#even when I had my first blog in 2014 when I was 12 it felt nice to have a space that made me feel like I was gonna be okay

[donnieisaprettyboy]

2014 - realized I liked girls but began desperately trying to “pray the gay away”

2016 - stopped believing in Christianity as I began to better accept my sexuality

2020 - publicly came out as bisexual, and shortly after my gender crisis began

2021 - nonbinary ? we’ll run with it, I’m experimenting! I’m playing with it! I’ve been in college for a year so now I have the room to try some things out!

2023 - my first pride parade! and the gender crisis continues on…. I would really love more masculine features… a deeper voice is my dream… I see men with flat chests and I get so envious. maybe I’m trans?

2024 - FINALLY allowing myself to use multiple labels that feel right! nonbinary, transmasc, genderfluid, genderqueer, they all feel like ME! planning on starting HRT after I get married and get onto my fiancé’s health insurance. plan on getting married in a wedding dress because THAT’S WHAT I WANT! because gender is not a strict binary and I am allowed to play with it however I want! my gender is not for the pleasure or comfort of anyone else! I got to experience my SECOND pride finally feeling content with myself and my identity! I’m happy! I’m so happy :)

[zukazukazuka]

Serika Toa to Retire on April 27, 2025

Long reflective navel-gazing and emotional processing under the cut.

tl;dr: If I had a nickel for every time I inadvertently planned a trip during a Soragumi taidan, I'd have two nickels.

Second nickel hurts way worse.

Inevitably, living on the opposite side of the world means I usually wake up to messages about these things before I actually see them for myself. I remember waking up on July 7, 2017 to things like "wow...hope you like Soragumi!" when her transfer was announced. It feels oddly prophetic that that year we inadvertently planned our trip to catch Asaka Manato's taidan show as well as Kiki's last Grand Theater show with Hanagumi. I cried a lot on that trip, honestly.

Once you start to immerse yourself, it's easy to get attached to your first round of top stars. We'd gotten to see Maasama and Soragumi in Elisabeth the year before, and I was sad she was leaving. Hanagumi was our home troupe, and my favorite actress was transferring. Both shows were incredible, and to this day SANTE!! remains my favorite revue of all time. I think we saw it some ridiculous amount of eight times, back when it was possible to have the privilege of satisfying your brainrot by waiting outside the Tokyo Theater at 5 AM in hopes of getting same-day tickets. I remember the utter devastation of seeing that show from the 4th row, of getting arrowed with a Kukochihiko stare from the silver bridge during her duet with Mirio that made me squirm in my seat. I remember how loud the audience was on senshuuraku in Tokyo, it felt like we were at a rock concert rather than a Takarazuka show, and how satisfying that was, despite the tears.

It's hard to believe that was seven years ago, which feels both so close (literally to a degree, as you don't have to scroll very far down this blog to get my live reaction posts lol) and somehow yet so far away (thanks COVID).

Two months ago, we bought tickets to go back to Japan in January, our first trip since 2019.

This morning I woke up to messages again.

And now apparently I've stumbled yet again into a Soragumi taidan, "my" taidan, which of course I knew ultimately was on the nearer horizon since June 2023, but could never have guessed how fraught everything in between would become.

I can't help but feel exceptionally, heartbreakingly sad.

I fell in love with Kiki from the very first time I set foot in Quatre Reves and saw her photo as Rudolf in 2014. She has always been my favorite since that day, and by the time she goes it will have been effectively 10 and a half years. 10 years, nibante under two long-running top stars, through pandemic closures and changes, and effectively 1.5 GT shows as top. In truth, I'd always prepared myself for a short run. 3 shows would've been just enough to give her 'decent' time without really feeling like they were just shoveling her off after so long as #2, although I would've been cranky about it. 4 or 5 would have been an ideal sweet spot. At this point, I'm sure 3 was always the initial plan, and I hope that had been satisfying for her going into things.

It just extra fucking sucks now.

Today I can't help but feel regret for falling off as much as I did after her transfer. I was able to see her in both of those 2019 trips, thankfully at least once on stage, but the double whammy of Mirio leaving and COVID closures made it feel a lot hard to stay connected to Takarazuka in general - which is ironic, given that I will never, ever not find it surreal to watch a raku livestream on my fucking couch at 12 AM. But I didn't watch as many as I could have. One of my favorite things had always been seeing iride photos on twitter, and it made me feel like even if I couldn't be there, I could still "keep up" with what was happening day to day. Unfortunately (or rather fortunately, given this last year) I am famously too lazy to make a lot of effort to read things in Japanese, even if Takarazuka helped improve it for a time. I have limited space and desire to buy dozens of GRAPHs or other magazines for interviews. I moved on to other interests, but always kept one finger on the pulse of things. At one point, as things went on longer and longer, I thought so many times "hey girl, if you wanna pull a MiyaRuri and bounce without making top, I fully respect and support that, even if I won't get to see you one last time."

Well.

I don't have much I want to say here about what happened last year, except that I hope such a horrendous tragedy does ultimately lead to a lot of reform at the revue. Unlike apparently most everyone, I didn't go digging around the internet for names and 'what really' happened (see: lazy, also not my fucking business). I don't know, I don't want to know, and at this point frankly I don't really care about anyone's particular opinion about the people involved, or whatever outcome they think should have happened.

But we are where we are, now.

Last week, in my naive hope that after we got through Escalier's break with no taidan announcement, I was guessing that she might yet go later next year. I'd been reading the schedule wrong and complaining about the possibility of a late summer taidan, because Japan is fucking horrendous in summer, only to realize that it would've really been October, which would be ideal, although truthfully I'm not sure I could have swung a second trip in one year. I'd been sad about not getting to see her possible ohirome during my favorite time of year, since I couldn't swing a trip last year. In hindsight, I'm glad it turned out as "lucking" into actually seeing taidan rather than potentially have booking a trip last fall and "wasting" it, and that I no longer have to worry about whether or not I get to see it. But it still really fucking sucks.

Part of what helps offset the hurt of an actress retiring, especially your actress, especially a top star, is the celebration of all that's come before. Coming in as a fan in 2014, I saw all of the photos and videos of the last day festivities of Teru and Chie, which continued through all of the others that left in subsequent years. I felt devastated for the top stars who left during the height of pandemic closures, who couldn't have that, and for fans who couldn't get to see it. I'm not even sure what taidans look like these days, as I'm sorry to say a consequence of only trailing vaguely along on the hype train for the past several years is that I haven't seen any taidan shows or bothered with social media to know if they do even a semblance of those last day activities, even for the troupe. It makes me sad to think that maybe those sorts of things are perhaps long gone, just generally. Even if they aren't, though, I doubt we'd get any of that, anyway.

So in absence of that element or really any other joy, all I can really feel is bitterly sad.

In truth, I have a lot of complex feelings about her whole run, and have for many years, but those aren't things I care to lay out here. Suffice it to say, this whole situation feels like icing on that whole cake, I guess.

As I was writing all of this, I realized that just because of timing and that we usually prioritized seeing grand theater shows over small ones, the only time I will have seen Kiki live in a lead show will be her last one. I realize that compared to many people I'm privileged to go at all, let alone the number of times I've already done so in the past, but I'm still utterly heartbroken.

At the end of Escalier last weekend, I'd been so happy to see a semblance of her old self again. Her jokes, her smile, which has always felt like sunshine to me. I can't ever know her real feelings, but I hope that maybe there is some relief for her, knowing there's an end in sight. I hope that despite everything, she can find a satisfying life after the fact, that she'll still be able to perform, if she wishes. At the end of it all, I do feel thankful for the things we do have, the experiences I've had up to this point. My one tiny silver lining is that Sakura is (supposedly, maybe, fingers crossed) hanging around, hopefully for a while, because she's an incredible powerhouse and deserves the world. I'm grateful to her for being Kiki's partner and radiating love at her on stage, and terribly looking forward to seeing that in person.

Anyway, time to go cry some more, and eventually write a letter.

[marnz]

since i'm one of those people who watched tsn in 2023 (i was 12 when tsn was broadcasted) so it gave me this weird mixed feeling whenever i read markwardo fanfic because knowing how bad these people actually are irl and not some uwu precious baby but i can't blame fanfic writers in 2010-2011 for thinking zuckerberg and saverin were cool because during that time facebook was indeed cool and the internet was younger at that time too, the fic are good i admit but sometimes i need a moment to rethink why am i reading irl capitalists fanfic, it's so hard to distinguish between tsn and irl material most of the time too and not to mention tsn was just a story written based on irl saverin pov of fb and he was also an asshole. The only fun time to enjoy tsn was probably 2010-2011 because fb was cool, the cast was close and now even the cast of this film probably don't even contact each other anymore despite being so closed in 2010, sorry for rambling i just think it's amazing that people who enjoy tsn in 2010 still post about it in 2024!

well anon. Like I said. You had to be there. Look I love context and you said you were 12 in 2010 so here is some context: yes the internet was younger and yes fb/meta had not destroyed democracy yet but I also think there was more of a sense of hope related to technology, as opposed to dread. A lot of tech and social mainstays had not happened yet, politics were drastically different, Chris Hughes (cofounder of fb & communications guy) helped Obama get elected, people didn’t think global warming was real, society was MUCH more conservative and homophobic, etc., and the internet was the place to be.

when you say the internet was younger I’m interpreting this to mean that FB had not come into its final form yet, which is true, but also it & the internet was such a radically different experience. It felt limitless. You weren’t corralled in as much. You could go anywhere, you could find anything, you could make your own websites very easily, you were not assaulted by pop ups and apps were not mainstream because Apple didn’t launch the App Store until 2008. It was so easy to learn how to code. The operating systems between Apple and Android were SO distinct. Twitter launched in 2008/2009 but wasn’t quite so relevant until idk 2014? Fandom had just migrated from LJ to Tumblr but Tumblr was also hotter with the aesthetic girlies and porn blogs. “The algorithm” didn’t run the world. Yesterday I tried to find an article by searching for it and both Google and DuckDuckGo completely disregarded my request and did not turn up anything relevant. I can assure you that would not have happened in 2011. So there was SUCH a sense of optimism because the internet felt like a social good instead of an obligation that is increasingly privatized, surveilled, constrained, and decayed.

Which is why TSN got made and why there was an interest. It was a source of profound social change. But anyway. FB/Meta has ruined lives and it and all other social media apps that elevate divisive opinions to prompt as much engagement as possible (have you heard of the awful Isabel Fall twitter scandal? I recommend this article) are awful! And yet there’s an expectation of being online because a lot of communities now organize online, a lot of services require being online, etc., fandom has become less centralized/less unified, which is its own post.

Out of curiosity, what led you to watch the film? I do find it fascinating that there’s been a resurgence of TSN fandom. If this article had not been written I would not be posting about it but there’s still a lot of fic being written and fanvids being made to Taylor Swift songs. But it’s fandom devoid of all this context. So it is very strange, because you know what FB and all these people in it will become. I think I would have the exact cognitive dissonance you described if I watched it for the first time last year and tried to read fic. It is SO deeply fictionalized, so much of it is radically untrue, but you as the reader carry the truth in your mind. Which is why I cannot and do not engage with these days. And why I hold TSN in my mind curtained off. I spoke with many ppl from the original fandom yesterday and trust me, no one wants this.

I think, realistically, whatever movie Sorkin wants to make will probably be very good. It’s probably a good story to tell & explore. But I won’t be watching it. I lived that shit

[localwebslingers]

12. what roleplay trends do you remember from the year you started tumblr rp? how did you feel about those trends?

I have been on this hellsite roleplaying since 2014. A whole decade. I have seen some good, weird, and bad just...across the board.

In terms of trends though, not just the community as a whole, I remember when a big thing was just having a blog and running it as the character and that being popular. My first blog was actually originally run similarly because that was the only kind I'd really seen from friends, so I started with that before getting my feet under me and my own feel for it. I remember "mains" were a huge thing too, where just one version of a character was the main one your muse interacted with and would even refer to. I tried that once but it felt just way too limiting. I know quite a few people love it and are still more comfortable with it but I just can't do it myself.

On a similar note to the first one, running ask blogs for a character too was pretty common to see. Like a blog that was just playing as the character, or characters, and answering questions. I never did one myself but I thought about it once for both muses that I had at the time. I know those were huge and I honestly would consider that as a kind of roleplay, how most of them were run at the time. Those were actually really fun to see and follow sometimes, but I think most of them died out. There is exactly ONE that I still follow on my personal account that's still going strong but I honestly haven't seen any others around anymore.

[checkoutmybookshelf]

The Middle School Series That Frankly Should Have Been More Popular Than It Was

So seventh grade for me was horrendous for a variety of reasons, from the remnants of a full-on poodle perm to being actively and horrifically allergic and asthmatic (yes, both things) to the building. My saving grace that year was a standing hall pass to the library during lunch, and Cameron Dokey's The Storyteller's Daughter.

The Once Upon a Time is Timeless series is a firmly middle grade set of fairy and folk tale retellings, and frankly for what they are, they are worlds better than they had any right to be. As is a common refrain on this blog, I do own more of this series, but they're in tubs in my dad's basement in Alaska, so we're just gonna cover the three that I physically have in my possession on my current book shelf 3,000 miles away from those book tubs.

I want to start with The Storyteller's Daughter, because this was the first of these books that I read and was my first book introduction to the Arabian Nights (my actual first introduction was the Wishbone episode, because I was a PBS 90s kid). That said, the cover on my shelf is not the cover that drew me in, no. My 12-year-old, did not know that Orientalism was a thing self saw this cover on the shelf,

and literally could not check this book out fast enough. Sterotypical cover design aside, the stories within the frame narrative were lovely, and there was a lush, comforting quality to the prose itself that was immensely required for a very sad, very sick seventh grader. This was the literary equivalent of a luxury hot choclate that I could have every day at lunch, tucked into a chair in the library (no, I didn't eat lunch for that entire school year because I felt so awful and just wanted my books). As of writing this post more years later than I care to put a number on, I still have not managed to read the actual Arabian Nights, so I'm not going to comment on adaptation. I will simply say that this book saved my sanity as a middle schooler, and for that reason alone I will never not recommend Shaharazad's story and the stories she and her mother tell.

I could talk about issues of orientalism, cultural appropriation, and fetishizing the Arabic world, and the academic in me is refusing to let this pass without saying that those are issues that have a valid place in the overall conversation, because series that uncritically retell other cultures' stories lean hard into problematic--and this series does this for their Mulan retelling too. But even bearing all of that in mind, I wouldn't shy away from recommending this series to middle schoolers who desperately need comfort stories.

I found Suzanne Weyn's The Diamond Secret as an undergrad, when I was trying (and ultimately failing) to conceive a research project around the weird pervasiveness of retellings of the folk tale about Anastasia's survival and how, even after the family's bodies were discovered in the 1980s, the discovery was made public in the 1990s, and the family were reinterred in...I want to say like 2014? People were still desperate to tell a happier story, in which the Grand Duchess who inexplicably captured imaginations got to live a full life. I still have my collection of both historical books about the Romanovs and fiction versions of the Anastasia story, and this is by far my favorite fiction version.

I might still write that research project some day, because the mythologizing of a 17-year-old is just a fascinating process to my academic mind, but today is not this day. Today, I want to gush about how well this version of the story was done. Nadya's story has some grit, some actual danger, and revolves around actual human emotions, not a makeover. Like this book is the movie Don Bluth and Gary Goldman wanted to make, but they ended up with a Disney princess clone that sucked so much of the character work that made this book so good.

Finally we come to the eyebrow raiser of these three books, Suzanne Weyn's The Night Dance. I wouldn't have automatically mashed up an Arthurian side character with the 12 dancing princesses fairy tale, but y'know, it's not the worst mash-up I've ever read, and the 12 danging princesses are extremely flexible in terms of how you want to contextualize them and what other IP you want to cross them with (just off the top of my head, Barbie did the 12 dancing princesses, and Juliet Marillier adapted it for her Wildwood Dancing). This book is fine, but it's one of the more forgettable versions of this particular fairy tale, so if you want to jump into this series, I don't recommend starting here. I also don't recommend skipping it completely, so have a resounding "it's fine."

[batteredwarriorstillstanding]

Interestingly enough, I did not discover Tumblr when, while chasing after my decades long crush, she made a clever, quick, u turn, and cut back, sprinted through previously unmapped social media content....the "previous unmapping" causing me to hopelessly lose her as I attempted to follow, look for clues concerning her whereabouts, WHILE IGNORING THE RACY CONTENT certain to slow me down hopelessly. Or....not so much. A few hours later, I was plodding slowly through the blog #Theanalintruder and hopelessly behind my beloved....although I was pretty sure I saw her in some pictures the previous night.....this makes a ton of sense, but is nowhere near correct.

I was able to ignore the first few emails. They detailed the antics of a group of heroin addicts in arizona (yep. Guilty as charged. There were 6 of us detailed in this particular bit of true/fiction, all OBVIOUSLY based on real people (interesting note: except for me, every other person the author turned into a character has either sobered up: 3, or died, 2 since 2014, when these stories were set. We ranged in age from early 20s to mid 30s. The emails kept coming. After a few, I began to see that, yes, in fact, the author was writing about our little H Coven and was, quite likely, one of us. I could not tell who, though. It was quite well written, and he or she gave no hint as to who she (another revelation...it, for sure, was not a dude...not even a gay dude) favored. She was remarkably neutral in her narration. ...until the 5th or 6th installment of the untitled tales of young junkies. The character that mirrored me often kept "lulls" in certain episodes from being too boring when he and a-ahem-STILL unnamed friend would get into arguments, which turned to insult matches, but, thankfully, whoever wrote this either was not privy to where these "disagreements" or "debates" tended to end up in reality, or just wanted to keep those areas of the blog from revealing what incredible assholes both of us were...almost certainly the 2nd option. No doubt, in fact. No portion of the blog that I ever read came close to revealing just how mean and intentionally hurtful to one another we both became. It's too long of a story to even summarize here, but I will say that though we both bore plenty of fault, I have to claim a bit more. First of all, I was the oldest junkie in the group (I think. Yeah...pretty sure) she was one of the youngest, 12 years my junior. There were plenty of altercations I coukd have ended...or prevented from exploding, as they did. Some times, I wanted a serious screaming match because I had plenty of mean shit to say to her and felt she deserved to have her feelings hurt. As I said. I was awful.. The strange (but not all that bad, truthfully...it was pretty well written) blog actually seemed to intentionally avoid sides in anything and focused content on shit I was pretty certain never happened, and other shit that did, but much earlier or later, than it claimed. Whenever half a dozen junkies plus add-ons have to struggle for money to pay life expenses, plus an extra $100 EASILY for heroin and other drugs, but none are employed....and learn to interact with one another, convince their out of state families of their sobriety etc etc etc there is gonna be plenty of material for anyone who wants to log it in a blog or journal (why anyone would choose that particular subject in front of all others is anither question, but...anywaaayy....moving right along...while the blogger displayed some talent, the first few installments were fairly bland and boring. I remember thinking that I would tell ghostbligger to focus on the more interesting shit (which I knew was present) and, to my absolute horror, she did exactly that in part 6.

Backing up a bit......beginning in about 2012, I developed an interest in a beautiful young woman I met at 12 step meetings (wait a minute!!!! Every whining ass mutual will shout via IM, I thought you were the guy who was beholden to the chick you barely knew for two and a half decades cuz blah, blah, a real connection and yabidah yabidah you will always love her!!! You're playing your tonsils, kid." Okay. Fist off...I had some minor flings and crushes during the 20 period I'm question. The vast majority of them (like every single one almost) occured between 2011 and 2016. During this stretch I was convinced, for reasons of my own, that under no circumstances would the long envisioned coupling with her ever happen, and I felt a tinge of desperation to replace her....I thought this would be tantamount to supplanting her in my thought hierarchy with someone else. Which, at the time, I very much needed to do. That should have been the first clue that I needed to consider this goal a bit more carefully and perhaps lend a great deal of respect to a source I did not feel like giving any at the time....my feelings for her. So, anyway...I initially met this girl when she was classified by me as a target of sorts. I was into her.

[flower-blooming-in-hell]

and honestly like.... whatever, at this point.

im sick and tired of worrying more abt them than myself

and im tired of them gaslighting and manipulating me

and im tired of them pushing all the blame onto me and making me feel like im insane for feeling this way

i WASNT a saint in our relationship!

but i very strongly maintain the fact that i only ever did things that they told me they were okay with

like. i ALWAYS stopped when they told me to

(even if i was confused bc they told me prior that they wanted me to keep doing that specific behvaior, only to backtrack n say they hated it when i did that)

like... jesus christ they rlly did just treat me in a way they never treated anyone else

nobody else that they got into a relationship with had a "trial by fire" entry

i struggled HARD in our relationship, the ENTIRE way through

like yeah part of that is my aromanticism, but a far larger part is them literally traumatizing me

i genuinely never wouldve had this reaction either if like. i hadnt

a) figured out that there was a strong timeline incongnruency (we started dating in 2014. im not crazy. im NOT crazy. their excuse of "well we were qpps beforehand" doesnt fucking matter we called each other qpps WELL into 2015 and beyond - i would know, i checked our old blogs out. also thats arophobic lol qpps are committed relationships just like romantic partners are)

b) been told that one of their current alters had left-over traits from hyde. like. i was fully convinced before this point that hyde was a spiritual alter, not an actual part of them. i was abused by hyde. he was the one alter they had that i pointed to and said that i was abused by him. they said they were abused by him too. i was intimate with that alter before i ever knew this info. im still rlly upset abt this. like. at some point, at least one of your alters KNEW. i have no clue how quickly i was told. but i just. i cant wrap my head around this lol. like wow. youre always the one preaching abt system responsibility but you have never apologized or tried to repair what hyde broke. hyde was literally a part of you. his traits are part of you. part of you hurt me so bad that i honest to god have PTSD now.

NOT TO MENTION. ari was abusive to me too tbh not even gonna like. minimize that

were they abusive in the same way as hyde? no. but they also abused me

i was never the one in control in that relationship, there was never a sense of me being the one holding more of the power

we literally joked that ari was the one who wore the pants. i was always the one changing my behavior to match their needs - it was never the other way around. they encouraged me to act yandere. they encouraged me to have no boundaries between us. literally they are the whole reason i had a scare abt possibly feeling incestuous feelings irl towards my older family members in the first place

i was literally probably at the tail end of 12 when we met, and DEFINITELY at MAX i was 13.

hyde was my introduction to bdsm, tossing me into CG/L, with me as the little. he emphasized my youth and innocence and his desire to corrupt me into a more mature sexy femme fatale type. I WAS LITERALLY THIRTEEN.

ari wanted me to be their actual mom. I WAS YOUNGER THAN THEM BY A YEAR AND A HALF? I WAS A CHILD/PRETEEN WHEN WE FIRST MET? I NEVER SHOULDVE BEEN PUSHED INTO THAT ROLE

like. being a mommy NEVER came naturally to me

not to mention me feeling like i wasnt allowed to regress or feel young around them - i never felt safe enough to

also bc ari would pitch a fit abt my child alters being out around them bc they said they were scared of children

which - fun fact - they never had that issue with our other friends

like... god. im just angry. its that feeling of like. "why can they treat other people like that but im always relegated to second best and back up?"

just. FUCK. wow

just. aughhhh

i want to know why everyone else got to see the bulk of their good side while i only ever got crumbs tossed my way

also like... ugh. idk

i dont owe them an explanation. i dont want them in my life anymore.

i already uninstalled discord off of my pc and phone

i feel a lot better bc of that

everythings on a new notes app im using now!

i just need to organize it lol

[x-byte-info]

Blog post 3: Just the Weight

Anorexia, what?

When we usually hear about eating disorders, the first thing that comes to mind is anorexia nervosa. Anorexia is said to be the most common eating disorder out of all other forms of eating problems existing out there. Mostly, when people hear about anorexia, the first thing that comes to mind would be underweight. Although there can be truth to that, it is not entirely about weight, and we cannot blame people for having these surface levels of understanding of it because that's what society had constructed for us—that people who have this problem can only be characterized as being conscious of their body. In contrast, anorexia is a monster that eats you—a gluttonous monster living inside you that creates an abnormal relationship between you and food. While it is understandable for the masses, like us, to have inadequate knowledge of it, that shouldn't be the case in healthcare, but sadly, it is. Nowadays, it is alarming that the healthcare itself, where professionals who are supposed to know about eating disorders the most, are as well unprepared for this issue. Instead of treating it through the underlying factors that cause it, hospitals focus on what is visible in our two eyes, and that is the weight, which should not be the case, for anorexia is more than "just the weight".

So, there’s more?

There are multiple types of eating disorders. Aside from anorexia, one mentioned in the video is bulimia Nervosa and Binge eating disorder, wherein a person tends to overeat or eat until they are uncomfortably full. Another example would be eating things that are not food, which is a symptom of Pica, and others that I may not be familiar with. Even though we have knowledge about these and we acknowledge their existence, the system still lacks information on how to treat the aforementioned disorders.

How are these treated in real life?

Take for example, 23-year-old, Sara, who suffered from anorexia nervosa for 10 years as the video was posted and had also been in and out of the eating disorder unit 12 times in a span of two years. In those years of being administered multiple times in hospitals, no treatment worked for long. This implies that the treatment given to eating disorder patients still needs to be improved. Furthermore, there was this part in the video wherein it mentioned a unique rehabilitation center compared to most because it does not focus on weight gain.

Personal takes? Was it really treated?

Personally, that seems to be alarming for me because, in my opinion, it shouldn't work that way. After all, anorexia is more of an internal battle, and forcing them to gain weight can cause serious stress and anxiety attacks. This was manifested as Sara tried to eat her breakfast with her mom. After not even finishing her meal, it was evident how she felt uncomfortable after that and that is how anorexia works. Although I can’t describe how it feels, I understand that it is an internal battle that chains a person from the thought of not being deserving of eating. If we would only focus on feeding them, chances are they will not be able to escape this problem. This is mainly why I chose to watch and give insight into this video about eating disorders— to raise awareness about the unseen factor that causes these types of health problems and how they must be dealt with. 

To conclude:

The topic of disorders related to our mental health is still ongoing. Like other mental health issues such as depression and anxiety, problems like anorexia must be given equal attention. Finally, further studies must be administered to improve treatments given to people who have this, eventually leading to a more suitable approach that doesn’t look only at the patient’s weight in treating anorexia and other eating disorders.

Word Count: 642 words 

Sources: 

Harvard Health Publishing. (2014, December 19.). Anorexia. https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/anorexia Seitz, A. (2022, May 18.) 6 Common Types of Eating Disorders (and Their Symptoms). Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/common-eating-disorders

[focsle]

[ID: screenshot of @kittokatsu saying: I would like to hear about the other coincidences if you wish to share!]

I’m gonna stick these under a readmore I think just cos while Im happy to share I’d prefer that people don’t rebl it!

This is a long game, but over the years I’ve cobbled together a career largely in public history. It’s not a field I expected to be in, it’s not one I have ANY academic background in (I went to art school that had like…Baby High School-Level humanities classes I…REALLY do not have a rigorous academic background at all), but I stumbled into it by being a passionate nerd I guess.

In 2014 I had been a year out of school and was anxiously wallowing through my options as far as what I was doing with my life. But also was working on The Whaling Comic (though a much different iteration than what I’m drawing now). I went to a historic house museum (that has nothing to do with whaling but the time period was right) to get interior reference pictures for said whaling comic. Fell in love with said house. Volunteered there once a week. Even though I was tremendously shy from the ages of 12-22 I suddenly realized that I wasn’t when I was talking to people about history. My relationship with that house later launched my career in working in various historical spaces and at various museums, and that work equipped me with an understanding I didn’t have from my prior educational background about how to find out about plain old everyday people from the past. I learned what resources and records I had access to, how to read them properly, how to navigate federal and state census and cross reference them with ward maps and fire insurance maps to find old addresses in the past when enumerators didn’t initially list them and when the streets and house numbers changed over the decades. I learned what city directories were, how to use those, all this stuff. These are the things I ultimately used to find out about William’s life based off the pieces of personal info in his journal (I knew he was a New Yorker, that’s it. Everything else came from my own research)

While reading his journal I knew, historically, what he was talking about in ways I wouldn’t have prior to my obtaining this background in my city’s history. I knew the developmental history of the specific neighborhood he lived in without needing further background. And the eeriest thing was when I was looking through city directories to see other potential addresses the fam may have lived at, I found his father by chance…running his physician’s practice DIRECTLY across the street from the historic house where I got my start in this all in 2014, and the family lived very nearby to that house. His father was a contemporary of the patriarch of said house. I went to that house cos of whaling reference pictures, fell into public history through it, used what I learned through osmosis in that work to find out about a specific whaler 8 years later, and was led directly back to the beginning of that circle. So that’s what made me feel like I was…meant to find this journal. First coincidence.

So…I write a little blog post about the parts of his journal I found most interesting in December. I leave off a copy of the book he said he wanted to read and didn‘t get the chance to at the family plot. And I think that, with that, I’ve told his story. I’m all done, and that’s as much of a closure as either of us is gonna get.

Then 2 1/2 months later, mid March, I am suddenly seized with the need to transcribe the entire journal. I hadn’t thought I was gonna engage with it like that again but I just…suddenly felt like I needed to, and that I needed to do it soon. So I transcribe the thing in three days. And having spent so much close time with it, when I get to the end I feel like the timing of his death doesn’t make sense to me anymore. His last journal entry is on Feb 17th. The captain says he dies suddenly ‘about April 13’, the ‘about‘ telling me that this is recorded sometime after the fact. The ship goes into port in Talcahuano from Feb 22nd to March 9th. And I just feel like, after reading what he wrote through the whole journal, there is NO way William would have nothing to say in the weeks that followed about being in a port for the first time in 6 months, in a new country and continent, when earlier he was writing journal entries about just like ‘saw a bird today…got rained on today’. Him not writing anything about things that were frankly probably among the most exciting parts of his voyage so far for two whole months seems highly uncharacteristic.

At the back of his journal he had drawn a calendar since the voyage began, and had mapped it out to the beginning of July, 1857. Every single day, regardless of if he wrote a journal entry or not, he consistently made a visual mark over the day as it passed. When those visual marks stop, it’s on March 12th. Which again seems strange for him to suddenly stop marking those days when he didnt miss a single one before. And then when I counted back MY days to when I had this immediate compulsion to transcribe his whole journal and resolved to do it, it was on March 13th. My suspicion that his death happened around that day came AFTER my resolution to transcribe the journal. So that’s the second coincidence that spooked me a bit. There’s no way to say for sure, and my thoughts on his death date are only my thoughts—if I was being less wooey I’d go by the information the captain put down because that’s more concrete. But again it’s a weird intersection of dates.

So now I’m sort of…being very open to anything else that comes my way.

[deanwasalwaysbi]

I've gotta say, I find the concept of Bedlund trying to Ben-Hur Jensen absolutely hysterical. I'm just imagining Jensen getting a script and being like "Ben?? What's this? Is this gay? This seems gay????" and Ben just soothing him like a frightened horse.

Hahaha - Look it wouldn't be the first time. What is this verb we're working with? Okay. Strap in everyone. The Multi-Oscar-winning 1959 movie 'Ben Hur' had a bunch of gay subtext. The writer, the director, and the second lead actor all knew that Charlton Heston's character, Ben Hur, was gay. However, one person didn't find out until the 1990s: Charlton Heston. The consensus on set was "Don’t tell Charlton, because he’ll freak out." and when Heston found out in the ninties, freak out was exactly what he did. (x) [the movie may have gotten a reference from Misha back in season 6 (x)]

Whether this happened with Jensen on SPN depends on two things.

Was the character of Dean intentionally written as Bi and, if so, at what point did that become true?

Did anyone tell Jensen? Did he figure it out? if so, when?

I personally DO believe at this point, I really do, that Bedlund - Ben Hur'd Jensen. I think it was part of the writers room but not all of it, until it was. (Which RN I believe finally happened under Dabb.) I think Jensen wasn't in on it, until he was. So for me? I think he really was in the dark at one point. But at what point that changed? Probably only he can answer that question. and RN? He ain't talking.

In the meantime we can only look at things Jensen has said on the subject - Like this unbearably ambiguous GIF set from @nikadd. Was this tongue in cheek? Legitimate ignorance? You're killing me, Jensen. That cheeky lil smile, Jensen. Nvm - I'm going to kill you instead. It's for my own survival. No hard feelings right? You understand.

UH OH HERE COMES A CUT TO HIDE A LONG DERANGED POST...

We can look at the text for number 1 - and I do that uh - a lot - see the blog name #Dean Was Always Bi

For number 2 we can look over some points when we got clues from what Jensen thought was going on [regardless of whether they make sense based on his jacting or directorial choices I guess] and get left wondering whether at any point he felt pressured to lie for his career, for self protection, or to protect the narrative from the network: 

2010 - 'We're missing the gay angel' (x) (Season 5 gag reel) (x) “Sorry man, not what the show’s about.” Jared: One of the good and bads about playing the straight [non-comedic] character on the show… Jensen: What wait? I’ve been playing him so wrong

2012 / S8 - Trenchcoat - Jensen talking about how sometimes they change the lines because they're way too gay. Calls Cas a third brother

2012 - "What's Destiel?" Ben Edlund: That’s some weird shit. Jensen: Is this something that you created, Ben? Ben: You don’t want any part of that.

“Don’t ruin it for everyone now” “I still don’t know what the question was. I’m going to pretend I don’t know what the question was.”

2013 @ JIB, re Dean’s reaction to Aaron’s flirting in the season 8 episode Everybody Hates Hitler,  (x)

“And the scene wasn’t written to be that kind of - I mean - It was written to be awkward.  Ben Edlund wrote the - my favorite line in that scene was ‘carry on . citizen’ that was - I almost couldn’t say that with a straight face I was laughing so hard.  But it was - you know - it was comedy. It was a comedic moment in the show and fortunately Dean gets a lot of the comedic moments in the show and it was just, you know, Ben was poking fun at the fact that - you know, how can we make this very kind of manly, heterosexual guy uncomfortable - uh -you know, or  or have him back on his heels and throw him off his game a little bit.”

The thing is - Bedlund and Phil Sgriccia made very clear on the commentary track that THEY saw this scene as a 'romantic comedy kind of fluster' "This potential for love in all places."

Ben Edlund calling the writer’s room a boy’s club in 2013 (x)

Misha Collins telling Destiel fans they aren’t Crazy in 2013 after some executives said they were (x).

2014 Jensen says he was glad there wasn’t much Dean and Cas in season 9  - HA Hah HAH (x)

“I think the whole Cas and Dean thing has gotten out of hand”  “I don’t think there’s anything secret to their relationship even though a lot of people wish there was” REMINDER - that season we got the nightstands acknowledgement and “play him like a jilted lover” and the “he dumped me James” cut and -

I certainly know that Misha and I don’t play that. SIGH. they Ben Hur'd Jensen.

2014 - the fan fiction joke - 10.05

“I didn’t have a positive reaction, The first time in I think 200 scripts I went and sat down in the showrunners office and said, ‘What in god’s name are you doing?! Why? I need to understand why this is happening.’” “[Carver] gave very eloquent answers and did a great job of explaining why we were doing what we were doing, I guess I had been aware of this ‘fan fiction’ for a while and I felt like maybe if I ignored it, it would eventually go away. When I read it in the script that is what I do for a living and is my work—I’m very protective of these characters and the story and I think we have a right to be—I wasn’t angry. I just wanted to understand why and what was the message we were ultimately sending with this script and story. By the end of it, I felt good and it gave me all the confidence I needed. It was better than I could have ever hoped.”

But then there's Jensen in 2015 talking about all of Dean’s bromances. (x)  [gifs at the top] Could go either way - starting to figure it out? or No?

What had changed if anything? the entire Crowely season 10 story line?  This was July 2015 - the same day as the SDCC 2015 panel where Misha talked about Destiel   (x @ 13) Carver and Dabb were there - 

By this time Jensen and Misha were nominated for a teen choice award for best chemistry against various tv couples (and one ensemble cast, but the award nomination did NOT include Jared) .... Misha and Jensen would go on to WIN this award one month after the panel.

At the Panel Rob and Rich ask the question: “You two have branded yourselves as TV’s greatest team since, ... idk who.... Ernie and Bert so.”  [Misha says to Jensen & Jared, half not on the microphone: “I really didn’t expect them to throw us under the bus.”] “are we going to see that continue? Is the Castiel Dean relationship still aflutter and still growing as we move into season 11?”  Jeremy Carver: “Ish.” [mocking from panel ensues] “Yes. Of course. I mean Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. There’s no doubt.”

Jensen Directs 11x03 and the choreo mimics Goodbye stranger (x)

2016 - Jensen: Dean could have a huntress, but you’d kill her.

Jan 2017 Con the infamous - no hedge - harsh - “Destiel doesn’t exist.” (x)

I would hope that if he knew he wouldn’t have been so harsh with it.  So by that point either he still didn’t know - OR - to him ‘Destiel’ was specifically about internet porn/sex and not like - the potential for feelings / a relationship.  It makes me think about something Misha had actually said, around 2013, “It’s called ‘Destiel’ and it’s about the romantic interludes between Dean and Castiel.” (x)

2017 - jib8 Jensen called Dean a lover of the ladies

May 2017 - After filming the end of season 12:

2018 - Misha confirms he and Jensen have talked about Destiel (x) - also 2018: The Bisexual Dean essay "? No." (Oh god was this really this recent?! I can't deal with this.)

Well. SOMETHING happened in 2019. cuz here it comes

2019 - "Dean has no taste, clearly." 2019 - 'So, tell us just a little bit about what you're most excited to tackle with your character this final season.' "Cas. Just like a full football form tackle."

Look at this face he gave Dean when Cas told him he loved him and tell me he wasn't playing into it here. You can't. (x)

[tomblomfield]

Monzo growth

I've been asked a few times recently how we got customers to sign up to Monzo in the early years and I haven't been able to give a satisfactory answer in a sufficiently short space of time. I thought I'd write out my thoughts in a longer piece so I can feel less bad about giving an incomplete answer - anyone who wants to know the details can read this instead.

Let's start with a rough timeline, which I'll then flesh out below.

2015

Started the company in February 2015.

We had a big, ambitious goal - to start a bank - and worked hard to get press coverage before publicly launching.

Ended the year with 3k "Alpha" cardholders and a waitlist of 20k.

2016

We launched an early prototype and continuously improved it.

Scarcity (waitlist) seemed to drive more signups - there was a standard "invite a friends and we'll bump you up the queue" mechanic.

A lot of hustle and hard work (100+ in-person events).

Community + Mission + Transparency - lots of blogging and social media. Crowdfunding.

Ended the year with about 70k "Beta" cardholders.

2017

Genuinely great product.

Market-leading customer service.

Hot coral card!

We consciously worked on viral product features & referral mechanics for the first time.

Ended the year with about 600k "Beta" customers.

2018

Full banking licence.

Hit 1m customers in September!

---

First, a note about the context. We started the company in the UK in February 2015, when "digital banks" weren't yet a popular idea. BankSimple had launched in 2012 with some big plans, but sold to BBVA in early 2014 with about 100,000 accounts, having struggled to raise sufficient funding to continue. N26 started development in late 2013, initially as a card for kids, while Revolut was founded a few months after Monzo, in April 2015. At around the same time, the UK regulator had announced plans to make it easier to start new banks, following the "too-big-to-fail" mess of the financial crisis, and it was on the back of this initiative that Monzo was born. 

We spent the first couple of months of the company’s life furiously writing a banking licence application, believing that the licence might be granted within 12 months. In fact, it took 3 years before we were able to open full bank accounts for the bulk of our customers. Even 12 months felt slow; it had only been a handful of years since I'd gone through Y Combinator with my previous startup, GoCardless, and I was terrified of spending too much time building something without a real indication that customers wanted what we were building. Going back through my notes from the time, I found I'd peppered them with YC mantras like "Do things that don't scale", "Launch early and talk to users" and "Make something people want". So we looked for ways to get a product into users’ hands as soon as possible.

Pretty quickly we figured out that we could use prepaid debit cards as a sort of hacky prototype for a full bank. Before that point, prepaid cards had only really been used for kids' accounts (Osper and GoHenry had both been founded in 2012) and the financially excluded - people who couldn't get full bank accounts. These prepaid cards were horribly loss-making, and lacked about 60% of the functionality of a full bank account, so we budgeted for 10,000 cards. At the time, we couldn’t imagine more than 10,000 people would be willing to test out an incomplete bank account. In fact, we had almost 600,000 active prepaid cards by the time we transferred all customers to the full bank almost 3 years later. Despite the cost, these prepaid cards let us get a product into the hands of real users, who could help us figure out what product features to focus on.

---

So, about 3 months after the company was formed, we had a couple of dozen live prepaid cards linked to our backend systems and a very, very basic iOS app. We gave Eileen Burbidge, our first investor, one of the very earliest prototype cards and she was so excited about the payment push notifications that she immediately tweeted about it, which led to a Techcrunch article in May (and a reply from the N26 founder saying that it was nothing special 😆)

I don't think we were really ready for the press - we quickly scrambled to get a waitlist up on the website and launched our blog a few days later. 

In any case, we got so much interest following the Techcrunch article that we doubled down on PR as a strategy. One of my notes at the time said we were aiming to get "Press at fever-pitch". Eileen seemed to know everyone in the UK press, and I worked really hard to meet journalists and explain what we were trying to build. More press followed over the next few months:

We were covered in the Guardian, The Memo, Bloomberg (complete with weird sci-fi photoshoot), Business Insider, Techcrunch again, plus a bunch more. It's important to note that we had zero real customers at this stage. Just two dozen internal test prepaid cards, a very basic iOS app and a lot of storytelling.

I spoke to Kiki recently (now the Director Of Communications at Monzo) about a conversation we had at the time. “I remember you turning up to my office when I was at the Sunday Times, signing me up with a Monzo account and telling me all about your plans to grow the business (and deep fry your Christmas turkey that year!)

You invested in forging relationships with the press and that paid dividends for you and Monzo. You were never too important to pick up the phone and explain simple stuff or go for a coffee with a journalist. Something many start-up founders don't do because they think it's all about finding angles and firing out press releases.”

PR is not a strategy that works for all early stage startups. I've been thinking a little about how it worked so well for Monzo in 2015 and 2016. Timing and context were important - the UK press was getting interested in startups (the Social Network movie honestly felt like a tipping point), but there weren't actually that many successful startups to write about in the UK in 2015. I had started another startup previously, and Eileen, our first investor, was very well known in the tech press, so I guess journalists were interested in covering us.

Probably more importantly, it seemed like we were embarking on a bold, ambitious project - to build a new bank from scratch - and we felt like underdogs in the way that the British press loves. So we got a lot of press, and I was the very visible figurehead. I'm pretty sure all that press was the reason for the hype and user signups we got by the end of 2015 - we didn't have a product live with users, nor did we really have any other meaningful marketing activity that year.

Looking back, I'm not sure how I feel about it. At the start, it was exciting to see my face in newspapers and it felt good when my friends and family told me that they'd seen me in an article or on TV. I guess I felt important, and it seemed to drive user signups. It was also a Faustian bargain. When we became a national brand name 4 years later, we were no longer the underdog - we were a big bank that the press could criticise.

I'm also not sure it was great for my relationship with my cofounders - we had 5 cofounders at the start, but it was often just my face in the picture. It was impractical to interview or photograph 5 people. They were busy working. Or at least that's what I told myself.

---

"Is it a bit early to hire a Head of Marketing?" - conversation with Eileen in June 2015, four months into the life of the company. Throughout June, July and August 2015 we were interviewing marketing candidates.

Although the hiring process was slow and frustrating, we learned a lot. We wanted to assess the paid social media ad skills of one candidate, so we had him set up and run 4 small Facebook campaigns. The first three were focussed on product benefits - "Here's a card that has no FX fees", "Turn off your overdraft", "Instant notifications". They all performed fine. But the fourth campaign outperformed the others by almost 300% - "Help us build a bank you'd be proud to call your own". This was to become a core part of our marketing over the next couple of years.

I eventually interviewed about 10 or 15 candidates, finally picking a woman who had decades of experience at a very large tech company and a UK media company. We hired her as a CMO. Looking back on my notes, all our conversations were about picking the right agency to run PR and another agency to run our paid social campaigns. She was used to running teams that were bigger than the entire headcount of the company at the time. I think she lasted less than 4 months.

At the same time, we interviewed and hired a young guy called Tristan as a community manager - he was in his early twenties, he'd graduated in Economics and spent the previous year in Egypt working with a local startup, where he'd picked up Arabic. He'd taught himself web development as a young teenager, and seemed to be extremely hands-on and impact-focussed.

Looking back, I think I would have counselled myself to think about what we wanted this person to do for the next ~12 months or so. If you hire a big-name CMO from a large, international brand, they are going to naturally assume there's a budget to spend on agencies and a marketing team. Even if they talk about being "hands-on" and "scrappy", that's probably only true relative to their previous work. For the first 12 months, what we really wanted was someone to write blog posts, respond to social media and edit the copy for our app and website. Tristan was perfect for us because he was representative of our customer base. Young, cosmopolitan lifestyle, socially conscious. He had never employed a marketing agency or really hired anyone at all, so it just didn't really occur to him to do that stuff. It was just obvious to him that he should write our Twitter posts himself.

We made another Head of Marketing hire later in 2016 who also didn't work out, and from that point onwards Tristan was put in charge of all marketing at Monzo.

---

Before talking about the launch of the product - the Alpha and then Beta programmes, I want to touch on a couple of things that didn't work.

First, we repeatedly thought about trying to pitch a TV production company to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Monzo in the early days. I still think that this might have been a great marketing idea to propel the brand onto a national stage (although may have made the eventual press backlash even harsher), but we just never followed through on it. Maybe it was just a vanity project!

We spent more time on a second idea - hackathons and developer relations. A lot of the early team (including me) were software developers and we were really excited about the idea of a bank account with an API. We ran 3 or 4 hackathons early on (even before we had live prepaid cards) and folks came up with a handful of interesting ideas, but we realised pretty quickly that this wasn't going to be a big growth mechanic. We only got 300 extra users, but it definitely helped hire several early engineers.

---

We finally got the "Alpha" prepaid debit card programme live to the public by November 2015 - it was a chance for people to get a card, try out the app and give us feedback to help improve the product. We capped the number of customers at 3000 because I think that was the limit for Testflight. There wasn't even a public release of the app you could download from the App Store.

What was the rationale here? The product wasn't even nearly "complete" - the list of things that were missing before you could call it a full bank account spanned several pages. Customers had to come to an event at our office to pick up the card because we hadn't yet built the functionality to collect customers’ postal addresses or post out cards. As a consequence, I met all 3000 of these users face-to-face - many of them would turn up to company events for the next 6 years and greet me with a smile.

Even though the app wasn't polished, exclusivity & scarcity was a big part of the strategy early on (drawing on early Gmail launch tactics). I read somewhere that human brains are basically wired to seek out scarce resources and perceive them as more valuable than those that are abundant. Being "in the know" - the first amongst your peers to get access to some new product or service - is a badge of honour amongst early adopters, and we harnessed that. Even the physical cards had "Alpha" printed on them - people would brag years later how early they'd signed up to Monzo. For these people, finding a bug wasn't an annoyance - it was proof that they were experiencing something at the bleeding edge of development, and they were excited to help improve the product. So we ran with that.

This is the first archived version of our website I can find - "We’ve only got 3000 invites for our Alpha Preview. Sign up now to be in with a chance"

It turns out this strategy also works on tech journalists. The early preview accounts we gave to Techcrunch and Business Insider journalists led to great coverage. 

This strategy also let us organise events at a number of London's top companies. We would promise to come along with 50 or 100 Monzo cards, give a 20 minute presentation during the lunch break, and enable attendees to skip the waiting list. This proved irresistible - I got into companies like Transferwise, McKinsey and the BBC. Much like the hackathons, it didn’t actually turn out to be a very effective way to sign up users, but it was an incredibly strong recruiting strategy. We'd get a flood of inbound CVs a week or two after each talk.

Looking back, it’s quite surprising how many major pieces of functionality were missing from the app. You couldn’t make bank transfers or pay bills, for example, because we didn’t yet have access to the payments infrastructure we needed. Instead, we obsessed over the tiny details that we could control - accurate merchant logos that represented your spending, rather than the cryptic data you normally find on bank statements. Jonas (one of our cofounders) first came up with the idea to add emojis to the push notification customers received to alert them about spending. Plane tickets might show 🛫, while spend at a coffee shop would show ☕. I have so many notes from that first year about improving the logos - I even wrote some of the early code to put the right emojis onto transactions. We really cared about making it a delightful experience.

Even before we'd opened up the product to the full waitlist, we decided to run a £1m crowdfunding campaign early in 2016. Again, we ran the "scarcity" and "exclusivity" playbooks. We anticipated the round would sell out, so we set up a pre-registration system so that our customers could invest before the general public, and we capped individual investment at £1000 to maximise the number of people who could invest. Along with owning shares in the company, investors would get "Investor" printed on their debit card (and this is still honoured to this day). Investors would also be able to skip the main queue and get access to a Monzo card if they didn't already have one.

The campaign turned out to be a huge PR coup, but mainly for reasons we had not anticipated. Approaching the launch date, we told our crowdfunding partner to expect larger than normal volumes of people looking to invest, as we already had 6500 pre registrations. For whatever reason, they did not take this warning very seriously, and their servers buckled under the load just seconds after the round opened on Monday. This was very annoying and stressful at the time, especially since 6500 simultaneous visitors is not a huge amount of load. We quickly decided we'd rebuild the investment registration page ourselves, and planned to relaunch the campaign a few days later.

While our engineers rebuilt the site, we thought about how to communicate this to the press and our customers. It was an absolute gift of a PR story - we had so much demand to invest that the crowdfunding site had crashed. This story ran continually over the next couple of days. By Thursday, the campaign relaunched and sold out in 96 seconds, making it the fastest crowdfunding in history, and the press attention was intense.

We ultimately raised £1m from 1861 investors, out of the 6500 people who had pre-registered. In comparison, we only had 3000 cardholders who up to that point had only spent £1m in total on our cards. I'm not sure how repeatable this lesson is - lots of companies have tried crowdfunding since, and it's no longer newsworthy. I think we had an incredible amount of hype at the time, and we played the scarcity/exclusivity angles well. It also helped that we already had 45,000 customers on a waitlist, and £5m investment committed from Passion Capital - this was an extra £1m investment that normal people could get access to on the same terms as a VC.

---

Soon after the crowdfunding completed, we announced a public Beta in March 2016, the Alpha having capped out at 3000 users (the Testflight limit). This was 13 months after the company was founded.

Anyone (as long as they were an iOS user) could download the Monzo app and see their place in the queue. People could improve their place in the queue by inviting friends to join and a certain number of people at the top of the queue every week would have a card sent out. In the spirit of “doing things that don’t scale”, we figured out a basic system for collecting addresses in the app and posting cards directly from our office. When we had a particularly big week of signups, the whole team would have to stop their regular work to help stuff all the prepaid cards into envelopes to catch the last post. I vividly remember stuffing envelopes at the time, thinking “each of these cards is another person who wants to use our product”. It really felt like customers were signing up faster than we could ship out cards - one of the first indications that we had “product-market fit”. It seemed like we were on the verge of something huge.

I think there are a couple of interesting things worth mentioning in 2016 - both related to company values. The first is our name-change. We had been threatened with a trademark lawsuit from a German fintech company which had a similar brand name (we were "Mondo" at the time) and considerably more funding than us. I fought this for several months (against the counsel of my board and investors), before accepting we had to change our name. To make the most of a bad situation, we decided we'd ask our community members - our customers - to suggest new names. The only constraint was that it had to begin with "M" because we had recently designed a great new logo that we didn't want to give up. Incredibly, bearing in mind we only had around 20,000 customers at the time, we received 12,000 suggestions in about two weeks. 6 people suggested the name we chose - Matt from Bristol had studied a rock called "Monzonite" and another customer, Ashley, told us it was slang for money when he was a kid in Scotland. We hosted a big party and live-streamed the announcement of the new name - Monzo.

Predictably, our power-users overwhelmingly hated it, suggesting it sounded too much like  "gonzo" (a form of first-person journalism and, later, pornography). It took a little while to stick, but I like it - it sounds much more dynamic and active than "Mondo", which now feels quite staid to me.

The second was our transparent Product Roadmap. In a world where the big banks had huge head offices and enormous marketing budgets, but very little personal trust, we wanted to come across as different. Where big banks were faceless and corporate, we would be human and personal. Where they were impenetrable and secretive, we would be transparent and approachable. So, in May 2016, we announced we'd publish the plans for our product, and take input from our community. In other situations, when things went wrong, we'd proactively tell our users about it and explain what we were doing to fix the situation. Invariably, this transparency generated more customer goodwill and positive PR.

These two core values - Community and Transparency -  permeated almost everything we did throughout the life of the company. They became a fundamental part of our brand. Prior to Monzo, I didn’t really believe in the concept of “brand” - I thought it was a made-up thing that marketing agencies tried to sell you. And that “brand” didn’t really extend beyond a company’s name and logo. I now believe it can be a superpower for any company - and particularly consumer-facing businesses.

There’s been good stuff written about brand-building elsewhere, so I won’t try to recreate it all - I’ll offer just a handful of thoughts. A great brand is like a promise you make to your customers. It’s a shared set of beliefs, or the “why” behind the company. Building your brand is not a one-off thing; you build (or damage) your brand with every decision you make. Events like crowdfunding and the company rename were perfect examples to reinforce the brand. It has to be authentic - a lot of big banks’ marketing towards younger customers felt really painful. Monzo, in contrast, felt human and relatable.

And when a brand really resonates with a customer, it becomes an extension of their identity. I wear Patagonia. I drive a Tesla. I use an iPhone. I bank with Monzo. I think a lot of customers were proud to pull out their Monzo card and feel like they were part of something. 

In the UK, at least, Monzo has become a verb.

---

We grew from about 3,000 users at the start of 2016 to 70,000 by year-end, which seemed pretty good, but I think we realised in the summer of 2016 that our strategies so far weren't going to scale to drive the kind of continued growth we ultimately needed. So, towards the end of the year we really started to think about product features with network effects, and referral mechanics. Pretty quickly, this became "Monzo with Friends" - we aimed to build a product that worked better and better as more of your friends joined. We started working on ideas, but nothing really launched until early 2017, so I'll talk about this more in the next section.

Before that though, here are two things that failed in 2016. First was the idea of "Campus Insiders" - university students that we employed to represent the Monzo brand and sign up new customers. They required a lot of babysitting and delivered no measurable impact, as far as I can tell. One of our early ideas was to have a custom Monzo card for each university - similar to how we had "Alpha" and "Beta" subtly printed on the corner of the card. Students might get Monzo "Oxford" or Monzo "Birmingham" if they signed up with a student email address. This could have maybe extended into discounts at local shops, but it seemed like too much work and we never followed through with it.

The second was a campaign to work with local businesses in the Old Street area of London in the run up to Christmas. I think we had folks out flyering and offering discounts in local shops, but again it was a lot of manual work with no discernible impact.

---

2017 was the year of product-driven growth.  We had a slide in several of our early investor presentations that said "Viral mechanics will get us to the first million customers", but investors overwhelmingly didn't believe it. We set out to prove them wrong.

I'll make a distinction between two related ideas - viral mechanics and network effects. A "viral mechanic" normally uses the existing customer base to spread the product to friends. It’s sometimes called "member-get-member", and it can be incentivised or free. An example is the way Wordle allowed you to post your "score" to social media. Other people see it and sign up for Wordle themselves. The game isn't really improved in any way by having your friends join - they're just curious to check it out. Gmail used a viral waitlist + invitation mechanic in the early days - again, your experience of Gmail wasn't really improved if you convinced your friends to switch from Outlook.

A network effect is different - the product itself actually improves as more of your network joins. Whatsapp and Skype are great examples. The more of your friends who join, the more people you can communicate with for free. That was a big hook at a time when people paid for SMS and international phone calls.

Great products have both network effects and viral mechanics. Facebook's early photo tagging is an example. "You've been tagged in a photo" email - prompts you to sign up for Facebook, see the photos you're in, upload your own photos, tag more friends, repeat. The network gets more valuable and drives more growth as more users join.

At Monzo we had both of these, and 2017 was the year they really took off.

I'll talk about "Golden Tickets" first - a silly allusion to the Willy Wonka story. We had a pretty big waiting list at this point, but the "Invite friends to get bumped up the queue" felt a little old and ineffective. People who wanted an account enough would just create a bunch of throwaway email addresses. We figured that the best people to be making referrals were those who were already actively using the product. Presumably they liked it enough because they kept using it, and they'd all had the experience of having to wait in the queue, so they perceived a Monzo account to be both scarce and valuable. 

Rather than paying our users to refer friends like most apps did, we decided that once you'd used the account for about two weeks, we'd send you a single "Golden Ticket". This was a one-time-use invitation that you could send to one friend to enable them to skip the queue entirely and get a Monzo account straight away. You can think about the psychology by analogy - you've queued all afternoon to attend a cool new event in your city, you’ve just managed to get in the door, and you've been able to talk the bouncer into getting your friend a queue-jump ticket. You get the early-adopter social credibility of having known about the event before your friends, plus you’ve done your friend a favour by getting them access. It just worked incredibly well - about 40% of our signups in 2017 came from Golden Tickets, and it cost us nothing.

Second, "Monzo with friends" was our drive to make Monzo work better if you invited your friends to use it. This might sound obvious now, but I can't really think of any other bank that had previously done this, beyond suggesting you get a joint account with your spouse. If you used Barclays and your friends used Natwest, there was no change in how useful the account was, right? We wanted to change that.

We started with peer-to-peer payments, based on the contact-list of your mobile phone. For US audiences, this was Venmo, but inside your bank account. UK banks already allowed you to pay any other UK account holder instantly, for free, but you needed to know their account number and sort-code, and the interface was really clunky. It basically worked, but it wasn't a delightful experience. We asked people to share their phone contact lists (using some clever encryption so that we'd never actually saw your friends' mobile phone numbers), and then allowed you to pay your friends on Monzo with just a couple of taps. For contacts who weren't on Monzo, that's where Golden Tickets came in! It was a really slick interface, and we allowed you to include longer-than-normal messages with the payment, including emoji. Later that year, we added "Reactions" - if you'd received money from a friend, you could send a quick response - just a single emoji. This was just a quick way of saying "thanks, payment received". And we let people quickly upload profile pictures to make it feel more personal.

We then added "Split the bill" functionality for a single payment, plus a more general "Request money" feature, and finally more complex "Shared Tabs" for multi-day trips away with friends and family that might include dividing several payments. If your friends weren't on Monzo, you could still request money with your personal Monzo.me link, which would allow folks to pay you using another bank card or Apple/Google Pay (and Monzo covered the transaction fees), and included a little upsell for Monzo at the end. Mine is https://monzo.me/tomblomfield. If you clicked on this link with a Monzo app installed, it would just deep-link straight into the Monzo account with all the payment information pre-populated. 

Alternatively, if you went for dinner or drinks and wanted to split a bill with someone who already had Monzo, but who wasn’t in your phone’s contact list, you could securely broadcast your account details by bluetooth, so you could pay each other without having to type in any account information. It's an incredibly slick experience that I am proud of to this day.

Peer-to-peer payments drove massive adoption - time and time again we saw Monzo take hold in a new group of friends and then quickly spread to the entire group. At the start of 2017, only 5% of our users had 10 or more friends on Monzo. By the end of 2017, more than 40% of our users had 10+ friends on Monzo. Today, the average Monzo user has more than 100 friends on Monzo. This is network effect in full force.

2017 was also the year that we really got a handle on our metrics - particularly retention. There are much more complete retention guides out there, but I'll give a quick summary here. Say 100 users sign up for Monzo, complete KYC, register a card and load money into the account. That's the denominator - 100 funded accounts. Fast forward say three months - how many are still using the account? Maybe 60? That's the numerator. So we have 60% (60/100) retention at Month 3 (or day 90). You can draw a curve to show how quickly retention falls off day by day since signup.

What does "still using the account" actually mean? We decided to count "at least one financial transaction in the 7 days" would make you a Weekly Active User (WAU). "At least one financial transaction in the preceding 30 days" would make you a Monthly Active User (MAU). Clearly, a WAU was more engaged than a MAU. I dug out our stats for 2017 - about 60% of our signups were WAU on day 90.

These retention rates still strike me as surprisingly high, especially considering that every user had to proactively add money to the account every time they ran low on funds. This wasn't (yet) a bank account where you sort of "defaulted" into retention once a customer set up the account - users could not deposit their salary into the account until 2018, and there was no auto-top up functionality.

Monzo started 2017 on 70k users and ended the year on around 650k - averaging just under 5% compounding weekly growth for 52 weeks of the year. 

So why did it grow organically and retain so well?  First of all, I think the day-to-day product experience (for all its functional limitations) was world-class - it was a delight to use, especially compared to the clunky old banking apps in the market. Without that, basically nothing else would have mattered. The customer service was also exceptional - this was often mentioned in our NPS surveys (NPS was around +70 at the time).

Secondly, I think the brand we had started to build really resonated with people. Our mission and values (mainly transparency and community) seemed to strike a chord with customers. Even the card itself was visibly different to traditional banks. The Monzo card was "hot coral" (aka bright pink) - the colour alone often started a conversation when customers pulled it out of their wallets to pay. Our tone of voice was youthful, direct and extremely personal. By 2019, Monzo was the single most recommended brand in the UK.

And third, the network effect really started to kick in - if you had 3+ friends on Monzo when you joined, you had a 70% chance of being a WAU by day 90, versus only a 50% chance if you didn't have any friends on the platform.

As a result of these things, Monzo hit 1 million customers in September 2018, without having spent any significant money on marketing.

---

This feels like a good place to draw this chapter of a story to a close. There are other topics I’d like to write about - getting a full UK banking licence, fixing unit economics, and spending money on paid advertising to catapult the bank from 1m to 4m customers - but they will have to wait for another time.

[snom0001inu]

Now that it's calm........

A lot went down and I want to apologize to everyone because that was not the intention whatsoever. I have not made commentary because I did not want to fuel the fire, nor was it my intention for others to become involved.

Let me make this very clear.

I AM NOT DOXXING ANYONE NOR AM I BITTER ABOUT BEING BLOCKED.

STAR'S CLAIMS ARE FALSE AND SHE IS PURPOSELY PAINTING ME AND MY FRIENDS AS VILLAINS BECAUSE SHE DOES NOT WANT TO BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR HER ACTIONS. THIS IS A PATTERN SHE CONSTANTLY HAS AND PREVIOUS PEOPLE SHE HAS KNOWN HAVE COME FORWARD SAYING THE EXACT SAME THING ABOUT HER, SHE'S KNOWN TO CONSISTENTLY PLATFORM HOP TO AVOID ACCOUNTABILITY.

I blocked Starlatte first on Tumblr and then on Discord because she repeatedly crossed boundaries and as an adult, I felt the need to draw the line of communication there. The claims that I'm retaliating for being blocked are false and just straight petty.

The post I made was just to warn others and Star was never named in the post. SHE chose to publish Cherry's ask to publicize what was happening even after Cherry asked her to keep it private for her own safety.

I genuinely worry about Star, but she does not want to be helped, she wants to be enabled and a victim. I was civil with her, I really was. But I never claimed to be her best friend or ever said I would denounce the people she hates so much. When she first approached me about what-the-hazbin, I told her to prioritize her own mental health over my blog. She insisted she could handle it but still unfollowed me. I never took any negative interaction personally because she's a minor and I'm the adult.

Also, I am not affiliated with the people she pissed off earlier in the week due to her ignorance on the sex worker community. That's their beef and the fact that 2 different groups (fans and criticals) are saying the same things about her should be pretty telling.

(Readmore for more info but tbh, I don't like super long posts so I'm just going to ask that you DM me if you need me to clarify more)

Just.....take it from an adult who's already tried to deal with her nicely, do not personally interact with Star. She has an extreme parasocial relationship with Vivienne Medrano and just cannot keep being enabled by newcomers. We could've just blocked each other and left it at that but she always needs to be the victim and stir up drama, this is your warning sign if you've ever been hesitant about your interactions with her.

And yes, I still believe she is lying about her age. As I stated in my original post, someone already reported her blog under "harmful to minors". Again, if Star didn't blow this up as much as she did, nobody would know her dirty laundry. Tumblr isn't known for the best tech support, we all know this.

I believe she's lying about her age because she keeps miscalculating and claiming different ages. I know she's shown her "proof" but she's conveniently leaving out the part where she claims she was 12 in 2014 (meaning she's 19 turning 20). She also keeps switching between it being Autism that forced her to make the mistake in numbers, that her phone forced it, that her laptop forced it, that it's because Tumblr doesn't have autocorrect. It's a new lie for her everytime and she needs to stop being so harmful to herself and others. If doxxing was my intention, I would've done it without her consent. I wouldn't have allowed Cherry to reach out to her. Because yes, Cherry asked me if she could and I said it was fine but not to expect much since Star does not want help. If I wanted to doxx her, I could've done it a long time ago because she's always posting too much personal information without any prompting. She's been approached about this before and is hostile to anyone who points this out with an excuse that she's a minor, has Autism, is a POC, etc etc

I know Star's patterns and know for a fact she's been making posts about me after blocking me herself. I know this because again, I've seen her do it multiple times to other people. I took this chance when I blocked her and knew she'd throw a fit as soon as she saw that I was still civil with the people she wants everyone to hate. Which again, she wasn't supposed to see in the first place due to being blocked.

Feel free to verify the information about me yourself, I'm really sorry everyone that got involved had to be in the first place. But I promise you, Star is not a victim of abuse from her former friends. She's the main one with the abusive and manipulative behavior with the idea that she can control people and Vivienne Medrano.

Original "call out" post (April 21st, 2021): https://siaesnow.tumblr.com/post/649085106252890112/this-is-serious-yall-someone-ive-been

My archive for the month of April 2021 : https://siaesnow.tumblr.com/archive/2021/4

[andvys]

💻 🌧🧁💖 🍀🐻🥘🔥🍇

THANK YOU BESTIE!! 💖💖

💻 what pushed you to make this blog in the first place?

omg okay so i’ve had this blog since i was like 17 but i was literally only reading fanfics on here and i didn’t write until last year. i’ve always had so many ideas for stories and i’m daydreaming literally all the time and i’d look for stories that would match my daydreams but i obviously wouldn’t find them but some amazing people motivated me to try writing myself and yeah, sharing all these stories with people makes me really happy 🥲💕

🌧 go to song when you’re feeling depresso?

omg so many, my fav ones are the war and where’s my love by syml, another love by tom odell, i found by amber run, literally almost every song by sleeping at last!

🧁 favorite memory with a specific song/album?

taylor swift’s album 1989 always makes me remember one of my fav times in general. I was 16 and that was probably the only time i actually had a lot of fun and felt happy for once, like the whole year 2014 was just great and the whole album reminds of that time, especially christmas/winter 🥲💕

💖 something you love about yourself?

ummm physically my eyes, that’s probably the only thing i like about myself 💀 and that i never give up, even tho i’d love to give some things up sometimes. (i’m stubborn lol)

🍀 meaningful life-lesson or quote you vibe to?

totally unexpected!

“It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.”

whenever i’m having a hard time i think about finnick’s quote 🥲

🐻 do you have a comfort object? what is it?

hmm a switchblade my sister got me 😭 and a necklace & earrings that my mom gave me for my birthday <3

🥘 what is the best meal you make? or bake?

chocolate chip cookies! 💖

🍇 who are you closest to in your family?

my mom & both of my sisters! they are 10&12 years older than me but my sister alex is literally my best friend 🥲💖

[blackthornfaery]

thank you to the one and only @marilyn-monroes-jeans for tagging me <3

1. how did you choose your url?

one of my favorite cicely mary barker flower fairies is the blackthorn fairy, i think she’s so pretty and she looks like me when i had my natural hair color

2. any side blogs?

@vivaciouslady is my old hollywood/vintage blog and @tiredfaery is my side/personal that i post random stuff on, mostly things i want to save for later like recipes or witchy stuff

3. how long have you been on tumblr?

oh boy a while, since august, 2013. back in those days this was a total tumblr girl 1D 5sos zoella acacia brinley justgirlythings blog lolol then it was a soft grunge blog for a lonnnng time and then it sat relatively dormant for a couple years until I changed the url to blackthornfaery in june, 2018 and made it into what it is now. i don’t even think of this as those other blogs anymore because i got all but 100 of my followers after i made the switch 5 years after i originally made the blog lol BUT if you scroll back far enough you’ll get some mad 2014 nostalgia posts

4. do you have a queue tag?

no, i’m on mobile most of the time and it’s just so much easier to press and tap without opening up the post to edit sorryyyyy

5. why did you start your blog in the first place?

well originally i was just really into all those things i mentioned earlier but as far as changing it to blackthornfaery i just really liked how safe and cozy the whole cottagecore, gardencore, etc. aesthetics felt and even though i have always loved the stuff i post about now (like pride and prejudice and beatrix potter) i’d never really made them a part of my personality that i shared and i wanted to change that. then a few months after i changed the blog something really terrible and tragic happened to me and i needed a safe calm space even more than ever and seeing all these lovely little cottages and garden and picnic baskets is that for me

as for @vivaciouslady i just really really love old hollywood

6. why did you choose your icon/pfp?

because i love anne of green gables, especially megan follows as anne

on @vivaciouslady it’s a picture of julie andrews in her broadway days, need i say more? i love her

7. why did you choose your header

i see pretty countryside i click. also it matches the background of the anne picture

on @vivaciouslady it’s a gif of my favorite film… wait for it… Vivacious Lady (1938)

8. what’s your post with the most notes?

this moodboard for the name “heidi” that someone requested has nearly 6.5k notes which is a bit insane because i think it’s very pretty but it was one of the first ones i made and i think i have made some even better ones in the past few weeks

9. how many mutuals do you have?

oh god i have no idea, maybe like 100 or 200 across this blog and my old hollywood blog? possibly way more… i follow over 1000 people and i’m not exactly sure how to check lol

10. how many followers do you have?

on here i have 7,827, on @vivaciouslady i have 1,281

11. how many people do you follow

exactly 1,111 (and this is on number 11 as well? this is destined to be a sign)

12. have you ever made a shitpost?

no, i don’t think so

13. how often do you use tumblr each day?

for at least an hour or so, except for when i took over a monthlong hiatus a bit ago

14. did you have a fight/argument with another blog once?

no, people in this community are pretty peaceful, and so am i

15. how do you feel about “you need to reblog this” posts?

i absolutely do NOT! i have reposted so many “immunity” posts in my life that i never have to take those seriously again, even if i am superstitious

16. do you like tag games?

yes! i think they’re fun ways to get to know the people behind the blog

17. do you like ask games

yes i love them, especially the ones with niche, lovely questions

18. which of your mutuals do you think is tumblr famous?

oh gosh i don’t know, i’m not really sure that term even pertains to anyone in the cottagecore and vintage communities because our blogs are often so specific that no matter how many followers someone has i don’t think they can be classed as “famous”, especially not the way tumblr fame used to be back in 2014 and stuff

19. do you have a crush on a mutual?

sorry my loves i don’t know any of you that well lol

tagging: anyone who would like to do this!! (please tag me if you do, i’d love to see your answers)

[aprito]

hello <3 since i got these asks at the same time i decided to combine my thoughts on them in this post. yet another annoying sjw essay from yours truly on this blog 

before i get into these i think i need to preface why im like. i guess overly hyperfocused on a certain unproblematic base (same age au / platonic canon) for them and avoid the ped0philic content like the plague lol

tw for pedophilia ment, rape ment if that makes you squicky. ALSO THIS IS LONG AND RAMBLY

as i’ve mentioned a couple times already, ive been into the ship since i was 12, back when it was very very common to not only post untagged (nsfw) canonverse content of the two in writing and in drawing but also non con and the like, so you can imagine how bad my first impression online was. thinking back on it ...as a child i found it disturbing but didnt really register how problematic it really was?? (i know, but i also lived in the middle of nowhere and had no one explain this to me) 

skip to 2014 aka me coming back to naruto at 17ish and i had kinda become hyper aware of the fact that there was an increasing amount of people online who had come forward with explaining how fictional problematic content, mostly pedophilia, had been used to groom them into starting relationships with adullts. it was also a time where a lot of people didnt believe these victims, not registering how common it was for minors to be online friends with adults who had no boundaries and no qualms exposing them such content. not gonna get into my personal life here but i was lucky to not having gone through this myself. like... it kinda was my first time truly realising how fiction can EASILY be used to manipulate others irl (and yes i will not argue this, if you dont think fictional media can form and manipulate people’s opinions on attitudes, countries, cultures and virtues, pick up a book about the effects of propaganda media at least once please) 

i, being young, still liking the dynamic but not really the romance, would point this out here and there in the fandom and get into fights with grown adults in their mid 20s who assumed i automatically hated the ship(s) and tried to restrict their freedom of speech or whatever, heard everything from the “age of consent doesnt exist in naruto” to the “sasori looks like a child what does it matter” despite people clearly playing on him being older and experienced. it made me so upset that people were just consuming all this content uncritically and exposing children to it tbh?? not really just sos but a lot of minor/adult ships in naruto in general. and thats where i sat down and thought, i do not want to be a grown adult talking down to children that point out how unsafe the fandom is. theyre absolutely right in drawing these boundaries and calling out adults who defend the uncritical consumption and creation of this content. i do not want to consume or create content that predators could use to groom minors, and i absolutely do want to let younger people in fandom know that i am respecting their comfort zones and want them to have a safe and fun experience. after all, naruto is not an adult show and i think a lot of people forget that!!!! i am not perfect in that regard but its something that i, at the age of 23, am very passionate about and strive towards to.

and i guess thats where same age au was born for me and i have been sticking to it ever since. 

so finally we can move to the first question 

aside from the fact that we both dont like canon sos, i dont think it would work out even if i wasnt prejudiced to it anyways. in all honesty, 35 year old canon sasori is not a redeemable character to me, given the fact that he’s easily amongst the cruelest villains in naruto (torturing and killing and taxiderming people for his own fun personal gain, never for a goal that served anyone but himself. how do you redeem having over 300 corpses in your backpack that you felt absolutely no remorse for killing). sasori was legit one of the only cruel villains that didnt had someone else pull the strings, which sends a clear message on kishi’s part, who absolutely loves to redeem villains LOL.

being that old, he obviously had already been very manifested in what he believed in, even if it was shakey, to the point where the first crack in that world view (sakura and chiyo protecting each other) immediately had him give up on his life all together. that, in my opinion, is not a man who’s going to know what healthy relationships would look like, regardless of it being romantic or not. 35 year old sasori to me has the same appeal as an expired can of tuna and he’s probably very happy 6 feet under. he’s supposed to be a failed gaara in that sense that he had no one to look out for him and therefore was never going to experience anything but a bad ending in life. its fine that hes dead honestly, it wraps up his short character development the best IMO.

adding to that, seriously, sakura was obviously interested in knowing why he was that way, and called him out for being seriously fucked in the head, but it’s weird to me that people assume she had any interest in actively rehabilitating him, let alone starting a serious romantic relationship with him. sakura who’s not only very, uhm, immature and straight forward when it comes to her romantic viewpoints also, as a big bootlicker, wouldnt soil her standing in the village by starting anything with a disgraced and far too gone criminal like sasori. shipping that version of sasori with sakura intimately is still going to set her up for a huge power imbalance that would be difficult to handle imo, even if she was the one in the fight ultimately exerting her power over him. i would still look at it and think damn she deserves better than having to play therapist for man like that lol.

additionally, even if you ignored all of this, you cant really ignore that sasori had already known her as a child, and that had been his first and most impactful impression of her. i dont think that sasori would look at 35 year old sakura and see her as a grown woman and not the little green girl she was in the fight. plus, you easily fall into predatory comparison territory between the “childish” and “womanly” and i have seen way too often in fic just being boiled down to her now being fuckable. a lot of of ships do this and i would just like to remind yall thats it not normal for adults to want to start relationships with children they have seen grown up or known as a child when they themselves were fully grown adults. therefore, maybe if sakura hadnt met sasori before it would be less of a problem? but that also obviously defeats the point of the dynamic and the reason he died in the first place. so yeah, it sounds kind of doomed especially if you were to make it romantic. 

WHICH BRINGS ME TO THE SECOND QUESTION

let me preface this that im not fundamentally against age gaps, even if im not super interested in it. after all, colorblind had a 5 yr age gap (with sakura being 21), even if, say, i wrote similar fics today i probably would make it smaller lol. i think it can be handled well if both parties have enough life experience to deal with it, and the author is cautious of where the age gap starts, i think a 10+ year age gap would be fine in a scenario where the younger party (i guess sakura) was at least 25-27ish, meaning she has completed most of her most formative life stages and probably had been in relationships before, meaning she would be able to handle it without having to fear a huge power imbalance. the older the younger party is the less the age gap is going to matter tbh .TsukiHoshino and AngelOfDeath10 both handle age gaps in their fics really well imo, so i do not mind reading about them.

unfortunately, a lot of people in this fandom think making sakura barely "”””legal””””” (18, not even 20 which is hilarious to me because the source material is obviously japanese) because they both cannot stand her being past her “prime years” of being young fertile and fuckable to much older men as well as thinking a 20 year old is automatically old enough to handle that type of relationship. ive seen a lot of unironic takes that believe it will absolve them of callout posts if they throw around age of consent and “shes 18 now suckers!!!” enough lmfao. absolutely hilarious. aging a minor up without aging the adult down seriously reeks of predatory “cant wait until youre 18″ narratives and thats why i find it similarly disturbing as straight up pedo shipping.

ultimately, sasosaku is and will always be a inherently problematic ship in canon, which is why i think it should always be handled a little more responsibly in fandom spaces, ignoring or outright excusing the main problem factor, which is sasori, isnt going to convince anyone that the dynamic in itself is well written and interesting enough to explore in aus, like giving sasori the redemption most of us wanted him to have by aging him down to a point in time where he was still realistically going to allow being positively influenced, similar to gaara. 

so really, what i think is well handled age gap and how most people handle age gap in the naruto fandom are two different worlds at times lol 

tl;dr

canon shippers have never been anything but gross when i was younger and i didnt wanna be like that, even if youre “smart”enough to differenate, actual creeps dont really care and might use your content to blur the lines, sasori isnt rly redeemable so romantic canonverse realistically wouldnt make much sense and is still iffy, age gaps are fine if they are handled well, but given that the dynamic doesnt really need the age gap to still work im not that invested on making that an essential part of my shipping experience.  

thank you for reading and hope this makes sense!

[nametags]

But her emails...

I aim to be a woman of integrity. I’ve sat on the content I’m about to share for almost 6 years in part because it originally was a private conversation between me and a friend. A friend who happens to be a lead singer of a band, but a friend none the less. However the way people have been speaking about him and what’s been going on in the world lately, I couldn’t let this stay hidden anymore.

I’m tired of people claiming that because Patrick no longer uses social media (and hasn’t for damn near five years at this point) that somehow he doesn’t “care” or isn’t doing anything right now to help the Black Lives Matter movement. I’m also incredibly tired of people ignoring/belittling the fact that Pete Wentz is a biracial/black man in America. You really do not want the social media person in charge of Patrick’s account tweeting things out. It would be hollow and fake.

Below is both a transcript of the conversation I had with Patrick on 12/06/2014, a follow up message he sent to me 08/25/2015, and the accompanying screenshots. Unfortunately I do not have the tweet(s) that prompted me to contact him in the first place nor can I find screenshots of them to provide that context. An image of me and my younger brother Jacob when we met the band at Boys of Zummer will also be attached to demonstrate one of the people I was concerned about in my original email. 

The only redactions made were my personal email address and the name of a friend I referenced. Patrick deleted his email account at some point between late 2016 and early 2017. It’s only left in these screenshots as proof for those who knew the address before to see these were legitimate messages. I hope the content reveals not only where his heart lies not only then but where it is now. 

Allison White: So I caught the insanity way late, but it's a tricky spot to be in with what's going on. For most of my life, I didn't even identify with half of my race. I was raised with my mom's side of the family and it just didn't click for me. It really hasn't been until teen years and onward that I've opened my eyes to it all. And with that, I began to grow wary of authority in a way. Like I still believe that people go into law enforcement for the right reasons. The few times I have dealt with police officers personally I haven't been concerned, but I have noticed in the past few years that when I spot a police car on the road or an officer just out in public somewhere is if I look "white enough" or do I actually look like an adult who belongs in whatever space I am in. I know Trayvon Martin was murdered by a vigilante and not an actual officer of the law, but that was when I first started to fear for my little brothers. I knew both of them were the sort of young men that could get targeted and most likely justice would not be found for them. And then there comes this summer. With both the Mike Brown and Eric Garner cases coming back with no indictment, it makes it feel as if it's just open season for black people to be hunted by cops. Which is hurtful for the cops who are actually in it to protect and serve, and every citizen who now has to wonder if they are next. I hope that your cousin is doing alright. I hope that people aren't making his job harder right now. Just I know for me right now with all that's going on I am definitely on the side of the protesters.

Patrick Stump: Brief for now; I'm sorry in all that you didn't notice that I'm squarely on the side of the protestors too. That's a failure of my wording

PS: The problem is that I so poorly expressed myself, people thought I was balancing the empathy to be spread across the black community and cops. That's a mistake on my part. I'm angry.

I'm angry that Mike Brown's case didn't yield enough evidence to indict. But that case was a very complicated one...Brown had just (allegedly) committed a violent crime and information was murky. As sure as I was that Wilson straight up murdered the Brown, I understood the limitations of the american Justice system given how little evidence there was. That's the unfortunate reality of justice is that it needs to be just. It needs to be 100%. We can't go in with "I know in my heart." And so that case pissed me off, but I understood it. 

With Eric Garner however, this just feels so flagrant. By no accounts was he violent, wasn't he doing anything that could even be misconstrued as life-threatening enough to even imagine defending the usage of deadly force. He was cooperating and they choked him to death on camera. That's fucked up. I'm pissed. I tried to be polite and sit back and not say anything, but I'm pissed.

However, my reason for discussing the side of the police as well is that human beings are complicated. When we boil people down to simplistic stereotypes, when we create a narrative of "Us VS them," we lose sight of the humanity of it all. You can't reason with a "Them." You can only reason with a person and it works better when you remember they're people.

I don't believe in enemies. I'm not religious but I love the way Jesus preached "Love thy enemy." That's hugely influential to me. Hugely important. That's the empathy I mean.

The other night I was holding my son and I thought to myself about a black girl I used to date. And how, we could have had a kid together. Maybe a little boy. And how, that boy could (by no action of his own) be killed just for the color of his skin. Like, I've heard and read words like that before, but to actually connect with it (on as small a scale as that) was horrifying. Gutting. For a little moment I thought, all this joy and all this beauty and somewhere, someone's having a black baby boy, loving him and feeling all the same things I feel for my son. But I wondered if in between their tired diaper changes and their burpings, if they were saying a silent prayer "I hope you don't get killed by a cop." If they say it constantly because they know how possible it is. Or even if he lives to be a 100, what black man won't have an unjust run in with the law? Not to make it exclusively a male issue but seriously, how many black men are in prison right now in America? That's a disgusting thing. The young parent of a young black boy probably considers that and that's maybe the most depressing thing I've ever tried to understood. That's a horrifying thing. There really still is a racial divide in this country, and to not be black is to not say those little prayers. We live in a supposedly free country. What about the pursuit of happiness? Who's defending the right of that little black baby boy born somewhere in America to just be an adorable little baby without any pretense? And when that baby grows up, who's defending his right to walk down a residential sidewalk and not expect to get pulled over and frisked? Maybe worse? 

So I'm angry. Just plain angry. But I didn't want to offend anyone so I expressed my anger in the lightest way I could think of. 

I'm not sorry for having an opinion, I'm sorry I explained it so poorly that you didn't know what it was.

AW: All of this is hard, and there is so much anger. You shouldn't ever be sorry for your opinions, and I am pretty sure you yourself have told people only be sorry for how you express your opinions. I wasn't upset with you or what you said, I just felt compelled to share that for me there's a knee jerk reaction to the image/idea of police and why.  This whole situation has been tough and it's been inspiring watching people across this country let their anger show and demonstrate in the streets against it. It makes me wish I was brave enough to take part in it out in the streets and not just online. 

I hope this collective anger and protest leads to real change. That in 2014 we are able to do the things they were aiming for in 1964. I mean recently the full letter the FBI sent to MLK to urge him into suicide was released and it just highlights the divide between how much has and has not changed. There's a lot of value in what religion is supposed to teach. Love thy enemy, love thy neighbor. True love and care for those around you is a great thing and certainly something I'd hope people identified with. 

The past nearly seven years there has been this push for hope and change. Maybe the country is finally reaching a point to make it happen?

PS: I have a funny feeling this is civil rights part 2. I'm proud of the protests. I'm so grateful our generation is angry about something it should be angry about for a change.

AW: An argument can be made that our generation (or just post baby boomer generations in general) have been taught and fed nonsense to keep us compliant, but that veers into a territory that I am not completely sure or comfortable with. Overall I do think that this is heading a direction that the powers that be are not ready for in the slightest.

PS: Where did I go wrong? What do people think I said? They're so mad at me, and none of the people have said anything I didn't mean. I'm not getting angry right-wing stuff, people are just calling me a racist. What did I say that was racist? What do I think that's racist?

AW: There's a strong immediate reaction right now of if you sound slightly in favor of the officers that did wrong that you are racist. The swift reaction and need to dogpile on is kind of crazy. I think people took the initial comment to mean "not all cops!!!!" In the same vein as "not all men!!!" and that's where the rage is coming from. 

AW: Just to be clear, those who matter know you're not racist. You have shown both in your words and actions where your beliefs lie. I don't know how to calm the masses right now because at least for the time being its not going to get through :(

AW: You could try a blog entry on tumblr?

PS: Nah, I think I've done enough damage for one lifetime. I think I'll keep it to myself but I appreciate your talking it through with me. 

AW: No problem. I am always willing to be a sounding board for that stuff if you need it.

PS: I re-read my stuff; "I support our police," is the worst things said. I meant "I support the idea of police and the need for a police force we can trust on a national level," not "I support the police in NYC who are killing people and attacking protestors." That sucks.

AW: If you wanna try to clarify now you can. At least in your Google alert it only had one mention of he mess and it was a tumblr user supporting/defending you. 

PS: There's no fixing it. The Internet is unforgiving I think and the reality is, I said that. I didn't mean it in the way that it so obviously sounds, but I said that. So I deserve everything I get.

AW: It will most likely go easier if you let it ride out instead of trying to go out and fight it. That just gives the "he doth protest too much" air about it. Hopefully the energy behind letting you know you said something like that will dissipate sooner rather than later. And that it won't get big enough for someone to write a story about it. 

PS: Yeah. It'll sound like back-pedaling and glad-handing. Anyway, thanks for talking it through! 

AW: You're very welcome! Thank you for hearing out my side of it this morning.

PS:  I never would've ignored your side.

AW: Which is very much appreciated

AW: I say that because in the past two weeks I have lost a handful of friends because of all of what's going on and them being unable to understand how and why their words hurt me.

PS: Well that's awful and unfair

AW: It was but they were all from the "when I look at you I don't see black, I just see Ally" camp and then would go on to say things about stereotypes and "thugs"

PS: Yeah. Thug. "Oh that's so ghetto." Bullshit.

AW: When someone says "thug" it's always clear they wanna say the n word

PS: Or even if they're the kind of "Well meaning," person who knows enough not to say that word, they mean the same thing

PS: "Not like you. You're good"

PS: White America just needs to know what it doesn't know

PS: Or rather, understand that there are things they (we) will never understand. Not from a first person perspective.

AW: It always makes me want to scream. The erasure of identity so then the people known to them stay safe. It reminds me of something I witnessed the other day. My friend [REDACTED] from junior high is now an established lawyer. Needless to say he has been keeping up very much with the recent events. He made a post about it and one of his friends commented with "I wish you would go back to being my friend [REDACTED] and not my black friend [REDACTED]." Mind you there's no denying [REDACTED] is a black man. He can't pass in the slightest so the comment shocked and saddened me. Thankfully [REDACTED] handled it with poise and grace. 

PS: If you have to say you have a "black friend," then you probably don't. That's fucked. I guess I just genuinely didn't imagine how pervasive this stuff really is. Like, Pete and Joe and I have been talking a lot today. I was under the misapprehension that we grew up in a decently inclusive area. Just come to find out, nobody used those words around me. The whole time they were heckling kids like Joe and Pete. I thought racism was this thing that doesn't happen here. It's scary how much it's come out post Obama's election. Elected officials sending out mass e-mails of pictures of watermelons. I just didn't get it. Ignorance is bliss.

AW: It knows how to hide in plain sight, which is a lot of the problem. People are taught "don't be racist!!!!" Without being told exactly what racism is. People (myself included at times) aren't aware of words/phrases/ideas have nefarious ties until too late. 

PS: I think we get too caught up on words and not enough on what they imply. "Thug," means a prepackaged idea of a black male. It instantly limits his perceived intelligence, his perceived trustworthiness, his perceived value to society, and his perceived prospects in life. That's so fucked. We expect black men to go to prison. Not be doctors and lawyers. When a black man is a doctor or lawyer, we treat him like such a cool novelty. When a black woman asserts herself, she's so "Sassy." "You go girl." 

These little words and phrases feel harmless. They never were

AW: Those are the positives. Usually assertive black women are angry, mean. It's so fucked all around. 

AW: I really owe Pete for helping me be informed on Ferguson. He tweeted the hashtag the night the protests started in August and it helped me dive in. I am sure tumblr would have got me to it eventually, but seeing it from day one was a definite help. 

PS: You know part of my problem? I'm just not brave enough to say what I think. I'm just scared of offending people. Pete's not. He doesn't care. That's powerful

AW: It takes a lot to just put it out there. I am not sure if I had the amount of eyes on me that you do that I would be so "fuck you I will do/say what I want" as I am. Hell I become such a shadow of myself when at work with how quiet and polite I am. I mean I am still pierced and tatted with short hair so visually I say a lot, but then I watch my speech to make us for it. 

(Follow up on 8/25/2015)

Patrick Stump: That is amazing and I'm very flattered. By the way; Been thinking about our conversation from a year ago a lot. The takeaway is this: Saying "All lives matter," and "Not all cops," while literally true are contextually horrendous. Really awful. In retrospect I feel pretty awful about saying both. Specifically because "All lives matter," can carry a lot of implications. Who's lives? I meant by it that Latinos and Muslims are also unreasonably targeted/mistreated/murdered by cops. But is it as systematic or blatant as it is with darker skinned Americans? Not remotely. Furthermore, as a white man, I just need to remember how fucking easy I have it. It's easy for me to preach peace and unflinching patience when I've NEVER been a victim of the War On Drugs or the aftermath of straight up slavery. So there's a lot to think about in terms of what I, a white guy, have to say and do about the situation. But not a lot I have to say about the way it feels to be oppressed to the point of feeling like less than a citizen of this country. I shouldn't have spoken about it because I don't/can't know. Well-meaning white folks get to talk about policy changes and do everything we can to help, otherwise we should get the fuck out of the way. I'm sorry, really REALLY sorry to the world that I ever said either of those things. It's more than "Fuck the police." It's "Fuck this whole system." And as aware as I'd been, I hadn't realized how complacent in it I was. Anyway, disgusted I said what I said. Sorry to the whole world for being part of the problem