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bigskydreaming · 3 years ago

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In a mood and I’m trying not to be, but oof. Not easy at the moment. Real life stresses are kicking my butt and I’m decidedly limited in resources for addressing that at the moment, so might as well get this off my chest, lol. Already lost the usual fifty followers or so I lose every single time I post about stuff the way I did the other day, so what’s some more, y’know?

So earlier today I tried to get my mind off things with some fic, and happened across one I hadn’t read before that promised Jason and Dick talking things out and bonding. Halfway through I sighed and went oh, this is familiar, and skipped to the bottom to check the end notes and comments to see if there was any mention of this next part, but nope. The reason for the sigh was it took me about halfway into the fic to realize that it was blatantly inspired by my post about what if Jason was missing some memories from his death/resurrection and the Pit, like specifically the ski trip they took, stuff like that. Now I’m not so egotistical as to think nobody but me has certain ideas, but its fairly easy for me to recognize when someone is basing something off a post of mine because of specific turns of phrases that I use and like, they hit ten or so bullet points from my post without missing a one. Like, there’s parallel evolution and similar ideas, and then there’s going down a check list, y’know?

And don’t get me wrong....I don’t mind people basing stuff of my posts, being inspired by them, etc. I WANT that. I’m GLAD to have that happen.

The part I mind is the way this all ties back into my interaction with fandom as a whole....and this fandom’s interaction with me. Which I don’t tend to hear NEARLY as much about as I tend to have people giving me shit about my impact on fandom....but ONLY the negative impact.

In the four years or so that I’ve been active in this fandom, I can think of only three people who have given me some kinda shout out for being the basis of one of their fics. Three people. And in that time I’ve come across literal dozens of fics that I am almost certain can trace their way back to popular posts of mine. There’s the post about Jason’s memories and the ski trip for one - this fic isn’t an isolated occurrence, I’ve found a good half a dozen or so I feel fall into the same pattern. There’s fics based off my posts about how fucked up the blame Dick got for Spyral was, with my certainty based on the fact that I know I’m the only fucking person who ever brought up various key phrases like “Bruce not having an extraction plan for Dick’s highly dangerous undercover op, leaving him stranded when Bruce got/(chose) amnesia.” I made a big deal about that in a few posts because of the fact I NEVER saw that particular element raised in any fics, and a couple months after I started including that bit regularly, I was seeing the words ‘without an extraction plan’ in every other new post Spyral fic. That’s not a coincidence.

There’s been stuff that included bits and phrasings from my post about Dick and Jason being partners who focused on helping kids who had been abused specifically....oh wait, no, my bad. The two fics I’m thinking of there lifted straight up entire lines from that post but just made it about Jason and TIM doing that instead, despite like.....the entire basis of that headcanon stemming from Dick’s juvie origin but whatever. There’s been stuff based on juvie posts of mine, stuff based on posts I’ve made about Mirage, there’s been stuff based on the post about Jason looking into why Dick was undercover as a mob enforcer and then Renegade, there’s been stuff clearly inspired by my headcanons about Jason calling Dick for advice after the Garzonas case. I could go on. There’s a fucking LOT.

I don’t try to give myself too much credit but I’m not unaware of being a loud voice in this fandom and that having an impact. And like I said, I’m not adverse to inspiring people to make their own stuff based off an idea they initially saw me present. That’s fine. People should feel free to do that. My problem is that none of this exists in a vacuum. It exists in a fandom where I regularly get people lecturing me on my presentation, people hyping up how negative I make fandom, my condescension, my anger, my hostility, etc, etc.

But the thing I never see is any awareness whatsoever that like....dudes, I’m literally just a guy on the internet. And that goes two ways. Yeah, I have an impact on people, but they have one on me too. And I’m tired and frustrated by it being acted like this is a one way street and everyone is just helpless victims of my bullying, while meanwhile SOME OF THE EXACT SAME PEOPLE GIVING ME CRAP FOR MY NEGATIVITY are ACTIVELY adding to their own fics with stuff that I JUST posted about.

And like, I see people vagueblogging about the negativity on their dashes and its impact on fandom right after I have a Dick Grayson rant blow up and get a few hundred notes......but its acted like I DID that to fandom, that’s my negativity and mine alone when its like....y’know, if you’re not following me yourself, and this stuff is still on your dash, you uh....have to be following people who reblog my negative posts for some reason or another. And given that there are obviously reasons you follow THOSE people, maybe instead of worrying about what I’M doing all the time, you can spare a thought or two for the fact that I don’t have any power to make people reblog anything, and for whatever reason, something about my oh so negative post resonated with those people reblogging it onto your dash, which also kinda suggests it wasn’t negative in THEIR eyes, but was actually a kind of validation of thoughts or feelings they already had?

Trust me, there’s no mind control ray at work here. This mood is also brought to you by the cricket sounds that come every time I fucking BEG people to reblog and signal boost posts I make about rape/abuse fandom trends and depictions from my POV as a survivor, specifically. Like I mentioned, I LOSE followers every time I bring that stuff up. It doesn’t benefit me in any way whatsoever, in fact my notes tend to go comparatively radio silent for a good couple weeks after I go off on one of those jaunts, because idk, people don’t want THEIR mutuals and followers to think they agree with some of my oh so controversial stances?

Actually, I say idk, but I do know is the thing, because people actually go on anon and tell me they appreciate me posting stuff like this, and its like.....that....doesn’t actually make me feel good? Because I never expect any single person in particular to reblog me, but when I say crickets after I post on those topics, I mean CRICKETS. I’m lucky if I can get five reblogs on those posts in total, and those are usually all from the same people. It actually kinda sucks knowing that people agree with me and what I have to say there, but they won’t put it on their own blogs because this fandom is so fucking STEEPED in its views, they don’t want to risk their friendships or back-and-forths with certain popular fandom authors by rocking the boat.

Because meanwhile I’m making myself target practice for the people who really would like me to shut up on certain topics but are too cowardly to ever confront me directly about why they dislike what I have to say there, in the vain hope that other people might finally even just START to pass some of that on even for consideration....because I can make waves by myself just by being loud and consistent, but I can’t do shit to actually make CHANGE without other people agreeing in PUBLIC so that fandom is forced to confront the fact that no, certain opinions aren’t just one loud asshole being annoying, there’s an actual viewpoint here that people actually have in greater numbers than we realized and we DON’T have as much of a monopoly on this topic as we thought.

I have anons who give me shit accusing me of driving off certain authors by making this fandom not fun for them anymore, when like, I never even fucking INTERACTED with the authors in question. Some of the names I’m accused of driving off I don’t even KNOW. I’m called an ‘abusive survivor shaming cunt’ with zero irony or self-awareness that they’re literally doing the exact same thing because they don’t like the stance *I* take as a survivor posting about how ‘some survivors use dark fic/rape fantasy to cope’ shouldn’t be treated as a monolithic defense of such things if it leads directly into the same kind of survivor shaming other people view criticism of such fic as being in the first place.

I’ve had to unfollow mutuals because I post about how reblogging posts about purity culture is a direct fucking slap into the face to people like me whose stances on fandom culture are directly based on our own personal experiences and the intersection those have with various popular fandom takes.....like you don’t have to agree with all my takes obviously, but if you can’t see how framing a naive pursuit of ideological purity as the only possible reason people object to certain fandom trends when I’m literally standing right here saying no actually, the way these fandom trends impact me is the reason for me saying the things I say when I say “here’s how this fandom trend impacts me”.....like.....c’mon.

And I’ve had mutuals unfollow me because despite following me because they liked my takes on social justice issues THEY care about, I just ‘post too much about what’s really just a personal issue’ and has no larger social relevance whatsoever, obviously. LOL. (Oh and this of course has nothing to do with them getting friendly with various popular authors on discord, who happen to be vocal about ‘disapproving’ of any fic criticism whatsoever. Just FYI, there’s a reason I haven’t followed anyone new or made any new mutuals in like....a year. I have my reasons for being....not quick about that).

I get condescended to constantly about not minding the tags, and then radio silence when I list literal examples of ways in which people haven’t tagged things correctly, tagged things at all, or literally used the tags in an attempt TO trigger people they just don’t like.

And meanwhile, allllllll of this keeps happening while the general narrative is I’m this loud asshole guy with zero concern about anything but his own personal likes or dislikes and who makes fandom a negative place that’s unwelcoming in general. And with basically zero mention of all the ways in which I’ve contributed to this fandom, the amount of content I’ve made that has DIRECTLY inspired people, and the productive conversations I’ve started which have resulted in people actually changing the way they approach various characters or dynamics in fics.

Its THAT part that bugs me, specifically.

Look, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now.....I’m not anyone’s victim. Negative fandom interactions are negative fandom interactions. All this complaining I’m doing here - lol, that’s all it is. I’m venting. I’m pissed off and I think its relevant to a greater fandom dynamic or tendencies a lot of people unknowingly or consciously reinforce, and so I’m just fucking SAYING it because while its not something I EXPECT this post will do much to change, if at all, I would still like it to change so any effort towards that end is still better than no effort at all...hence, my posting this rather than bottling it up so at least people have it to consider.

If you don’t agree with it, if you don’t like that it exists at all, if it ruins your day to have to consider whether or not you or people you know or even like are active participants in what someone else is describing as y’know....fairly day-ruining in its own way? Hit that unfollow, that block, that make new text post button of your own and have your own rant about what a douchebag I am.

Literally all I’m trying to express is like.....fa*ndom’s got a lot to say about the stuff I have to say about fandom, but like....this is a two way interaction. A lot of people make a big deal about MY impact (again, JUST the negative though, lol) but I don’t ever see anyone ever addressing anyone else about hey maybe you could spare a thought or two about YOUR impact for a change as well.

I mean, what if....just maybe...what if.....a lot of my behavior or attitude has a lot to do with how people approach or talk about me BEFORE that display of attitude or certain behavior? Weirdly....I feel like maybe something that could then have a transformative effect on the kind of behavior or attitude people dislike from me....is.....them acknowledging or addressing things they might have done to prompt certain responses from me?

I don’t actually like being whiny or negative or down in general, just to be clear? If I see something I have a problem with or think could use change or improvement, I say so - but I pretty much always put an effort into expressing both WHY and HOW I think possible change could look - because I’m not generally interested in being negative for the sake of just being negative. I just....want things to be better. That’s not an obsession with purity or perfection, btw, I will NEVER understand how people think that survivors of rape and abuse (which include a lot more ‘antis’ than anyone else seems to want to acknowledge) and the like EVER expects perfection or thinks that the world will ever produce that - lol no I’m actually pretty clear that things being perfect is pointless, I’m just interested in BETTER.

But I mean, I like being goofy and silly and also analytical and contemplative and also creative and spontaneous. I like lots of things. I like lots of moods. I like producing, creating, generating, interacting, engaging, I like a million things more than I like THIS kind of mood, THIS kind of post.

But I’m just not someone who is content to sit and stew in that sort of thing when I know full well that the problem does not actually stem from something broken or flawed inside of me, because I’m also someone who does believe very strongly in periodic bouts of self-reflection and honest self-assessment.....so that I can change things about myself when and where I feel necessary. But this also has the effect of me also being VERY aware of when the problem is not internal, but actually just me having a perfectly valid reaction or emotional response to outside stimulus. Aka fandom’s interaction with me, every bit as much as my interaction with fandom.

So....posts like this. I’ll do my usual rituals, get myself back onto my preferred trains of thought soon enough on my own, because ultimately that is all I can control and just because I make posts like this doesn’t mean I ever EXPECT any specific result - or a result at all - to come from it.

But, y’know, sue me for being hopeful.

I know. What an ass am I?

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taffystake · 5 years ago

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Tony Stark Iron Man #13 Review

Written by: Gail Simone

Art by: Paolo Villanelli

Colors by: Edgar Delgado

Cover by: Alexander Lozano

Well, last issue was entirely about fighting a dragon with the most modern technology available and watching as magic rendered all that modern tech a mess. So whats a man of science to do against this sort of magic? Well, stayed tuned to this......written review, to read and find out.

The comic opens with our friendly neighborhood dragon, Sadurang, marching on the New York Stock Exchange to get at Tony Stark’s ‘gold’. And after talking with the homeless man outside, who had previously been a stock trader, Sadurang rewards him gold for the information of how much money goes through the Stock Exchange. A number that is so alien to Sadurang that he is almost baffled until he simply decides to claim all that money as his own (No one tell him he wants a bunch of ones and zeros to sit on for a horde).

Back with Tony, we get to watch as he desperately attempts to think around the magic invading his suit, a process that, in his words, ‘is his kryptonite’. So, taht magic inevitably transforms the Iron Man suit into what appears to be medieval knight armor with an ability to use magic. Which he promptly demonstrates by making it rain frogs by accident. And while Rhodey attempts to talk him into getting out of the suit, Tony takes off after Sadurang when he sees the three dead guards. And enroute, he makes a call to Janet Van Dyne to try and get hmself some backup against a reality warping dragon. A dragon who is still tearing up the trading floor of the Stock Exchange as he attempts to find coins and crystals.

So when Tony shows up, he manages to make his armor doing a bit of offensive lightning magic by uttering the word ‘Shazam.’ But unfortunately, one magic word doesn't stop a fifty ton dragon from backhanding you across a room and pinning you under his claw. So Sadurang goes bite Tony in half, Tony summons up his rain of frogs directly inside of Sadurang’s mouth before beating a hasty retreat back towards Stark Unlimited with orders for everything to go dark except the Hulkbot.

Once he gets there, he explains that Sadurang’s magic is essentially a mystical computer virus. So since Hulkbot is already a glitchy mess, he either won’t be affected or won’t be a loss if he gets magicked. So Tony has Hulkbot rip him out of his armor just as Janet arrives. Asking her to run interference while he sets up something, Janet quickly sets work blasting and pestering the dragon with a few hit-and-run attacks before he is left yelling at her and blasting fire at her. Which is when Tony comes out with what exactly he planned on using to face Sadurang: the Mark I Armor. And the Mark I Armor, powered by Tony’s Arc Reactor, makes for a hell of a bruiser. So we get an entire page of the most iron of Iron Man just beating this dragon down through fists and anger before he gets pulled back from the unconscious dragon by Janet. And as the comic closes we get a remark on if Tony has any Elfbuster armor as the story leads into War Of The Realms.

The art is extremely fun to see, with every impact in the fights and all the expressions outside of them working extremely well to help convey the story. While the paneling can be a bit basic, it makes the few times it becomes dynamic stand out all the more as it tries to emphasis the power of these moments. And I would remiss if I forgot to talk specifically about the writing. The level of charm and humor that Gail Simone is able to get out of all the characters involved here is great, especially with the unspoken irony of where Sadurang’s hunt for treasure leads him and the little quippy nicknames that Tony gives Sadurang that just feel like exactly something Robert Downey Jr would’ve ad-libbed for the movies.

Now then, I will talk about the one mild thing that may have some people confused. Namely, the fact that Tony is dropping a few DC Universe specific terms in the midst of the comic here. And this isn’t just a slip of the tongue or anything, this is a reference towards the crossovers that DC and Marvel had in the past. Which has now inspired a small amount of questioning as to whether the two companies could do this again that I am all for. But, on the topic of the comic, it is still a fun as hell read, with great jokes and action that just keep you engaged and wanting to see where they end up.

#marvel #marvel comics #dc #dc comics #iron man #tony stark #gail simone #comic #comics #comic book #comic books #comic review #review #taffys take

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what-the-hekate · 6 years ago

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The Becoming

There’s a lot I want to do with this blog, and I’m still putting it together in my head. I do know that I want to use it as a space to share my thoughts on witchcraft and related subjects, some of it centered around research into particular topics, and some of it just what I’ve been thinking about.

Right now, I have a lot of stray thoughts that aren’t ready to be developed into posts of their own. As I sat down to type some of them out and see where they went, I ended up running pretty far with a piece about my personal journey into witchcraft. And that seems as good a place as any to start.

I suppose I’ve always been attracted to the strange and supernatural, but I didn’t think of myself a witch (or even consider it) until I was a teenager. This was during the teen witch craze of the 1990s, when the movie The Craft and the TV series Charmed reintroduced the idea of witchcraft as something appealing and empowering to young women. I don’t remember which of my friends first got the idea to dabble in witchcraft; maybe it was me, maybe not. I do remember that someone got hold of a copy of a Silver RavenWolf book, probably Teen Witch, and that we had to pass it around because the girl who actually owned it was afraid her parents would find it in her room.

Looking back, I have mixed feelings about those books. I feel lucky that I was the right age at the right time to have that option offered to me—that I was a teenage girl in the 90s listening to Tori Amos and Liz Phair and Ani DiFranco and Paula Cole and Alanis Morissette, and that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was on TV, and that pop culture in general was telling me I had power at the point in my life when I could’ve felt the most powerless.

Which Witch? A wordgame

At the same time, I wish there had been a greater variety of voices to hear about witchcraft from. Silver RavenWolf may have been a driving force behind a generation’s interest in witchcraft and Wicca, but her books were also full of bad information and skewed heavily towards one version of witchcraft. She doesn’t clearly distinguish between “witch” and “Wiccan”, and I think the passage in To Ride a Silver Broomstick about her associations with those two words explains why, but I also think it’s important to be clear that they aren’t wholly interchangeable. You can be a witch and not be a Wiccan; her books are about how to be a Wiccan. That’s what I tried to be as a teenager, and ultimately it’s why I drifted away from witchcraft in general over the next few years.

(Let me go ahead and say: Wicca is right for some people, and that’s fine. It’s not right for me.)

Some of my aversion to the Wiccan version of being a witch is instinctual and was pinged early on. when I was reading those Silver RavenWolf books. For me, being a witch was about female empowerment and independence, so I was confused when I got to the bit about worshiping a dual deity, the Goddess and the God. I never gelled with the Horned God on any level. It wasn’t to do with the similarity to the Christian devil; I wasn’t raised religious and I had no particularly strong feelings about anything in the Christian universe. I just didn’t feel at all compelled to adopt a central deity (or two) in general, and I really wasn’t interested in a male one.

Nor did I really care for the heterosexual duality of the Goddess/God, and all the binary sexual symbolism of things like the Great Rite and chalices and athames. At the time, I wasn’t consciously aware that I was queer (probably because it just wasn’t a possibility that I was exposed to very much). But I reacted to this whole Goddess/God thing turning up in my magical female empowerment pretty much the same way I reacted to a romance subplot suddenly taking center stage in a book I was enjoying. It wasn’t a dealbreaker, but I couldn’t help being annoyed that it was distracting from the stuff I was really there for.

Honestly, what probably played the biggest overt role in my move away from Wicca was simply that it was a religion. I’m just not cut out for religions. I find them interesting, and there are pieces of them that work for me sometimes, but on the whole it’s just not something that’s ever going to be a part of my life. Wicca is a very demanding religion. It’s highly ritualized, from the major holidays (the eight sabbats, plus the 12-13 esbats) down to the daily practices of spellwork. There is just a lot to do, and a lot of specificity about when and how to do it. I have enough trouble disciplining myself to do the other things I’m obligated to do in my life, like work and school and errands and keeping my house reasonably tidy and eating a vegetable on a regular basis. I was way worse at this at 14 or 15 years old. I got tired of rituals fast.

So TL;DR, I did not end up being a Wiccan. And because I’d gotten the idea that, in real life, witch = Wiccan, I didn’t think of myself as a witch anymore, either. If I have any lasting bitterness toward that segment of my path, that’s it. The identity of “witch” was an empowering, beautiful thing that I wish I’d been able to keep in my life even after my dalliance with Wicca was over. There were definitely times I could’ve used it.

In the years after that, I kept on being a little spooky and magical and all the things I’d been that had drawn me to witchcraft in the first place, just without a central identity to pin it all to. It’s interesting how things drift in and out of focus and concreteness depending on whether they have a name. The witch fad gave way to something else the way fads do, Buffy and Charmed eventually ended, and I didn’t think much about witches again until recently.

There’s a lot to delve into about why witchcraft has its resurgences when it has them; probably there are already a lot of essays on the subject. But generally, I think you tend to find women thinking witchy thoughts at times when they’re particularly under threat.

Much of my early/middle-early adult life coincided with the Obama administration. I’d only become really aware of politics toward the end of the Bush era. When 9/11 happened, I was in the middle of an unrelated nervous breakdown and just did not have the spoons to think critically about political issues; I was also 16 years old. I didn’t realize how fucked up things like the PATRIOT Act were until years down the line. I was in the dark in more ways than one, dealing with undiagnosed depression and anxiety and having to claw my way up out of its depths without even medication to give me a boost.

A Musical Interlude: What does this have to do with witchcraft...?

Two things kept me just this side of insane when I was in the depths: writing and listening to music. Of the latter, I still had the female artists who’d taught me how to be a woman, thank fucking god for them. And as I was trying to find a foothold in the long slow climb out of my depressive pit, I’d come across a Finnish band called HIM; for whatever reason, their particular brand of gothy romantic macabre intellectual music was exactly what my soul resonated with at that moment. I realized that I could vibe with men sometimes, provided they were the type of men who wrote poetry and wore eyeliner and a lot of black. This is probably how I ended up listening to Nine Inch Nails.

I was aware of NIN, as anyone who experienced the 90s was; even if that wasn’t your particular scene, you heard “Closer”. A lot of women around my age credit David Bowie in Labyrinth for their early confusing sexuality-related experience; mine was probably the “Closer” video. I think this explains a lot about me. But besides that, I hadn’t paid much attention to NIN until I ran into them again in 2007 or so, when they were doing this crazy metafictional thing called Year Zero around their latest album. I don’t remember exactly how I found it; maybe via Lost, which had its own thing like that and led me to the niche narrative medium of alternate reality games. Anyway, it was highly political, which was not what I remembered NIN being about, and as I was listening through the band’s back catalog and reading a bazillion interviews with brooding, sarcastic, witty, thoughtful Trent Reznor (look, I’m not completely gay), I got sucked into this thing.

I don’t remember whether I read this while I was diving into Year Zero or after, but in some interview or other I found out that Trent had just come out of his own darkness. He’d struggled with drugs and depression and nearly died, and when he finally got his shit together, he realized how much he’d been oblivious to, in his own life and in the world around him. Year Zero was political because he’d woken up, and it woke me up.

It’s interesting to me now to think that female music and male music acted like an alternating current in my life, one then the other driving me forward, yet I got absolutely zilch out of the hetero-duality of Wicca. I don’t know what to tell you. It’s also interesting that the avatars of that dynamic in my life were Tori Amos and Trent Reznor, since they had an important impact on each others’ lives too (that I didn’t know about till much later). There’s a bit in Tori’s book Piece By Piece where she talks about reconciling with the angry masculine energies she was drawn to at points in her life (I can’t remember if she specifically mentions Trent in that part, but I assume it’s at least somewhat about him), and her realization that she had a need to tap into energy like that sometimes. If anyone is the embodiment of feminine power to me it’s Tori, and reading her words about needing to channel masculine rage did and does resonate with me about the time in my life when male artists’ energies were what I needed to survive and evolve.

So anyway, back on the path: my dark times led me to Nine Inch Nails which, while the music was also helping me heal my soul, also focused my brain on the world I’d been ignoring. I became aware of, and pissed off about, politics in no time flat. I devoured Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. I watched C-SPAN of my own volition. In short, I realized that the system is fucked up. I realized that the things happening in America were literally insane, and I knew insanity. I learned the word “patriarchy”, but I’d known the thing it named for a long, long time. This was also the point when I realized I’d exhausted my lifetime stores of patience for bullshit and being fucked with; they have not, to this day, been replenished.

And then, like a lot of people, I thought the Obama years meant everything was okay forever. I mean, god, I sure felt like I deserved a break. There were ups and downs even then, but I really had no idea how fast and how far we could plummet down again until 2016.

Witch 2: The Rewitchening

I don’t believe you can be a woman and be aware of what’s going on in the world and not be angry. As I write this, my home state of Alabama has just passed an amendment (which may be useless; we do have the longest mess of a constitution in the world) aimed at undermining women’s right to an abortion. We have a president who says the most vile things about women on a regular basis, and a new Supreme Court Justice who is a rapist. There are a lot of rapists. There are a lot of men who beat up their wives and girlfriends and then go on to shoot up a school or a nightclub or a shopping mall, and we keep acting surprised, and we keep forcing women to share custody with their abusers and berating them for being abused. Women, everywhere, are under attack.

If there’s a single predominant reason I came back to witchcraft now, and why I think a lot of women are coming to witchcraft now, this is it. We are threatened, and that idea of female empowerment and strength and the potential to be feared by those who would harm us and to be fearless... it is as potent and attractive to us now as it was in the 90s, and the 60s, and probably so many times before.

I am a witch. I don’t belong to a religion, and I don’t feel obligated to be a witch according to anyone’s definition but my own. My witchery is a product of the path I’ve taken to this point, and is highly focused around female empowerment; that said, I recognize that other people’s witchery has a different shape, and different (or no) gender, and is religious or isn’t, and I acknowledge and respect that, too. I have zero interest in telling anyone else how to be a witch, or whether they can be.

I started this blog because I need to express myself, but also because I want to contribute to a diversity of voices about witchcraft that wasn’t available to me as a teenager. I want to put things out there in case someone else needs them. Honestly, I’m writing and gathering all the things that will eventually be here for a hypothetical, imaginary-but-maybe-real young witch who is maybe just a ghost of my teenage past, to tell her the things I wish I could’ve heard, and just to remind her that no one can tell you how to be a witch, and no one should try, and that there are so many different ideas and beliefs and voices and experiences out there for her to learn from, including the ones inside herself.

That’s my origin story.

#op #witchblr #personal

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erenthecoordinate · 7 years ago

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I don’t entirely agree with your examples of Eren having similar responsibility for his actions in comparison to Reiner. I know Reiner and the warriors did horrible things to innocent people but they were naive children! None of them had any idea about the people in Paradis. Eren however had all that knowledge and still chose to destroy Marley. Don’t you think that makes him especially more cruel? Or is he really as naive? I like Eren but he seems off the rails now.

[TL;DR I got a little passionate and wordy here, but the simple answers, at least based on my analysis and what has been physically presented to us in the story as of Chapter 100, are Eren is not more or less cruel and what he did is not a product of being naive.]

I honestly don’t understand when people talk about Eren having some sort of apparent “advantage” over those who also shook their moral balance at a time, as if that excuses other people’s actions for being unaware of what was going on in the rest of the world. It seems to come down to Eren having access to memories of the past, particularly his dad’s, seeing what life was like on the other side of the ocean, actually living among them and experiencing their society, etc. etc.

No offense to those that think that but it is a very weak argument considering as far as we the readers know he only had clear access to his dad’s memories which are entirely full of hate for Marley. It was all about Grisha seeking a way to avenge his sister’s death and when he couldn’t do anything about it he depended on his son’s discontent for their confinement and eventual mother’s death to accomplish the goal. Even Kruger’s story painted nothing but a bad picture of Marley, even if he acknowledged a complicated Eldian history. There were no “two sides” shown to him prior to him entering Marley. He is not by any means all-knowing with infinite access to other memories and almost no sight of the royal side unless contacting with Historia and even that wasn’t a guarantee method of memory surfing. As far as we know, he remains a young man with god-level abilities beyond comprehension stuck inside a locked box without any way to constantly activate them without an outside influence. But I also mentioned that we lack context so this can easily be turned on its head and revealed otherwise due to any happenings during that timeskip.

On that note, ch100 showed us that Eren and Reiner are near exact parallels of one another and have been throughout the story; from their core intentions and placement in the world, the responsibilities they carry, the truths they both have access to, right down to the imagery. It’s not just something Eren brings up, but Reiner thinks about before he puts the gun barrel in his mouth. The only thing we are waiting for is whatever, if any, emotional aftermath Eren will experience after this whole ordeal is finished. If the parallels continue he would probably feel just as guilty, despite what he ends up doing (i.e. killing the masses).

So in knowing that, Reiner experienced essentially the same things Eren did. While he was a child, and I personally believe that manipulation played a role in his self-proclaimed selfishness, and he did suffer mentally from what he forced himself and his comrades to do. He did grow up on enemy territory for 5 years. He did experience the people that “pissed him off” but also encountered “good people.” He may have reinforced a false persona to deal with the guilt, but even his “warrior” self is aware of the devastation he is causing and how innocent these people are—but no matter how innocent or vulnerable the Walldians are, he never wavers from his goal. Even if he absolutely hates it. He is one of the FIRST people to experience “two lives” and still chose to betray a side even though he realizes there are some non-truths to what Marley was feeding them. The issue is that he is ultimately in too deep to pull himself out and thus enters his mental and emotional degradation and guilt that he lives with for 4+ years.

Nevertheless, the action is played almost to the illustration of what Eren eventually does, betrayal and destruction included. They both follow a similar behavioral path and that’s what Eren has been raised on from the moment of his birth. A large part of the reason both of them do what they do is because of an extremely dangerous version of “believing themselves.” I don’t think Eren is working independently on this mission, it’s already been confirmed that there are others working with him, and the Survey Corps are absolutely not above killing people, even if they are manipulated innocents, so long as it is the survival of humanity, the one that they are part of, that prevails. I don’t believe he is a bloodthirsty monster bent on destruction and I do believe there will be a lot of consequence coming his way, and he knows it. He does what he thinks he has to do to survive. To make sure his people are free in some way. That’s what he is fighting for. Whether this is the best way or not is up to future interpretation (you can take guesses now, but again we don’t have as much evidence as we’ve had throughout the series due to this timeskip).

Anyway on topic of who is most to blame for their cruelty, they both come off on par. And you can argue that the mind of the child and the adult are different and should be treated different, and on a biological and societal standpoint that is entirely correct, but we are comparing how much information they have on the other side and the grey morality that comes with it and factually Reiner has years of experience and Eren was left in the dark longer. By the time Reiner betrays the friends he’s known for 3 years, he is older and no longer that patriotic child that wants to bring honor to his family and himself, he has gone through enough that his naiveness gone; he was not much younger than Eren currently is. Eren has a childlike, naive moral compass at the start as well, but I don’t think what he does now comes down to ignorance and it is definitely not impulse as he had done things. This took a lot more thinking, a lot more dedicated planning. This is not like the time he killed those kidnappers when he was nine. Whether he is acting alone or not, there is thought and consideration on his part. His very expressions are ominous and solemn, much like those of the warrior trio, when faced with the decision to transform, kill people, devastate lives, etc. Even if there is anger and rage, they are not lone emotions within him. He is aware of what is happening and what he is doing.

There have been theories that all of this has to do with his inheritance of the Attack Titan and/or Grisha and Kruger. While I believe there is some influence, Eren has always been one to fight and motivate the underdog even as a child. This takes a much larger scale. He views his people as more vulnerable and he must stand up for them. Because even if Marley is also manipulated, they are knowingly reacting to Eldian existence with direct violence, whereas Paradis never stood a chance because they had no knowledge to begin with. Eren will always side with those people (unless something severely impacted that consistency then I don’t know what Isayama is going for haha). That has nothing to do with his titan, he has always been this way, as he puts it. I do have thoughts as to how the Attack Titan itself may influence him to act in certain ways, but the primary intent to protect the weak is just simply an Eren thing. Whether that is something Grisha nurtured since in his childhood is yet to be told, though it seems more of convenience for Eren to be passed down that power. He likely wasn’t raised quite like Zeke even if they eventually ended up getting swept up by their father’s involvement.

So I do not believe Eren is any less or more cruel with his actions than Reiner, for example. I don’t think he is more or less cruel than a majority of actions taken by other characters who may also be blamed for risking innocent lives. I also do not believe it to be a product of him being naive; and saying he is AS naive as Reiner discredits the things Reiner has learned along the way and the present inner turmoil he experiences now that he is less and less sure of the cause he was originally fighting for. It’d be interesting if Eren came up to that point. He did after all, despite all the memories of Marley being very negative and having zero experience with their society, have that vague reflection of his purpose during that ocean scene. I think whatever it is he does from then on out will refer to that in more detail.

But as it stands right now, yes what he did was morally screwy, what he does will likely follow suit, but it is poor thinking to say he is an aggressor when in reality he’s been a defender the entire time, to criticize him if he has a step ahead of his enemies even though they have always been leaps ahead of him, to assume he is acting in raw anger when recent visuals show otherwise– and there is absolutely no reason for Isayama to waste his time drawing those expressions just to say he was lying. Any of these can change to be truth, but for now the context clues in this arc and arcs prior point to another direction and it does not paint Eren to be this careless, ignorant berserk monster with little sympathy for his enemy’s circumstances. Be upset by it all you want and take sides, but I don’t believe he is any more wrong or right than any other character, Reiner or otherwise, who have done essentially similar things with the same amount of knowledge. At this point in the story, it’s all fair game.

Thanks for the question, even though I went on tangent, but I still hope I explained myself well enough! It got me to circulate some thoughts I’ve had about this chapter for weeks now!

#eren yeager #reiner braun #eren jaeger #snk meta #snk 100 #snk #meta #or just me rambling #mypost

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ductrungnguyen87 · 4 years ago

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Location Data + Reviews: The 1–2 Punch of Local SEO (Updated for 2020)

Posted by MiriamEllis

Get found. Get chosen.

It’s the local SEO two-step at the heart of every campaign. It’s the 1-2 punch combo that hinges on a balance of visible, accurate contact data, and a volunteer salesforce of consumer reviewers who are supporting your rise to local prominence.

But here’s the thing: while managed location data and reviews may be of equal and complementary power, they shouldn’t require an equal share of your time.

Automation of basic business data distribution is the key to freeing you up to focus on the elements of listings that require human ingenuity — namely, reviews and other listings-based content like posts and Q&A.

It’s my hope that sharing this article with your team or your boss will help you get the financial allocations you need for automated listings management, plus generous resources for creative reputation management.

Location data + reviews = the big picture

When Google lists a business, it gives good space to the business name, and a varying degree of space to the address and phone number. But look at the real estate occupied by the various aspects associated with reputation:

If Google cares this much about ratings, review text, responses, and emerging elements like place topics and attributes, any local brand you’re marketing should see these factors as a priority. In this article, I’ll strive to codify your actionable perspective on managing both location data and the many aspects of reviews.

Ratings: The most powerful local filter of them all

In the local SEO industry, we talk a lot about Google’s filters, like the Possum filter that’s supposed to strain local businesses through a sort of sieve so that a greater diversity of mapped results is shown to the searcher. But searchers have an even more powerful filter than this — the human-driven filter of ratings that helps people intuitively sort local brands by perceived quality.

Whether they’re stars or circles, the majority of rating icons send a 1–5 point signal to consumers that can be instantly understood. This symbol system has been around since at least the 1820s; it’s deeply ingrained in all our brains as a judgement of value.

This useful, rapid form of shorthand lets a searcher needing to do something like grab a quick taco see that the food truck with five Yelp stars is likely a better bet than the one with only two. Meanwhile, searchers with more complex needs can comb through the ratings of many listings at leisure, carefully weighing one option against another for major purchases. In Google’s local results, ratings are the most powerful human-created filter that influences the major goal of being chosen.

But before a local brand can be chosen on the basis of its high ratings, it has to rank well enough to be found. The good news is that, over the past three years, expert local SEOs have become increasingly convinced of the impact of Google ratings on Google local pack rankings. In 2017, when I wrote the original version of this post, contributors to the Local Search Ranking Factors survey placed Google star ratings down at #24 in terms of local rankings influence. In 2020, this metric has jumped up to spot #8 — a leap of 16 spots in just three years.

In the interim, Google has been experimenting with different ratings-related displays. In 2017, they were testing the application of a “highly rated” snippet on hotel rankings in the local packs. Today, their complex hotel results let the user opt to see only 4+ star results. Meanwhile, local SEOs have noticed patterns over the years like searches with the format of “best X in city” (e.g. best burrito in Dallas) appearing to default to local results made up of businesses that have earned a minimum average of four stars. Doubtless, observations like these have strengthened experts’ convictions that Google cares a lot about ratings and allows them to influence rank.

Heading into 2021, any local brand with goals of being found and chosen must view low ratings as an impediment to reaching full growth potential.

Consumer sentiment: The local business story your customers are writing for you

Here’s a randomly chosen Google 3-pack result when searching just for “tacos” in a small city in the San Francisco Bay Area:

We’ve just covered the topic of ratings, and you can look at a result like this to get that instant gut feeling about the 4-star-rated eateries vs. the 2-star place. Now, let’s open the book on business #3 and see precisely what kind of brand story its consumers are writing, as you would in conducting a professional review audit for a local business, excerpting dominant sentiment:

It’s easy to ding fast food chains. Their business model isn’t commonly associated with fine dining or the kind of high wages that tend to promote employee excellence. In some ways, I think of them as extreme examples. Yet, they serve as good teaching models for how even the most modest-quality offerings create certain expectations in the minds of consumers, and when those basic expectations aren’t met, it’s enough of a story for consumers to share in the form of reviews.

This particular restaurant location has an obvious problem with slow service, orders being filled incorrectly, and employees who have been denied the training they need to represent the brand in a knowledgeable, friendly, or accessible manner. If you audited a different business, its pain points might surround outdated fixtures or low standards of cleanliness.

Whatever the case, when the incoming consumer turns to the review world, their eyes scan the story as it scrolls down their screen. Repeat mentions of a particular negative issue can create enough of a theme to turn the potential customer away. One survey says only up to 11% of consumers will do business with a brand that’s wound up with a 2-star rating based on poor reviews. Who can afford to let the other 91% of consumers go elsewhere?

The central goal of being chosen hinges on recognizing that your reviewer base is a massive, unpaid salesforce that tells your brand story. Survey after survey consistently finds that people trust reviews — in fact, they may trust them more than any claim your brand can make about itself.

Going into 2021, the writing is on the wall that Google cares a great deal about themes surfacing in your reviews. The ongoing development and display of place topics and attributes signifies Google’s increasing interest in parsing sentiment, and doubtless, using such data to determine relevance.

Fully embracing review management and the total local customer service ecosystem is key to giving customers a positive tale to tell, enabling the business you’re marketing to be trusted and chosen for the maximum number of transactions.

Velocity/recency/count: Just enough of a timely good thing to be competitive

This is one of the easiest aspects of review management to convey. You can sum it up in one sentence: don’t get too many reviews at once on any given platform but do get enough reviews on an ongoing basis to avoid looking like you’ve gone out of business.

For a little more background on the first part of that statement, watch Mary Bowling describing in this LocalU video how she audited a law firm that went from zero to thirty 5-star reviews within a single month. Sudden gluts of reviews like this not only look odd to alert customers, but they can trip review platform filters, resulting in removal. Remember, reviews are a business lifetime effort, not a race. Get a few this month, a few next month, and a few the month after that. Keep going.

The second half of the review timing paradigm relates to not running out of steam in your acquisition campaigns. Multiple surveys indicate that the largest percentage of review readers consider content from the past month to be most relevant. Despite this, Google’s index is filled with local brands that haven’t been reviewed in over a year, leaving searchers to wonder if a place is still in business, or if it’s so unimpressive that no one is bothering to review it.

While I’d argue that review recency may be more important in review-oriented industries (like restaurants) vs. those that aren’t quite as actively reviewed (like septic system servicing), the idea here is similar to that of velocity, in that you want to keep things going. Don’t run a big review acquisition campaign in January and then forget about outreach for the rest of the year. A moderate, steady pace of acquisition is ideal.

And finally, a local SEO FAQ comes from business owners who want to know how many reviews they need to earn. There’s no magic number, but the rule of thumb is that you need to earn more reviews than the top competitor you are trying to outrank for each of your search terms. This varies from keyword phrase, to keyword phrase, from city to city, from vertical to vertical. The best approach is steady growth of reviews to surpass whatever number the top competitor has earned.

Authenticity: Honesty is the only honest policy

For me, this is one of the most prickly and interesting aspects of the review world. Three opposing forces meet on this playing field: business ethics, business education, and the temptations engendered by the obvious limitations of review platforms to police themselves.

I often recall a basic review audit I did for a family-owned restaurant belonging to a friend of a friend. Within minutes, I realized that the family had been reviewing their own restaurant on Yelp (a glaring violation of Yelp’s policy). I felt sorry to see this, but being acquainted with the people involved (and knowing them to be quite nice!), I highly doubted they had done this out of some dark impulse to deceive the public.

Rather, my guess was that they may have thought they were “getting the ball rolling” for their new business, hoping to inspire real reviews. My gut feeling was that they simply lacked the necessary education to understand that they were being dishonest with their community and how this could lead to them being publicly shamed by Yelp, or even subjected to a lawsuit, if caught.

In such a scenario, there’s definitely an opportunity for the marketer to offer the necessary education to describe the risks involved in tying a brand to misleading practices, highlighting how vital it is to build trust within the local community. Fake positive reviews aren’t building anything real on which a company can stake its future. Ethical business owners will catch on when you explain this in honest terms and can then begin marketing themselves in smarter ways.

But then there's the other side. Mike Blumenthal’s reporting on this has set a high bar in the industry, with coverage of developments like the largest review spam network he’d ever encountered. There's simply no way to confuse organized, global review spam with a busy small business making a wrong, novice move. Real temptation resides in this scenario, because, as Blumenthal states:

“Review spam at this scale, unencumbered by any Google enforcement, calls into question every review that Google has. Fake business listings are bad, but businesses with 20, or 50, or 150 fake reviews are worse. They deceive the searcher and the buying public and they stain every real review, every honest business, and Google.”

When a platform like Google makes it easy to “get away with” deception, companies lacking ethics will take advantage of the opportunity. Beyond reporting review spam, one of the best things we can do as marketers is to offer ethical clients the education that helps them make honest choices. We can simply pose the question:

Is it better to fake your business’ success or to actually achieve success?

Local brands that choose to take the high road must avoid:

Any form of review incentives or spam

Review gating that filters consumers so that only happy ones leave reviews

Violations of the review guidelines specific to each review platform

Owner responses: creatively turning reviews into two-way conversations

Over the years, I’ve devoted abundant space in my column here at Moz to the fascinating topic of owner responses. I’ve highlighted the five types of Google My Business reviews and how to respond to them, I’ve diagrammed a real-world example of how a terrible owner response can make a bad situation even worse, and I’ve studied basic reputation management for better customer service and how to get unhappy customers to edit their negative reviews.

My key learnings from nearly two decades of examining reviews and responses are these:

Review responses are a critical form of customer service that can’t be ignored any more than business staff should ignore in-person customers asking for face-to-face help. Many reviewers expect responses.

The number of local business listings in every industry with zero owner responses on them is totally shocking.

Negative reviews, when fairly given, are a priceless form of free quality control for the brand. Customers directly tell the brand which problems need to be fixed to make them happy.

Many reviewers think of their reviews as living documents, and update them to reflect subsequent experiences.

Many reviewers are more than happy to give brands a second chance when a problem is resolved.

Positive reviews are conversations starters warmly inviting a response that further engages the customer and can convince them that the brand deserves repeat business.

Local brands and agencies can use software to automate updating a phone number or hours of operation. Software like Moz Local can be of real help in alerting you to new, incoming reviews across multiple platforms, or surfacing the top sentiment themes within your review corpus.

Tools free up resources to manage what can’t be automated: human creativity. It takes serious creative resources to spend time with review sentiment and respond to customers in a way that makes a brand stand out as responsive and worthy. It takes time to fully utilize the opportunities owner responses represent to impact goals all the way from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel.

I’ve never forgotten a piece Florian Huebner wrote for StreetFight documenting the neglected reviews of a major fast food chain and its subsequent increase in location closures and decrease in profits. No one was taking the time to sit down with the reviews, listen, fix problems customers were citing, or offer proofs of caring resolution via owner responses.

And all too often, when brands large and small do respond to reviews, they take a corporate-speak stance equivalent to “whistling past the graveyard” when addressing complaints. To keep the customer and to signal to the public that the brand deserves to be chosen, creative resources must be allocated to providing gutsy, honest owner responses. It’s easy to spot the difference:

The response in yellow signals that the brand simply isn’t invested in customer retention. By contrast, the response in blue is a sample of what it takes to have a real conversation with a real person on the other side of the review text, in hopes of transforming one bad initial experience into a second chance, and hopefully, a lifetime of loyalty.

NAP and reviews: The 1–2 punch combo every local business must practice

Right now, there’s an employee at a local business or a staffer at an agency who is looking at the review corpus of a brand that’s struggling for rankings and profits. The set of reviews contains mixed sentiment, and no one is responding to either positive or negative customer experiences.

Maybe this is an issue that’s been brought up from time to time in company meetings, but it’s never made it to priority status. Decision-makers have felt that time and budget are better spent elsewhere.

Meanwhile, customers are quietly trickling away for lack of attention, leads are being missed, structural issues are being ignored…

If the employee or staffer I’m describing is you, my best advice is to make 2021 the year you make your strongest case for automating listing distribution and management with software so that creative resources can be dedicated to full reputation management.

Local SEO experts, your customers and clients, and Google, itself, are all indicating that location data + reviews are highly impactful and here to stay. In fact, history proves that this combination is deeply embedded in our entire approach to local commerce.

When traveling salesman Duncan Hines first published his 1935 review guide Adventures in Good Eating, he was developing what we think of today as local SEO. Here is my color-coded version of his review of the business that would one day become KFC. It should look strangely familiar to anyone who has ever tackled local business listings management:

No phone number on this “citation,” of course, but telephones were quite a luxury in 1935. Barring that element, this simple and historic review has the core earmarks of a modern local business listing. It has location data and review data; it’s the 1–2 punch combo every local business still needs to get right today. Without the NAP, the business can’t be found. Without the sentiment, the business gives little reason to be chosen.

From Duncan Hines to the digital age, there may be nothing new under the sun in marketing, but striking the right pose between listings and reputation management may be new news to your CEO, your teammates, or clients. So go for it — communicate this stuff, and good luck at your next big meeting!

Check out the new Moz Local plans that let you take care of location data distribution in seconds so that the balance of your focus can be on creatively caring for the customer.

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lakelandseo · 4 years ago