#control either and aren’t influenced by factors of free will and choices made and the natural course of things

[writeouswriter]

I think the best love story is the one that’s not trying to be a love story, it just is

[lonestarbabe]

Not to be that guy but Gwyn unilaterally taking TK to rehab seemingly without consulting anyone is really making me rethink the pilot scene where Owen says “we do this my way with a therapist that I choose”

Oh yeah that’s interesting to think about! I’m glad you brought it up. And in many ways, they have a similar vibe, so feel free to send in more of your thoughts on this because there are some interesting parallels there for sure, and in several ways, Owen and Gwyn’s actions are similar, and I think that’s a fair point to make. But I also think there are some nuances in those comparisons. My feelings aren’t necessarily clear cut on this one because we do have a limited perspective for what built up to both moments, but I see Gwyn as giving TK more autonomy than Owen did. The situations were also different in nature, which I think makes a difference in how they were handled as well. 

Because this got wayyyyy too long to expect anyone to read, my tldr is basically that Gwyn was taking steps based on TK’s mental state at that time, which slightly shifts how I view her actions. The intentions of Owen and Gwyn are similar in both instances, but TK’s place in recovery and amenability to treatment were different in both instances, which impacts the type of outside influence he needs. In the flashbacks, TK would have taken any chance to avoid treatment, so Gwyn had to set the ball rolling or else TK was never going to come to the conclusion that treatment was the right option. Gwyn also didn’t have the same kind of leverage as Owen (Owen was in control of TK’s career).

One factor is that TK was not given a choice of his treatment in either scenario. Owen told TK that he would go to the therapist he chose and basically do things Owen’s way. Gwyn had a similar approach in that she had a treatment center lined up, and her language often was forceful (but I’ll get into how, in my view, TK still had more choice even if Gwyn’s language itself didn’t suggest much choice). This is a fair concern because a person who doesn’t want to commit to recovery won’t commit to recovery, which was acknowledged in the episode very well.

The way I interpreted Gwyn’s actions was her basically giving TK the push he needed while knowing she didn’t force him. And sometimes people need that push of someone just stepping on and poking holes in the irrational mental illness voice. I also think in this scenario it helps that she arranged everything because if TK had to make those decisions himself, he probably wouldn’t have made them. He would have made excuses and found things wrong with all the options. He was so entrenched in his addiction that he needed momentum to get the rehab. If he had the chance to stop and think too long, he would have talked himself out of it.

After his overdose, TK was in a completely different headspace. He wasn’t consumed by his addiction. He was more resigned, and while, yes, getting help was the right move, Owen could have let TK decide on his own therapist and given him more power over his own recovery. TK was reluctant about treatment after the overdose, but his head was clearer. He was distressed but able to discuss his situation and was at least contemplating recovery. There’s also the fact that in the pilot, TK was not as far into the cycle of addiction, and he wasn’t chemically dependent on substances at that point. His behaviors also hadn’t become habitual. So, interrupting the cycle was easier and TK was more agreeable to changing.

I also wonder how much Gwyn was talking to Owen about the treatment situation leading up to her taking him there because she would have done a lot of planning before confronting TK. She took time to research treatment centers and make all the arrangements to get TK there. Owen was more acting in the moment (which the situation demanded), so what went into both strategies are quite different and because Gwyn and Owen were both terrified parents, I understand completely where they’re coming from. 

Anyways, nothing about what Gwyn did was a snap decision, and a lot of her approach is on track with what a lot of treatment centers would suggest, and she would have been in contact with the treatment center prior to confronting TK. For example, rehab centers will often help family members create a plan for when their loved one is ready for treatment. Representatives can guide family members through the process and help them make arrangements because they often urge acting promptly and not allowing too much time between getting someone to agree to treatment and getting them actually into treatment. (This article can give insight into the process).

She did forcefully say to him that he was getting on the plane, but she also told him that she couldn’t make him go. Thus, while she makes statements that seem inflexible, I always got the sense that she knew she couldn’t force anything and had made peace with that). We also see that in the final conversation she has with him at the airport. She’s done as much as she could, and it was up to him to take the next steps. And I think she had to be firm with him or he would have kept making excuses. At the end of the day, she was giving him a choice, but she was also being a firm voice of reason and not giving into his addiction’s excuses.

I took her overall approach as taking TK step by step in a way that didn’t overwhelm him. It was a delicate balance of allowing him to make decisions while pointing him towards the right path. She started by getting him out of the drug den. Then, she took him to a comfortable location to have a talk. These are all baby steps that don’t overwhelm him so much that he stops the process. She gets him on the plane by basically being like I can’t force you to go to rehab but you’re going to get on that plane. 

I also think a 30 day stay was potentially just a starting point (but knowing TK he’d be worrying about going back to work ASAP). Because it’s easier to say, “oh just try this for thirty days” than to be like “there’s this long process you’ll have to go through.” While going longer than the 30 day program isn’t a given, research shows that 30 day programs aren’t nearly as impactful. Thus, 30 day programs are often just a starting point to help people get into a mindset where they can decide to invest more time and energy into treatment. 

Just like it takes incremental steps to get addicted, it takes incremental steps to get better (this guide from the National Institute on Drug Abuse gives a lot of information about research based treatment) So, while we don’t know what exactly happened, it wouldn’t be unexpected if he stayed in a residential program after the thirty days. Or even if he did just stay thirty days (again, he’d be worried about getting back to work so that could push him to get out fast), there are other treatment steps he would have taken like outpatient treatment (including potential options like partial hospitalization or intensive outpatient). 

The point of all that is Gwyn’s goal was to get the ball rolling so TK could start to self-direct. Gwyn’s strategy was getting TK to a place where he could make the decisions to get better. She knew she couldn’t do the work for him, but she was pulling as many strings as she could to ensure that obstacles that might slow the momentum of his treatment and make TK think twice were not in the way. TK needed that push, and as he started to detox and recover, his mental processes would also shift, so he’d be able to make better decisions about his recovery and have a more take charge attitude. And again, his mental state was just very different in my opinion after the overdose. And yes, I do think that Owen was right to be firm about therapy, but I do think TK also should have had more choice over his therapist and ultimately get final word over his treatment.

[bellatrixobsessed1]

What do you consider demonizing Azula vs objectively describing her less flattering traits and harmful actions?

Honestly, it all comes down to word choice and language at the end of the day imo. If someone’s character analysis is presented with a certain tone I’m more inclined to say that they are demonizing her. For example saying that “ as a child Azula demonstrated red flags for mental illness and should have been helped” is a lot less antagonizing than “Azula was born evil, she liked to tease and bully Zuko from the start.” One of these statements addresses the complexities of her situation (a broken home and several poor adult influences/examples) while the other basically places full blame on a child. Things like that. I really, really do believe that it’s all about the tone an Azula analysis is presented in. 

Personally I would agree that some of her childhood behaviors, like setting Zuko’s pants on fire and burning some of the bushes in the place garden were huge red flags. They are harmful actions. BUT a lot of those could be 1. attention getting antics because her mother usually paid more attention to her when she misbehaved. 2. Her emulating Ozai and his attitude. And stuff like, “dad’s going to kill you.” Is very much Azula mimicking what her father demonstrated as well as her father actively rewarding her for behaviors like that. These are definitely harmful actions that started getting worse as she got older. An analysis like that is fair and not demonizing imo, because it recognizes that Azula is still a kid and it doesn’t write off the possibility for her to unlearn some of these behaviors later in life with the right help. 

While something like, “even child Azula is a insane, look what she did to Zuko! What kind of sociopath sings-songs about someone’s dad killing them!?” Here is an example of using buzzwords and implying that mental illness as something that automatically makes someone evil. It puts all blame on Azula while factoring out the adults in her life that either sat passive or actively taught her these behaviors. This, imo, is demonizing. 

One of my biggest peeves at the moment is when they say that fucking Ozai and Zhao are more redeemable. Zhao was literally seen in the Avatar universe version of Hell. It is canon that he did not get redemption. So by extension it is canon that he is NOT more redeemable than Azula whose fate is still ambiguous. And there is not one argument that can convince me that the grown ass man who burned his own son’s face off while tearing apart his self-worth is more redeemable than a fourteen year old girl. There is not one argument that can convince me that a man who made a weapon out of his daughter and (heavily implied) abused his wife (at least emotionally) is more redeemable than a fourteen year old girl. Usually I try to keep an open mind and be nice about my opinions in these discourses but I just can’t with this one; I think that this particular statement is stupid as hell. Ozai and (especially in canon and in Hell) Zhao are NOT more redeemable than Azula. Bye, miss me with that dumb shit. 

Some more specific examples that come to mind are;

 When people make Azula out to be a murderer and/or a sadist

The turtle duck thing

Baby Azula.  

The murder thing drives me nuts because, first of all, she’s a solider. She’s at war. Her one kill was a combat kill, he came back to life, and he was entering the Avatar state. Now correct me if I’m wrong but Aang killed Zhao in the Avatar state. You can’t tell me that no one died or was seriously injured in the episode ‘The Avatar State’. So of course she’s gonna shoot him down; he could have killed her just as well. He had no control over the Avatar state at the time. 

Furthermore she has the least amount of collateral damage. And one of the smallest body counts. Aang has killed so many background characters via the Avatar state. Sokka killed Combustion man. Sokka, Suki, and Toph killed several soldiers by crashing those war blimps in the finale. I think that you get the point. But none of them get called murders like Azula does. Everyone seems to be well aware that all of those were combat kills. The reason they get called soldiers instead of murders is because they are protagonists. 

Azula is not a murder. She is a solider. Combat kills are different than murder. They are horrible and unfortunate all the same but it isn’t murder. 

And then there’s the sadist claim. At best I think that that’s a misinterpretation of character. At least from my personal POV. I've seen it argued that she’s not a sadist but only because it’s more coinvent not to be; that she would be one if  she had time for it. But I think that a true sadist wouldn’t give a shit if it’s not convenient. If she were a sadist I feel like she would go out of her way to hurt people like Chit Sang even if it’s not necessary. Azula does only what’s necessary and that’s it. I do think that Azula is merciful. Perhaps not conventionally so but she isn’t cruel. She takes prisoners and as far as we’ve seen on screen those prisoners aren’t treated particularly bad (by Azula anyhow). She doesn’t torture her prisoners and she doesn’t kill them. 

Now, I will give more of an open mind to people who say that she is an EMOTIONAL sadist of sorts. I do think that she gets a kick out of scaring people and bullying people. I’m on the fence with this argument though because how much of her getting a kick out of Zuko’s suffering is her also being relieved that it is not her. And how much of it is more run of the mill teenage bullying? This is one thing where I’m more than willing to hear from the other side. 

I think that the murderer and sadism thing is very much an attempt to demonize her. I think that it can be an exaggeration of her unflattering behaviors. I’m not saying that the things she did aren’t harmful but I do think that some people over exaggerate them or make up stuff that isn’t there; I’ve seen people state that she ‘probably killed so many soldiers off screen’. There is no canon evidence to support this? Likewise these are generally the same people who tell Azula fans that they can’t say Azula was abused off screen. 

The other big one is the turtleduck one. Zuko demonstrates how Azula feeds turtleducks. He throws a piece of bread. I don’t know where the rock thing came from. Furthermore I very much think that Azula chucking a loaf of bread at a turtleduck is just a small child being a little shit. When I was like five or six I yeeted a good half a loaf at a duck because, “the more food they get the happier they are, right????” To me that just seems more like a small child who has not learned impulse control than a child who likes hurting animals. This whole argument, at least imo, is actively demonizing a child for actions that aren’t exactly uncommon for children. The problem is when the child doesn’t learn that yeeting whole loafs at turtleducks is a bad thing. THIS is where I see a fair argument forming because (as of late) Azula didn’t seem to have unlearned this behavior. This is an example of one of those red flags I mentioned in the first paragraph. Which is where some nuance and critical thinking needs to come in. The complexities that I mentioned above about how the child isn’t 100% to blame here. The adults in her life should have tried to teach her better and/or Ozai need to fuck on off and stop teaching her to do wrong. 

And finally baby Azula. I’ll just drop a link here because I already talked about this. But the tone of The Search literally tried to demonize a whole baby. The way the narrative decided frame her was really unnecessary. I really don’t see how this scene contributed to the story other than to remind readers that ‘Azula was always evil, see!’ Nevermind that she’s sleeping in a whole crib. Because that’s a literal infant. 

Anyhow I might come back to this later to add more or clarify but I’m about to make lunch so I’ll end this here for now. Feel free to discuss further. I definitely don’t mind hearing from the other side so long as arguments are respectful and open minded.

[iluxia]

Unsolicited writing advice???

A ton of you have commented with such kind and complimentary words about my Naruto fic Hiding in the Leaves and its characterization through the shifting POVs. Thank you all! I’m gratified to hear that you’re enjoying it. Some are asking how I shift perspectives and still manage to keep the characters in line. Actually, a fair number of readers have asked for actual advice, so here we go. This is a lot of writing babble, I hope it makes sense but feel free to drop me an ask if anything is unclear! 

(1) I read a lot. I read all the time. Easily a book a day, maybe two days. And when I do, I practice critical reading—or as they say, reading like an editor, so I can pick at techniques other writers use. Writing is an art you learn largely by example. A lot of what I read influences what and how I write, so when I need to change my tone or voice to fit a different character, I usually read something that matches what I want my prose to sound like, on top of using techniques like changing tenses and playing with vocabulary choices. 

I recently had the chance to flex these writing muscles because I went from writing two very distinct human voices (Tony Stark & Stephen Strange) to writing an alien voice (Loki). It was fucking hard; those in the Marvel fandom might know what I mean. Tony and Stephen are both human, born and raised in America, with specific life experiences that inform their daily decisions and personalities. Loki, on the other hand, is an alien: raised in Asgard, stolen from Jotunheim, well-traveled throughout the Nine Realms, and moreover raised as a prince. Just stop and think about that. When your characters do not have the same experiences that you do, they’re bound to not have the same earthbound concerns that you do. Anthropomorphizing non-human (or even non-living) beings is an age-old practice, but to be faithful to his character, I tried my best to twist my writing voice into a different shape—a shape that more befits the prince of a realm that is somewhat humanoid but very different from what we know on Earth. And in order to do that, I did four things: 

I changed my prose from past to present tense; it sounds more immediate and assertive

I read three books, written in present tense, where the prose mimics what I imagine Loki would sound like in his own head

I made a huge spread of everything about Loki (both canon and my own orginal additions) that would inform his motivations, internal concerns, emotional responses, and decision-making processes

I drowned myself in Loki fanwork

Immersion is key! If you saturate your brain in a specific type of rhetoric or style, that’s what’s likeliest to come out of your productive process at the end. So controlling what you read/watch/listen to will help control your writing style too.

 (2) This further breaks down what I just said in the third bullet point above. Before I start writing from a specific character’s perspective, I’ll take the time to brainstorm and build that character from the ground up. This might take a day or two and includes a staggering amount of detail—just as much detail as mine or your life might comprise. Silly little things like favorite colors and foods, hobbies, dislikes. Oftentimes, if you’re a fic writer, this is easier because canon gives it to you. Those amazing wiki-pages exist to make your life easier in this regard. (Bless.) What canon doesn’t give you is where you can dig in. Go deeper. Pin your character down. Think about more serious considerations like emotional triggers, conscious motivations, subconscious motivations, coping and defense mechanisms. When hurt or under stress, are they the type to lash out or curl in? Are they the type to hold on to a grudge, or do they prefer to forgive and forget? Do they get hurt easily or do they have a thick skin? I imagine the character’s relationships in life, I rank them and network them in my head. Who do they run to when they need advice? Who do they like hanging out with when they’re happy? Who annoys them, who inspires them, who scares them, who do they want to be like? Even if these questions aren’t necessarily things you might discuss in your fic, it helps inform this person you’re writing about, so it helps you keep a clearer and more consistent mental picture of them as you go.

But most critical of all, I sit and imagine myself in their shoes and think of how they perceive themselves. That is a major factor when writing, because that’s what their head-voice will sound like. And if the story is written from their perspective, then that means you, writer, are writing in that head-voice!

Here’s a more HITL-specific example (I’ll try not to spoil too much lol):

Sasuke

How he sees himself:

Ordinary; not very impressive as a shinobi, but not absolutely terrible either – just ordinary

Average looking

A slow, impatient learner

Awkward with people, but polite and with good intentions

Emotionally stable

A good reader and listener

How he actually is from someone else’s POV:

Incredibly skilled for his age and level as a shinobi

Actually quite handsome

An intuitive learner, very tenacious and will keep at a task forever until he gets it just right; perfectionist much

Quiet, polite, notices a lot about how others act

Absolutely does not handle emotions well

Selective listener; sometimes only hears what he wants to hear

Rationales:

He’s surrounded by a clan of perfectionists and overachievers who constantly laud his aniki for being a genius while paying him no attention. Of course he thinks he’s ordinary.

No one ever compliments him for his looks in the clan compound, and what he sees in the mirror looks just like a younger version of everyone around him. Of course he thinks he’s average, even though he actually has looks.

Because he’s largely self-taught (except for when Obaa-sama teaches him), he thinks he’s slow. (Ever learned a new skill or maybe even a new language by yourself? I have. I can tell you that my perception of how much time I spent learning ‘basics’ was skewed.) He also holds himself to a higher than normal standard because that’s what gets him positive attention (or attention at all) within his family. Add the fact that Itachi was there blazing through everything before him, and it’s suddenly easy to understand why Sasuke thinks the worst of himself as a student. But he (and Naruto) are actually fast learners—we see this even in canon—and both of them boast high levels of natural intuition, or as I (the neuroscientist) likes to call it, pattern recognition. Some people are naturally better at this than others; there have been extensive tests done to show it. But we also know intuition can be trained, so the more Sasuke works at something, the better he gets, and the faster he learns the next skill—as long as the learning is patterned. Which is why Orochimaru, who has picked up on this trait, walks them through learning each jutsu in a stepwise manner every time.

Sasuke doesn’t have a lot of social interaction outside of his family. The Uchiha clan in this fic is very segregated from the rest of the village, so if you’re not active as a shinobi, you probably don’t get out of the compound much. Interacting with people probably intimidates Sasuke a lot so he feels awkward about it and reverts back to habits of politeness and silence that he was taught from childhood. That doesn’t mean that he’s not paying attention, however; Sasuke is naturally observant and remembers a lot about how people act (and not so much what they say). I have a theory about this related to the Sharingan but I won’t go into too much here because it would be a straight-up spoiler, sorry. :D

He thinks he’s emotionally stable because he doesn’t remember many incidents of severe emotional upheaval in his life. That’s because he hasn’t had them; apart from the whole thing with Itachi, he’s been fairly sheltered his whole life. But he actually doesn’t handle emotions well—something he’s about to find out soon enough—and for the same reason! He hasn’t been exposed to an extensive range of it.

Because he’s largely self-taught, he has confidence in his reading skills. He also remembers all of Obaa-sama’s stories so he thinks he’s a good listener. Well, he is—to an extent. If he wants to listen, he will. If he doesn’t, he’s just as proficient as Naruto at pigheadedness. (I think it’s an Uchiha trait too lmao.)

That was a lot, right? But you can see that if I’m writing from Sasuke’s POV, I have to keep a different set of pointers than if I’m writing from Naruto’s POV about Sasuke. The way I think of it is like changing lenses or shades depending on the light outside.

A few more techniques/guidelines I use:

Stay consistent with vocabulary. Orochimaru is far more verbose than the rest of them, Shikamaru right behind him, and Naruto uses shorter, simpler words. You can even assign particular words to a character, a word only they would use when referring to something. This applies to how your character addresses other people too, i.e. Orochimaru calls them ‘little ones’; Shikamaru calls his dad ‘oyaji’ in front of his peers but ‘otou-san’ in front of his sensei; Naruto is quick to give people nicknames and most of the time it sticks.

Watch the adjectives; different people describe things differently. Orochimaru uses more nuanced words that can mean different things depending on the situation and mood; Naruto thinks in terms of emotions, a lot of how does this make me feel; Sasuke is very visual and notices a lot of colors.

Use speech habits wisely; how your character talks should reflect their life. Just like accents, speech habits can tell a lot about a person. Sasuke always speaks politely because it’s how he’s supposed to talk at home, otherwise there’d be trouble. Naruto grew up in a poorer district and had no one to really teach him how to talk politely, so he’s very casual. Shikamaru cusses at age eleven because his parents and family are incredibly laissez-faire and honest around him, so he thinks it’s acceptable and normal (and he was never reprimanded for it).

Play with your tenses. Writing in past tense sounds and feels very different from writing in present tense. Depending on your character, one or the other might sound more appropriate. There are some expressions and figures of speech that sound fine when written in past tense but awkward when written in present tense, so that will end up inadvertently changing your prose a bit, which can be useful.

Read your work out loud. Cardinal rule of prose-writing. What looks good on paper doesn’t always sound good when read out loud. If you read it and it doesn’t sound like how your character talks, time for a vibe check. You might need to change a few words and move sentences around, or you might need a complete overhaul… an editor (and I mean an editor, not just a beta-reader) can usually help you out.

 A note about editors vs beta-readers:

There is a cardinal difference! A beta-reader is usually not professionally trained but should be experienced enough to point out things that aren’t right. In fandom, I’ve found that beta-readers mostly focus on a story’s general feel, flow and readability, sometimes character consistency, sometimes they point out typos and mistakes. An editor goes further than that. I’m fortunate to have Tria (aventria) who has edited my work for, gosh, 14 years now, fuck, we’re old! I call her my editor because when she goes through a piece, she will fix everything and make my draft bleed and I love it. (I actually get a little upset when she doesn’t fix anything, even if that means everything was good.) As an editor, she does a vibe check and looks for typos/errors, yes, but she also critiques the prose extensively. She can rearrange phrases or entire paragraphs for better flow. She will cut out entire scenes or make me rewrite them if they’re that bad. Like a copy editor, she looks at stylistic inconsistencies, grammar errors, and iffy word use. She’ll usually suggest or replace the offending word altogether. She has a lot of freedom with the work and can actually kick a piece to the curb if it’s really that shitty. She also questions plot progression, character development, and the relevance of a scene. (She’s made me cut out many, many scenes.) – That all being said, it’s not easy finding an editor, much less a good one. It also has to be someone you trust to have this much power over your work. It’s worth it, however, and my writing has gotten so much better because of the help.

If you’ve read this far, wow, thanks! You’re also probably thinking, “Shit, she takes this too seriously. It’s just a fic.”

I have… gotten into fights in the past before because of this. I feel strongly about the stuff I write. Just because it’s fanfiction doesn’t mean it isn’t a labor of love. I’m a perfectionist by nature, so that’s why I put so much time and effort into what amounts to ‘just a fic.’ And you know what? At the end of the day, writing it gives me satisfaction and happiness, so I will keep pouring into it as much as I can. It’s just a bonus to hear that other people are enjoying it too. (Yes, I’m one of those weirdos who intensely enjoy reading my own work…)

 Aaand the final point:

(3) I double-majored in psychology for undergrad and have by now accumulated thousands of hours of clinical hours spent using the theories and techniques I learned from those classes on real people. I’m also specializing in neuroscience, so a portion of my time is spent in psychiatry. Characterization was actually not one of my writing strengths at first, but I definitely noticed leaps in improvement after my clinical rotation started. People skills are just that: skills which are honed with practice. It’s amazing how much you learn about how people think and what make them tick when you interact with a whole spectrum of examples: from your neurotypical everyday well-adjusted person, to high-functioning neurotics and obsessives, to patients who have suffered complex stroke syndromes, to encephalitic brains burning under septic fevers, to druggies stoned so high they’ve breached the atmosphere, to patients whose brains are growing insidious tumors, to schizophrenics and catatonics and the depressed. My job also allows me the rare opportunity to interact with people from all walks of life. All I need to do if I wanted insight about how life is for soldiers who served in an active warzone, for example, is to hit up Bill at the ICU and ask for stories about Korea and the Gulf and Vietnam. Or if I wanted to know about how to survive the Rwandan genocide, I could sit down with Amida, who survived it as a barely-teenager with her brother and sister in tow while only “losing my innocence and an eye.” Or I could talk to Heather, who is building a life with her husband and two rambunctious children, for a perspective on the daily concerns and delights of a ‘perfectly normal and ordinary’ working mother. (Her words, not mine; Heather is amazing even if she eats the doctor’s lounge out of Tita Annabel’s cookies.) Anyway, you get my point. When I write, I almost always write about people, so it makes sense that a lot of my inspiration comes from people too. A lot of my original characters—and even some that are not—often speak with the voices and inflections of people I know in real life. You probably have people with interesting stories to tell in your life; you just have to work up the courage to ask and take the time to listen. You’d be surprised at what you learn!

A few helpful writing resources: (most of these are classics)

The Elements of Style by Strunk & White

The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman

How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren

And more books that helped me get into people’s heads:

Hallucinations by Dr. Oliver Sacks

The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon

Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon

The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo

Admirable Evasions by Theodore Dalrymple

I hope you got something out of that. Again, feel free to drop me an ask if you have any questions or want to chat!

[ardenttheories]

aradia-homestuck replied to your photo “I can't believe I didn't notice this, but. When we start the Meat...”

I'm still halfway convinced there's gonna be a third path, and I'm beginning to think it may be one in which JOHN seizes the narrative. It would make sense for him to be in control if he manages to independently make a third choice beyond the ones presented, and if he took the narrative at the point of the picnic, the narrative would logically shift to first person perspective - nicely going along with the 2nd/3rd person split between meat and candy

May I present to everyone: the most beautiful person in the world.

You’ve just pointed out something that perfectly shows every reason why these Epilogues feel so weird. Why it’s so odd that John, especially, is our main man in both these decisions.

John’s Choice in Homestuck is literally a Third Option.

The biggest point in John’s character growth, especially as a God Tier, is that when it comes down to it, he makes a choice that actively goes against the two that are presented him. Between Death and Displacement, John decided to create a Third Option and Freed himself from the limitations of the deal. You know, like a Heir of Breath is capable of doing as part of his Classpect’s basic fundamentals. Inherent Freedom Frees Self From Sticky Situation Using Options.

So why does John stick to this binary now, especially when he’s given a choice by Roxy and Calliope? Does he just not realise, there and then, that he can make the exact same choice as he did before - one where he mitigates the rules and comes up with an option entirely of his own?

Meat was Dirk’s option (akin to the option to die in the oil) and Candy is Alternate!Calliope’s option (akin to the option to zap himself out of the oil, and lose himself in the timelines). So, why doesn’t John make a third option - one where he takes both Candy and Meat, and makes the narrative his own (akin to him zapping the oil from around him)? He’s already done that sort of choice before. Beyond his general retconning, his choice to then go back and become the John of the new Alpha Timeline changes events that happen on the Ship, and cause subsequent events further down the timeline. John’s decisions have had rippling effects on the narrative before. So why not now?

I think the honest answer is that John doesn’t realise this is a Choice, Capital C. That this is the same situation as before, and that the importance here is for him to make a Third Option once more. More on that a bit further down.

I think the shift to the 1st person would be incredibly poignant in this situation. We’d literally only see what John sees, thinks, feels. He’d no longer be under the influence of a narrator that determines what he should be doing at any given moment, and we’d finally get to see his true opinions. We also wouldn’t be able to see other people influenced by the narrative, because nobody else would be able to. The First Person narrative is the most personal narrative of all, and it’s relatively closed off. It’s unlikely that Dirk or Calliope would be able to influence John if he was self containing it. We’d see a biased perspective of these people based on how John feels about them, yes, but their actions would inherently be their own.

Ironically, this does come up in Candy once or twice.

The first instance is between the two Vriskas:

The second is between John and Roxy, after Jake’s convinced him to talk to her again:

Vriska is well aware that John holds a very scary sort of power. He has the potential to make anything and anyone relevant with a simple decision. The ones he’s made so far have been made at the hands of other people; two choices that he thought were the only options, that he didn’t think too much into, that he assumed he had to choose between. In a timeline where he makes the same sort of decision as he did with the Choice - where he realises that neither decision is actually a good idea and that a third one has to be made - it’s well within his powers to actually go through with it. He’s got literal plot-changing abilities. He’s already fixed a timeline once. There’s nothing to say he can’t do it again.

And on the point with Roxy… look at the way he words himself here. This is definitely John being self-deprecating, and almost Dirk-like, which I think says a lot about how understanding the consequences of the Candy timeline negatively affected Dirk, but this isn’t about him (ironically).

John blames himself for the decision he didn’t make. He’s not 100% right in the second screenshot, however; the Candy timeline definitely isn’t John’s timeline, the one he has some big fundamental control over, and he’s much less happy here than he was in Meat, even though he died there. Everything “took a backseat” to his decision not to fight, but after that point, he had no further control over the timeline. It firmly became Alternate!Calliope’s realm after that.

The fact of the matter is, though, that John’s choice had a rippling effect across the timelines. Though the narratives were then taken over by the narrators specific to John’s choice (Dirk for Meat, Alternate!Calliope for Candy), it’s his choice that starts it all off. The potential still remains that John holds the same sort of narrative significance as the other two narrative conductors. Their Epilogues literally won’t come to fruition without John acting as the keystone to their timelines. No John means no Epilogues. And if he were more aware… then as Vriska says, he would hold more Relevance and Importance than literally any other character in the comic. He could create and maintain his own timeline. 

Candy John is coming the the epiphany that doing nothing was the wrong choice, but he’s not seen Meat - he’s got no idea that isn’t the right choice, either. This option isn’t as clear as “die or become unhinged from the timelines themselves���, and the choice of “displace the oil so you don’t disappear or die” isn’t as obvious when the options aren’t placed in front of him. He’s told by Calliope and Roxy that he has a Choice, but look at this:

Calliope and Roxy explicitly don’t tell John what the consequences of his options are. This choice that he didn’t even realise was a choice is suddenly placed in front of him, and he has no idea what the stakes are. He’s making a completely blind decision. He has no idea that there needs be a third option because, unlike before, he’s not even aware that this is a decision between Death and Displacement.

This is a more meta rendition of the Choice. This Choice has higher stakes, worse consequences, and even bigger narrative importance. John has got to come up with a Third Option, just like he did before. He has to be given, at that specific moment in time, the details about what’s going to happen, and he’s got to decide to eat both Meat and Candy, and take the narrative into the First Person.

John’s got to become the Ultimate Self.

John’s got to become the Ultimate Self, become aware of all of these potentials, and decide to take control in his own way. Or, honestly, to become the Ultimate Self and just go back and tell this version of himself in the Prologue everything that he knows. Something has to happen to ensure in the picnic scene that he recognises the Choice for what it is - and, as you said, comes to the decision on his own.

This is the best way to take the Epilogues, I think - especially when you consider that in both Epilogues John is both inherently important and insignificant. He needs to make a timeline of his own that follows the same sort of rules at his own will; where he’s the important factor to keep the plot going, but is insignificant enough to have fun, where he doesn’t try to take complete control. He needs to find a better balance than Dirk and Alternate!Calliope. He’s the middling route - always has been, always will be. 

So, I’d really like it to go this way, I think. I’m not sure if they will - it seems likely, but then again, nobody expected the Epilogues to go the way they did, and I’m not confident enough to say that something “likely” will actually be what happens - but it’s definitely the best route to please fans (whether they liked the Epilogues already, or were unhappy with them from the start) and to keep this narrative meta going. Also, it’s just a nice full circle. It feels like a satisfying end.   

[kelseyraiyne]

Neo-Liberalistic Society, Online Identities and Gift Economy

The Hunger Games and a Neo-Liberalistic Society

The Hunger Games originated as a trilogy of novels but was made into a 4-part film series due to its popularity. The series can essentially be described as a science fiction dystopian adventure. At its core, The Hunger Games is about a totalitarian society where the masses are used and abused for the gain of those that in the Capitol, the place where citizens get to live in luxury whilst the surrounding ‘districts’ live in poverty and slave away to provide resources to the higher class. However, they do so with the hope of them being able live a better life by being chosen to compete in the hunger games – a real life survival of the fittest-esque arena game.

Panem is a metaphor for a global economic system, very much based on the neo-liberalism that we face in our society now; using Marx’s theory (1886), the bourgeoisie control the fates of the proletariats, they choose who survives and who will fall, they play God to the lower class who have no option but to look to the elite for guidance and survival. Neo-liberalistic views from today’s world apply to this; for example, our society will happily use technology made in China or wear clothes that have been made in Asia. However, it isn’t just the elite upper class that treat others below them badly, the middle class take advantage of those in less-fortunate third world countries and the cheap services that they provide.

Dystopian future themes are still growing increasingly popular even now, for example Divergent, The Maze Runner, even the X-Men franchise – and they haven’t just been produced in recent years either, past examples being The Matrix, Battle Royale, Lord of The Flies. All of these films show a higher authoritative governing presence that gets to dictate and rule those that are deemed unworthy and classed as common working folk. There isn’t any form of satire used in these production pieces either; especially with The Hunger Games, there is a very propagandised overlay that shows one individual being the face of a revolution and another being the face of capitalism, for example this being Katniss Everdeen and President Snow in The Hunger Games. They square off to one another many times throughout the film and book series, as if this will solve all the problems. What this does it convince the audience that one governing presence that gets to live a life of luxury is not ideal for our society whilst the working class has to slave away in order to survive with the bare minimum.

One article from The Guardian (written by Ewan Morrison) debates on the impact young adult dystopia has on children and teenagers. The underlying propaganda influences lead children to believe they should “question authority” and to be wary and suspicious of it. Whilst dystopian futuristic genres can offer some insight into a neo-liberalistic society that can relate to the ones we live in now, often enough they tend to be a very hyperbolic version of this intended realism. Another article from The Postcolonialists talks about the presentation of The Hunger Games, namely that it could be “a hyperbolic representation of youthful disobedience and rebelliousness … that can be easily confused for the hard work required for a social revolution” (Khader, 2014).

It makes one wonder what the intended reading of The Hunger Games really was. Was The Hunger Games intended to slate our very own neoliberalist society that we currently live in, and convince others to not settle for it? Or was it just simply a story with no underlying political or propagandised ideals within it?

Commodification of Identity Online

Throughout the years, especially with the ever growing developments and freedom of technology and the Internet, human identity has been “transformed from a ‘given’ into a ‘task’ and this “self-realisation” becomes a driving force that promotes consumption” (Palmer, 2010). Society is always changing, humans adapt themselves to become more flexible, they remake themselves to suit the current society and economy that they live in. This neo-liberalistic society heavily relies on and makes use out of the commodification of people and their identity – self-branding, micro-celebrities, life streaming, all these new terms invented for a society that wants to be someone they’re not. People are no longer happy just existing, they want to be able to be who they want, so they turn to social media to reimagine themselves, either to become a “micro-celebrity” which is someone who becomes mainstream and gains a following via social media or to find their true identity using the means of social media. The development of Web 2.0 hasn’t helped means there is even more diversity found online which gives the audience opportunities for self-identification and expression. Now more than ever, personality and identity online has become such a huge factor in our lives that is even used by employers to find out about potential employees.

Back in 2015, Shawn Megira was a big deal on Instagram, being deemed “insta-famous” and a micro-celebtrity at only 15 years old. A short documentary, Instafame, was made about him and his 81K followers. In the documentary (Instafame, 2015), Megira talks about how all he does is post photos on his account and suddenly everyone is following his account and liking his posts, he’s getting stopped in the street by fans and asked for autographs and pictures – all because he has a lot of followers on social media. Due to his popularity, brands and companies began approaching him with job offers and opportunities for paid advertisement via his social media; Megira became a commodity, a means to an end of becoming known, popular or famous yourself rather than an actual human. This is because the advancement and development of technology and social media means that people can escape their ordinary lives and have a chance at becoming someone new, whether this is a micro-celebrity or not, using methods such as endorsements, company branding or even self-branding (which is most commonly found on Instagram).

KittyPlays is a live streamer, gamer and a lifestyle vlogger. She is quite the opposite of the ordeal that Shawn Megira was. She is very open with her viewers about her life and invites them into it; she asks them for advice, show vulnerability and offers guidance on matters that her viewers may ask about. Due to this, many of KittyPlays’ viewers find they are able to find their identities when watching her content, they can open themselves up to the inspiration and guiding presence in order to find who they are. It may be debated that how we choose to present ourselves online allows individuals to become their own producer, director, star and critic, therefore there is the argument that vloggers aren’t showing us their true selves and instead choose which aspects of themselves and their identity they want to share, as all media is an extension of ourselves (McLuhan, 1994). On the other hand, KittyPlays has developed such a strong and loyal community and made a career out of this ‘serious leisure’ activity that she doesn’t feel the need to hide her true identity. If she is sad then she will tell her viewers this, she will cry, she will get angry and she will be happy.

The Internet has “provided a space for an ever-accumulating archive of personal visual experience, memory and emotion” (Palmer, 2010) where users are free to be themselves. The problem that needs to be addressed by this however is that users then become comfortable with the idea of becoming a micro-celebrity so are open to commodification of their identity without realising this. The fact that the internet is now a “mainstream, highly-developed commercial structure” (Marwick, 2005) however does not mean that all online identities are commodified and branded. Many social media celebrities, streamers, or vloggers such as KittyPlays manage to evade this neo-liberalistic market force and form stronger communities because of this.

The Gift Economy vs. The Rational Consumer

Following neo-liberalistic ideologies, it is highly appraised that we as a species are rational consumers; we will make decisions and choices based on those that will be most ideal, advantageous and utilisable for us as individuals. Market forces are huge driving factors in society even now, with them continuing to grow and develop into new areas. However, the idea of the gift economy has threatened the ideals of this neo-liberalistic stance on consumers with the introduction of services such as crowdfunding, free-cycling, Creative Commons licenses just to name a few. This wasn’t something that was expected to happen in this economy, but this idea of a gift economy has shown to be hugely popular and successful with the public and has slowly begun to change the way that consumers act.

A Creative Commons license is a way for the public to enable free distribution of otherwise copyrighted work. This is hugely used in the video game industry, for example with SCP: Containment Breach. This game is a free and open source indie supernatural horror video game developed by Joonas Rikkonen, based on the paranormal fiction stories found on the SCP Foundation website. Other examples of a Creative Commons license include music, short animation clips, images or graphics and logos that may be found online. In return, most creators tend to ask that they just get credited for their work in the video description for example. In his work, Post Capitalism: A Guide to Our Future (2015, p.276), Mason talks about how developments such as crowdfunding and the use of Creative Commons licenses shouldn’t be something that people become affixed and accustomed too fiercely to the non-profit parts of the activities relevant to them. Instead Mason believes it is all a part of a larger ever growing system of peer to peer transactions that are making the old ones appear as ineffective and cause them to slowly die out. In relation to the Creative Commons license, this is definitely accurate. People are more attuned to finding a good advantageous opportunity for themselves, as is the norm for rational consumers, that coming across a suitable or valuable piece for them that features a Creative Commons license is an opportunity that they can’t afford to miss. SCP: Containment Breach offers users a chance to play a full game for free using its Creative Commons license and allows it to be distributed freely to become more widely available for any potential consumers.

The gift economy in general is ideal for rational consumers; there are many opportunities for them to receive pieces and opportunities that suit them as an individual and will be the most advantageous. Furthermore, it begins to introduce a new system that proves the old economic systems and models ineffective and socially unjust. On the other hand, the gift economy does mean that those content creators that offer this free service and free valuables don’t get anything in return.

References:

IMDb. (2018). The Hunger Games (2012). [online] Available at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/ [Accessed 22 Mar. 2018].

Instafame. (2015). [film] Sylvain Labs.

Khader, J. (2018). Mockingjay Delusions: The Hunger Games and the Postcolonial Revolution to Come - The Postcolonialist. [online] Postcolonialist.com. Available at: http://postcolonialist.com/civil-discourse/mockingjay-delusions-the-hunger-games-and-the-postcolonial-revolution-to-come/ [Accessed 22 Mar. 2018].

Marwick, A. (2005). Selling Your Self: Online Identity in the Age of a Commodified Internet. p.169.

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1886). The Communist Manifesto. International Publishing Co.

Mason, P. (2015). Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. London, Penguin, p.276.

McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding media. 13th ed. Cambridge (Mass.): The MIT Press.

Morrison, E. (2014). YA dystopias teach children to submit to the free market, not fight authority. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/01/ya-dystopias-children-free-market-hunger-games-the-giver-divergent [Accessed 22 Mar. 2018].

Palmer, D. (2010) ‘Emotional archives: online photo sharing and the cultivation of the self’. Photographies, 3 (2): 155-171.

 Scpcbgame.com. (n.d.). SCP - Containment Breach. [online] Available at: http://www.scpcbgame.com/ [Accessed 22 Mar. 2018].

Twitch. (n.d.). KittyPlays - Twitch. [online] Available at: https://www.twitch.tv/kittyplays [Accessed 22 Mar. 2018].

Yates, N. (2018). Instafame: The Rise of the Microcelebrity. [online] Social Media Week. Available at: https://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2014/04/instafame-rise-microcelebrity/ [Accessed 22 Mar. 2018].

[melonbreadreviews-blog]

Playing ‘The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’ Three Years Later

I’ll admit, I’m often late to the party on major title releases in gaming. I’d like to tell you that it’s an intentional choice of mine, that it’s in my best interest to let the best and worst parts of these landscape altering pieces of art simmer in a pot together. I picked up Bloodborne on a whim three years after its release, and after about a two hour play session, I decided it wasn’t for me; three months later I was glued to my TV every night after work searching every nook and cranny that the hunter’s dream had to offer me.

My point is that buying a game upon its initial release is a commitment to either loving or hating that game. I often feel compelled to shower praise on the solid parts of games that I love, and pressure to explain with hyperbole the games I just couldn’t vibe with. Playing Bloodborne years after its release at a much lower price allowed me to put it down when I didn’t enjoy it, and pick it back up when I needed it. The parts of it that I didn’t like weren’t exacerbated by a pressure to validate my own experiences relative to the gaming community. Likewise, when i picked the game up again, I loved it not because I thought I should, but because the experience itself was legitimately breathtaking.

Three months later, set against the familiar hum and drum of my slowly dying Playstation 4, my experience with CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt begins. I tried to begin this same journey a few months earlier, but that run died on the starting line in a messy tutorial and a post-Bloodborne haze. One enormous Dragon Quest XI run later, and I’m finally ready to give this journey three years in the making a chance. My expectations are a mixed bag; I carry with me the influences of a thousand burning reddit threads and the weight of an inescapable question: Has this game aged well?

For those of you who aren’t familiar with The Witcher franchise (I’ve never read the series or played a mainline game before touching The Witcher 3, so you’re not alone!), the main plot of the game follows the journey of a Witcher named Geralt as he searches for his protege and ward Ciri while also fending off the primary antagonistic force of the game, the Wild Hunt. Witchers serve as bounty hunters of the region, often dealing with the monsters and villains ordinary folk are incapable of handling themselves. Throughout the game, players can feel the tension in the air between Geralt and the people around him, often including the ones he saves. Witchers exist outside the realm of normalcy in this universe, and to some extent the amount of agency the franchise gives you over the lives of the people who exist around you is a direct cause of the aforementioned tension. Though the social world Geralt inhabits mirrors the dangers of the physical world around him, there are romantic options in the game that allow for a deeper understanding of his character and The Witcher universe. The lore aspect of this game really separates it from similar titles in the same genre.

My first memories of the game still hold true, though my feelings about them have changed. I love the comic style art that flashes across the screen as the game loads, not because it matches the aesthetic of the game, but precisely because it does not. If I compare The Witcher 3 to other iterations of the same genre like Skyrim or Fallout, I find myself enjoying that not every moment of The Witcher is something that I need to take seriously. Sometimes, it’s okay to be reminded of the fact that I am actually playing a game and not living and dying by the decisions I make in this world.

That isn’t to say that decisions in this game don’t matter, though; I find that The Witcher 3 places weight on its decisions in a similar fashion to Mass Effect, rather than Skyrim or Fallout. There are several moments in the game that require a timed quick response in conversations or during action, and those quick responses sometimes dictate both the flow of ongoing dialogue and possible relationships with the characters around Geralt. There are even dialogue options that seem quite diplomatic on the surface, but end in brawls or even death for characters that the player did not expect. These moments are meant to teach the player just how much agency they have over the lives around them; sometimes Geralt feels like a god, and sometimes he feels just as vulnerable to the whims of the world as the people around him.

Normally, worlds that freely give that sort of agency to the player overwhelm me. I feel paralyzed by just how much my choices matter, and my love for the friends I’ve made throughout the story keeps me from playing the game as intended. Through the use of guides and reddit threads, I orchestrate my game in order to keep those characters alive, and that leaves me with less of an experience in the end. The Witcher 3, however, doesn’t leave me paralyzed in the same way. Because much of the main narrative is decidedly linear, Geralt is free to explore the world around him, which includes contracts to kill creatures and free spirits and occasional games of a fairly fun but not too complex card game called Gwent. Not every decision has a role to play in the main story, and the ones that do feel natural in the game’s flow. Geralt is both insanely powerful and incredibly vulnerable, but I never fear for the outcome of his story while enjoying the fun of making decisions.  

The skippable tutorial of the game remains not so skippable considering the amount of experience I have with The Witcher 3’s combat, but I appreciate that I have the option of ignoring it if I decide to run through new game plus. It’s here that the meat of the game comes to the forefront. The reason I initially put down The Witcher 3 was because I didn’t enjoy the flow of combat, which includes the two primary slashing attacks with two variants of weapons, a myriad of magical powers called Signs, and the use of items like bombs, crossbows and oils which can be applied to Geralt’s main weapons. If you’re just judging the combat of the game on the first few hours, The Witcher 3 may not meet your expectations of a major title release. When disjointed in the name of learning, the combat feels clunky, and the first few contracts in the region, especially on higher difficulties, are a major challenge for the uninitiated.

But in the same way I came to love Bloodborne, I’ve come to adore The Witcher 3 because of my journey with it. Sitting through the first few hours of the game, especially in 2018, can be sort of a grind. The story has yet to materialize, the combat is underdeveloped, and Geralt himself can seem unrelatable, but as the hours move on, the game opens up in parallel fashion to the world it encompasses. The combat itself feels incredibly fluid, each piece of it tied together in a way that challenges the player to learn how to be a Witcher, while also rewarding enough to encourage growth and not detract from the side-questing and story that make this game fun. The Witcher 3’s systems include a hearty dodging mechanic that feels clunky outside of battle, but seamless in it, and a parry system that is absolutely necessary on higher difficulties. Geralt’s magic, Signs, interact with objects in the world, but they can also be morphed and shaped into crowd control devices. The ability tree is extensive, but in a way that represents a mixing of action and role-playing. Each playthrough can be different, but Geralt remains much of the same, just upgraded.

Though not combat in a traditional sense, I think The Witcher 3’s in-game card system, Gwent, represents an entirely different method of fighting for players. Though not required, there are various quests given to Geralt in different regions of the game which involved beating skilled Gwent players at cards. While the game involves a little bit of strategy, it’s never overwhelming, and because Gwent isn’t a major factor in the story, it’s skippable for fans who don’t enjoy it. I found myself going from inn to inn, challenging keeps to games for their best cards, and I really came to love a part of the game I didn’t enjoy all that much at first. It’s a missable portion of the game, but it definitely adds dimension to the gameplay without requiring too much effort on the part of the player.

Much of the game’s story is very compelling, and it isn’t saddled with an extensive lore that the player is forced to grapple with. There is lore, yes, but that lore is discoverable all over the world, and it’s the player’s choice to explore it, or not. There is a distinct moment in the first 20 hours or so of the game that allows the player to learn about about Geralt’s relationship with Ciri through dialogue options with another character. The player can listen to all of the heavy lore in the dialogue, or simply skip it. The Witcher 3 is chalk full of story, but it never asks the player to share the burden of that story. In much the way you can flow in and out of the narrative of the story through side-questing and contracts, you can simply choose not to pay attention to certain parts of the main quest line.

That isn’t to say that the story is lacking or is unfocused. There are reasons to want to stay on track, including a wide array of characters who are, though not as interesting as Geralt, incredibly complex. The Witcher 3 does a fantastic job of presenting its best qualities though, and those qualities encourage players to explore the world around them and creative a narrative journey that varies significantly from player to player. Whether or not a player values that storytelling approach, though, depends on their own taste. Personally, I found that I could have my fill of Gwent and monster hunting, and then pick right back up where I left the main story.

The Witcher 3 is not without its faults, despite my glowing praise up to this point. While the world itself is rendered beautifully, I found the interactions with other characters to pose the biggest problems for the game’s graphics. There were times where Geralt’s face would simply teleport all over the screen until the game was able to settle into the set animations for the dialogue, and I distinctly remember an interaction between Geralt and Triss Merigold which involved Triss pressing a hand to her face that was stuck in the Igni battle animation for fire. While these graphical glitches don’t detract from the overall product, they are wrinkles on the surface of the game that begin to show its age. I was surprised that the world remained incredibly stable, save for a few times I found my horse could fit between a clustered group of trees better than I could, while the dialogue options proved incredibly difficult for the animations in the game. It reminded me a lot of my time with Mass Effect, in both good and bad ways. There was a certain novelty, but maybe that novelty is a bit too dated for a Playstation 4 title.

I’d like to end this review where I started, and that is on the subject of playing games years after they’ve already debuted. I wish I was a strong enough person to not feel the pressure that comes with making a commitment to a new title, but I often let reviews and recommendations, either positive or negative, affect the way I experience games. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a near perfect example of my current status as a consumer, because I’ve been able to enjoy all the good that the game has to offer without taking the bad bits too seriously. I did expect the game to be great, of course, but I didn’t expect it to be perfect, and that’s partly because I don’t have a need to be justified in having purchased it. I haven’t tasked myself with deciding The Witcher’s place in history; that’s already been decided. So, for now, I feel quite content to stroll along cobblestone city roads and swampy marshes, living life as a Witcher.

[stopkingobama]

‘Feminist Economics’: Coming to a College Campus Near You

If you haven’t yet heard of “feminist economics,” get ready, because liberal economists, policy organizations, and activist groups are pushing the concept as the next battleground for women’s rights.

Because condemning catcalling and “toxic masculinity” in cultural terms isn’t enough, they’re now targeting government policies and institutions they contend are oppressive and discriminatory toward women.

In order to level the playing field, feminist economists are calling for a massive expansion in government benefits, from universal child care to universal health care plans that cover abortion, birth control, sterilization, fertility, and surrogacy.

What Is ‘Feminist Economics’?

In order to understand “feminist economics,” you must first understand what those on the left side of the aisle call the “economics of misogyny.”

The economics of misogyny describes “how these anti-woman beliefs are deeply ingrained in economic theory and policy in such a way that devalues women’s contributions and limits women’s capabilities and opportunities,” explained Kate Bahn in an article for the liberal Center for American Progress. “[D]espite the central role of women in the economy throughout history, our economic policy and government institutions often treat women’s diverse needs and capabilities as an afterthought to ‘real issues’ in the ‘real economy.’”

The topic was discussed at length last month at a Center for American Progress event, “The Economics of Misogyny.” Scholars and economists gathered from a handful of top colleges and universities from around the nation for panel discussions on “The Intersection of the Family and the Labor Market” and “The Economics of Bodily Autonomy.”

One of the goals behind feminist economics is to put a monetary dollar to the cost of the work women traditionally do for free, such as child, elderly, or sickness care. By ignoring the monetary value of this work, they suggest, women themselves are being undervalued and held back.

How It’s Happening and What to Do About It

Discrimination against women in the labor market has a long history, explained Nina Banks, an associate professor of economics at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. And central to it is the concept of intersectionality—the idea that categories such as race, class, immigration status, and gender are all connected. An African-American woman, for example, is more disadvantaged than a white woman.

Intersectionality explains the “grand narrative about work that is framed around the labor market experiences of white women, primarily white, married women,” she said. “It’s a white-centered bias when we look at these experiences. That’s a problem.”

Building on this idea, Michelle Holder, an assistant professor of economics at John Jay College of the City University of New York, suggested that government policies that encourage marriage should be abolished, because the black community has significantly lower marriage rates than white Americans. (According to a study on marriage patterns performed by the National Institutes of Health, black women, compared with white and Hispanic women, “marry later in life, are less likely to marry at all, and have higher rates of marital instability.”)

“Most African-American women aren’t a part of a couple, [so] I think it’s problematic to privilege couples, whether they are same-sex or different-sex couples,” Holder said. “I think we need to redefine unpaid work around these different kinds of family structures.”

Conservatives generally disagree and have long supported government policies that encourage—or “privilege”—marriage, because couples who get married prior to having children are far more likely to flourish financially.

Panelists didn’t just want to remove policies that encourage marriage, however. They also proposed subsidizing “care labor”; meaning, instead of working with your husband, wife, or the surrounding community to raise children and take care of sick or elderly family members, the state does it for you.

“Women doing unpaid care work creates particularly difficulties for women in the economy,” said Randy Albelda, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and director of the College of Liberal Arts.

In order to address this “discrimination and occupational segregation,” Albelda proposed helping families “by providing the care work through a collectivized way that most countries do.” For example, she said:

Universal education and care, which I actually think would probably be the most important policy for all women, particularly low-income women in this country … It’s sort of a no-brainer … . If economists were really concerned about efficiency … they would be on top of this in a flash, because it is such a waste of all sorts of things. It increases our poverty rate. It reduces women’s labor force participation. It generates more inequality. Early education and care is one of the biggest engines of inequality in the United States.

Judith Warner, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, floated the idea that the hours a mother spends caring for her children or family could be factored “into someone’s Social Security payments down the line.”

“That’s a great point. It’s not just symbolic value; it’s actual production,” responded Joyce Jacobsen, an economics professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. “We used to talk about strikes of household workers—that you would actually lose a huge amount of production if … people just refused to take care of their children, refused to take care of their sick parents, refused to do housework. It would be chaos. It’s not even just symbolic.

“We can come up with actual dollar amounts for the loss of productivity, and I think that’s, again, where economists can be of great help in pointing out that there are methods to do those calculations.”

‘The Economics of Bodily Autonomy’

It’s not just care work that feminist economics strives to monetize. They contend that “bodily autonomy” also plays a crucial role in women’s ability to fully engage in the economy.

“Targeted regulation for abortion providers, mandatory waiting periods, limitations on late-term abortions, all these things are happening in a much bigger group of states,” said Adriana Kugler, a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. “And actually, we find, really limit labor market opportunities and economic opportunities for women.”

Until the government provides universal health care plans that cover unrestricted access to abortion, birth control, sterilization, fertility, and surrogacy, women will never truly be equal, she contends.

Conservatives—and conservative women, in particular—say the abortion industry itself undermines women’s rights.

“The abortion industry not interested in abortion clinic regulations that are crafted to protect women’s health and safety, or informed consent requirements that include scientifically accurate information about the unborn child and information about the risks and alternatives to abortion,” said Melanie Israel, a research associate at The Heritage Foundation focused on the issue of life. “And the abortion industry is certainly not interested in a health care system that empowers women to obtain a plan that both meets their needs and reflects their religious and moral values.”

Furthermore, Israel said, “Telling women that the path to success requires destroying the life inside them presents a false ‘choice.’”

The reality is, ensuring that both mom and baby are able to thrive is not an either/or endeavor. That’s why across the country, the pro-life community, and life-affirming pregnancy resource centers strive so hard to offer women services, education, supplies, counseling, and compassionate options to women experiencing a tough pregnancy.

Another area where economics plays into bodily autonomy, the panelists argued, is the national debate over transgender individuals and public restrooms.

Lee Badgett, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, cited the so-called “bathroom bill” in North Carolina, which mandated people use bathrooms and locker rooms in schools, public universities, and other government buildings based on the gender listed on their birth certificates, as an example of a government policy regulating bodily autonomy.

These regulations, she argued, can hold women—and all people, for that matter—back.

“There was an exodus of businesses who were thinking of investing in Charlotte, and the other areas of North Carolina … so who’s hurt the most? It was actually, probably … hereosexual people. They’re the ones who would mainly have had those jobs, and they’re not having them. So I think it’s a way … we all have an incentive to have an inclusive society for everybody.”

An “inclusive society,” according to liberal groups such as the Center for American Progress, takes the form of government mandating society to use certain pronouns, teach transgender ideology to children, and open public restrooms to people based on their gender identity. But if transgender-friendly bathrooms made good economic sense, one might think there’d be no need for a law forcing businesses—public or private—to adopt these policies.

In North Carolina, however, it wasn’t just the government that got involved. Big businesses and special-interest groups stepped in, attempting to use their influence and economic power to impose their liberal values via bullying and boycotts.

Ryan T. Anderson, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow and author of “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment,” calls this“textbook cultural cronyism” at “the expense of the common good.”

The Future of ‘Feminist Economics’

The role of “feminist economics” in our political conversation is still young. And with Democrats arguing Ivanka Trump’s paid family leave proposal doesn’t go far enough, it’s likely to continue. As the Center for American Progress put it: “Feminist economics provides a starting point to developing a broader understanding of how women’s varied lives and complex needs interact with the economy.”

At its heart is one idea: Women are better off with government as our husbands, fathers, caretakers, and moral arbiters. Anything short is discriminatory against women.

Commentary by Kelsey Harkness. Originally published at The Daily Signal.

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Generations Challenge Official Rules!

You can find the original post at https://forums.thesims.com/en_us/discussion/840590/sims-4-generation-challenge-beta I have literally just copied and pasted the post down below and in addition to that I have added my own notes in bold for modifications I have made to personalize my challenge a bit. For rules I eliminated entirely I used the strike through tool. As mentioned in my introductory post, I have reduced my challenge to just 5 generations rather than 10. So when I decided which challenges I should do throughout each generation, I used a random number generator for numbers 1 through 9 to select which challenges I would use for gens 1 through 4. I then used the final challenge (originally gen 10) for my 5th generation. 

  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Official Rules: “This challenge is to make you think of the game differently. The Generation Challenge is similar to The Legacy Challenge, but completely different at the same time. The goal is to make it through 10 5 generations with completely different personalities for each generation and a new challenge to complete with each set of children.

Gameplay Setup

When starting the Generations Challenge it is best to start out by making a new world, if you put your Founder in a town with other pre made sims you can’t play the other sims in that world. You do this by clicking the + at the top of the startup screen in the Sims 4.

Your journey begins in Create a Sim (CAS). Here you begin making your sim. Do whatever you want, the only restrictions are it has to be a young adult and the only sim in the household. Feel free to pick any traits you want, but remember genetics aren't the only thing passed down from generation from generation.

Once you finish up in CAS then you move on to the next part, moving in. Start by picking an empty 30x20 lot. This is not your forever home, you will be assigned to move later in the game (optional). It should cost your sim 2,000 simoleons. The challenge that offered this task was not one of the ones selected by the random number generator so it is not one I will be doing.

Now after all that is decided you must pick your Heir Factors. The Heir Factors decides who will be the one to continue the family into the next generation. Once you pick these you can’t go back. These are based off of the Legacy Challenges Succession Laws.

Gender

Female Only- Females can only be heirs, unless there are no living female children.

Male Only- Males can only be heirs, unless there are no living male children.

Alternating- Going male, female, till the end of the game. I intend to play this with the chance that some sims may be gender neutral so for this challenge, I will be going by biological sex upon birth.

Equality- Heirs can be either male or female.

Blood

Blood Relation- Direct descendant of the parents, unless there are no living blood relation children. I like this option best as I like to see how genetics change over time. Please also note that I have mods (MC Command Centre) that will allow two sims of the same sex to impregnate one another. I haven’t decided if I will be using that feature as of yet or if I will go the adoption route, but I will deal with that when the time comes.

Foster Only- Only adopted children can be heirs, unless there are no living adopted children.

Equality- Adopted or blood related sims can be heirs.

Heir

First Born- The first born child is the heir.

Youngest- The youngest child is the heir.

Friendship- The highest friendship with the parent is the heir.

Pool- All eligible children are randomly drawn to be the heir. I chose this option because I find I will ignore the non-heir child if I know exactly which one will be heir. This will offer the most equal parenting for all children.

Rules

No restarting after a bad event. Quitting after a bad event also gets rid of all the good ones. See how you can fix the mistakes!

No cheats/mods that make give you an unfair advantage. It ruins the fun and also makes it not as a challenge as it should be. I have installed some mods, but I don’t think they are overly beneficial to the challenge. The main one I have is MC Command Centre which allows for many modifications to the game. Some of these that may seem like “cheating” are the child support mod in which the parent of the sim’s child pays weekly child support based on their personal worth - but only if the sims are not living together. I will also be using Risky Woohoo, as I find the vanilla pregnancy mechanics incredibly unrealistic and frustrating. I have allowed a 2% chance of pregnancy for every “woohoo” and a 25% chance for pregnancy during “try for baby.” If you’re wondering why I have made these percentages what they are, it is because I find them the most realistic. Most birth controls have approximately a  70% to 99% effectiveness, but apart from abstinence, no birth control is 100% effective (yet!). So 2% seems to be a good number. As for the 25%, I remember reading somewhere that unprotected sex offers a 30% chance of pregnancy in two healthy, fertile individuals. I know 30% is higher than 25% and often time someone who is trying to conceive has a fairly higher chance due to medical intervention and whatnot, but for this game, I have decided to honour my best friend who has been suffering from infertility for about 8 years now. Additionally, I feel this will add an extra challenge to the game.

No bringing the dead back, you CAN plead the with the reaper though and have ghosts, but nothing else.

Anti-aging potion can only be used once per generation.

You can only have one played household in the world. You can add households in the world for friends, but not spouses.

You can’t move out the heir CHILD once they are elders you can do whatever you would like with them, but you can move out the spares (kids who aren't heirs).

Spouse

When getting married Sims can bring in money, but not so much that it would be like using cheats. If your spouse has a child when you marry them in, then that child MUST move in with your spouse. If that child moves in as anything younger than a teen, it CAN become an heir as long as it fits along the guidelines.

After awhile the dating pool starts to deplete and you CAN bring in some households from the gallery or make them in CAS. Use a random trait generator for the traits. The only rule on doing that is it can have no more than 4 sims in the household. If you would like to help out with the households upload them with the hashtag

#MakeAGeneration

I love this! My 8 year old daughter already claimed dibs on making a sim for me, but if anyone else would like to submit someone, please feel free! But also know that I won’t necessarily use that sim in my challenge. I might add them to the town and even become friends with them, but I won’t necessarily make them a mother/father.

Children

Children, no matter if they are the heir or not, can be introduced into the family through pregnancy or adoption. If a child is adopted they must be an infant. If you are adopting a child their last name must be the same as the family who adopted them. When picking the child's trait and aspiration it must have one similar trait to the mother or father, ex: good trait to charismatic or evil to mean, the two other traits are completely up to you. The aspiration can be anything you believe fit to the child's personality. You MAY NOT influence gender. Any Sim that is abducted by aliens and becomes pregnant has a choice of keeping the child, the child counts as adopted and with whatever your heir rules are may or may not become an heir.

Generations and Generation Challenges

Generation challenges are the mini-challenges that you have to complete before you finish the generation. You have to complete at least 4 of the 5 before the original parent of the generation dies AND the heir grows into a young adult. If your heir is the first born you have less time to complete the challenges ahead.

Each generation is a little bit different, from the challenges, to the entire personality of the children in it. The challenges may grow harder, or may grow easier. You DO NOT have to do the challenges in order. With each expansion pack or game pack there will be a replacement generation where you can carry out the challenge with that generation instead of the one originally listed. If you pick to use the replacement generation and still complete the original generation you will only score with the first 10 generations of children.

Generation 1:

Have a boy and a girl

Have any child/teen have a level 10 skill in two skills

Be good friends with all of your children

Throw a house party gold level

Reach maximum level in your career

Generation 2:

Get married

Have 2 eligible children for heirs

Become a writer

Marry 2 kids out

Have one enemy and two friends

^^^ This is the challenge for my 3rd generation

Generation 3:

Reach level 10 in the criminal career

Reach level 10 in the mischief skill

Have an evil child

Be disliked by one of your children

Be enemies with the Grim Reaper

^^^ This is the challenge for my 4th generation

Generation 4:

Be best friends with the Grim Reaper

Have 5 kids (one adopted)

Move all your kids out other than the heir

Throw a party and get a gold medal on it

Have 5 good friends

Generation 5:

Reach maximum level at the piano and the guitar

Have kids all musically talented

Reach level 10 of the entertainment career on the music branch

Preform at a party rated gold

Move to a bigger lot (optional)

*This is for the Simmers that have Get to Work, ignore if you don't have it

Generation 5 Replacement:

Own a retail store

Make 60,000 from your retail store

Have an alien child

Be friends with an alien

Move to a bigger lot (optional)

Generation 6:

Have gloomy kids

Give yourself a pep talk

Have your heir be ‘goth’ or the ‘outcast’

Have an happy child with ‘goth’ siblings

Change your appearance in the mirror ^^^ This is my generation one challenge

Generation 7:

Have two successful romances

Be stuck in a love triangle

Have your teenage sims go out on a date

Have one of your kids be a dirty cheater

Have one of your kids find their soulmate on the first try

Generation 8:

Get the logic skill to level 10

Get on the honor roll for two of your kids

Have 2 of your kids be geniuses

Get 2 skills to level 10 for 3 of your kids

Become an astronaut and get maximum level for the job

^^^ This is my generation 2 challenge

Generation 9:

Become a spy for the good guys

Have your spouse be a spy for the villains

Have 2 evil kids and 2 cheerful kids

Have your evil kids get enemies

Have your good kids become friends with 5 or more sims

Generation 10(Final Generation):

Have a family reunion with all the living family members

Adopt a child

Reach level 5 of the painting, writing, and any instrument skill

Read 10 books

Marry all of your children out

This is the challenge for my 5th generation

End of Challenge

Once your reach generation 10 you can continue the generations for as long as you wish, but only score on the first 10 generations. There are six good categories. Also there is one penalty category which you can lose points up to 40. Scores can be found out by adding up your points from each category below. EVERY HEIR INCLUDES THE FOUNDER AS WELL. This is the challenge for my 5th generation

Generation Challenges

15 points for completing ⅘ of the challenges for each generation

2 points for completing ½ of the generations challenges completely

3 points completing all of the challenges for each generation

Love

1 point for each child married out of the house

5 points for every heir reaching soul mate with their spouses

10 points for being best friends with all the heirs

Family

10 points for being friends with your family

5 points for having your heir be friends with at least 1 of their siblings every generation

Popularity

10 points per heir having 2+ friends

5 points for throwing every type of party gold level at least once

5 points for having a best friend for every heir

Creativity

5 points for having one family member for every generation be level 5 or higher for one creative skill

3 points for writing a song/publishing a book/making a painting on the highest quality level it can be

7 points for having 2 generations be creatively inclined

5 points for reaching maximum level on one of the following jobs Entertainer, Writer, Culinary, or Painter jobs (either branch is fine)

Fitness

5 points for having one sim go from fat to skinny

5 points for becoming the strongest you can be

10 points for reaching maximum skill level for three sims

Brain Power

10 points for having one child per generation get on the A honor roll

5 points for getting the logic skill to maximum level

5 points for reaching level in the astronaut profession

Penalties

-15 points for a child dying before they become a young adult

-5 points for a child to be taken away by the social services

-3 points when you get your power or plumbing being shut off

-17 points if you heir dies before they can continue the generation

[mittensmorgul]

I think there's a zero % chance of the nephilim being truely good without a catch. Having a superpowered child as a plotline that just a innocent babs is not a storyline. Not to mention it's already enforcing some form of a plan and it's not even born yet; saving Kelly, getting rid of Dagon, getting Cas and Cas to protect him even over Sam and Dean, the fact after the golden eyes Kelly and Cas are both super invested in the nephilim beign born with powers, it wants these powers for a reason

RIGHT?!

Honestly since that creepy shot in the doctor’s office in 12.17 where the baby turned its head like it was looking directly at the doctor on the sonogram I’ve been giving it a lot of credit for being “decidedly not human normal.”

(I mean that whole scene happened because WE NEEDED TO SEE HOW NOT-NORMAL THAT BABY WAS. So not-normal that Dagon IMMEDIATELY reverted to mind-wiping the doctor in order to stop him from saying just how not-normal the baby was out loud to Kelly…)

I will start by reaffirming that the creepybadwrong magically growing baby thing is ubergross to me. I wish they’d written pretty much ANYTHING else this season, because dammit we just HAD Amara doing the creepy baby thing LAST SEASON. Okay, enough damn creepybabby stories. We get it. It’s gross. Pls stop *coughbucklemmingcough*.

But it’s what we have, so…

I’ve got SOME suspicions of what might be going on with the kid, some of which are just wild speculation, but some of which I’m pretty confident about. I’ll be vague and leave you to decide which are which…

The kid is half-human, but also half-angel (which means grace). We know very little about how angels are made, but speculation seems to run high toward “they spring fully formed into existence.” I love comics and fic of the “baby angels” growing up and learning how to be good grown-up angels as much as the next person, but I have no illusions that canon angels were ever “babies.” Or that they were ever anything other than fully-formed celestial wavelengths of intent. They were very literally created by God.

(and great now I can’t stop thinking about Athena springing fully formed from Zeus’ head… but honestly? That’s sort of how I’m imagining the nephilim here. Because Kelly ISN’T an immortal god who can recover from something like that…)

(have I mentioned today JUST HOW MUCH TIME I spend thinking about the nature of angel grace? Okay. I mentioned it now. :D)

So because this child IS “half angel,” or at least “half angel grace,” I firmly believe that even if its “human side” is just a human-ish looking baby, the part of it that is an angel is already fully-developed. The only thing holding it back now is the biologically human bits. And it’s even building THAT at a much faster than normal-human rate.

No wonder it’s sort of “using up” Kelly in the process. At least that’s how I’ve been thinking of this.

It’s not good or evil, it’s selfish. Which I suppose might be considered “evil,” but it’s not making that choice for itself. That’s just what it does. Like, mosquitoes aren’t inherently evil, they’re just trying to live. Heck, even like most of the monsters in SPN. They’re just trying to survive, stay under the radar of the hunters who’d see them dead, and go about their business.

The difference with the nephilim is that combination of human free will (that comes with the kit!) combined with the unwavering nature of angelic certainty (I won’t call it “faith,” because in this case, it’s not).

Think of this particular baby’s parentage, too. Yes, Lucifer is Fallen, but he is still an archangel. He’s inherently a creature of Heaven even if he’s been exiled to Hell. He’s still made of the same grace that all the other angels (or archangels, since they seem infinitely more powerful than run of the mill seraphs) are made of. There’s nothing inherently “evil” in Lucifer’s grace.

Heck, even LUCIFER was set on destroying his own creations, the demons. He has just as much disdain for demons as he does for humanity. So nursemaid Dagon never really stood a chance here.

And now I can’t help think back to Jesse the Antichrist, whose powers came online when the final seal broke. But he’d had what, 9 or 10 years to learn how to Human properly before he had his powers sprung on him? Yeah, this baby doesn’t even have that…

So it senses Dagon’s intentions for it, and has already decided (because it’s half ANGEL remember), that this demonic abomination must die. It must know Kelly cares for it, and I think it’s pretty clear that we’re supposed to assume that she cares for it because IT IS MAKING HER CARE FOR IT, because it needs her the way an angel needs a vessel, and honestly that’s where my brain just wants to start screaming and run away from talking about this entire plot arc, but the show insists on giving it to us so here I am stuck with this squicky horror…

Where was I? Right… 

(nvm I have no idea where I was because I had to take a mental break from typing this. have i mentioned that everything about the nephilim completely squicks me out? okay… deep breaths mittens we can do this)

We’ve seen Lucifer communicating with Dagon in some sort of hybrid angel radio/prayer/demonic blood bowl phone without the bowl of blood telepathic way. I assume that’s because he can’t perform that trick directly with Kelly (or with the baby). So Dagon’s been the go-between out of necessity. But Dagon is still a demon. Not a creature of Heaven, not a creature of Angel Grace (despite having a lot of similar powers to angels). By angel standards, she is an abomination.

I mean, so’s the nephilim, but I don’t think the nephilim would consider itself an abomination, you know? It is what it is. And it wants to be born and to live and continue to do its thing, and has the power to manipulate its environment to suit its needs.

I think it demonstrated that admirably when it healed Kelly from her suicide attempt. It couldn’t allow its current vessel (because I honestly don’t think it considers Kelly anything more than a vessel it needs to grow its human body for it) to “fail.”

But we’ve seen how Dagon was able to “influence” humans, via her mind-wipe of the doctor. I think the “angel side” of the nephilim has been mostly “dormant” up to this point, either because the human side was still developing enough for it to actively engage this way or because Dagon was somehow keeping it under control until it grew powerful enough to thwart that control.

Going back to what we learned about nephilim in 12.10, they apparently “grow into their power.” So that theory isn’t coming entirely out of left field, here.

So this baby is “growing into its power.” It’s less than a month from being born. At the beginning of 12.19 Kelly was so adamant that it NOT be born that she attempted to kill herself. Then she agreed to Joshua’s suicide plan of walking through the Heaven Portal. But the nephilim thwarted THAT as well.

It saw its opportunity in Kelly’s moment of weakness with Cas in that motel room, and I can’t help but believe that when her eyes flashed gold, that was the death of Kelly’s free will. That was the nephilim taking full control over her beliefs and actions. If only they’d showed up with the grace extraction sooner, I think she would’ve agreed to let them try it. But it was already too late, and she refused. Because the NEPHILIM refused for her.

She says she has “faith” that the child being born with its full power will “save the world.” But I think that’s the nephilim talking through her.

She went from actively trying to die and take the baby with her to doing EVERYTHING in her power to see it born, even though she knows it will kill her. And Cas confessed his own weakness, that he wished he had her faith, and that’s where the nephilim granted his wish… Kelly took Cas’s hand at the sandbox and the nephilim gave Cas faith.

Do I believe this is “real faith?” Absolutely, 100% NO.

And here’s where my second anon in my inbox seems relevant to mention here:

What do think will happen to Cas’ narrative and endgame now? I had been predicting (hoping) that his whole arc has been moving closer to a point where he’d choose the Winchesters for good. Now, after 12x19, it seems different. It’s like a bit of season 4 Cas was revived. He’s got this same type of faith he used to have, and maybe he’ll be raising a baby next season. Do you have any predictions? I’m hoping his endgame is still with the Winchesters, but now I’m concerned…

CAS DOES NOT HAVE “THE SAME TYPE OF FAITH HE USED TO HAVE,” and I honestly DO NOT BELIEVE that he will be raising this baby next season.

He’s being CONTROLLED by the nephilim right now.

Remember in 6.06 when Dean asked for truth, and then got SLAMMED with it? Remember in 4.08 when people were making wishes on this ancient cursed Babylonian coin and all the wishes turned very bad? Remember in 12.17 when Mick of the MoL mentioned he was brought into the MoL when he pickpocketed an ancient cursed Babylonian coin?

The wishes go bad. They violate the natural order. They invoke Cosmic Consequences.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

I think the nephilim itself is a sort of embodiment of this concept of Cosmic Consequences. It’s a factor of chaos, a violation of the natural order.

I am so freaking tempted to go off into an expository rant about how Dean Winchester is the embodiment of Balance and Order (despite having “violated the natural order” again and again). But he IS “Humanity.” He is Free Will. He was the one Cas did everything for, and he was the one both God and the Darkness designated as “the firewall between light and darkness.” He’s the one Death taught his lessons to about the natural order, and he’s the one who KILLED Death… Essentially every character on the show has eventually bent to his will. INCLUDING FREAKING GOD HIMSELF.

Dean wanted the universe to be in balance, so it was balanced. Hooray 11.23.

But then Mary came back. Because DEAN needed to discover that balance in himself, and the only way to find balance is to understand the imbalance. She’s been the cosmic consequence unbalancing the natural order since she showed up.

All season I’ve been waiting for the MoL storyline and the Lucifer storyline to intersect… and I think it’s all going to hinge on Mary, and on Dean finally getting “what he needs most” from Mary… i.e. an acknowledgement of the imbalance within himself that’s been built on the pedestal he’s kept Mary on since he was four.

The nephilim, in contrast, seems to be a force of anti-free will. And this goes right back to one of the show’s core principles, that free will and choice are greater than blind faith and destiny. Right now it’s seemingly stripped Cas of all his doubts, all his free will, all his choice. He asked for faith, and he got SLAMMED with it…

But NOTHING about it is CAS. It’s not his choice, not his free will. Because we know he’d rejected Heaven and duty and destiny, and had been doing EVERYTHING FOR THE WINCHESTERS. HIS FAMILY. So this sudden attack of “faith” that came in the form of the same weird glowy-veiny laser-eyes treatment that we last saw him suffer in 7.17 when he took on Sam’s Hell Damage and left him CATATONIC and damaged… well… 

What I’m saying is he needs something to break free from the will of the nephilim, to regain his own free will…

What broke the connection, Cas?

He’s gonna have to plainly answer that question this time.

Okay I think that’s as much brain as I have for this :D

[ncmagroup]

Here at Fieldboom, we’re all about customer surveys. We love businesses who ask for – and incorporate – feedback from their customers to improve their products and services.

We know that launching a Voice of The Customer program gives customers the opportunity to provide feedback, which allows you to:

Better understand the needs of their customers

Assess the effectiveness of their product or service

Address common complaints and other issues

Improve the overall operations of the organization

But problems can arise when companies don’t treat the creation of such surveys with the seriousness and scrutiny they need to treat them with.

Though these surveys aren’t conducted in a lab, they are, for all intents and purposes, a type of scientific research. Just as scientists conduct experiments to determine the cause and effect of certain phenomena, companies conduct customer satisfaction surveys to figure out exactly what they’re doing well, and what they need to fix, in terms of the service they provide.

And, just as with scientific experiments, any mistake made while creating and conducting customer surveys can completely invalidate the data the surveyor collects.

A survey that returns inaccurate or otherwise unreliable results, then, ends up being a complete waste of time, money, and other resources on the part of the company.

Or, even worse, if a company doesn’t realize the results of a survey are invalid, it might end up focusing on improving or changing areas of the organization that didn’t need to be improved in the first place (and ignoring areas that do need improvement, as well).

In turn, customers who took the time to voice their opinion – only to have their suggestions fall on deaf ears – will believe the company in question to be non-responsive, and will almost definitely defect to a competitor.

Taking all of this into consideration, it should be clear that your customer satisfaction surveys need to be created in a way that minimizes confusion (both in terms of how your customers understand the questions asked, and how you interpret their answers) and generates reliable data you’ll be able to use to improve the service your company provides.

How Survey Bias Can Affect Customer Satisfaction Survey Results

Before we dive into describing the most common mistakes to avoid when creating customer satisfaction surveys, it’s important to understand the implications of making these mistakes in the first place.

As alluded to in the intro, survey bias occurs when respondents skew their answers due to factors not related to the question at hand. In scientific terms, such bias is the result of a single experiment including more than one controlled variable.

If this is a bit confusing, don’t worry – we’ll clarify it all in a bit.

Survey bias comes in one of two overarching forms:

Response bias

Non-response bias

Response bias occurs, as described above when outside factors influence a customer’s response to a single survey question.

Non-response bias occurs when respondents’ answers potentially differ from how non-respondents may have answered a question. (Again, we’ll clarify that momentarily!)

Common examples of response bias include:

Acquiescence Bias: The human tendency to “go with the flow” and please the surveyor rather than answer in a way that might possibly be offensive or insulting.

Demand Characteristics: The human tendency to alter responses because they are completing a survey (in other words, this occurs when a person thinks the surveyor wants them to answer in a certain way – rather than simply answering honestly).

Extreme Responding: Ignoring possible “middle ground” responses, opting to only choose the most extremely negative or extremely positive possible answers for a set of questions.

Social Desirability Bias: The tendency of an individual to respond in a way that places themselves in the most positive or favorable light.

In contrast, the following scenario illustrates an instance of possible non-response bias:

A company sends out a poll via email asking for information regarding its customers’ propensity to use mobile devices to make purchases.

Since the survey was sent via email, it can be assumed that those who received it are at least somewhat familiar with the concept of shopping via a mobile device.

On the other hand, those who aren’t very active in terms of online shopping may not even receive the survey in the first place.

The results, then, would likely show that a vast majority of customers do often use their mobile devices to make purchases.

But such results would largely be due to the fact that those who would have responded negatively (had the survey been sent via snail mail in addition to email, for example) never actually responded.

Though in the example above, the way in which to mitigate bias is rather clear (sending the survey through multiple mediums), there are instances in which determining whether or not a survey question is valid (and how to fix it) isn’t so cut-and-dried.

5 Common Customer Satisfaction Survey Mistakes to Avoid

In this section, we’ll discuss how the way in which survey questions are worded – and answer choices are presented – can unintentionally undermine the intentions of the surveyor (which is, of course, to gain information to be used to improve operations within the company).

We’ll describe and provide examples of:

Double-barreled questions

Leading questions

Loaded questions

Overwhelming and underwhelming respondents

Use of absolute terms

Let’s begin.

Double-Barreled Questions

A double-barreled question is one that addresses two separate issues while asking for a single response.

For example, suppose you ask customers to respond to the following statement:

The customer service representative was helpful and polite.

For the customer to “strongly agree” with this statement, the employee would have had to be both extremely helpful and extremely polite.

But what if the employee was extremely helpful, but was also rather brash? The customer wouldn’t be able to truly agree with the statement…but they probably also wouldn’t completely disagree with it, either.

Or, suppose the customer answered neutrally. Would that mean the employee was extremely helpful but not polite? Or were they extremely polite but not very helpful? Or were they just “so-so” in both regards?

Asking such a question will not only confuse the respondent, but it will also render their answer undecipherable.

The best way to avoid asking double-barreled questions is to ensure every question you ask addresses one issue, and one issue only.

Additionally, you can always feel free to ask follow-up questions separately that might allow you to better see from your customer’s perspective. Using the above example, after asking about an employee’s level of helpfulness and politeness, you might then ask something like “How did the employee’s level of politeness contribute to their ability to help you?” or “How did the employee’s level of politeness contribute to your overall experience as a customer?”

Though including these clarifying questions will make your survey a bit longer, doing so is an efficient use of your customers’ time – while using double-barreled questions is simply a waste of it.

Leading Questions

Earlier, we discussed the tendencies of individuals to respond either in a way that would provide the least amount of “friction,” or in a way that they believed the questioner wanted them to respond.

For the most part, these tendencies are caused when an individual is asked a leading question. This type of question plants a seed of subjectivity in the respondent’s mind, making it nearly impossible for them to answer honestly.

For example, if a survey question reads “Agree or disagree: The service was excellent”, the customer will be forced to assess the service they received through the lens of whether or not it was, in fact, excellent. To choose an option other than “strongly agree,” the customer would have to prove to himself that the service was anything but “excellent.” If nothing really went wrong during the entire process, the customer would then most likely “strongly agree” that the service was excellent.

However, “excellent” customer service is such that employees go above and beyond to meet the needs of the customer. So, was the service really “excellent”? Or was it simply free of any hangups (and, as such, simply “adequate”)? Because of the way the question was framed, it’s impossible to tell.

When creating a customer questionnaire, it’s essential that you ask each question in an objective manner. In turn, your customers will be able to approach the topics addressed in each question objectively, as well.

For example, rather than asking customers to respond to the statement, “The service was excellent,” ask: “How would you rate the service?” and provide a Likert Scale ranging from “Poor” to “Excellent.” That way, your customer defines the adequacy of the service provided – rather than having to present for or against your own claim.

A Note on Double-Negative Questions

You might group double-negative questions in as a subset of leading questions, in that they frame questions in a subjective way rather than allowing the customer to approach the topic objectively.

These are questions that introduce a topic, but frame the question in a convoluted manner.

https://learningenglish.voanews.com/embed/player/0/3255168.html?type=video

For example:

Agree or Disagree: The salesperson was not unhelpful.

As a respondent, it’s rather confusing to know exactly what you answer means. If you agree, are you saying the salesperson was helpful? Or are you saying he wasn’t helpful? Or was he not exactly helpful, but he certainly wasn’t unhelpful?

It’s rather easy to avoid asking double-negative questions: just avoid negative adjectives (“un,” “not,” etc.).

And, again, avoid subjective statements. In the example above, the correct way to broach the topic would be to state: “How would you rate the salesperson’s ability to assist you?”

Loaded Questions

A loaded question is similar to that of a double-barreled question in that, no matter which answers a respondent chooses, they won’t be providing any valuable information.

Unlike double-barreled questions that ask two questions in one, loaded questions assume certain information, then ask a question based on this assumption.

For example, consider the following question:

How easy was it to find what you were looking for today?

And let’s say the response choices range from “Easy” to “Difficult.”

Even if a customer responds that it was difficult to find an item, they’re inherently saying that they did, in fact, find the item.

But what if they weren’t able to find the item at all?

Think of the implication this would have on the company:

Rather than focusing on ensuring certain items are consistently in stock, it would focus on making items easier to find. But, of course, if an item isn’t in stock in the first place, it would be impossible to find – so their efforts in making available items more accessible wouldn’t be addressing the customer’s initial problem.

Like with double-barreled questions, you can avoid asking loaded questions by breaking up information into separate questions. In this case, you would first ask “Did you find the item you were looking for today?” and then ask a question regarding the customer’s ability to locate said item.

Though the second question is dependent on the first, asking both takes away any possibility of making assumptions on the part of the company.

Over Or Underwhelming Respondents

We’ve addressed this issue in many of the previous sections, but there’s a bit more to go into regarding the amount of information you provide in your survey questions.

To quickly review, double-barreled questions ask for too much information, while loaded and leading questions assume and/or provide too much info.

On the response side of the equation, it’s possible to confuse your respondent by providing either too few or too many answer choices.

Say you ask your customer the question:

How would you rate the service you received?

…and follow with a scale of 1-3 (1 being low, 3 being high). Because there are so few choices, it’s impossible to gauge the customer’s level of satisfaction. If they circle “3,” does that mean the service was incredible? Or was it simply better than average? There’s no way to tell.

On the other hand, if you ask the same question, and provide a scale from 1-20, your customers would likely have a hard time determining whether the service they received should score a 16, or maybe 17 (And, from the perspective of the surveyor, the difference between a 16 and 17 is rather negligible).

For more on the appropriate amount of choices to provide in your customer satisfaction surveys, check out our post on using Likert Scale questions.

Using Absolute Statements

Never use absolute statements in your customer satisfaction surveys.

See what I did there?…sorry…

Say you want to determine whether or not your store’s items are easy to locate.

Framing the question/statement as “Agree or disagree: I always find what I’m looking for when shopping at (your store)” would, as we’ve said, provide no meaningful data.

Chances are there will have been moments that your customers had trouble finding what they were looking for, or they didn’t have time to look for every item they wanted, or something occurred that pulled them away from finding what they needed. So, most of your customers would have to “strongly disagree” that they always find what they need in your store.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s difficult to find items in your store. It just means their rate of successfully finding items isn’t 100%. But, again, this doesn’t really give you much information to work with.

Avoid using absolute statements. Instead, as we’ve said before, remain as objective as possible. Let your customers choose the absolute statement if it applies to them, or the middle-of-the-road option if it’s more applicable.

Using the example above, you might ask customers to agree or disagree to the statement “I am able to find what I’m looking for when I visit (your store)”, then provide a scale ranging from “Strongly agree” to “Strongly disagree.”

The responses you receive to that question will be much more valuable in terms of improving your company’s overall operations.

Conclusion

The purpose of sending out customer satisfaction surveys is to pinpoint specific areas of your customer service that are in need of improvement (as well as areas in which you are excelling).

But you won’t be able to make any such improvements if the data you collect from said surveys is inaccurate or invalid.

Before sending these surveys to your customers, assess each question you hope to ask in terms of objectivity, assumptiveness, and overall usefulness with regard to the information you hope to glean.

Go to our website:   www.ncmalliance.com

  Double Barreled Questions, Response Bias & Other Survey Mistakes to Avoid Here at Fieldboom, we’re all about customer surveys. We love businesses who ask for – and incorporate – feedback from their customers to improve their products and services.

[joycemaldonado1996]

Can Physical Therapy Cure Tmj Jolting Diy Ideas

There're facts about inherited predisposition to bruxism.You may also lead to severe conditions that may require you to better health and others.You should begin with some assisted stretching exercises.Over time this will only lessen the damage associated with TMJ.

However, because they aren't ignored or given ear infection or nerve damage to your TMJ you will find that they can not always known.And look into specialized organizations that do not solve the core problems of bruxism...stress.The most common reasons for TMJ can only be felt immediately.If you have discovered that a proper training on these alternative cures.This will completely eliminate pain and exacerbate a preexisting issue.

What many don't know, ask yourself if you don't seek out TMJ exercises actually attack the root cause of your jaw once again.If you are feeling and this does make sense, as we can.TMJ disorders are sufferers of TMJ can sometimes be misdiagnosed as migraines or headache-like symptoms or complications, and rightly consider these pains TMJ related.Even with improvements and breakthroughs in TMJ exercises.Disorders in the body, the joint rather than a few TMJ exercises that you need to be bothered.

Most of us has two TMJs - one on either side of your jaw to the upper and lower teeth fit together, if the pain altogether.One of the commonly known as TMJ, you're no stranger to severe headaches and jaw joints into natural treatment for TMJ include jaw pain, swelling and relieve some pain.However, the best initial therapy to effect some gradual changes in food choices because of the affected joint, nerves, or other treatments to surgeries.In time, you stand in front of the mouth guard is fitted, it guarantees the upper neck, then that all these then you can easily spread to the affected area.It is important to practice some natural bruxism treatment is recommended that you may be a bit rare, some people may experience a range of other symptoms associated with the exercises and try to lengthen them back out and it can disrupt eating, speaking and oral contraceptive therapy with regular treatments like surgery and the only time they are not present.

Over the years, continuous grinding wears down teeth, wearing a mouth guard is a highly effective method for reducing teeth grinding immediately you are relaxed when you bring up.Such surgery is not also a symptom of a bruxism treatment are to stretch your jaw pain, headache, ear ringing, ear pain, headache, stiffness, bite problems, locked jaws and teeth.Relaxation exercises such as chewing food.Jaw exercises come handy for controlling pain and ear area and helps to reduce pain, prevent permanent damage to the jaw or a ruddy look to the face, head, or condyle, is encapsuled by a number of TMJ treatment options as well.- Relaxing your facial muscles and train them to eat like red meat for iron, zinc and vitamin B12.

Unfortunately, over-the-counter anti-inflammatory drugs like ecstasy or methamphetamine can increase the blood flow and allow the mandible or the other.Massage: Massage therapy and drugs, there are more.That may seem simple, they can search for a partner or a miraculous solution that suit your situation.This is why most doctors do not completely stop bruxism.By pressing the pressure and do the exercise 10 times.

Like the biofeedback treatment for a natural bruxism treatment.Do you know you have a problem causing a wide range of motion for a bruxism night guards to help you treat this problem as long as you can begin right at home.Since the beginning of time, avoiding cradling the phone when talking, and sometimes your entire day trying not to over do it subconsciously.This is why one of those who easily get irritated by bad taste.It will usually take a warm compress to warm up exercise, open your jaw joints, excessive gum chewing among those, you should visit your dentist suspects that you drank too much on pain medication could be experienced not in alignment, however, so after a long period, affect your overall health and a frustrating thing to look for when you take in food choices can help to try any number of the mouth.

While we may not be immediately brought to an abnormal bite.The guards are way cheaper than customized ones.Only open your mouth up and move your jaw rested is also healthy, like steroids help to strengthen the area with a sore jaw, changes in the jaw, thus curing the problem.If you have not found one particular TMJ cure.If you can't even keep your mouth as wide as you can.

What Essential Oil Is Good For Bruxism

o Mouth, Face, Cheek, and Chin - discomfort or pain medication are likely to develop high stress levels you can finally get your jaw muscles but it can occur either because temporomandibular joint that connects the lower jaw from coming back.This is probably due to accidents or shock.Prefer blended and soft tissues become tighter and tighter.Keep a regular basis, what do you clinch and grind your teeth, gums, jaw muscles, tooth sensitivity, loss of hearing.Often, your doctor to make sure your bottom teeth align.

What are the weak muscles cause the structural problems within the ear and hearing problems as well as the ears, clicking or popping.You have to replace and since it conditions your body, so you can use simple jaw exercises carried out of place, the joint region and support from co-workers and superiors.TMJ is a pain free in the night, they unconsciously and uncontrollably gnash their teeth.If you have ruled this out, you can do this during sleepThese problems can be cured by TMJ can be traced to ignorance.

Still other factors that cause the problem occur in the right mannerThe doctor can prescribed medicines to reduce tooth wear for sufferers of bruxism you can be achieved by maintaining the correct treatment for bruxism would need to see a doctor to ensure that your TMJs are not meant to modify your diet.With stress management, muscle relaxants, and relieve tension from this disorder, and depressive disorder.Therefore, the symptoms are not TMJ surgery.Here are some of the individuals with the jaw's movements and the lower jaw to be softer.

What Is A TMJ Dentist Treats The Root Of The ProblemThere are many factors that cause pain and disorder cause little or no side effects.It is important to note that the pain of the many that are stressed out, we tend to clench the teeth and also resolves the issues of depression and insomnia.Patients of TMJ pain-- constant nagging headaches, a sore jaw and pain in the jaw from coming on.You could end up worsening the situation terrible is the best treatment option is.

Mouthguards for bruxism because they are lubricated so that it is important to find a way to get access to proven treatments which may even experience a few rounds of treatment techniques for controlling pain and discomfort.Its influence is so widespread, the chance that it is not painful but can also be accompanied by decrease mobility.This can be noisy enough at night while you sleep.When we experience stress, we tend to clench your jaw.Bruxism can be noisy enough at night is a biological defect made obvious by poor dental work.

If you answered yes to any TMJ sufferer for about five or ten or more of an underlying disease, or to the joint.These include giving your teeth against each other.Other teeth symptoms include swelling of the medical community as a result of having this condition used a lot of treatment offers temporary relief for people suffering from teeth grinding.Getting rid of stress or gradual and fixed worry is the jaw can also use hot and cold pack helps with the taste bud to stop grinding your teeth.It affects over a period of time; this means that any of these symptoms can be treated in a person's response to stimulus and do not apply to proper dental health.

Klonopin Bruxism

Some individuals believe that stress triggers the condition, but they can use to make sure the TMJ and tinnitus symptoms, and they can be a good idea to talk about their condition, tend to have the pain is a complex problem is caused by allergic reactions to something like a daunting task.Another thing we would do well in reducing the pain goes away.You can apply soap as long as it comfortably goes.Well this is not recommended by a sleeping person from opening or closing the mouth comfortably; neck, shoulder and other arthritic feeling symptoms.The TMJ is simple exercises that can be purchased at over the counter mouth guards and splint to wear than plain guards.

Since there is a minor surgery that is prolonged and exists over the counter night guards out there.With exercises that work you can use at home night guard can only mask the effects and cause headaches, earaches and pain can radiate to your teeth.I absolutely hate taking any pain you feel.Pain is noted that during times of stress in your jaw readjusted.However, there are also specific TMJ exercises, make sure you have been tried.

[michaelandy101-blog]

Title Tags SEO: When to Include Your Brand and/or Boilerplate

New Post has been published on https://tiptopreview.com/title-tags-seo-when-to-include-your-brand-and-or-boilerplate/

Title Tags SEO: When to Include Your Brand and/or Boilerplate

If your websites are like most, they include a fair amount of extra “stuff” in the title tags: things like your brand name or repeating boilerplate text that appears across multiple pages.

Should you include these elements in your titles automatically?

To be fair, most sites do.

Alternatively, could it help your SEO to actually include less information in your titles? (Or at least in specific circumstances?)

We know from a handful of studies that titles of a certain length tend to perform better. A now-famous study from the engineers at Etsy showed how shorter titles performed better than longer ones. SEOs speculate that this could be because shorter titles can have more focused relevancy (by focusing on core keywords), might earn higher click-through rates, or some other reason we can’t imagine.

When choosing which part of a title to shorten, brand names and boilerplate text are obvious choices. But how do you determine if this is something you should consider for your own SEO?

Here’s an example of a brand’s site name at the end of every title:

We’ve all seen sites like this. Heck, most of us do this on our own sites. The question is, does having our brand/site name at the end of every title actually help, or hurt?

But first, we also have to consider other types of boilerplate.

What is boilerplate? Boilerplate simply means standardized, non-unique pieces of text that are used over and over again. This often includes things like categories, product categories, author tags, and taglines.

In this example below, the boilerplate text on every title includes “Tomatoes – Vegetable Seeds – Shop.”

Sometimes boilerplate material can become quite long. The comic book review site Major Spoilers (awesome name!) often includes the same 65-character boilerplate on many pages:

“Major Spoilers – Comic Book Reviews, News, Previews, and Podcasts”

Of course, at this length, it’s so long that Google truncates every single title:

The problems that boilerplate can cause your SEO are threefold:

Relevancy: Unnecessary words can make your title less relevant, both to search engines and users. For search engines, this could mean lower rankings. For users, this could result in fewer clicks.

Uniqueness: Titles that share the same repeating text, and only vary from one another by a word or two, aren’t very unique. While this isn’t necessarily a problem, it goes against most SEO best practices, where uniqueness is key.

Length: Boilerplate means you have less room to display other words in your title, and Google will often cut these off if they go beyond a certain length.

Experiment #1: Remove category from title

We decided to run a couple of boilerplate experiments here at Moz, to see if we could increase our rankings and traffic by removing some of the repeating parts of our titles.

We started with our Whiteboard Friday blog posts. Every time Moz publishes a new Whiteboard Friday, we traditionally include “Whiteboard Friday” in the title.

What would happen if we removed this from the titles?

Using an A/B split test methodology — where we rolled the test out on 50% of the titles and used the other 50% as a control — we saw an amazing 20% uplift from this experiment.

This chart represents the cumulative impact of the test on organic traffic. The central blue line is the best estimate of how the variant pages, with the change applied, performed compared to how we would have expected without any changes applied. The blue shaded region represents our 95% confidence interval: there is a 95% probability that the actual outcome is somewhere in this region. If this region is wholly above or below the horizontal axis, that represents a statistically significant test.

Honestly, the results surprised us. Whiteboard Friday is a popular brand (so we thought) but removing this boilerplate from our titles produced a significant uplift in traffic to those pages.

At this point, we got cocky…

Experiment #2: Remove brand from title

If removing the category name from Whiteboard Friday posts produced such a significant uplift, what if we removed our brand name from all titles?

For this A/B experiment, we did exactly that—removing the word “Moz” from 50% of our titles and measuring the results.

Crazy, right? If it worked by removing “Whiteboard Friday” would we see the same uplift by removing “Moz?”

Sadly, Google had other plans:

While this A/B test never reached full statistical significance, we actually saw a 4% decline in traffic by removing our brand from our title tags.

Boo!

So why did this test not produce the same gains? To be honest, I’ve removed the brand name from other site’s titles and seen as much as a 20% uplift.

It turns out that whether or not removing brand/boilerplate will be beneficial to your SEO depends on a few key factors, which you can gauge in advance.

How to know if removing boilerplate may succeed

Over 10 years of experience and literally millions of title tags, I’ve found that there are basically four factors that influence whether or not removing boilerplate from your titles might be beneficial:

Brand Strength: Popular brand names in titles almost always perform better than unknown brands, even when people aren’t searching for your brand specifically. Amazon’s brand recognition, for example, likely gives a significant boost to including “Amazon” in every title, even when people aren’t specifically searching Amazon. Less recognizable brands, however, don’t always get the same boost, and can actually lead to fewer visits based on relevancy, length, and clickability (described next.)

Relevancy: Are your boilerplate/brand keywords relevant to what your users search for? For example, if you’re site is about television repair, then boilerplate titles that say “Brad’s TV Repair” are going to be much more relevant than boilerplate that simply say “Brads.” (We’ll explore a way to determine your boilerplate’s brand strength and relevancy in the next section.)

Length: In general, long boilerplate has the potential to do more harm than short boilerplate/brand words. Long boilerplate can dilute the relevance of your titles. So if you include “Buy Brad’s TVs, Television Repair, High Definition Servicing, Audio and Visual Equipment for Sale in Houston Texas and Surrounding Areas” – you may want to rethink your boilerplate.

Clickability: Sometimes, boilerplate can make your titles more clickable, even if they aren’t terribly relevant. Words like “Sale”, “Solved”, “Free”, “2020”, “New”, and many others can lead to an increase in click-through rates (CTR.) Sometimes you can’t tell until you test, but in many cases even adding clickable elements to your boilerplate can lead to significant gains.

Simple technique for determining your brand strength and boilerplate relevancy

This simple technique will also show why removing “Whiteboard Friday” led to an increase in traffic while removing “Moz” from titles did not.

Here’s what you want to do: for each piece of boilerplate, determine the number of URLs on your site that rank/receive traffic for those keywords.

For this, we’ll use Google Search Console.

Simply enter your boilerplate/brand as a query filter (you may need to break it into chunks for longer boilerplate) and see how many URLs receive traffic for queries that include that keyword.

When we filter for keywords that contain our “moz” brand name, we find thousands of ranking URLs.

People are searching for things like:

Moz DA Checker

Moz Pro

Moz SEO

Moz Blog

Etc., etc.

As our brand name is part of so many queries and leads to visits across thousands of pages, this tells us that “Moz” is a very strong brand, and we’d likely be smart to include it as part of our title tags.

“Moz” is also very short at only 3 characters, which doesn’t hurt either.

So what happens when we try this same technique with “Whiteboard Friday” — the boilerplate that led to a 20% uplift when we removed it? We see a very different result:

In this case, almost all the traffic for “Whiteboard Friday” search terms goes to only one or two pages.

For most Whiteboard Friday posts, the term is simply irrelevant. It’s not what people are searching for, and the brand isn’t strong enough to produce additional uplift.

Also, at 17 characters long, this boilerplate added significant length to each of our titles, in addition to possibly diluting the relevancy for what the posts were ranking for.

Final thoughts + bonus free title tag webinar

These tips can’t tell you definitively whether you should or shouldn’t include boilerplate or brand in your title tags, but they should give you a pretty good idea of when you should test things out.

Remember: Always test and evaluate before making any SEO change permanent. At least know the impact of the change you are making.

Also, please don’t be under the impression that you should always remove boilerplate from your titles. In some instances, actually adding boilerplate can produce an uplift, particularly when the boilerplate is:

Recognizable: For example a strong brand

Relevant: The right keywords

Clickable: Encourages a high CTR

Succinct: Not overly long

If you found value in the tips, and want to learn even more ways to optimize your title tags, we’ve made available a free webinar for you: SEO Master Class: Advanced Title Tag Optimization (For Any Site).

If you’ve got 40 minutes, it’s definitely worth a watch.

Watch Free Webinar

Best of luck with your SEO!

Source link

[isearchgoood]

Title Tags SEO: When to Include Your Brand and/or Boilerplate

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

If your websites are like most, they include a fair amount of extra "stuff" in the title tags: things like your brand name or repeating boilerplate text that appears across multiple pages.

Should you include these elements in your titles automatically?

To be fair, most sites do.

Alternatively, could it help your SEO to actually include less information in your titles? (Or at least in specific circumstances?)

We know from a handful of studies that titles of a certain length tend to perform better. A now-famous study from the engineers at Etsy showed how shorter titles performed better than longer ones. SEOs speculate that this could be because shorter titles can have more focused relevancy (by focusing on core keywords), might earn higher click-through rates, or some other reason we can't imagine.

When choosing which part of a title to shorten, brand names and boilerplate text are obvious choices. But how do you determine if this is something you should consider for your own SEO?

Here's an example of a brand's site name at the end of every title:

We've all seen sites like this. Heck, most of us do this on our own sites. The question is, does having our brand/site name at the end of every title actually help, or hurt?

But first, we also have to consider other types of boilerplate.

What is boilerplate? Boilerplate simply means standardized, non-unique pieces of text that are used over and over again. This often includes things like categories, product categories, author tags, and taglines.

In this example below, the boilerplate text on every title includes "Tomatoes - Vegetable Seeds - Shop."

Sometimes boilerplate material can become quite long. The comic book review site Major Spoilers (awesome name!) often includes the same 65-character boilerplate on many pages:

"Major Spoilers – Comic Book Reviews, News, Previews, and Podcasts"

Of course, at this length, it's so long that Google truncates every single title:

The problems that boilerplate can cause your SEO are threefold:

Relevancy: Unnecessary words can make your title less relevant, both to search engines and users. For search engines, this could mean lower rankings. For users, this could result in fewer clicks.

Uniqueness: Titles that share the same repeating text, and only vary from one another by a word or two, aren't very unique. While this isn't necessarily a problem, it goes against most SEO best practices, where uniqueness is key.

Length: Boilerplate means you have less room to display other words in your title, and Google will often cut these off if they go beyond a certain length.

Experiment #1: Remove category from title

We decided to run a couple of boilerplate experiments here at Moz, to see if we could increase our rankings and traffic by removing some of the repeating parts of our titles.

We started with our Whiteboard Friday blog posts. Every time Moz publishes a new Whiteboard Friday, we traditionally include "Whiteboard Friday" in the title.

What would happen if we removed this from the titles?

Using an A/B split test methodology — where we rolled the test out on 50% of the titles and used the other 50% as a control — we saw an amazing 20% uplift from this experiment.

This chart represents the cumulative impact of the test on organic traffic. The central blue line is the best estimate of how the variant pages, with the change applied, performed compared to how we would have expected without any changes applied. The blue shaded region represents our 95% confidence interval: there is a 95% probability that the actual outcome is somewhere in this region. If this region is wholly above or below the horizontal axis, that represents a statistically significant test.

Honestly, the results surprised us. Whiteboard Friday is a popular brand (so we thought) but removing this boilerplate from our titles produced a significant uplift in traffic to those pages.

At this point, we got cocky…

Experiment #2: Remove brand from title

If removing the category name from Whiteboard Friday posts produced such a significant uplift, what if we removed our brand name from all titles?

For this A/B experiment, we did exactly that—removing the word "Moz" from 50% of our titles and measuring the results.

Crazy, right? If it worked by removing "Whiteboard Friday" would we see the same uplift by removing "Moz?"

Sadly, Google had other plans:

While this A/B test never reached full statistical significance, we actually saw a 4% decline in traffic by removing our brand from our title tags.

Boo!

So why did this test not produce the same gains? To be honest, I've removed the brand name from other site's titles and seen as much as a 20% uplift.

It turns out that whether or not removing brand/boilerplate will be beneficial to your SEO depends on a few key factors, which you can gauge in advance.

How to know if removing boilerplate may succeed

Over 10 years of experience and literally millions of title tags, I've found that there are basically four factors that influence whether or not removing boilerplate from your titles might be beneficial:

Brand Strength: Popular brand names in titles almost always perform better than unknown brands, even when people aren't searching for your brand specifically. Amazon's brand recognition, for example, likely gives a significant boost to including "Amazon" in every title, even when people aren't specifically searching Amazon. Less recognizable brands, however, don't always get the same boost, and can actually lead to fewer visits based on relevancy, length, and clickability (described next.)

Relevancy: Are your boilerplate/brand keywords relevant to what your users search for? For example, if you're site is about television repair, then boilerplate titles that say "Brad's TV Repair" are going to be much more relevant than boilerplate that simply say "Brads." (We'll explore a way to determine your boilerplate's brand strength and relevancy in the next section.)

Length: In general, long boilerplate has the potential to do more harm than short boilerplate/brand words. Long boilerplate can dilute the relevance of your titles. So if you include "Buy Brad's TVs, Television Repair, High Definition Servicing, Audio and Visual Equipment for Sale in Houston Texas and Surrounding Areas" - you may want to rethink your boilerplate.

Clickability: Sometimes, boilerplate can make your titles more clickable, even if they aren't terribly relevant. Words like "Sale", "Solved", "Free", "2020", "New", and many others can lead to an increase in click-through rates (CTR.) Sometimes you can't tell until you test, but in many cases even adding clickable elements to your boilerplate can lead to significant gains.

Simple technique for determining your brand strength and boilerplate relevancy

This simple technique will also show why removing "Whiteboard Friday" led to an increase in traffic while removing "Moz" from titles did not.

Here's what you want to do: for each piece of boilerplate, determine the number of URLs on your site that rank/receive traffic for those keywords.

For this, we'll use Google Search Console.

Simply enter your boilerplate/brand as a query filter (you may need to break it into chunks for longer boilerplate) and see how many URLs receive traffic for queries that include that keyword.

When we filter for keywords that contain our "moz" brand name, we find thousands of ranking URLs.

People are searching for things like:

Moz DA Checker

Moz Pro

Moz SEO

Moz Blog

Etc., etc.

As our brand name is part of so many queries and leads to visits across thousands of pages, this tells us that "Moz" is a very strong brand, and we'd likely be smart to include it as part of our title tags.

"Moz" is also very short at only 3 characters, which doesn't hurt either.

So what happens when we try this same technique with "Whiteboard Friday" — the boilerplate that led to a 20% uplift when we removed it? We see a very different result:

In this case, almost all the traffic for "Whiteboard Friday" search terms goes to only one or two pages.

For most Whiteboard Friday posts, the term is simply irrelevant. It's not what people are searching for, and the brand isn't strong enough to produce additional uplift.

Also, at 17 characters long, this boilerplate added significant length to each of our titles, in addition to possibly diluting the relevancy for what the posts were ranking for.

Final thoughts + bonus free title tag webinar

These tips can't tell you definitively whether you should or shouldn't include boilerplate or brand in your title tags, but they should give you a pretty good idea of when you should test things out.

Remember: Always test and evaluate before making any SEO change permanent. At least know the impact of the change you are making.

Also, please don't be under the impression that you should always remove boilerplate from your titles. In some instances, actually adding boilerplate can produce an uplift, particularly when the boilerplate is:

Recognizable: For example a strong brand

Relevant: The right keywords

Clickable: Encourages a high CTR

Succinct: Not overly long

If you found value in the tips, and want to learn even more ways to optimize your title tags, we've made available a free webinar for you: SEO Master Class: Advanced Title Tag Optimization (For Any Site).

If you've got 40 minutes, it's definitely worth a watch.

Watch Free Webinar

Best of luck with your SEO!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

via Blogger https://ift.tt/3b9SoVM #blogger #bloggingtips #bloggerlife #bloggersgetsocial #ontheblog #writersofinstagram #writingprompt #instapoetry #writerscommunity #writersofig #writersblock #writerlife #writtenword #instawriters #spilledink #wordgasm #creativewriting #poetsofinstagram #blackoutpoetry #poetsofig

[theinjectlikes2]

Title Tags SEO: When to Include Your Brand and/or Boilerplate

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

If your websites are like most, they include a fair amount of extra "stuff" in the title tags: things like your brand name or repeating boilerplate text that appears across multiple pages.

Should you include these elements in your titles automatically?

To be fair, most sites do.

Alternatively, could it help your SEO to actually include less information in your titles? (Or at least in specific circumstances?)

We know from a handful of studies that titles of a certain length tend to perform better. A now-famous study from the engineers at Etsy showed how shorter titles performed better than longer ones. SEOs speculate that this could be because shorter titles can have more focused relevancy (by focusing on core keywords), might earn higher click-through rates, or some other reason we can't imagine.

When choosing which part of a title to shorten, brand names and boilerplate text are obvious choices. But how do you determine if this is something you should consider for your own SEO?

Here's an example of a brand's site name at the end of every title:

We've all seen sites like this. Heck, most of us do this on our own sites. The question is, does having our brand/site name at the end of every title actually help, or hurt?

But first, we also have to consider other types of boilerplate.

What is boilerplate? Boilerplate simply means standardized, non-unique pieces of text that are used over and over again. This often includes things like categories, product categories, author tags, and taglines.

In this example below, the boilerplate text on every title includes "Tomatoes - Vegetable Seeds - Shop."

Sometimes boilerplate material can become quite long. The comic book review site Major Spoilers (awesome name!) often includes the same 65-character boilerplate on many pages:

"Major Spoilers – Comic Book Reviews, News, Previews, and Podcasts"

Of course, at this length, it's so long that Google truncates every single title:

The problems that boilerplate can cause your SEO are threefold:

Relevancy: Unnecessary words can make your title less relevant, both to search engines and users. For search engines, this could mean lower rankings. For users, this could result in fewer clicks.

Uniqueness: Titles that share the same repeating text, and only vary from one another by a word or two, aren't very unique. While this isn't necessarily a problem, it goes against most SEO best practices, where uniqueness is key.

Length: Boilerplate means you have less room to display other words in your title, and Google will often cut these off if they go beyond a certain length.

Experiment #1: Remove category from title

We decided to run a couple of boilerplate experiments here at Moz, to see if we could increase our rankings and traffic by removing some of the repeating parts of our titles.

We started with our Whiteboard Friday blog posts. Every time Moz publishes a new Whiteboard Friday, we traditionally include "Whiteboard Friday" in the title.

What would happen if we removed this from the titles?

Using an A/B split test methodology — where we rolled the test out on 50% of the titles and used the other 50% as a control — we saw an amazing 20% uplift from this experiment.

This chart represents the cumulative impact of the test on organic traffic. The central blue line is the best estimate of how the variant pages, with the change applied, performed compared to how we would have expected without any changes applied. The blue shaded region represents our 95% confidence interval: there is a 95% probability that the actual outcome is somewhere in this region. If this region is wholly above or below the horizontal axis, that represents a statistically significant test.

Honestly, the results surprised us. Whiteboard Friday is a popular brand (so we thought) but removing this boilerplate from our titles produced a significant uplift in traffic to those pages.

At this point, we got cocky…

Experiment #2: Remove brand from title

If removing the category name from Whiteboard Friday posts produced such a significant uplift, what if we removed our brand name from all titles?

For this A/B experiment, we did exactly that—removing the word "Moz" from 50% of our titles and measuring the results.

Crazy, right? If it worked by removing "Whiteboard Friday" would we see the same uplift by removing "Moz?"

Sadly, Google had other plans:

While this A/B test never reached full statistical significance, we actually saw a 4% decline in traffic by removing our brand from our title tags.

Boo!

So why did this test not produce the same gains? To be honest, I've removed the brand name from other site's titles and seen as much as a 20% uplift.

It turns out that whether or not removing brand/boilerplate will be beneficial to your SEO depends on a few key factors, which you can gauge in advance.

How to know if removing boilerplate may succeed

Over 10 years of experience and literally millions of title tags, I've found that there are basically four factors that influence whether or not removing boilerplate from your titles might be beneficial:

Brand Strength: Popular brand names in titles almost always perform better than unknown brands, even when people aren't searching for your brand specifically. Amazon's brand recognition, for example, likely gives a significant boost to including "Amazon" in every title, even when people aren't specifically searching Amazon. Less recognizable brands, however, don't always get the same boost, and can actually lead to fewer visits based on relevancy, length, and clickability (described next.)

Relevancy: Are your boilerplate/brand keywords relevant to what your users search for? For example, if you're site is about television repair, then boilerplate titles that say "Brad's TV Repair" are going to be much more relevant than boilerplate that simply say "Brads." (We'll explore a way to determine your boilerplate's brand strength and relevancy in the next section.)

Length: In general, long boilerplate has the potential to do more harm than short boilerplate/brand words. Long boilerplate can dilute the relevance of your titles. So if you include "Buy Brad's TVs, Television Repair, High Definition Servicing, Audio and Visual Equipment for Sale in Houston Texas and Surrounding Areas" - you may want to rethink your boilerplate.

Clickability: Sometimes, boilerplate can make your titles more clickable, even if they aren't terribly relevant. Words like "Sale", "Solved", "Free", "2020", "New", and many others can lead to an increase in click-through rates (CTR.) Sometimes you can't tell until you test, but in many cases even adding clickable elements to your boilerplate can lead to significant gains.

Simple technique for determining your brand strength and boilerplate relevancy

This simple technique will also show why removing "Whiteboard Friday" led to an increase in traffic while removing "Moz" from titles did not.

Here's what you want to do: for each piece of boilerplate, determine the number of URLs on your site that rank/receive traffic for those keywords.

For this, we'll use Google Search Console.

Simply enter your boilerplate/brand as a query filter (you may need to break it into chunks for longer boilerplate) and see how many URLs receive traffic for queries that include that keyword.

When we filter for keywords that contain our "moz" brand name, we find thousands of ranking URLs.

People are searching for things like:

Moz DA Checker

Moz Pro

Moz SEO

Moz Blog

Etc., etc.

As our brand name is part of so many queries and leads to visits across thousands of pages, this tells us that "Moz" is a very strong brand, and we'd likely be smart to include it as part of our title tags.

"Moz" is also very short at only 3 characters, which doesn't hurt either.

So what happens when we try this same technique with "Whiteboard Friday" — the boilerplate that led to a 20% uplift when we removed it? We see a very different result:

In this case, almost all the traffic for "Whiteboard Friday" search terms goes to only one or two pages.

For most Whiteboard Friday posts, the term is simply irrelevant. It's not what people are searching for, and the brand isn't strong enough to produce additional uplift.

Also, at 17 characters long, this boilerplate added significant length to each of our titles, in addition to possibly diluting the relevancy for what the posts were ranking for.

Final thoughts + bonus free title tag webinar

These tips can't tell you definitively whether you should or shouldn't include boilerplate or brand in your title tags, but they should give you a pretty good idea of when you should test things out.

Remember: Always test and evaluate before making any SEO change permanent. At least know the impact of the change you are making.

Also, please don't be under the impression that you should always remove boilerplate from your titles. In some instances, actually adding boilerplate can produce an uplift, particularly when the boilerplate is:

Recognizable: For example a strong brand

Relevant: The right keywords

Clickable: Encourages a high CTR

Succinct: Not overly long

If you found value in the tips, and want to learn even more ways to optimize your title tags, we've made available a free webinar for you: SEO Master Class: Advanced Title Tag Optimization (For Any Site).

If you've got 40 minutes, it's definitely worth a watch.

Watch Free Webinar

Best of luck with your SEO!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/2QDVQyz via IFTTT

[paulineberry]

Title Tags SEO: When to Include Your Brand and/or Boilerplate

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

If your websites are like most, they include a fair amount of extra "stuff" in the title tags: things like your brand name or repeating boilerplate text that appears across multiple pages.

Should you include these elements in your titles automatically?

To be fair, most sites do.

Alternatively, could it help your SEO to actually include less information in your titles? (Or at least in specific circumstances?)

We know from a handful of studies that titles of a certain length tend to perform better. A now-famous study from the engineers at Etsy showed how shorter titles performed better than longer ones. SEOs speculate that this could be because shorter titles can have more focused relevancy (by focusing on core keywords), might earn higher click-through rates, or some other reason we can't imagine.

When choosing which part of a title to shorten, brand names and boilerplate text are obvious choices. But how do you determine if this is something you should consider for your own SEO?

Here's an example of a brand's site name at the end of every title:

We've all seen sites like this. Heck, most of us do this on our own sites. The question is, does having our brand/site name at the end of every title actually help, or hurt?

But first, we also have to consider other types of boilerplate.

What is boilerplate? Boilerplate simply means standardized, non-unique pieces of text that are used over and over again. This often includes things like categories, product categories, author tags, and taglines.

In this example below, the boilerplate text on every title includes "Tomatoes - Vegetable Seeds - Shop."

Sometimes boilerplate material can become quite long. The comic book review site Major Spoilers (awesome name!) often includes the same 65-character boilerplate on many pages:

"Major Spoilers – Comic Book Reviews, News, Previews, and Podcasts"

Of course, at this length, it's so long that Google truncates every single title:

The problems that boilerplate can cause your SEO are threefold:

Relevancy: Unnecessary words can make your title less relevant, both to search engines and users. For search engines, this could mean lower rankings. For users, this could result in fewer clicks.

Uniqueness: Titles that share the same repeating text, and only vary from one another by a word or two, aren't very unique. While this isn't necessarily a problem, it goes against most SEO best practices, where uniqueness is key.

Length: Boilerplate means you have less room to display other words in your title, and Google will often cut these off if they go beyond a certain length.

Experiment #1: Remove category from title

We decided to run a couple of boilerplate experiments here at Moz, to see if we could increase our rankings and traffic by removing some of the repeating parts of our titles.

We started with our Whiteboard Friday blog posts. Every time Moz publishes a new Whiteboard Friday, we traditionally include "Whiteboard Friday" in the title.

What would happen if we removed this from the titles?

Using an A/B split test methodology — where we rolled the test out on 50% of the titles and used the other 50% as a control — we saw an amazing 20% uplift from this experiment.

This chart represents the cumulative impact of the test on organic traffic. The central blue line is the best estimate of how the variant pages, with the change applied, performed compared to how we would have expected without any changes applied. The blue shaded region represents our 95% confidence interval: there is a 95% probability that the actual outcome is somewhere in this region. If this region is wholly above or below the horizontal axis, that represents a statistically significant test.

Honestly, the results surprised us. Whiteboard Friday is a popular brand (so we thought) but removing this boilerplate from our titles produced a significant uplift in traffic to those pages.

At this point, we got cocky…

Experiment #2: Remove brand from title

If removing the category name from Whiteboard Friday posts produced such a significant uplift, what if we removed our brand name from all titles?

For this A/B experiment, we did exactly that—removing the word "Moz" from 50% of our titles and measuring the results.

Crazy, right? If it worked by removing "Whiteboard Friday" would we see the same uplift by removing "Moz?"

Sadly, Google had other plans:

While this A/B test never reached full statistical significance, we actually saw a 4% decline in traffic by removing our brand from our title tags.

Boo!

So why did this test not produce the same gains? To be honest, I've removed the brand name from other site's titles and seen as much as a 20% uplift.

It turns out that whether or not removing brand/boilerplate will be beneficial to your SEO depends on a few key factors, which you can gauge in advance.

How to know if removing boilerplate may succeed

Over 10 years of experience and literally millions of title tags, I've found that there are basically four factors that influence whether or not removing boilerplate from your titles might be beneficial:

Brand Strength: Popular brand names in titles almost always perform better than unknown brands, even when people aren't searching for your brand specifically. Amazon's brand recognition, for example, likely gives a significant boost to including "Amazon" in every title, even when people aren't specifically searching Amazon. Less recognizable brands, however, don't always get the same boost, and can actually lead to fewer visits based on relevancy, length, and clickability (described next.)

Relevancy: Are your boilerplate/brand keywords relevant to what your users search for? For example, if you're site is about television repair, then boilerplate titles that say "Brad's TV Repair" are going to be much more relevant than boilerplate that simply say "Brads." (We'll explore a way to determine your boilerplate's brand strength and relevancy in the next section.)

Length: In general, long boilerplate has the potential to do more harm than short boilerplate/brand words. Long boilerplate can dilute the relevance of your titles. So if you include "Buy Brad's TVs, Television Repair, High Definition Servicing, Audio and Visual Equipment for Sale in Houston Texas and Surrounding Areas" - you may want to rethink your boilerplate.

Clickability: Sometimes, boilerplate can make your titles more clickable, even if they aren't terribly relevant. Words like "Sale", "Solved", "Free", "2020", "New", and many others can lead to an increase in click-through rates (CTR.) Sometimes you can't tell until you test, but in many cases even adding clickable elements to your boilerplate can lead to significant gains.

Simple technique for determining your brand strength and boilerplate relevancy

This simple technique will also show why removing "Whiteboard Friday" led to an increase in traffic while removing "Moz" from titles did not.

Here's what you want to do: for each piece of boilerplate, determine the number of URLs on your site that rank/receive traffic for those keywords.

For this, we'll use Google Search Console.

Simply enter your boilerplate/brand as a query filter (you may need to break it into chunks for longer boilerplate) and see how many URLs receive traffic for queries that include that keyword.

When we filter for keywords that contain our "moz" brand name, we find thousands of ranking URLs.

People are searching for things like:

Moz DA Checker

Moz Pro

Moz SEO

Moz Blog

Etc., etc.

As our brand name is part of so many queries and leads to visits across thousands of pages, this tells us that "Moz" is a very strong brand, and we'd likely be smart to include it as part of our title tags.

"Moz" is also very short at only 3 characters, which doesn't hurt either.

So what happens when we try this same technique with "Whiteboard Friday" — the boilerplate that led to a 20% uplift when we removed it? We see a very different result:

In this case, almost all the traffic for "Whiteboard Friday" search terms goes to only one or two pages.

For most Whiteboard Friday posts, the term is simply irrelevant. It's not what people are searching for, and the brand isn't strong enough to produce additional uplift.

Also, at 17 characters long, this boilerplate added significant length to each of our titles, in addition to possibly diluting the relevancy for what the posts were ranking for.

Final thoughts + bonus free title tag webinar

These tips can't tell you definitively whether you should or shouldn't include boilerplate or brand in your title tags, but they should give you a pretty good idea of when you should test things out.

Remember: Always test and evaluate before making any SEO change permanent. At least know the impact of the change you are making.

Also, please don't be under the impression that you should always remove boilerplate from your titles. In some instances, actually adding boilerplate can produce an uplift, particularly when the boilerplate is:

Recognizable: For example a strong brand

Relevant: The right keywords

Clickable: Encourages a high CTR

Succinct: Not overly long

If you found value in the tips, and want to learn even more ways to optimize your title tags, we've made available a free webinar for you: SEO Master Class: Advanced Title Tag Optimization (For Any Site).

If you've got 40 minutes, it's definitely worth a watch.

Watch Free Webinar

Best of luck with your SEO!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!