and decides to incite a hostage situation. If Sony wins this case, it gets even easier for the big guys to take it out of the little guys. And if they don't... It's not like they're going to stop suing people and gatekeeping the use of art.

If humanity remains a going concern long enough for us to come to our senses, there's just going to be this huge hole in our media right around the 20th century. If Sony or Disney or Warner Brothers or Fox or some other huge corporate conglomerate doesn't make it into the fossil record, or just decides to delete everything it owns for tax purposes, future historians are going to be trying to reconstruct a significant portion of lost culture off whatever's left of Internet Archive and AO3. And that's only if the corporations don't obliterate that stuff too.

I guess there are non-zero folks out there who are just doing commission-style work to get paid so they can eat, maybe they don't care what happens to it. But if your art means something to you, or if someone else's art means something to you, you should be upset about this.

You like Nosferatu? The movie? Well, like it or hate it, we weren't supposed to have it. They filed off the serial numbers but it didn't matter - they stepped on Stoker's copyright, they got sued, they lost, and they were supposed to destroy all the copies of that film. A film that's widely considered one of the best movies ever, codifier of many of the vampire tropes you know and love - which you could also call plagiarism, if you had enough money and were so inclined. Yeah, it's in the Public Domain now, but it doesn't have to stay that way (see: Peter and the Wolf). Copyright law destroys art. Period. Artists need to eat, but this is not the way to make that happen!

The makeup company is already dead. If the court case goes against them, it's precedent to kill so much more, just because someone sang a tune, or said words in a certain order, or played notes in a certain way. And, yeah, my work could evaporate on that basis. I reference real music. I don't have to, but it fits the themes and I do not agree with these laws and how they are applied. I'm contrary. I'm protesting. But if I ever get popular enough to make a difference... I could be toast.

[vampiresuns]

having a tav that's a Lloth-sworn life domain cleric of a noble background who before getting yeeted into the nautiloid was a sacrificial priestess (gn) during one of the cycles of Drow society and had their own altar and temple under their care, means Solune would have the most insane however many minutes they spent interacting with Minthara and I am obsessed about it. As far as I'm conceptualising it, I'm thinking of Lloth as extremely Ungoliant-like. Goddess of hunger, goddess of wanting and consumption, goddess of excess and exuberance, goddess who unmasked the hypocritical gods of starvation, guilt and purity into a society that cherishes a certain kind of clarity about the double standard they impose. For Drow are evil for their wars and their wanting and their taking, but those other people with their other gods kill, warmonger and enslave with no regard and no self-awareness, calling the indignation about receiving scraps from a bunch of silent, unrepentant gods, "guilt and shame". There is violence in denial and her Children will not suffer it.

In the season of Life, they do not sacrifice the unwilling. It is taboo. The only sacrifice that matters is the desire to be devoured and destroyed by the things you love the most.

And Solune sees Minthara and is like fucking finally, someone rational enough to get what I'm going through, that they're losing their mind that their life was taken from them and if they become this other thing, if they transform, if they do not remain Luxe Solune Mizzmyrra, Life Knife of Lloth, they're never going to be able to be reintegrated into that life. They will die away from home, from their temple, from their (first) spouse, from their mother and their siblings and there won't be the day when they too succumb to the knife, when it is time, when the day they no longer feel hunger comes.

And then the parasite gives them an in into Minthara thinking she was raised from the darkness into a FALSE GOD? One thing you do not do is steal from Lady Lloth, and oh my god, there could've been a time, a chance that existed only in ignorance, of Solune lending a hand to Minthara but this to them is unforgivable because Solune is genuinely a good friend to their friends, but if you keep peeking into whatever mindset nobility and religious authority has given them it's like realising your friend is a cesspool of "what the actual and everliving fuck", and when the knife of the morningstar priestess comes down on Minthara it won't be with love but with absolute rage, grief and disgust and I will be thinking about this for evermore. Thanks, I'm not well

[foggyfanfic]

Mirabel's Super Secret Adventure

Movie AU

Chapter Preview: How many secrets were Tío Bruno and Tía Leandra keeping? First the cracks, then Isabela, now this.

Prologue Prev Next Masterlist

7. Things Bruno Doesn't Talk About

Mirabel’s epiphany made her re-examine her wish to keep the cracks to herself. On the one hand, she really kind of wanted to be the person who fixed all this; on the other, if somebody in her family was really in that much pain…

Shouldn’t Mirabel focus on fixing it fast rather than by herself?

Reluctantly, Mirabel decided she would share what she’d learned with Tío Bruno. He, at the very least, would still allow her to help. If she told Abuela she would be thanked for bringing it to her attention, then told to go rest and let somebody else handle it.

After she finished helping her Pá teach Antonio, she headed over to Tío Bruno’s room and knocked on the door. This time, when she didn’t get an answer, she walked in. Tío Bruno had a tent hidden somewhere in the cave system that ran throughout his canyon, so if he wanted privacy he would just hide in his tent. As such, the kids in the family were always allowed to enter his room and hang out in his storytelling tent in the middle of his canyon’s oasis.

Mirabel ducked under his sand curtain and paused on the landing to shake the sand out of her hair. Octavia was down at the bottom of the canyon, using the sand to practice different gazebo designs. She paused halfway through making an octagon shaped gazebo to wave at Mirabel, then got back to work.

“What do you think?” Octavia asked, holding the sand in the shape that she wanted.

“I like the trellis siding,” Mirabel answered.

“Yeah, I don’t know, feels pretty basic,” Octavia frowned, then she grinned and with a few twitches of her fingers, the diamond shaped holes became hearts.

Mirabel frowned at the hearts.

“What? Too much?”

“No uh, it’s just,” she thought about biting her tongue, but she’d already told Amada, so she might as well keep flapping her mouth, “Isabela doesn’t want to marry him. She’s doing it for the family. Your Pá has a plan to fix things though.”

“Oh,” Octavia paused, then adjusted the hearts so they were in two parts with a jagged line in between them, “so, that better?”

Mirabel couldn’t help a dry chuckle, “Abuela would blow a gasket.”

Octavia giggled, “Yeah.”

Mirabel watched for a while as her cousin made gazebo after gazebo, each one slowly becoming more extravagant. Eventually Octavia was making entire gazebo palaces. It was a far cry from the sloppy houses she’d made in front of the town’s architect.

Most of the time, she wouldn’t have thought twice about it. A gazebo is a whole lot simpler than a house, after all. But with her mind still buzzing away, looking for problems large enough to cause all those cracks, she found herself eyeing the ease with which Octavia molded the sand.

Now that Mirabel was really thinking about it, Octavia seemed to be ten times better at using her gift whenever Abuela wasn’t watching.

“Octavia?” Mirabel asked, slowly.

“Yep?” Octavia chirped, adding another open air turret to the top of the gazebo's right wing.

“Do you… pretend to be worse at your gift when Abuela is around?”

The gazebo palace collapsed in on itself, Octavia slowly turned towards Mirabel, wide eyed. It was all the confirmation Mirabel needed.

She whispered, “Please don’t tell.”

“I won’t, I won’t, but… why?”

“Because I don’t want to end up like Luisa.”

“Like Luisa-? Oh.”

Octavia jerked her shoulders in a shrug, “By the time she was my age, she was already working eight hours a day. Now she doesn’t even get to finish breakfast half the time.”

Mirabel slowly nodded, to show that she’d heard her, then drifted over to the story telling tent. She entered the dimly lit haven and sat down on one of the many floor cushions. The tent flap opened, letting unfiltered light in, then closed and Octavia sat next to her, fiddling with a rock.

There was a long period of contemplative silence.

“Are you happy?” Mirabel eventually asked. Was anyone in their family truly happy?

“I am,” Octavia said, smiling a little, “although, sometimes I feel a bit guilty for hiding what I can do from everybody.”

“So everyday, when you practice with Tía Leandra?”

“We mostly just play around, experiment with my gift and stuff,” Octavia shrugged, “I am actually learning about architecture, I do want to make houses, but I want to be a kid first. You know?”

“When did you start pretending?”

“Pretty much immediately,” Octavia floated the rock in the palm of her hand and began running it through different shapes, “Má has always been-. The first thing I learned was all the ways to make a house poorly, right? Long run it means when I want to make a house well, I just don’t do any of the things I’d do to make it bad. Short term, I know exactly how to make it look like I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“And Tía Leandra has been helping you lie? This whole time?”

“It was my parents’ idea,” Octavia admitted, “well, I think it was Pá’s, but he’s not great at the whole, sneaky subterfuge thing, so Má has been handling it. Oh! Since you know now, you wanna see the Eiffel Tower?”

“Sure,” Mirabel said, faintly, mind still reeling. How many secrets were Tío Bruno and Tía Leandra keeping? First the cracks, then Isabela, now this.

Tío Bruno had said his gift meant he knew a bunch of stuff that wasn’t technically his business, even Amada had learned things through her limited sight that weren’t hers to tell. Dolores was the same way, she knew everything about everyone, and barely ever said a word. As Mirabel followed Octavia back out to the dessert portion of the canyon bottom, she wondered what her life would have been like if she had gotten a gift. Specifically a gift that made her privy to information she wasn’t meant to know.

Would she keep so many secrets too?

“Ok, so! The trick is to lift all the sand up then shape it as it falls,” Octavia said brightly, lifting what must have been a ton or two of sand, she tilted her head, “hold on, that’s a little too much.”

She separated out some of the sand and dumped it, then examined her giant sand cloud. She grinned and nodded and began releasing the sand a little at a time.

“I have to be careful to remember all the big clumps at the top, there’s rooms and stuff up there you know,” Octavia continued to narrate, glancing excitedly at Mirabel every few minutes to make sure she was paying attention, “and then I gotta make all the cross beams. On all four sides, too. See! Then I used to put this part that all the people can stand on half way down, but it’s more like a quarter of the way up. Riiiiiiiiight there! Now the legs are nice and thick, but if I make them too thick it looks really cartoony, so it’s got to be just the right level of thick. And ta-da! The Eiffel Tower!”

She held the tower steady with one raised hand and put the other one on her hip, grinning broadly at Mirabel. 

“It’s amazing,” she told her, honestly. Because it was. The tower was about as tall as Tío Bruno’s canyon, and molded with such precision that Mirabel could make out all the little rivets, bolts, and screws holding it together.

“Yeah, I’m really good at this,” Octavia allowed the sand to fall in a controlled implosion, then turned back to Mirabel, “Sometimes I wish I could show off, you know? But I know the second I do I’ll pretty much just be Luisa the Sequel. Má and Pá always do a good job of acting impressed with me, and so do Amada and Gabe.”

“Wait, Gabe knows? And he hasn’t-?”

“Tattled? Of course not, you think he wants the townspeople treating one of his precious baby sisters the way they treat Luisa? Hell, if he could figure out how to get people to back off Luisa, he would.”

“Hold on, am I literally the last to know how overworked Luisa is?”

“Nah, pretty sure that’ll be Luisa herself,” Octavia lifted more sand and started making a statue of the family instead, “and your Má doesn’t know because she’s always working too, and Isabela doesn’t know because she’s always practicing being perfect, and Camilo doesn’t know because he’s always babysitting or entertaining the villagers, and I don’t think Tío Agustín or Tío Félix know because they got so many chores to do around the house.”

“But your parents know,” Mirabel filled in, “and they told you three?”

“Not really, Gabe noticed it by himself, and Má might have noticed it and told Pá. Or Pá told Má when he had that vision. I don’t know. But that’s how Amada and I found out, we saw Pá’s vision-. Wait… I maybe shouldn’t tell you about that.”

“What vision?”

“Um, nothing, no vision. Pá doesn’t have visions, he can’t even see!”

“Octavia, what vision?!”

She waved her hand and suddenly the sand gathered around her in a windowless dome. Mirabel tried digging into the sand, but it actively resisted her hands.

“Octavia!”

The dome didn’t budge. 

Eventually, Mirabel put her hands on her hips and looked up towards Tío Bruno’s vision cave. She could barely see it from her place on the ground. Tío Bruno said that it got taller and taller every year, but had slowed down ever since he had started giving weekly story time to the kids.

Climbing up there was still the worst.

Which was exactly why Mirabel suspected that was where he stored any visions he didn’t want anyone to see. Nobody climbed up those stairs unless they had to. Tío Bruno had a secret passageway up there, but, well it was a secret passageway, not a well known passageway.

So, leaving the dome behind, Mirabel made her way to the stairs. She took a few deep breaths, then started the long journey up to the vision cave.

About halfway up, Mirabel wondered if she really needed to see this vision. It was about Luisa after all, not her. It probably wasn’t any of her business. 

However, it might be connected to the cracks.

Or, it might give Mirabel some way to help her older sister.

Granted, if the vision could help Luisa in any way, Tío Bruno had probably already tried. But Mirabel would bet good money that the vision was about whatever warning Luisa had been ignoring. Maybe if she knew what was coming, she could give Luisa an extra push.

Three quarters of the way up, Mirabel paused to take a few more deep breaths, hands on her hips.

Almost there, she told herself, almost.

Steeling herself, she kept going.

She had to stop for another breather before crossing the bridge. If telling stories to kids had made the stairs slow in their growth, they needed to start making him tell stories once a day, then the stairs might actually shrink.

The bridge was thin, and felt pretty rickety. It was two lines of wooden planks side by side, suspended by some rough rope. Mirabel was just grateful there was a safety line on either side.

Carefully, Mirabel crossed the bridge, gritting her teeth as it swayed beneath her. She didn’t want to go too fast, but she definitely didn’t linger.

Mirabel could count on one hand all the times she’d been up here. And most of them were before the bridge had slimmed down to its current state. Usually when Tío Bruno gave personal visions, only he and Tía Leandra would come up. If he was giving one of his showy visions about fun stuff, he generally did it in the old river bed, so he could make the sand whirlwind as big as it needs to be to hold everybody in attendance.

As she entered the corridor to the actual cave, her eyes roved over the carvings on the wall. There were shelves full of incense and herbs, and a few vision tablets she recognized as being some of his favorite visions.

None of them featured Luisa.

Next, Mirabel eyed the big circular door. It looked heavy, but when she got her hands on the door knob, it swung open easily enough.

The cave beyond was about as dark as she expected, and, unsurprisingly, filled with sand. The only thing in the room other than sand and stone was a locked trunk. Mirabel propped the door open and walked over to the trunk, kneeling in front of it. The lock was a simple padlock, an old thing with a keyhole.

Mirabel glanced over her shoulder, then reached into her bag. She pulled out two of her thickest embroidery needles and began working at the lock.

Not that Mirabel had any experience with lock picking, of course. She had never ever, for random example, broken into a cupboard Abuela had hidden the good scissors in, or anything like that. It was purely beginner's luck that allowed Mirabel to open the padlock within minutes.

She placed the lock aside and opened the trunk. Sitting inside were three visions, stacked on top of eachother. The first was clearly very old and showed a much younger Tía Leandra wearing very little clothing; Mirabel wrinkled her nose and put that one aside. Underneath it was a vision showing Luisa standing by her pool, easily hefting Mariano over the water with one hand, and Dolores with the other. They were all laughing.

Mirabel cocked her head, she couldn’t think of a single reason why this vision would be hidden. Carefully, she picked it up, but when she held it up and changed the angle, the vision shifted to a much less cheerful image.

Instead, Luisa was now standing among rubble, clearly struggling to lift a section of wall off a crate.

Mirabel gasped as she started shifting the tablet back and forth, watching the happy scene appear and disappear.

Was Luisa going to lose her gift? Why?

Tío Bruno had apparently been telling Luisa she needed to relax, but how could her not relaxing lead to her gift going away? 

And what was with the rubble?

Mirabel dropped the vision into her lap, staring into the middle distance. For a few seconds, all she could do was blink dumbly into nothing, trying to figure out what this vision meant. Then something caught her eye.

Was that her?

Slowly, heart beating in her ears, Mirabel reached into the trunk and pulled out the last vision. It was like the one of Luisa, if she held it one way, Mirabel was standing in front of a perfectly intact Casita, if she tilted it the other, Casita was falling to pieces behind her.

This must be how Tío Bruno found out about the cracks. This must be the vision he had that told them Mirabel had miracle magic for emergencies. Mirabel had always assumed the vision showed her fixing whatever was broken, that it ended with a happy image. This vision didn’t look happy, it didn’t even look certain.

She hadn’t even considered the thought that she might not succeed. That she might not fix the cracks. Of course she would, this was Encanto, and she was a Madrigal. Mirabel couldn’t let her familia or the village down.

Suddenly she remembered Dolores’ words of warning, “If you can’t live up to the village’s expectations” she had trailed off but the implication had been that you would end up like Tío Bruno. Hated by many, and blamed for things beyond your control. 

After a few seconds of thought, she put the other two visions back, but kept the one about her.

Mirabel re-locked the trunk and hurried out of the cave, closing it behind her. She walked across the bridge as quickly as she dared, and had to struggle to keep herself from running down the stairs. When she was halfway down, she noticed that there were two more people standing at the bottom of the canyon.

Tío Bruno and Tía Leandra.

When they looked up and saw her they both smiled, Tío Bruno raising his hand to wave at her. Then they must have noticed the vision in her hand because Tía Leandra visibly grimaced and Tío Bruno’s hand stopped mid-wave.

To their credit, when she got to them, neither of them bothered to lecture her about snooping.

“I hope that’s not the one of me,” Tía Leandra said, Tío Bruno sent her a look, but she just flashed her cheekiest grin at him and he melted.

“I am honestly trying to forget I saw that, thanks,” Mirabel said.

“I uh I’m guessing that one is-,” Bruno rubbed nervously at his arm.

In answer, Mirabel held up the vision so they could see, “How do I fix things?”

The two adults exchanged a look, but didn’t respond. Octavia leaned as far forward as she could without losing her balance to see the tablet, then frowned, brows wrinkled.

“Do I, I don’t know, pray at the candle? Hug everybody in the family? What? How do I heal the cracks?”

“What cracks?” Octavia cut in. She must have been standing at an angle from which Casita was intact.

“The cracks in the walls,” Mirabel answered, eyes fixed on her Tío, “he’s been patching them for years but they keep growing.”

“You saw the cracks?” Tía Leandra looked a little more surprised then Mirabel would have expected.

“How’d you get past the hole?” Tío Bruno cocked his head.

“I used a ladder to climb down, walked across, then climbed back up.”

“A ladder…? We have a ladder that long?”

“Yeah, it’s not even ten feet deep.”

“Oh.”

They both stared at her in silence for a second.

“Bruno, darling?”

“Sí mi amor?”

“We might be stupid.”

“Sí mi amor.”

Mirabel lifted the tablet again, opening her mouth to insist Tío Bruno tell her more about his vision, but was cut off when Bruno’s door opened and Camilo’s voice bounced off the canyon walls, “Time for dinner!”

[roseband]

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