#i based my identity around in real life and not just online/internet blogs. like all of my irl family jknows about these things because

[computerpeople]

my life can be sectioned off into like fandom periods and i tend to be able to remember things more chronilogically because of that. no internet ballerina/webkinz only, deviantart user/furry fandom, mlp, homestuck, until dawn, danganronpa, overwatch, homestuck, and now i've cycled back into until dawn

[autumnslance]

Being in fandoms for so long yourself, do you have any tips on how to approach fandom in general? It can be so overwhelming sometimes!

Honestly avoid fandom as much as possible. 'Tis a silly place.

On a more serious note, I DO have a draft on staying sane on social media I’ve been slowly making. The main points are about knowing how your social media sites work in regards to tags, searches, cuts, filters, blocks, and mutes, and being liberal with using them for whatever reason you need. In general for this post: limit following counts and be picky about who you follow and why--don't just “follow back” because. Don’t sit in Discords that make you uncomfortable and keep utility servers to those channels needed and mute/hide the rest. I should get around to the rest eventually.

I maintain that sticking to what you love and with friends is better than trying to interact with “the fandom” at large. Especially as a property gets well known and a larger following, the vocal negative 1% seems to get louder and tiresome quickly. Protect yourself and your pals and enjoy what you wish, minimizing stress and drama and hurting real people over what’s supposed to be a shared interest of pretend characters and stories. More specifics of that below.

Limiting myself to some friends and branching off their recommendations, getting to know folks before hopping into servers or groups, helps a lot. I don’t have to engage with the entire fandom. I tend to hear about random dramas in passing, like a shadow underwater, because I interact with chill folks more interested in simply enjoying an interest, not in making it their entire life and identity and so having to be right or chase clout or whatever over a pretend world and make-believe characters, even if resonates with us.

Don't give too much of yourself away. Don't tell people all the ways to trigger you, or your vulnerabilities. Don't give away locations. Use basic internet safety and anonymity to keep folks at arms’ length as much as needed. You're not obligated to answer every DM, right away or ever. You can make some dear friends through fandom, but a single shared interest is not a guaranteed safe and healthy basis of relationships.

Focus on what you love, ignore what you don't. Yes, you want a healthy level of objectivity and criticism and sometimes you need to vent but overall, fandom experience is much better if you're actually enjoying the things you engage with. Don't force yourself to put up with things you don’t have fun with, but also let others have their fun (even if you don’t think that it is fun, if it isn’t harming other real people and dragging them down it’s fine even if you don’t get it). This can include leaving that fandom when the base material is no longer fun for you, leading to...

Remember that you don't own the characters and story; it's someone else's world, we just play in it. The creators are going to make choices and changes, some good and some bad; learn to accept that and keep fanon separate from canon. Interactions with creators via social media are also usually very surface level and parasocial; just because they make part of themselves visible and accessible, doesn't mean you know them, are friends, or are owed anything by their social presence.

Other fans have other takes; you may not like them, but they're valid. Sometimes those other ideas too can make you rethink or add to your own, make you realize some things you hadn’t considered due to a blindspot in your own experiences, and add to your understanding of characters and story arcs. So be open to others’ ideas. Find those of a like mind more or less and stick with ‘em.

Don’t let fandom ruin a thing for you. If you find yourself surrounded by a lot of negative opinions, especially about something you enjoy, you can speak up if comfortable, but if not, simply stop following/interacting. I cull my following lists regularly, and a lot of times remove people who tend to be negative about things too often for my taste. Their blog/timeline/whatever but I don’t have to interact with it. If I find my enjoyment of a thing souring, I ask myself if it’s due to the actual story/characters/how the creators act, or if it’s due to the corner of fandom I’m in and if I have to clean up and then see how I feel about the thing.

Don't assume the worst of people. I often make myself stop and reread what someone said, slowly and even out loud if I must, to make sure I understood. Go back some posts/threads/pages for context if needed. Some people are just bad at communicating. They may be ignorant of even the most basic of modern social manners, internet etiquette, and so on. English may not be their first language. I tend to assume unintentional oopses until someone makes it crystal clear they mean harm--it's generally easy to tell. Let things roll off your back; they don't know you, really, just the persona you present online. You don't know them and their issues, either, just what little you see. It's usually not worth the hassle and heartache to do more than eye-roll and move on with life.

Others won’t censor/remove everything you personally find a squick or trigger, but do advocate for proper tags, warnings, and hiding the content. Learn to skip past the crap you dislike to find the things you do; you do not have to read or view or comment or like everything. There's only so many hours in a day, and not everything is your taste.

My personal annoyance usually come from how people who engage with questionable content react to other fans being upset, especially when they didn’t take the proper precautions to warn/hide their content based on the site. Anyone who then revels in their “problematic” status and starts making their dark content “to spite antis” has lost sight of why they wanted to make that content to begin with and are acting like brats, IMO. Especially a waste when it can be well written/drawn, even if out of my own comfort area. Don’t do things for spite if you can help it; sometimes it leads to interesting things, but a lot of times, it ends up hollow and a regret down the road.

There’s likely more to this, but these are some general rules I’ve been trying to follow as I get older and realize a lot of time and emotional labor over fiction isn’t worth stress and negativity, but should be relaxing and fun, as the real world is difficult enough. Have fun and make things fun and positive for others when possible, don’t tear others down for the sake of it. Fandom is meant to be a shared interest and love of a thing, after all.

[werewolf-kat]

Introduction Post

Is this title too formal? Ah well.

Hello, I’m WolfKat! A werewolf in some fantasy existence, and thusly what I use to represent myself online. I like to keep my human self private.

My main areas of skill are in drawing, web design, and some story writing on the side. More on those in another post in the future.

I’m 26 years old as of February 2021 (year of this post). Just existing.

I used to be active here on another account mainly for Gravity Falls stuff back in est. 2015 until maybe 2018. My activity died down and then some drastic, traumatizing events in 2019 really burned me out. I moved onto Twitter for a while and decided I would leave Tumblr for good?

Look how that turned out. Here I am again! But I’m starting fresh on this new account.

And during 2020, I uuhh, had more self-reflection during the isolation with more daring self-confrontations than I have in a while. For things I would question about myself, but wouldn’t feel “allowed” to accept due to my upbringing and the painful subconscious programming that can still induce sick feelings to my stomach and moments of existential dread for my fate after death.

Born and raised in Georgia. Surrounded by baptists, fundies, evangelicals, you name ‘em. Connect the dots from there!

Anyway, to summarize my new self-discoveries... I don’t fit with gender binary stuff. So I’m experimenting with just... Being a neutral “they.” Though I do find comfort in presenting more conventionally masculine.

Having to be considered “female” in my past always felt like a costume; an uncomfortable social obligation so that navigating the world would be smooth when I otherwise struggled in it. In the end, my particular long-term obsession with secret and alternate identities growing up has caught up with me - ‘cause now I have to hide these aspects of myself from people irl! Very fun. My life here on the internet is pretty different to what I have to present of myself offline around locals and family.

It’s still difficult to embrace this and it’s been only since December 2020 through January 2021 that I slowly discussed this with close friends, and then opened up about it briefly and subtly online. I don’t like putting spotlight on this extra personal stuff about myself, so even writing this much without specifics has me a nervous wreck.

Moving on now!

I’ll have a page for interaction boundaries as I want to set those clearly and firmly on my social media and any online presence I have.

And likewise to how I ran my previous blogs, there will be a page for my common, general tags I’ll use to organize posts on here!

There will also be another blog I’m working on, which will be for my business side of things. It’ll be some time before it’s up and running since I want to make a custom theme for it. That’ll be a fun little personal project for me to do!

On that note, I’ve made some nice progress with [vanilla] JavaScript in the past 2 years. I’m still not super fancy with it yet, but I’m steadily getting there I hope? Only the front-end stuff too. I tried some back-end last month ‘cause I felt somewhat ready for NodeJS... It fried my brain beyond just setting up a localhost.

But back on the front-end stuff, I currently make assets and such using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for OBS’s browser sources! Two of them are free, and the others I sell on my Ko-Fi shop. I accept tips on Ko-Fi too if you wanna drop any instead of buying from the shop. I’ll appreciate any of that!

There’s quite a bit more I have planned, including the occasional project where I can spare time to make it free. They’ll usually be free out of legal obligation... Using IP’s and all, having them be fan works. Can’t risk selling those, y’know?

On the side of drawing, I’ve started using Clip Studio Paint this year... And it’s real darn fun! A generous close friend of mine gifted the base program to me as a belated birthday gift, since it had gone on sale in March IIRC! Been trying to learn how to animate on it (it’s not the fancy edition with extra animation tools) and it can get a little confusing still. But I’m sorta getting it.

For my birthday, I also got gift money to get my portable tablet! I desperately needed that because my unknown physical problems have made it uncomfortable to draw at the desk tablet I’ve had for a few years already. Apparently sitting up straight and/or leaning forward for a little while makes my heart skip beats and/or fully go into tachycardias after ever since having my ablation? Yeah. Gets scary.

So, with the portable tablet I can finally enjoy drawing again. And comfortably in bed... Where I can lean back and relax my body a lot better! Even more recently I got a metal flexible arm that holds my tablet up higher so it’s better for my neck too. I’m doing my best to make things more ergonomic with the very scarce money I earn at all. I have no real income or financial living at this time.

I think that’s all I can do for catching people up to speed with me for anyone who’s known me here before. And for any newcomers, you’ve gotten a first glimpse of me as well! There’s still more, but I think this is enough of a read as is.

My other online presences(?) will also soon be part of my navigation. Stay tuned! Can’t wait to share some art here too and whatever else of my interest!

[stepfbdbamby]

The training of bamby a future stepford wife bimbo doll

So an explanation might be the right thing to do.

Who am I? I am already an older male (44) (still looking young). Mistress Selene knows me already for quite some time as a visitor of a certain hypno feminization chat room. My fantasies changed over time but feminization for myself was never about identity as for many others but more about giving up control and becoming a obedient doll for a Mistress or owner.

What is the origine about this feelings? I think everything started in my teenage years  when I saw a in a kiosk. The woman on the magazine instantly aroused me. I was fascinated by the dominance and wanted to surrender her. It took me a few weeks till I found the courage to purchase a magazine. I was around 15/16. In the magazine, there was a story about a girl that became a rubber doll for her owner. She was inclosed in multiple layers of latex, her body functions were controlled over plugs and she slept in a vacuum bed. There were scenes, explicit described how she was teased by plugs and vibrators. She was not allowed to come and more and more weights were put on her anal plug while she was teased she was spanked trough the latex and teased at her pussy. Holding in the plugs was becoming more and more difficult while the spanking stronger and her arousel was close at coming even though she was not allowed. At the end she came before she got the ok. As punishment she was put in strong bondage while breath control and vibrators teased her body constantly let orgasm after orgasm wash over her body till she lost consciousness and was then repeatedly awoken by little electro shocks. 

This story blew my mind - I wanted to be here.

So how was my own development: Sadly, I have been always short on money and as a child that was in boarding school, I didn’t have chances to live these feelings out, especially cause I had and still have social anxiety and only a few friends which I didn’t talk about this. My first chance to explore these feelings I had in university where I was already older 29. 

Discorvering hypno-feminization chatrooms. it was at this time I found the hypnotic chat where Mistress Selene maybe not in the beginning, but only a few years later was also a member. We weren’t in touch at that time, but in the early days the room was wild. Everyone tranced everyone, no matter if you were new or inexperienced. Hypnotists (tists) where pm you out of nowhere and started to trance you. 

Finding my own hypnotist At this time I got in contact with a tist that liked my ideas about going really deep into conditioning and become a famed doll. At this time I had for the first time in my life a bit of money to buy some fetish dresses. Where I posted myself online (sadly no posts are left of it). So the test started to work on me bringing me under. With time she and I talked what are my wishes (I am still glad that she was a good one - never did any evil trance that might mess me up - today the room is much more monitored that no bad thing can happen but in the early days there were some extreme things that Were going on (turning Hero boys that were curious into full shemales that served a Dom).

So my tist was not into that for which I am still glad. But I had my own wild fantasies. The idea to become brainwashed and formed into a doll was fascinating me, but I didn’t want to go a road where my desires would control me and I would just without control just where starting to dress and start doing crazy sex stuff and might buying dangerous hormones on the black market. Cause I saw this happen. 

My old programming Cause the hypnotist that worked with me was well versed and took time with my 1-2 month 3+ sessions per week minimum most 5+ days per week 1-2 hours per day. The programs that were installed are deep and still work today. But the artist installed deep safeguards that should block an abuse or lots of control. So the personality which I describe cannot be accessed by triggering nor can they be forced open by trance or manipulated. The only way the program can be activated are by an ok of me as subject to certain conditions and each level needs its own unlock.

 The concept/personas was/were like this: Doll: (installed) Programming a doll persona for the tist to get access. This persona had a blank state where she was not really conscious about herself like only in the present.

Sub: personality: (semi-installed) I was always submissive so thee was not real reason to install a sub personality it was more that switching in the subrole there was a tendency of stronger submitment

Evil-Stepsister: (installed) The evil-stepsister is a personality that takes over it is a strange feeling when it happens. I feel like I am behind glass or someone leads me by the hands and does things for me but I am unable to do something else then to follow.  Further more this persona knows all my desires it can make me feel aroused and tease me with images. It also knows which is the maximal steps I am willing to take my training/transformation forward and what would be the steps that also have the strongest impact to take me deeper which I would not refuse to do, This programm can only be opened after Doll, Sub are unlocked and to unlock these not trance works or commands but certain parameters based on trust etc. must be met. But unlocked this programm would push my transformation to extrem mesures and would be difficult to stop.

Goddess: (softly installed) The Goddess program is in a way a saveguard program that sees me as a girl and therefore wants to protect me as long I embrace the girl side if I fight off my transformation it doesn’t help but when progressing on the journey the prograrm prevents things that threaten my health (unprotect sex or unsafe partners), abuse of my conditoning or abuse of power struction in relationship. 

Mistress: (not isntalled) to be honest here I can’t really remember what this was original the idea of this programm. 

TS-Mistress: At this time I got in contact with a Ts-Mistress online which found interest in me and loved my ideas of becoming a doll and feminization. We chatted a few times when I told her about my hypno conditioning. Which she found fascinating. Soon we she was interested in contacting my hypno-Mistress and the idea was slowly forming that I would finish the half of my Univeristy study here in Switzerland, then would move to Austria and inscribe there in the university while she would combine with my hypo-mistress into her shemale doll/slave-girl. We had also idea about building our own fetish training sites. The internet was still young at this time and we would have been one of the first one to offer such services. BUT sadly, then life came in the way. Family problems, health problems, financial took over and took away all of my time further more my test at the same moment also had to look for real things and so this never came to past

This all was about 15+ years ago. Now I got my life more in order and more time that I wanted to start living out my fantasies again this blog is about this. 

[malignedaffairs]

Artist Interview

Some time ago I was asked to answer some questions for a Russian community that collects interviews from various fanartists - what a lovely idea! Here’s the Russian translation along with lots of other interesting interviews. Under the cut is the English version.

On the artist

Nickname: Fifi

Date of birth: December 11th

What city are you from? Berlin

What genre in music do you prefer? Are there any favorite bands/singers? Dark electro, industrial, gothic, EBM, new wave, with a little side of metal and rock’n’roll. My favourite band is Rammstein.

The book that made the most impression and why? There’s nothing life-changing, but I have a ritual of reading before bedtime and some books have been great companions, mostly because they are gripping as hell or because they build up a huge world to blissfully get lost in. I really enjoyed In Cold Blood, The Swarm, Out, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Fifth Woman, Into Thin Air, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the Harry Potter series, Lord of the Rings and ASOIAF.

What are your hobbies besides artistic creativity? Video games, reading up/watching documentaries on things like history, nature, the psychology connected to criminal cases or the obscure niche interest du jour, tasting and trying to cook food from around the world, spending time with close friends and family, planning trips and travelling, board games, being outside in nature, doting on my cat.

What movies (TV series) do you like to watch? Is there something you revise (recommend)? I prefer short thriller/mystery/horror series like Zone Blanche, The Sinner, La Forêt, Penny Dreadful, period dramas like Moon Lovers or The Tudors, movies/series that are funny and thoughtful like Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Intouchables and Better Call Saul, Tarantino movies, oh and movies/series about food!

Favorite anime? Mushishi, Hellsing Ultimate, Samurai Champloo, Kuroko no Basuke, Dragonball Z

Favorite manga? Vagabond, Blade of the Immortal, Naruto, Dragonball, Rookies, Shokugeki no Soma

Favorite pictures, installations? Romanticism paintings, they’re so atmospheric. And traditional artwork from indigenous cultures.

Is there something that you would have trouble parting with? (Some thing, for example) There are things like my old diaries or my hard drive full of photos and drawings, but in general I’m more attached to places than to things.

What are your future plans? Getting better at my job, falling in love, lots of drawings.

On the art

What was the beginning of your passion? Discovering how crayons work as a toddler, I guess.

Do you think the academic base is obligatory and should everyone go through universities to be good masters? I think a profound education can totally polish your technical skills, so the benefits can be great. But art is very individual, and you don’t need university for expressing yourself creatively. When I graduated from high school I thought about studying to become a professional artist, but decided on keeping it a leisure activity for me to unwind and express myself without any pressure.

How long have you been drawing? I’ve been drawing from early childhood.

Tell us about the process of drawing. Where do you start, how do you finish? How much time is spent on drawing? When I’m super lazy, I just use one layer. I start with a rough sketch and refine it by just adding cleaner lines on top and erasing the messy parts. When I’m less lazy I do a rough sketch and a second layer of clean lines on top. During the process I often adjust proportions by cutting, warping and relocating parts of the content. For a comic I first think of a rough plot and draft the dialogue, then make a rough storyboard with page thumbnails. I usually only plan around three pages at a time, never the whole thing in one go. Colouring is another beast entirely. No system there whatsoever, I just put colours on there and hope for the best. Usually a drawing takes me at least two hours, comic pages take up to eight hours. I mostly use the same three brushes all the time.

How did your nickname appear? Fifi-la-fumeuse is a random thing I found in a book about curiosities I bought in Paris a long time ago. It’s basically a vintage doll that was used for educating students about the dangers of smoking during pregnancy. I liked how creepy it looked and the name sounds nice and a little similar to my real name, so I’ve kept it ever since. Malignedaffairs is an allusion to the “forbidden” nature of Itasasu, which was my OTP when I started my blog back in 2012/13. Nowadays I’m finding the name rather corny, but it’s what most people associate with my art, so I’m just keeping it.

What inspires you? Everyday life, my feelings, media, exchanging ideas with people within the fandom.

How do you feel about criticism? Do you criticize other artists? I’m not here for the criticism. My first and foremost goals in posting art on the internet are expressing my feelings, getting in touch with like-minded people and having fun, not necessarily improving my artwork or meeting any achievement goals. I’m grateful for constructive criticism if I respect and trust the person who gives it. I only give criticism if invited to do so.

Do you have your own characters? Or maybe the whole universe? Tell a little about it. No, I don’t have any OCs at all.

How did you come to the Naruto fandom? What kind of heroes do you draw and why them? My ex bf was a big fan of Naruto and always tried to get me into it, but I found it boring and childish. After we broke up though, I felt really lost and started to watch Naruto as a way to feel a little closer to him, and before I knew it I was super into the plot and the characters and then Itachi appeared and the story of the Uchiha brothers struck a very deep chord with me. I’m very much into beautiful, tragic, brilliant but troubled characters who are sweet cinnamon rolls inside, and Itachi and Shisui are like the posterboys for this concept. I feel like they’re the perfect muses for me to give some kind of shape to my ideals of love and mutual respect.

Do you agree with the opinion that national self-perception, as an intellectual factor, is present in the creative process? You’re always influenced by the social environment, the battles and the values you grew up with, and some of that can be determined by your nationality. Themes like identity, society, communication, politics and ideologies are often expressed in art, and if that’s the case you can’t and probably don’t even aim to separate it from national self-perception. I think it’s more present in original art than in fanart though.

What topics worry you and most often are reflected in your work? Belonging, mutual love, loss, sex.

Do you consider drawing to be your recognition in life? Do you plan to continue to devote yourself to this business? It’s an important part of my life and I’m going to do it as long as it feels right, but I won’t pressure myself.

What advice do you have for novice artists? Expect your drawings to look ugly in the beginning and draw all the ugly pictures anyway. Draw whatever attracts you, however silly it may seem. “Art block” means you should lower the pressure on yourself and allow yourself to draw something ugly, silly or uncreative, or even take a break from drawing. Art is not about achievement but about expression. Don’t take it personally when no one seems to appreciate your art right away. Instead actively seek out like-minded people in online communities or in real life, get engaged and show your art to them. Also: flip that canvas!

[rosy-writes]

Hi, Rosy! Do you have any tips on how to find writing jobs? I don’t necessarily mean just full-time jobs, but anything that pays? Things like ghost writing or freelancing things? I have no one in my life I can talk to about this or get advice from, and I really want to start building a writing career. It’s the one thing I’m not terrible at, and I’d like to do it because I love it and I’d like to start using that to help support myself in some way. I have no idea where to start.

This is not actually my area of expertise. The art and craft of writing? Yes. Storytelling? Yes. Lit analysis? Yes. Self help and self care? Yes. The business of writing? No. I finished the first draft of my first novel when I was 25 and I am now almost 50. That’s 25 years of writing, but very little being a professional writer. 

Part of that is because I had no economic freedom so always had to earn a living. I put my energy into my day job, or gradschool, or teaching. And then I had kids and that’s ten, fifteen years devoted to raising kids instead of business. Then I started doing internet marketing and that took all my time. And then, over that time period, writing changed from an analog business (mailing mss with a sase) to digital (email, emags, epub.) So my path to being a professional writer has been long and bumpy. I can’t tell you the end point. But I guess I can tell you what I’ve learned so far.

Get involved in the writing community. Not just people just learning how to write, but also people who are doing it as a business. The art and craft of writing is very different from the business of writing. You want to connect with people who are in the business side that you can learn from. I switched my twitter from fandom to writing twitter and it’s been a lot more helpful. I follow established authors, new authors, self published authors, poets, teachers, librarians, agents, freelancers and publishers along with unpublished writers. Read blogs. Follow links. Be aware of the politics in the writing and publishing community because hooboy there’s a lot of it. But it keeps me on the leading edge of the happenings. I mean. the Romance Writers Association just had a spectacular implosion all based around racism, silencing, gatekeeping, and diversity, and if you are at all connected with the writing world, you should have heard about it. Also connected is the #Oscarssowhite hashtag, and Stephen King making excuses for his Academy voting. No, Stephen, no. The world is changing. As a writer you need to know.

Get a blog yourself. You need to have a landing page where people can contact you. Where you can share what you’re doing and can do and what services you offer, as well as samples and testimonials and, most important, contact information. 

Begin building your writer’s platform. Don’t get scared. This is essentially your professional identity online. Who you are. Not who you are in total, but who you are as a writer. Your niche. Your style. Your expertise. Your philosophy. Your background. Your education. Your voice. Now’s the time to start acting as you would in a professional environment. Those fan wars? Ditch ‘em. Grudge matches with other people online? Be the better person. Talk of questionable private activities? Slow your roll, honey. Don’t put online things you wouldn’t want your boss or clients knowing. There is a difference between personal statements and private ones. Decide what face you want to put towards the world and be that. Keep some stuff out of it. You know the stuff. 

Tell people that you are a freelancer and professional writer. Make it public. People you know irl, on your social media. If you want to be a freelance writer, your work can come from anywhere. I got a gig because I told my sister who knew a hairdresser who needed a writer. Who knows? 

Research. Google everything. Not only can you find out *how* to freelance, you can find out sites with good job offers, which employers are reliable and which are not, dangers to avoid, what the going rates are for what you’re offering. I’ll be honest. This is where I am now and the part that I can’t tell you, because I don’t know enough, and also my memory is atrocious and I should write these job boards down. I’m working with two ghostwriting companies right now and both of them I found on twitter. Or someone mentioned a jobs board on twitter which I went to and found those opportunities. I am not really liking ghostwriting and I’m not sure I can recommend it. Yes, you can get money for writing novels, but it’s not that reliable and the deadlines are really stiff. I feel a bit like a writing machine, and I am a relatively fast and steady writer. I wouldn’t suggest it unless you know you can write at least 3k words a day without struggle and come up with a clean first draft. I’m going to start looking into content writing for a less intense and more frequent gig. I still want to be able to work on my own writing, though, and that can be tough when you have a demanding writing schedule. It can also be hard when you write for work, because writing then becomes WORK.

Also, research the financial aspect of freelance writing and how you need to save for taxes and keep your receipts and all. Perhaps join a writer’s organization so you’re not all on your own. 

Basically, it’s a small business, not a real stable one, with people who want you to work for free, or won’t pay you, or treat you like a monkey at a typewriter or whatever. You also have to hustle. You can’t just wait for your boss to give you work and a paycheck. Unless you work for an agency I guess, but you’d have to find one. But there’s something to be said for getting paid for writing, what you like, do well and enjoy. So there’s that. 

[kris10tisme]

Social Anxiety Origin Story

Social Anxiety is classified as a disorder. Isn’t that crazy!? You can actually read up on it on the MayoClinic or Webmd websites which shows that it really is a legitimate thing; it's not just you being a pussy. Most people who have social anxiety disorder don’t know what it is or why they’re like this. When we first become aware of our incomprehensible phobia we usually feel completely alien. People with this ailment tend to feel like the ultimate freaks, which knocks down their self esteem tenfold. If you have desperately searched online to potentially find answers: I feel you. The first time I felt a sense of belonging in this world was browsing through internet forums, reading about how people had the same irrational fears I did. You can find comfort in it sure, but it's definitely not the same as finding belonging in person. I didn’t know that I wasn’t completely alone in this struggle until I was maybe fifteen or sixteen years old navigating through my insufferable high school life!  During that time google searches quickly became my best friend.

I can’t even really pinpoint where my SAD began for me. As a child I was pretty shy but I’d eventually open up once I became semi-comfortable. I didn’t ruminate whether or not I made some sort of fool of myself publicly. I was just having a blast man. Childhood is all fun and games but you really do get the carpet ripped out from under you when you enter adolescence.

 I grew up a very privileged child financially - my parents both being middle class. My bills were all taken care of, and I didn't have to worry too much about the connections I would make with others in life. I was a kid. When a kid has no friends it's sad, but when an adult has no friends you wonder what they did wrong and you try to steer clear of them. There must be a reason why they are friendless: they must fetishize feet in their spare time! When you’re a child your only occupation is being a student. I’d wake up, go to school, learn stuff, socialize a bit among peers and then go home to watch TV and repeat, not questioning or overthinking the minutiae or idiosyncrasies in my life; just living day by day. Everything was smooth sailing. I figured I would hit my peak as a teenager and do all the cool teenagery things I saw on television like going to parties, making the cheerleading squad (though I’m not athletic at all; it would just happen), and have a tumultuous relationship with several boys. I’d pick the most special one to lose my virginity to on prom night! Then college would come, I’d go there and graduate and get a job. Sounds simple right!?

WRONG!

Hitting puberty was a big eye opener for me. It’s like once I menstruated my self-esteem plummeted. Everything about life just seemed a lot more competitive. There are all these milestones that society expects you to complete by certain ages: your first beer, your first kiss, your first fornication, your first job. All terrible and unfamiliar things! Now that I had bled and grown boobs, I was in the process of becoming a woman. I had to start making preparations to accomplish these milestones.

Seventh grade was the first year of my life I was depressed, and that terrible feeling hasn’t really depleted all that much since. In sixth grade I felt like a rock star… until the end of the year. I was a downright bully, mocking people in my class for the way they looked and acted. Some of my classmates found me funny, and I liked feeling that bold. I liked knowing that people were on the edge of their seats waiting for me to comment on a situation. It wasn’t until the end of the school year when one of the girls I heavily bullied called me out on my malicious means of garnering attention from my peers. She didn’t even insult me, she just spat out the truth. “You’re mean KRISTEN! You’re a BULLY!”

I can’t even explain how thrown off I felt by that mere observation. I never questioned why I did what I did; I liked the attention. I liked being someone people would be eager to hear from to know my latest outrageous comments on what surrounds us. Hearing this girl call me out for being a mean bully was a gut punch like no other. I couldn’t believe my ears. To me this girl wasn’t a person; she was a vessel. Someone to make fun of. Someone who was an easy target because she had a whole line of insults thrown her way since even before I saw her as easy prey.

No one ever downright called me out on my behavior. My dad did tell my mom that I was a horrible daughter, and he even asked who would want to have a daughter like me. But that was mostly because I was disrespectful towards him. Such a justified comment for a parent to make about his adolescent daughter right in front of her :)

That summer break I had tons of time to reflect upon my actions. I recognized how downright awful I had been to a lot of my classmates and vowed to make amends in the coming school year. I want to say, most of the bullying took place before I began menstruating, so you can blame my abhorrent behavior on my lack of emotional resonance and the fact that my womanly empathy and sympathy had not yet kicked in. That’s how I excuse how I acted.

So by seventh grade I was menstruating, and I grew D cup breasts overnight. I became a stand-up person - someone who didn’t throw vulnerable people under the bus for my own benefit. I became what you would call... “compassionate.”

Seventh grade was the year everything went downhill for me. Maybe it was the hormones kicking in and getting the better of me, or maybe it was me becoming more aware of what society deems as acceptable and proper. I felt like I should be cultivating a role in society, and I didn’t know what role to take.  I couldn’t be loud and obnoxious anymore because my victims were starting to bite back and I realized the biting back hurt me more than I could handle.

For the rest of Junior High I struggled with my transitioning into a new person. My classmates instantly recognized how much softer and kind-hearted I became. I didn’t throw around as many insults, and if I did it was just playful banter.  Me and the girl I had so savagely bullied were on decent terms, though we never really interacted with one another except for when obligatory social protocol called for it. I struggled with finding my niche again within my class. I got along with people just fine, but I suffered through a big identity crisis: I didn’t know what I could contribute without being outwardly obnoxious. I didn’t know what stereotypical personality trait defined me. Things got a bit more fucked at home for me, so that really took a toll on me mentally. I’ll get into how family influences your socialization tendencies in another post.

I’ve never wanted anything more in life other than to be liked. I know they say that not everyone’s gonna like you and that you should accept that, but I can’t! I just can’t accept it! The only way I will accept someone not liking me is if they’re completely indifferent to me, like when I have not done anything to them or in front of them to warrant them having an opinion on my character. So I keep my mouth shut. BUT THEN… I worry about what a weirdo they must think I am. If I’m too quiet then I give people the opportunity to make assumptions about me based on the impressions they have on me. They can be thinking anything, like that I watch tentacle porn, or that I collect toenail clippings or something.

I wonder if keeping my mouth shut all these years has done me more harm than good emotionally. Speaking up opens you up for attack, and I always feel like I have to be on the defensive. But when you say nothing to anyone, are you really living your life to the fullest and taking advantage of opportunities that could benefit you?

Meeting someone and getting to know them feels kind of like a step by step interrogation for me. The worst question I always get is, “What do you do?” Which I assume means “what do you do for a living?” Another one is,“Do you have a boyfriend?” It seems to me that the general public believes having a solid and steady job and being in some sort of romantic relationship completes the prerequisites for having a satisfactory life. Do these people even consider that you may be unemployed AND single? And that they’re unintentionally making you feel shitty about yourself? Just keep the convo focused on the weather for god sake. 

I started this blog to vent about my feelings. I have been journaling a lot recently to blow off some steam because it's uncomfortable to complain about this stuff in real life. Only people on the internet can understand certain problems. I don’t know if anyone’s going to read this, but I feel like social anxiety is an underrepresented disease in mainstream media. It’s embarrassing to tell people that you are anxious for your next family gathering because you don’t know if you should greet someone with a kiss on their cheek if they’re sitting down. Do I just bend down!? Should they stand up? Am I being too forward, or are they gonna be offended if I don’t make a move to embrace them? That's a whole ordeal for me. It's not what people call a “real problem” but this is the shit I think about while I lie in bed at night. So if shit similar to that wanders through your mind when you contemplate the world, maybe you can find some sort of catharsis through this blog. We may not have a very mainstream disease, but at least we’ve got each other to relate to. We’re people who find solace in reading about similar experiences we’ve experienced online. 

 Just thinking back on the fact that what jump started my anxiety issue was a small little comment made by someone whose life I made torturous. I don’t place the blame on this girl, as I just enabled her to pull the trigger on some deeper rooted issues I bore. Although it is quite the struggle I am glad that the nastier person I was eventually transformed into a more compassionate one. I never got to formally apologize to that girl. I hope I didn’t leave a big lasting impression on her. I was really shitty to her. I would reach out to her through social media and apologize, but I’ve got way too much social anxiety for that!

Well now that we’ve covered my origin story I would love to hear about all of yours. I will continue to write about various social situations or predicaments that freak me out, as well as stuff I’ve been through at home and in high school and how I’ve evolved and haven’t evolved. I don’t want this blog to be filled with negativity. Hopefully it's self-effacing in a not too depressing way. If it’s too depressing please let me know. I don’t want to spread the feeling of hopelessness with this blog. I want people to find comfort and humor, and maybe we can come up with some potential resolutions for certain scenarios and give each other tips. If there are any readers out there, thanks for reading. I hope this in some way made you smile and feel like less of an outcast. Keep trooping on! You’re not alone :)

[lettersandinkstains]

hi, sorry if this is annoying but i think i might be transgender (mtf) and i’m freaking out because i don’t know anything about how to transition or the identity and i was wonder if you have any advice or anything??? thanks a million

Anon, hello! You’re not being annoying at all! I’m sorry this is so late!! 

First things first, thank you for trusting me with this. And good for you for reaching out for answers! I’m not MtF, so my experiences are gonna be a little different but I’ll give you a run down of what I did, and list options for you and sorta just explain the identity. At the end, I’ll link the resources I can! Hopefully you’ll find this useful!

(Please be warned that this is going to be long ! Everything is itemized and broken down for hopefully an easy understanding and help!)

My Experience / What I Did

When I realized I was Definitely Not Cis, I was fairly into adulthood. She/Her pronouns made me want to die, but he/him felt like a puzzle piece that could fit, but not quite. 

I started talking to a therapist about it, and still continue to this day with talking to my new therapist about it. Over the course of the early sessions, I ended up being diagnosed with gender dysphoria, where there’s distress / discomfort between my assigned gender and my gender identity.

From there, on my old blog, I made a post asking for people to use ‘Silas’ and ‘they/them’ for my pronouns. And it just fit perfectly. I elated that I was being referred to correctly -- the pronouns and the name didn’t make me cringe and want to die.

That’s what I did.

What Is Transgender?

Transgender is the term for someone who does not identity as the gender they were assigned with at birth. They can be a trans man, a trans woman, non binary, genderfluid, etc.

The Steps To Take

Talk to a professional who is trained with and is supportive of the LGBTQIA+ community. While it’s not required per se, I very much recommend it. Talking to a professional is incredibly useful for many reasons:

You can get your thoughts and feelings out to a non biased party.

They can help navigate and help you figure out the steps to take.

It’s good to talk to someone! This person can become part of your support network!

Find a supportive community! There’s a thriving trans community on Tumblr, and elsewhere on the internet!

These people are the ones you can go to and talk and ask questions about being trans and transitioning. People’s experiences vary and everyone has different insight!

They will also be a support network for when you need it!

And it doesn’t always need to be online, you can search up local groups where you live, there should be something nearby. If not, that’s okay! Internet friends are real friends too!

I really love r/transpositive and r/asktransgender! Everyone on those two subreddits are so nice and incredible. r/lgbt is also really cool!

I don’t know any community blogs here on Tumblr since I follow only writeblr’s but someone is likely to know something.

I’ve also got an LGBT+ based writeblr discord if you wish to join a welcoming & incredible community! There are also non writing LGBTQIA+ discords! I’m in one for gaming, and r/lgbt’s mod’s run a discord as well called Spectrum. Highly recommend.

Play around with names & pronouns -- and you can also play around with styles too! You’re discovering yourself and your identity. Do what you feel is comfortable.

You can ask a close group of friends you know would be supportive of you to refer to you with she/her pronouns (or whatever pronouns you prefer!), and a name you would like to be called by!

It’s okay if you pick a name now and want to change it later! Names are an important part of your identity and you need to feel comfortable with it!

Dress in clothes that’s considered to be for women. You don’t have to do super femme if you don’t want to! Like, there is no wrong way to dress and present yourself! There’s butch, there’s femme, there’s an in between, etc.

After all, we don’t force cis women to dress super femme and model like (and doubt their gender identity and presentation), so we shouldn’t expect trans women to adhere to those standards either.

However there is nothing wrong with wanting to do! If that sundress makes you feel like a model, and make up makes you feel wonderful, go for it!! And if dressing in jeans, boots, and a t-shirt makes you feel happy, do that!! Dress in a style that makes you feel happy about yourself!

If anyone complains, punch them. Or Snip Snip.

HRT / Transitioning - Hormone Replacement Therapy. This is the act of taking hormones to develop secondary sex characteristics -- trans men take testosterone (T) and trans women take estrogen. Doctors will also sometimes prescribe another hormone to go with it.

If you decide to transition, estrogen will cause a development of breasts, softer skin, fat distribution will be more feminine, and you’ll also develop curves. Essentially, you’ll be going through the typical female puberty.

You don’t have to take hormones if you do not want to or are not ready yet! This is not a be all, end all situation! Take your time and do research on it and the effects it will have!

If anyone tells you that you have to take HRT to be a ~real trans person~, punch them. They have no right telling you what you should do with your body.

This also leads me back to point one: the professional will be able to help you figure this out and help be a support during the process.

Starting Transition

Depending on where you are and your age is what will be available to you.

Some countries do not allow those under the age of eighteen to transition. Some do with explicit parental consent. Be sure to research this as well.

I don’t know if this has changed since I was a youngin, but you would have typically needed a diagnosis if gender dysphoria* in order to get the doctor’s okay and prescription to start HRT. There are exceptions to everything.

This also may depend on local laws too, so check those out!

Depending on what you’re prescribed, you may take birth control, you may have to take shots, etc.

Where you get your hormones also largely depends on where you are too. Here in the United States, universities offer them at their on site clinics (mine does, anyways!), and some Planned Parenthood’s also prescribe hormones too! I can’t speak for other countries, and I wouldn’t even know where to begin looking for you.

HRT is also hella expensive in some places.

If you live in a country with universal health care, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem!

Coming Out -- Don’t come out unless you are ready & you are in a safe environment to do so!

This is basically LGBTQIA+ 101. If you are not safe to do so, do not do it. I know it sucks, but your safety is absolutely number one!

Everything is going to be okay. You are okay, there is nothing wrong with you.

There are certain groups of people who will tell you that your identity may be ~wrong~ or whatever arguments they can think of. Do your best to ignore them, and when you need to, vent to the people you trust.

Things To Check Out

YouTubers:uppercaseCHASE is a trans man who talks about trans issues and his own transition. He has an HRT 101 series that might be helpful! His expertise is FTM (Trans men) so there will be things that might not be as helpful. Educational videos, however!

arielle scarcella - while i do not like her very much and disagree with a lot of her beliefs, she’s a cis lesbian who has done videos in the past that’s educational about trans people -- and frequently has trans women on her channel where they talk about their experiences with HRT, as well as Gender Affirming Surgery if they’ve had it. (same goes for trans men!)

andrea chrysanthe is a trans woman who has documented her experience with transitioning and does life updates. She recently released a two part video that talks a lot about it. (warning: I haven’t watched all of her videos, and some look to be NSFW for at least talk of kink so be careful going in!)

melanie-ish is another trans woman youtuber! she talks about political issues as well as her own experience with transitioning and coming out. (warning: she hasn’t updated her channel in two years!)

PRINCESSJOULES is another trans woman who also documents her life as a trans woman! She also does make up tutorials, vlogging, and a lot of other things!

jammidodger is a trans man who talks about his experience with transitioning. he is by far one of my most favorite youtubers!

(if anyone else has any youtuber recommends, feel free to add on!)

trans resources -

leolines on etsy. they sell underwear for trans women -- a safer alternative to tucking. they also have binders! fairly inexpensive, and so many styles and designs!

the trevor project’s international center - the trevor project in general is absolutely amazing! they have a lot of resources on their website from phone numbers you can call if you’re feeling suicidal to groups and support groups! this link, if you are out of the united states and are looking for something, will give you a listing of international resources! 

transgender law center - legal services and advocacy for trans folks!

trans women of color collective - an advocacy group for trans women of color! they do a lot to help trans women of color! check them out, they’re super cool!

trans youth equality federation  - they provide support for family membes of trans youth, trans youth, and allies. as well as education!

gender spectrum - provides support for all trans youth, as well as education for families and educators!

I AM: trans people speak - a project that was made to raise awareness of about the diversity that exists within the transgender community.

glaad - resources - glaad is a well known organization for advocacy and education!

WHEW ANON that was a lot. Hopefully you made it through to the end, and hopefully it was helpful! I hope those links above help provide some use for you and figuring out what steps you want to take.

On that note, if anybody who has read this wants to add on, they are free to do so. The above is only advice, from one person whose experience is one of millions and still, different.

AND ANON, one more thing! If you wish to talk, you are so much welcome to DM me! They’re open for non mutuals :)!

Good luck on your journey, may it provide you happiness!

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS AND B

Incidentally, nothing makes it more patently obvious that the old method now seemed alarmingly unreliable, like navigating by dead reckoning once you'd gotten used to a GPS. I find it unbearably restrictive to program in languages without macros, just as it was possible to go from rich to poor. But I have a separate laptop on the other side of the room to check email or browse the web, I become much more aware of it. I was in the bathroom! Restrictiveness is mostly lack of succinctness. They'll just remember you as the company with the boneheaded plan for making money, rather than the order in which they happen to appear on the screen. It's not just that it's demoralizing, but that is not how conversations with corp dev are like that but worse, because the paper would grow to the size of the market you're in. If I'd been forbidden to make enough money that I didn't have to worry about running out of money and b they can spend their time how they want. Drew Houston realizes he's forgotten his USB stick and thinks I really need to make my files live online. I agree that a line of Lisp.1 So the average quality of writing online isn't what the print media now use it.

You do it sitting at a desk. You just have to be inferior people. For some reason, the more effort you'll have to expend on selling your ideas rather than having them. This implies that the kind of work is the future. With time, as with money. You can also be at the leading edge as a user. I reply: here's the data; here's the theory; theory explains data 100%. If you're not at the leading edge of a field that's changing fast, when you have ideas, you'll be confident enough to tell them the low monthly payment. Bill Woods once told me that, as a rule of thumb, each layer of interpretation costs a factor of 10 in speed. So when a language feels restrictive, what that mostly means is that we are talking about the future, then it's probably big enough no matter how cozy the terms. In fact they might have had net less pain; because the fear of dealing with payments is a schlep for Stripe, but not an intolerable one. A lot of the same things we said at the last two.

I know, was Fred Brooks in the Mythical Man Month. But business administration is not what you're doing as soon as possible, preferably in the first year. There have to be on most. After all, they're just a subset of lists in which the elements are characters. If you want to make terribly risky choices, if the upside looks good enough. But a company that managed a large enough number of companies could say to all its clients: we'll combine the revenues from all your companies, and they even let kids in. Which is particularly painful to someone who wants to buy you. Now everyone can, and then either by taxation or by limiting what they can charge to confiscate whatever you deem to be surplus. Wow.

A web site for college students to stalk one another? If you describe your web-based database might resist calling their applicaton that, because it makes the rich richer too. Thirty years later Facebook had the same shape. Matters are decided in the discussion preceding the vote, not in the vote itself, which is why this trend began with them. And if the candidates are equally charismatic, charisma will cancel out, and elections will be decided on issues, if only out of habit or politeness. In any purely economic relationship you're free to do what you want. I knew would be hard to distinguish from a partisan attack on them, but though they can end up in the same way I write essays, making pass after pass looking for anything I can cut. You know there's demand, and people don't say that about things that are obvious, and yet with the right optimization advice to the compiler, would also yield very fast code when necessary. If such management companies existed, they'd offer the maximum of freedom and security.

Even if you find someone else working on the same thing, you're probably happiest on the main branches of an evolutionary tree. Probably the single biggest piece of evidence, initially, will be your own confidence in it. And if the candidates are equally charismatic, charisma will cancel out, and it could require interpretation in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of Gilded Age financiers contending with one another to assemble railroad monopolies. Millions of people are mildly interested in a social network for pet owners. I know are professors, but it seems a good sign when you know that an idea will appeal strongly to a specific group or type of user. Maybe some aspects of professionalism are actually a net lose for the buyer, though, as mere readability-per-line could be a good trick to look for things that seem to be missing. Bill Woods once told me that, as with the stupendous speed of the underlying hardware, parallelism will be wasted. Four years later, pundits said the country had lurched to the right. Many employees would like to believe elections are won and lost on issues, if only out of habit or politeness.2

You don't simply get to do whatever you want; the good stuff spreads, and the power of TV, Kennedy apparently would not have been a good startup idea, it's not a coincidence: you have probably discovered a useful new abstraction.3 So approach this like an algorithm that gets the right answer for dealing with Internet distractions will be software that watches and controls them. But that is not, at least. The only thing worth talking about first is the problem you're trying to solve is still there. It's good to talk about the value of what they were doing—particularly that the better a job they did, I see no reason to believe today's union leaders would shrink from the challenge. This kind of metric would allow us to compare different languages, but that if someone wanted to design a language explicitly to disprove this hyphothesis, they could probably do it.4 If you're really at the leading edge of a domain that's changing fast. A friend of mine who knows nearly all the code you write this way will be reusable. What did I do before x?5 Some days I'd wake up, get a cup of tea, or walking around the neighborhood.6 Say what you're doing in a startup. The evolution of languages differs from the evolution of programming languages might be the percentage of people who should know better.

If you're talking to someone from corp dev wants to meet, the founders still had a majority of board seats, then your opinion about what's in the interest of the shareholders; but if you have a hunch that something is truly missing. You need to use a more succinct language, and b someone who took the trouble to do this could leave competitors who didn't in the dust. Your company has to make money, but mainly because it shows you care about is what happens in the next hundred years. TV. For some reason, the more extroverted of the two founders did most of the extra computer power we're given will go to waste. Increase taxes, and willingness to take risks. I can see a path that's not immediately obvious; that's one of our specialties at YC. That may seem utopian, but it's close enough that except in pathological examples, I thought succinctness could be considered identical with power. Most of the legal restrictions on employers are intended to protect employees. Of nonstop work. And God help you if you fire anyone.

But I didn't understand the equation governing my behavior. Or hasn't it? Ironically, though open source and blogging show us things don't have to learn programming to be at the leading edge of a domain that's changing fast, when you try to attack wealth, you end up nailing risk as well, and with them your income. He seemed to want the job more. They counted as work, just as everyone knows that Can you pass the salt? A quarter of their life. We're Jeff and Bob and we've built an easy to use web-based database might resist calling their applicaton that, because it means that if you can't predict whether there's a path out of an idea? A round. If not, just don't take the first meeting. And the kind of work is the future. So at dinner afterward we collected all our tips about presenting to investors.

Notes

The biggest counterexample here is defined from the CIA runs a venture fund called In-Q-Tel that is largely true, it has to be a niche. You should be asking will you build this?

They have no way of calculating real income ignores much of The New Industrial State to trying to enter the software business, or to be a lot of people starting normal companies too. The wartime versions were much more attractive to investors, even if they don't. You owe them such updates on your thesis. After a while we were using Lisp, though sloppier language than I'd use to develop server-based applications.

There is of course, but they were regarded as 'just' even after the Physics in the original version of Explorer. Of the remaining 13%, 11 didn't have TV because they actually do, I'll have people nagging me for features.

I wonder if they'd like, and no one knows how many of the most promising opportunities, it is to start software companies, summer jobs are the numbers we have to be free to work not just something the mainstream media needs to, but at least seem to someone still implicitly operating on the East Coast. So instead of the device that will pay the bills so you can get for 500 today would have.

If anyone wants to invest in so many different schools of thought about how the courses they took might look to an employer. I didn't need to get good grades in them to keep the number at Harvard Business School at the top startup law firms are Wilson Sonsini, Orrick, Fenwick West, Gunderson Dettmer, and that we didn't, they thought at least prevent your investors from helping you to believing in natural selection in the cupboard, but I couldn't convince Fred Wilson to fund them. If only one. He couldn't even afford a monitor.

Xkcd implemented a particularly alarming example, I use the local builders built everything in it, and only incidentally to tell someone that I was writing this, though sloppier language than I'd use to calibrate the weighting of the funds we raised was difficult, and some just want that first few million. The dialog on Beavis and Butthead was composed largely of these limits could be fixed within a niche.

Thanks to Geoff Ralston, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Sam Altman for reading a previous draft.

[alexanderessex3dstoryart]

Character Design - Anatomy and Robot Design Research -  28th of December

For this research section for my character, I thought I looked at body anatomy and robot designs online to help with my research for the character design project. This will mainly help to look at not only interesting robot designs that I can help towards my research, but also think about functionally how and mechanically would these parts work and how could I carry this over into a CG model-making process.

To start off with, I began to look into anatomy online like the different types of body forms as well as looking into muscles and bones for humans as this would help me with my visual library in coming up for ideas for my characters as well as helping me out later for my silhouette designs/drawings later on. I first looked at different body language in not only in a design sense but also posing wise too as one of the criticisms with my turnaround previously was how stiff the character looked as it didn’t have any flow to the character. This is why I didn’t just look at body shape but also something called contrapposto flow which shows how you can give flow to a model/character in a standing pose using Michelangelo’s statue as reference. Through just exaggerating in areas like the shoulders and ankles by titliting them, you create a more true to life character on screen than a character that’s standing in an A-pose that gives freedom to express which can also in term describe the character from just looking at it. Learning this, I understand the comments from the tutorial a lot better as this creates a much more dynamic and varied pose that allows you to understand the character better.

Body Form Diagram 

Michelangelesque Contrapposto

After this, I then did some research on bones and muscles in the human anatomy as I felt inspired from one of my favourite artists of all time (Igor Verniy) as one of his projects led to him combining human bones with scrap metal and mechanical parts he found in a scrapyard to create these really disturbing but gorgeous looking sculptures. 

Because of his artwork, it influenced me to look down this path of bones with technology which a video I found online really helped solidified what I wanted to do for the Hyde character’s design. From casually browsing on Youtube, I stumbled across a video of a deer snorting in the cold where visibly you can see the cold mist fly out of it’s nostrils. Because of this detail, it clicked in my head that I wanted to base my Hyde character using a Deer head as the basis for the design which linked in with Igor Verniy’s work, influenced me to look into trying to make a deer’s skull incorporated with technology. This was because I could imagine a mechanised deer that is collectively made from scrap and bone that is collected from the ground to help build up this monstrous beast as well as smoke snortling out of the deer’s nostrils.

Whitetail Buck Encounter With a Serious Snort || ViralHog

Because of this new revelation, I began to research into two different types of mood boards for the Hyde character with one looking at deer heads and skulls and ideas for the Hyde character based off my deer prompt. Starting with the first mood board, I wanted to look at the designs of the antlers and the skulls as I plan to use these as a base for the head of the character and maybe design aesthetics for the body too. Two images I really love are the more metallic deer skulls and the real skulls with their large teeth as the teeth aesthetically is something I might enhance on the characters deign as well as the metallic skull of a deer as i’m looking to experiment in both fully metallic skulls and a cross between the middle.

For the the second mood board, I came across a scandinavian folklore called a Kyrkogrim which is a deity that often protects christian churches and they’re grounds from people that want to try and harm it. From this, I found that there could be symbolism from the folk tale could be implemented between the characters as Hyde while his methods are outlandish and brutal is all in all trying to protect his smaller vessel from straying away from his self and losing his identity. Researching the Kyrkogrim online, I found a lot of depictions of the creature being very human like but having a deer like head for its appearance which I was particularly fond of ‘Specimen 8′ from Spooky’s house of Jumpscares (the deer deity on the left of the mood board) as I love his creepy design to him from the antlers to his long and elongated cloak flowing down his body. I think if I was to create him more nuclear, it would be the main basis of where I would want to be taking forward with the character. In addition to looking at the Kyrkogrim, I also looked at the designs of the Wendigo as it’s another piece of folk-lore that I was inspired by as it also contains these deer like creatures in its depecitions. In addition to the folk-lore research, I looked into big bulky character designs mostly of the mechanical nature as the character is going to be made up of scrap metal lying across the ground which I instantly gravitated towards the bottom robot design for it’s cluster of colours and unproportionate shapes.  

Through doing research on robots, I look into few images of real life robots that are made today and see how mechanically they work as well their design aesthetic. In addition too, I looked into robots built up from scrap metal for references and compare in visuals against the real life robots.

I first started off researching looking at robotic movement to see how morden robots have evolved in their articulation. This is where I stumbled across this video where a robot can simulate human movement in its body. Whilst not a fully autonomous robot that moves itself, understanding its movement was really fascinating to watch from how jittery but also smooth the movements were from the arms, legs and body of the robot were but quite strange at the same time with details like the legs and hands being so stiff in places. The design of the robot was something that really struck me as they use a lot of smooth and curved panels to hide the electronics of the robot but also have exposed areas in the arms and legs like wires and bolts.

This Humanoid Robot Can Mimic Human Movement In Real Time | Mach | NBC News

From this first bit of research, this then led me to the Boston Dynamics Youtube channel where their most recent video showcases all of their most developed robots dancing to the song ‘Do you Love Me’. I was completely mesmerised by the animation and how in sync they were all in together especially for something that's been made today. The main highlight was how each robot had their own style of movement to them giving them a different personality as they danced. The robot people acted jittery and stiff but somehow smooth with the dog and crane robots much smoother but much more limited in flexibility compared to the human based robots. Overseeing the robots dancing and watching a few more of the other demos of the robots opening doors and doing stunts, they have a very slow and jittery movement to them before they do a really quick action like they’re building up energy for the action. This is definitely more seen in the human based robots as the non-human like ones operate movement is a lot smoother but often hold a position/stance before a next move is made. 

In terms of design, they almost follow the same principles to the Toyota robots with the smooth white panel design to them with loose cables visible to the eye. However I prefer these robots to the Toyota ones very greatly as their visuals are more the kind of design I want to imagine for my Hyde character as they may have the protective panels on the more sensitive parts of the robots so they aren’t damaged, the loose cables and the exposed mechanisms that can be seen are so up my street for the character as it gives it a very futuristic look to it without looking too smart which what modern robots tend to look like. This is mostly shown in the human based robots that Boston Dynamics have made as the dog and crane are designed to have no protective panels or completely protective. Not this is a problem as both of their designs I really enjoy as I love the smartness of the dog looking robot and the complex and technical nature of the crane as they complement each other really well from how they move.

Do You Love Me?

Hey Buddy, Can You Give Me a Hand?

What's new, Atlas?

Images from the ‘Do you Love me’ video by Boston Dynamics

After the Boston Dynamics research, I then looked into scrap/junk based robot designs on the internet as that's how I imagine the Hyde character to look like when I will design him. Going back to when I was first thinking about the character in this blog post. the character ‘Metro’ from the film ‘Reel Steel’ is the the exact direction I would want to take with this character and possibly for the render style too. This is mostly from the irregular shapes that have been attached to the design like they’ve been randomly placed on the character in a frankenstein sort of fashion to the character which would work really well with my Hyde character as he gathers bits and bobs collectively around his surroundings. Going back to variety, I love how the arm joints are constructed here as its on a three ball hinge but being really exposed compare to the other arm which is heavily built too. I think from observing this design, I want to do a cross between irregular shapes on the characters design in addition to the smart looking design of the Boston Dynamics robots. Essentially, a fusion between Reel Steel’s Metro and Boston Dynamics Human-like robot is what my Hyde character should look like with deer elements inspired for the character.

Below is the mood board I also created when looking into the scrap aesthetic and creating a scrap robot of some kind. Like with ‘Metro’, i wanted to focus on irregular shapes for the Hyde character as this is how I imagine he's going to be built up which I looked at character which were not inherently bulky but more going along that brief. With the top right image in the corner of this mood board, it uses an excellent use of these irregular shapes with bits of metal sticking out of the body. Another thing I like from these mood board images is that I’ve looked at a variety of both bulky and thin character designs as they use different ways to build up the metal and parts to make the character like the one on top with the purple background being comprised of one solid object compared to the one below it with different parts scattered across the design with different patterns. 

Looking back on my research over these couple of days, I’m really happy from my findings as not only have I developed my understanding on the themes for my characters but also coming with new ideas and visuals that I can work from to make a final design for my characters. I think my favourite part of my research was looking up the deer-related content for the Hyde character as I ended finding a lots of cool references dwelled into like the Kyrkogrim and looking at modern day robots like the ones from Boston Dynamics. Their design of the panels being spaced out is something I would really love to incorporate into the character with loose cables and mechanisms being exposed to the eye.

[comm2800mockumentary-blog]

Blog 11 - Realism and practicality

For my idea to work I needed to pre-plan and detail the practicality of each shoot. I did this in a few different ways to ensure that my two week plan would work:

- Narrative: Firstly, I outlined the narrative I wanted to achieve. And sectioned my ideas into categories based on this (these are organised by colour). I then looked into how this would correlate to the visuals and noted down a general idea of what I envisioned. As mentioned in an earlier post, I want to experiment with my style of documentary making. Thus, pre-noting the narrative helped me chose the style I wished to opt for - if it was an interview, for example, I wanted to be more traditional, and rely on the right cuts to make the story more engaging. 

- Equipment: I then made an essential kit list, highlighting the equipment I would need for different shoots. I tried to ensure the safety of the equipment when I pre-planning the kit needed - would I need assistance? Could I avoid packing extra or unnecessarily heavy equipment? 

- Timeline: I gave myself a two week guideline period to film and edit a 2-2.5 part episode. This period seems realistic as I only set myself up to a maximum of 2 tasks per day. However, my project will be heavily edit-based meaning that I will have to continually be editing through-out the filming of my production. Likewise, should I notice any missing parts to my docu-series or find that there is ‘too much in too little time’, then I left myself space to re-adjust the sequence either by adding more days or scrapping a few scenes. 

:( - Because the timeline is so compact and doesn’t have much room for error, this could potentially hinder my production in terms of collating the structure or narrative I have in mind. For example, if the shoot doesn’t go to plan, a subject drops out last minute or there is an equipment malfunction; I could potentially lose an essential day’s worth of filming. For this reason, I will allow a couple of days leeway either side (around 4-5 in total) for an issues. However, I will not count this as part of the production until completely necessary. 

Another essential area within my pre-planning was anticipating the risk assessments. As I’ve used these many times in the past, I knew what to expect and was happy to do this for each shoot to ensure the safety of the subject, myself and the equipment too. Risk assessments would follow a similar pattern to the Siso link for equipment hire. My priority was to ensure that the subject came and left the production with no psychological or physical harm and to prepare for this, I believed that risk assessments would be useful. 

Release forms would also be an essential part of documenting the subject. This would not only allow me to film them during the production but also allow me to distribute the documentary with their consent. 

-

Update: 

[Due to a change in my approach, I now will be adopting a new style of ‘sit down’ interviews. For this I assembled a series of questions. Before I could utilise them in real life however, I wanted to try them out on some peers who were willing to contribute to my project idea; not knowing much, if any, of the documentary’s back story. The full list of questions are available on the next blog.]

Interview testing:

To test out some of my questions I interacted with my online peers for some feedback. I gave them some broad topics to engage with and asked them to return their answers via email. Whilst I did remind my interviewees that they need not answer all the questions, should they feel upset or uncomfortable, I also allowed them to ‘opt out’ at any point, as this would be part of the real process too. 

To protect their identity I gave them anonymity and changed their names into codes. Below are some REAL interviewees who participated in my test-run:

1) What do you know about Coronavirus? (Where did it start and how did it spread?)

2G01B: It is a virus that most people recover from but for those with pre existing health conditions or the rare few healthy people, it can be fatal. I don’t know how it started - some people claim it’s man made as a conspiracy, I wouldn’t say I agree but I don’t disagree either, it is a possibility. The cause seems unknown, it’s spread from Wuhan and no one took it seriously so people travelled in an out of Wuhan spreading it across the world without knowing 2) What was the hardest part of adjusting to the new restrictions?

2G01B: Not being able to see my family especially my younger cousin who is 3. At this age they grow so quickly, and I feel like I am missing her childhood. Not being able to see my friends and not being able to go to the gym/having my uni time cut short. Going for drinks and socialising

3) What have you learnt from this experience?

2G01B: The British government only care about the economy. They made lockdown procedures that would only help middle class people, they haven’t thought about disadvantaged groups at all. They just expect them to go out on the frontline with no protection and help society function. The government should have stopped travel into the UK from countries it was known to be prominent in in the beginning, the scale of it could have been avoided for Britain. MSP19:  I’ve learnt who is truly there for you and how important moments with friends are and to not take anything for granted

SS20T:  The money, my phone, the internet ain't shit. Happiness and money is the one. “When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can't eat money.” -Alanis Obomsawin

4) What was your best or worst memory of covid-19 / lockdown?

2G01B: Best was spending quality time with the family, learning new skills, having my friends come and sit from a distance outside my house and talk to me. And the worst would be worrying about my sister who is a midwife.

5) Was there a time in lockdown that you were grateful for? 

MSP19: Yes, spending time with family and being able to work on myself 

SS20T:  I am grateful for getting some time to get to know myself, for taking a step back and seeing whats working for me and what not, more importantly what really matters to me and what I can do to be happier

6) Was there a moment during the pandemic that you felt that you had made a personal contribution to the country’s efforts? If so, how?

MSP19: Felt like I’d made my contribution when I took food to my ill nannan

SS20T:  I decided to work in a super market so those employees that are in danger can stay safe at home and it also brings me a bit of a profit

7) Has your opinion on the virus changed since you first heard about it? 

MSP19: My opinion has changed because I didn’t take it seriously at first, I didn’t think it would be something that would affect me

SS20T: Yes. The media is all lies and what we should do is stay home, be strong and check on family.

8) How do you think life will be effected after? 

2G01B: I think our social interaction will completely change...People won’t want to be close to each other or hug etc which will be really upsetting, I think we will become even more socially distant than we even were before this 

- 

Of course answers could have, and I believe would definitely, differ, or be a little more personal at least, if the interviews were conducted in person. Thus this isn’t a true representation of my interview but just an example of the types of questions I’d ask and the responses I would get from differing subjects. 

[exploringsocialinformatics]

Blog #6: The Internet Could Empower Women If People Would Just Be Cool For Once

I wrote this based on the article Young Women’s Blogs as Ethical Spaces by Mia Lovheim, which I chose because I was interested by how constructive the Internet was framed and because, as a woman who has strong opinions on the internet, I know that isn’t necessarily always the case.

I have been a woman on the Internet for roughly seventeen years and it has opened up so many opportunities for me to express myself, to meet and engage with people I could’ve never connected to in real life and to collaborate with similarly-minded writers and artists. I’ve made lifelong friends online, fallen in love online (I wouldn’t recommend this but it’s fun while it lasts!) and developed so many aspects of my identity.

The only reason that I have been able to do these things is because I have done them in woman-dominated spaces and queer-dominated spaces.

Because while I’ve shared my opinions on Tumblr as a curated, personal space, I’ve shared the same opinions on Twitter and had someone threaten to rape me.

The internet is amazing! It’s also a toxic cesspool that limits my ability to express myself and open up my ideas to a wider audience! Both things are simultaneously true even though it’s sometimes difficult to rectify them.

There’s an encouraging amount of literature surrounding gender-based harassment online. Many of them give strong examples of the kind of harassment that women and female-presenting people face when they do things like say words and have emotions where people can see them online. Most women won’t need to dig into that literature because they see this in their daily lives; men experience online harassment at dissimilar rates and of a dissimilar nature (harassment aimed toward men is typically homophobic or belittling their masculinity; gendered but not nearly as violent [Jane 533]), but if they’d like to see examples of the vitriol that women face, all they need to do is read replies to tweets by women who talk about politics or sports or video games or television or music or movies or. . .you get the picture.

The point of this is not that the internet is irredeemable—although I am going to share enough of that literature that it may appear that we absolutely should burn it down and start over—but that it needs to be redeemed. We’ll get there, though.

Amnesty International has done a lot of work studying the issue of online harassment of women. In response to the #WomenBoycottTwitter day, they commissioned a poll that included women between the ages of 18 and 55 in Denmark, Italy, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the UK and USA. They found that 33% of women in the United States had experienced online harassment or abuse—and it’s important to remember the context that these are not all necessarily people who are actively using social media, especially considering the age range (”Amnesty Reveals Alarming [. . .]”).

TIME reports that the United Nations did a study that said that 73% of women have experienced online harassment—I would lean toward accepting theirs as it seems Amnesty’s sample size was limited (Alter 2015).

I’m going to toss out a list of statistics that came from the Amnesty poll that are genuinely upsetting to consider:

41% of women who had experienced harassment were made to feel physically unsafe

26% were doxxed by their harassers

46% said the harassment was rooted in misogyny specifically

25% were threatened with physical or sexual violence  (Amnesty International 2017)

Remembering again that this was a poll targeting women and not just women who are regular social media users, these numbers are staggering. And these aren’t just individual occurrences or one-off attacks. The nature of Twitter in particular means that messages spread rapidly—and so do attacks. According to studies of Twitter’s abuse reports, at least 29% of the reports filed by women were addressing ongoing attacks (Women, Action & Media) and according to an additional poll from Amnesty: the more visible and vocal a woman in, the more frequent harassment she’ll endure. A study of 778 female politicians and journalists (disproportionately women of color) found that they received abusive tweets every 30 seconds—1.1 million a year between them.

I couldn’t possibly get into #GamerGate here and give it the attention it deserves but, if you managed to avoid that nightmare in 2014, it’s something to look up that will really cement this problem for you.

And it is a problem—but it’s not just a problem because women feel threatened, because allowing a culture of harassment and degradation like this is inherently wrong, because this is something that impacts our lives on a semi-regular basis even if we’re not public figures. It’s also a problem because women are being silenced.

Even back in the early 90s before the insane access that we all have to each other online, women were “found to introduce fewer topics of discussion and receive fewer public responses than men” (Megarry 29). It’s no different than women speaking less in a classroom or meeting (Tannen 2017)—just a different venue. That form of silence seems more rooted in social norms, though, and in the early 2000s, according to Rodriguez-Darias and Aguilera-Avila, “the expansion of the online world was hailed as a catalyst for the development of democracy, equality and women’s empowerment by enabling access to information and social support” (63).

All of that is still true in 2020 and has made an incalculable difference to women all across the world. It’s just that now they’re statistically far more likely to receive hundreds of threats of violence and rape and have their address shared all across social media platforms because they said something about a video game.

Those threats and that atmosphere that makes women feel unsafe and like they can’t truly express themselves creates a framework that holds women back. When I said that I formed my identity on the Internet, it’s some of the most tender important parts of me—if I had been faced with this kind of harassment when I was younger, it would have been detrimental and I would have lost one of the few safe spaces I felt I had. People use the internet to convey their identities in so many ways that can be taken away from women: hashtags “convey attitudes and social identity” (Fox, Cruz, Lee) but also makes it easier for harassers to target you, “gendered avatars and usernames” (Assuncao) allow for gender expression that. . .makes it easier for harassers to target you, and all of these things tie into self-esteem that women could be building if they had access to positive, empowering communities. And it is unquestionably impacting their self-esteem: according to Amnesty International’s report, 61% of women experienced lower self-esteem and Emma A. Jane compiled information about how women described their experiences with online harassment, with words like “distress, pain, shock, fear, terror, devastation and violation” (536).

Because of that distress, that fear, that terror—women self-censor themselves. According to the same Amnesty report, 76% changed the way they used Twitter after facing attacks and 32% stopped talking about certain topics altogether. By being forced to endure the same gendered violence and discrimination that we face in the real world in a virtual setting, it’s like there’s no escape.

There’s one issue that can be brought up to complicate this: freedom of speech. This argument doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny on a base level. Social media networks aren’t actually entirely beholden to the First Amendment—which prevents the government from silencing you, although its reach has differed—and Twitter has a conduct policy that prohibits threats, slurs, degrading people, wishing ill on people, etc (Hateful Conduct Policy). The Internet often exists as a lawless, Wild West-type place, though (your Reddits when poorly monitored, your 4Chans, for example), and there will always be people on it that will believe that the freedom to speak their minds supersedes everything else. Freedom of speech is important and these are useful conversations to have to make sure that the platforms that we’re using are operating equitably.

A platform that allows women to be shamed or threatened into silence is not operating equitably, though. We should have the freedom to speak openly without worrying about our safety. Twitter is already addressing this issue but it hasn’t been enough—according to the survey of their abuse reports, only 55% of reports led to suspended accounts, 67% of women who reported said they’d done so at least twice and, mostly notably—Twitter’s staff at the time of their study (2014) was 79% men (Women, Action & Media).

Let’s loop back around to my ultimate point here: redeeming the Internet. Focusing on Twitter, there are plenty of plans of actions they could take to do better, including hiring more women and actively listening to their feedback, training their employees more thoroughly to recognize and address forms of harassment, and being more open about condemning both misogyny and other systemic issues like the spread of White Supremacy. These are all relatively small steps that could start to change the wider culture and start the inevitably unbearably slow process of detoxifying the Internet so it’s accessible for everyone.

Resources

Alter, C. (2015, September 24). UN: Cyber Violence is Equivalent to Physical Violence. Retrieved from https://time.com/4049106/un-cyber-violence-physical-violence/

Amnesty and Element AI release largest ever study into abuse against women on Twitter. (2018, December 18). Retrieved from https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/12/crowdsourced-twitter-study-reveals-shocking-scale-of-online-abuse-against-women/ 

Amnesty reveals alarming impact of online abuse against women. (2017, November 20). Retrieved from https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/11/amnesty-reveals-alarming-impact-of-online-abuse-against-women/

Assuncao, Carina. (2016). “No girls on the internet”: The experience of female gamers in the masculine space of violent gaming.” Press Start, 3(1).

Fox, J., Cruz, C., & Lee, J. Y. (2015). Perpetuating online sexism offline: Anonymity, interactivity, and the effects of sexist hashtags on social media. Computers in Human Behavior, 52, 436–442.

Jane, E. A. (2012). “Your a Ugly, Whorish, Slut.” Feminist Media Studies, 14(4), 531–546.

Megarry, J. (2014). Online incivility or sexual harassment? Conceptualizing women’s experiences in the digital age. Women’s Studies International Forum, 47, 46–55. 

Rodríguez-Darias, A. J., & Aguilera-Ávila, L. (2018). Gender-based harassment in cyberspace. The case of Pikara magazine. Womens Studies International Forum, 66, 63–69.

Tannen, D. (2017, June 28). Do Women Really Talk More Than Men? Retrieved from https://time.com/4837536/do-women-really-talk-more/

Twitter. (2020). Hateful conduct policy. Retrieved from https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-conduct-policy

Women, Action & Media. (2015, May 15). Reporting, Reviewing, and Responding to Harassment on Twitter.

[shinmegamitensei2]

i was gonna sleep cus i’m tired as shit but then my brain started blaring some thoughts in my head so now i can’t sleep, so now you guys get to hear me ramble angrily about privilege and intersections of it on my blog instead

warning: this is extremely long and at points starts to sound like “pwease weave the poow twans men awone we did nofing wrong uwu” but i promise there’s a point somewhere in here about how we gotta start thinking about what we say has consequences

just... i get so angry when privilege is conflated to “if you have it, you have every single facet of it and you always benefit from it” when that’s really not the case at all, and to treat privilege as a single card that is separate from, and consequently unaffected by personal experience, other VISIBLE aspects of identity and individuality, and so forth is a really flawed way of thinking

the way i see most people explain or treat privilege is whether you have, say, a “privilege card” and the more you accumulate, the more privileged you are and thus the more benefits society offers you as a result of your status over another person (say, a white cis straight man is far more privileged than a black trans gay woman)

this is it, a simplification of privilege, easily digestible and easy enough to regurgitate to other people to get them to understand on an elementary level what it means to have privilege - when you have it, you have benefits over another person because society deems you better than another person

but then the conversation stops there. it stops, and this simplification becomes a hard and fast rule rather than the beginning of an educational moment, and suddenly we have concepts such as self-determination of your identity means you can gain and drop privileges as you change and determine WITHIN YOURSELF who you are, rather than what society deems you as

and therein lies the problem: how do you gain or lose privilege? how does the concept of passing privilege factor into all this? what does it mean to pass, or to not pass, and can privilege be bargained, can it only be half-gained or half-lost, can it change on a whim?

the only times i ever see this brought up, it’s by some asshat who’s got some shitty opinions or is trying to defend the privileged group wherein exchanges of power usually do not happen on the level i’m trying to discuss (re: race and a white person whose family is predominantly european-white, although there is a lot to be said about someone who is white but also comes from a mixed family and the way that privilege can also be bartered based on perceived appearance versus the reality) but what i really want to look into, specifically, is the bartering of privilege gained and lost through identification as trans, nonbinary, or another gender unrecognized by mainstream society

because, like... it’s here, i feel like, where passing privilege becomes its most prominent (as well as sexuality and the culture surrounding it that has crafted a persona, either influenced by or influencing [or both!!] by homophobic caricatures of the past and present) and where we need to start having discussions, serious discussions, about how one passes not only affects their privilege, but also that we cannot and should not treat people specifically based on what privileges or disprivileges we believe they should be experiencing in their day-to-day lives, because... it doesn’t work that way

there’s such a monumental difference between people at different stages of passing, and what information they have about them that is on the internet, or among their friends and family, or to their bosses and coworkers or if it gets leaked in ways they didn’t intend or want people to see or know

i AM going to use trans men in this example, being one myself, because i don’t intend to try and explain anything using experiences that don’t belong to myself so as to not misrepresent anyone, so i apologize that this comes off as being really whiny and “wahhh stop treating transmasc ppl badly” because a whole lot of trans masc and trans men adopt misogyny and absorb toxic masculinity in an attempt to become masculine, in a world where manliness is often defined by how much you can reject femininity and the constant attempts to redefine masculinity in a way that doesn’t allow male predators to adopt it solely to hurt women I’M GOING ON A TANGENT ANYWAY

there was a point i wanted to make here, and it was specifically on the idea that, like... you cannot ever, possibly, expect a trans man who is completely untransitioned and is seen, societally, as a woman, to own any amount of male privilege that makes any real difference where it matters aside from an online community wherein anonymity is valued, but also in said community where that information (that they are trans, whether or not they mention they are untransitioned) may be open and ENCOURAGED to be posted online for the sake of engaging in these conversations in the first place

as opposed to a trans man who is fully transitioned, has spent several years being accepted as a man, having absorbed ideas about masculinity that may make him indistinguishable from other men and nobody questions his status as a man, and all of this is STILL contingent on the fact that nobody knows or SHOULD know that he is trans, as once that information comes out on a platform where people feel empowered to challenge him (not only including the internet, but in real life, where it is common and encouraged for men to engage in violence, especially where bigotry is concerned)

as opposed to any trans men who may be in between, too! a man who is taking T, whose voice is changing over time and where his neighbors may catch onto what’s going on and grow suspicious; a man who takes strides to act masculine where he can, but who is stifled in an environment where he could be abused or killed purely on account of transphobia; a man who does not WANT to take the steps required for society to fully “recognize” him as a man, and so may never be able to fully participate in presenting the way he wants

this is all transphobia, full stop. not transmisandry or whatever weirdo terms ppl are coming up with these days, but there is a lot to be said in how transness AFFECTS male privilege, and how that male privilege may be adopted, absorbed, and enacted depending on the way that society recognizes men, maleness and masculinity

trans masculinity, and the state of being a trans man, is not an experience shared by every trans man. trans men are not all the same - some are trans nonbinary men, some transition, some do not, some adopt abusive techniques and toxicity that comes built into the system that tells us what being a man is and what being a woman is (although i could also argue that in a lot of ways, to be recognized as a man without having homophobia and transphobia and misogyny thrown at you constantly is to HAVE to participate in these systems, but alas)

there is a wide variety of difference in all of these people, and how they are recognized on a widescale manner that makes any shred of difference outside of this website - which begs another question! where does privilege travel? can it disappear or appear depending on where you are? where you go? can you have privilege on tumblr, but then have it vanish when you leave this website?

there’s a distortion, a way we talk about privilege and the privileged folk, that makes it so damn difficult to discuss the finer and more important details about privilege, intersection, and how privilege is not the same for everyone. it CANNOT be the same for everyone, because passing privilege is not yet another token given to people just to show that they have it! and privilege is not a set of cards and coins that come separately and totally irrelevant of each other!

a trans man is pelted by misogyny, homophobia, as well as transphobia when he does not pass. just as cis men are pelted with these ideas, so too are trans men. and yes, they are misguided. they hurt women and gay people more than they hurt men and straight people, this much should be obvious to anyone. but these things - they are STILL internalized, and how they are internalized changes depending on who is on the receiving end, and in many ways these things are markers and indicators of how to and how not to act for men

i wanted to keep going on about this point and i think i have more to say but my end point with all this is just that privilege changes power depending on where you are, who you are, and on a moment’s notice depending on what information people have a hold of, and i know i did a not-great job of explaining this but also i’m just venting so whatever

another thought occurred to me, about something i was thinking about earlier today, and it’s about how we talk about this concept, and how we approach privilege and privileged people and people whose privilege may variably change

obviously tumblr’s a bad place to be. it’s polarizing, because a lot of people use it as a place to vent, and there’s a lot of gross and nasty people here (including highly-privileged folk and fucking neo-nazis for fuck’s sake) and having long and meaningful conversations here is pointless because it’s drowned out by the obsession and need for having notes yet lacking a cohesive way to spread posts and all proper additions to that post without someone losing some form of context along the way

(that fucking, pewdiepiekin post goin around is one such example, since it’s apparently a joke that OP has but everyone’s treating it as fact, and like obviously it’s hard to tell sarcasm on this website given how much weird shit we’ve seen, but also that it’s FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE to correct such a misunderstanding BECAUSE of the very nature of tumblr itself, go figure)

but that’s also why i think we gotta have this conversation, this like... talk that we can’t keep talking about shit the way we have been, especially in regards to social justice and conceptualizing it for the younger kids who USE this website, and like... we just gotta have a different way of approaching things now, because the more i watch idle chats where people gleefully and openly post screenshots of others making fun of them for minor shit or momentary fuck-ups that could be easily ignored because the person is still learning (ESPECIALLY IF THEY’RE LIKE 14) and otherwise give themselves a free pass to become openly vicious and in the name of coping or to share amongst their friends how pathetic they view some people

like ok not to be a liberal and i’d rather not be classified as such because i don’t lick the boots of the privileged or pull any of that devil’s advocate shit but this extremely hostile environment we’ve cultivated and continually defend because we think this website creates ANY sort of meaningful difference in the world and anything we do on this website has any sort of meaningful impact that is beneficial to us while also openly encouraging behaviors that mitigate and deny growth and learning from mistakes is honestly kind of fucking scary

this is in no way saying giving a pass or go on behavior that directly spreads violence like saying slurs and whatnot, but we’re also so, so very fucking vicious, and at some point, no matter what reason you have for saying what you do, the consequence is that your words and intents get hijacked and used out of context in a manner that forms high hostility in the first place

and it’s so, so hard to talk about here too, without going “well if you hate men hurr durr it’s ur fault everything on this site sucks don’t openly say you hate your oppressors hurr durr!” like that’s such an easy trap to fall into but i don’t believe that either, even if i’ve grown distasteful of openly expressing “i hate cis men” (because they terrify me and could murder me at a moment’s notice, both for thinking i’m a woman and for finding out i am trans) or “i hate straight people” (because they fetishize my gayness and shit!) and etc

i’ve got so many reasons why i could express those thoughts, but should i do it, and on a regular basis, consequences follow. consequences that destroy my cultivated and intended reputation as someone who is open and friendly and kind, because it is difficult to really PROVE that to someone who may be on the fence from allowing themself to be deprogrammed from societal teachings and ingrained and taught transphobia and homophobia and misogyny and racism and so on so forth

and i know not everyone is like that. not everyone WANTS to teach and to provide the resources for that and to help deprogram people. most people just want to vent, most people want to escape from the daily abuse and fear and vent their frustrations. i get that. but then where do we go from there, when we have such an absolute volume of people doing and saying this exact thing, in such a degree that such a climate becomes normal to be reactionary and to react to any level of ignorance with anger, no matter who it comes from?

i’m being so, so vague here, and i really do not want it to come off as protection of the poor soft privileged or what the fuck ever, i genuinely do not. i guess i’m just describing a time in my life where i was like that, where i openly enjoyed mocking people that i thought were beyond reprieve and “saving” and getting into fights and it was such a nasty attitude to be in because it led to me throwing people out of my life, throwing caution to the wind, destroying my reputation online and getting put on places like r/tumblrinaction and potentially k.i/.w/i./f./a/./r./.m//s for my actions

living that way endangered me, and not just because of who i am. living that way destroyed me, and it destroyed my way of thinking, too. it destroyed my moral system, it encouraged me to dehumanize others. it encouraged me to find new ways to rationalize violence as a way of “vengeance” and “retribution” for the damages society dealt me, as if that was any rational and correct way of approaching this situation

anger has its place. anger has its place in destroying the system we have now and rebuilding a new one. but we need to understand that our actions, no matter how justified, still have consequences, sometimes extremely unintended, and even unwarranted that we didn’t deserve, and just... i dunno

there is no easy solution to this. i don’t believe we’ll get anywhere by being nice to everyone all the time, just as much as i don’t believe we’ll get anywhere by developing such a community-wide but aimless anger that we develop as hostile an environment as we have on this website

i don’t know what we need, but it can’t be this

[jccamus]

Advice for aspiring explainer journalists

Advice for aspiring explainer journalists https://ift.tt/2QDnhu8

[This piece was originally publish in December 2018.]

One of the ongoing agonies of being a journalist is that aspiring journalists frequently write you and ask for advice: “What would you say to a young journalist starting out? How do I break into journalism?”

I call it an agony not because it’s an annoyance, not because there’s anything wrong with it, not because I don’t admire people with the pluck to reach out for help — I do! The agony is that I don’t know what to tell them.

The industry is not in good shape. Local journalism is dying. The online media industry is still driven by ad sales, which means by traffic, which means there’s still constant pressure to resort to quick, identity- and outrage-based content. Digital media outlets are getting bought up or shutting down. It’s difficult to find support for serious, in-depth journalism and it’s difficult to make a living as a journalist.

So when I get these requests, I read each one a half-dozen times, agonize over what to say, and then eventually forget about them until they vanish into the second page of my inbox. It’s not ideal.

So my new strategy is: I’m going to write this post. Then I’m going to send all advice seekers to it.

Hello, Advice Seekers! Welcome to my advice post. I do have some broad advice, but not much of the specific kind. Here we go.

Advice I cannot give

First, in terms of practical advice — who to contact, how to assemble clips, how to find jobs — I know nothing. I kind of sneaked into journalism. I studied philosophy for many years as a grad student, dropped out, wound up in Seattle, and was hired on as an editorial assistant at Grist.org (a nonprofit for environmental journalism) in late 2003. I was more or less left to my own devices, worming my way eventually into full-time writing, which I did until 2015, when Vox asked me to come on board.

It’s a somewhat idiosyncratic path, and I don’t know that there’s much to learn from it. All I’ve ever done, from college up through now, is write nerdy explanations and arguments. It’s all I know how to do. And I plan to do it until they boot me out into the street and I turn to mooching off my wife’s income full-time.

In the meantime, I don’t know who’s hiring or how to get jobs, so I’m not much help.

That said, if a child of mine were determined not to pursue (or to abandon) a remunerative career that might fund my retirement, and were determined instead to pursue journalism, here’s what I would tell them.

Explainer journalism, explained

One of the central insights that led Ezra Klein to found Wonkblog at the Washington Post and then, with Matt Yglesias and Melissa Bell, to found Vox is that journalism in the late 20th and early 21st century was constrained on the supply side, and that shaped many of the professional practices and social norms around it. (Speaking of Klein, here’s his advice for journalists.)

As a simple economic matter, the medium itself was constrained: It takes money to print things on paper and distribute them to newsstands. But the supply of information was also constrained. If you wanted to look up a fact, you had to go to the library or dig through files at some government office. Journalism was labor-intensive and thus also expensive. Operating and labor costs were both high.

Pretty expensive.

Shutterstock

The internet changed all that. There are no longer supply constraints — it is trivially cheap and easy to publish something on the web — and there are virtually no constraints left on the supply of information. Libraries are online. Government records are online. Every public figure’s every move is blogged or tweeted.

Two things follow. First, with supply constraints gone, there is no reason to confine web journalism to the length and formal constraints of journalism developed for paper. Any story can be as long as it needs to be, whether it’s 200 words or 2,000. Not every journalist must choose between the view-from-nowhere voice of the objective journalist and stale aphorisms of major newspaper editorial pages. There is room for a greater variety of length, form, tone, voice, and subject on the web.

And second, there’s more need for explanation. Because they were supply constrained, newspapers and newspaper journalists focused on what was new, what just happened, the incremental development. But lots of times, readers had no way of making sense of those developments or contextualizing them. They were getting the leaves, but they’d never gotten the trunk.

Especially as information and incremental developments explode in quantity, there is increasing public hunger for understanding — not so much what happened, but what it means.

The great question of our age is simply, WTF? WTF isn’t asking after what happened. It’s easy to find out what happened these days. Rather, it’s pointing at what happened and asking, well ... WTF?

What’s the deal with that? How does it work? How good or bad is it, really? How does it connect with these other things? What can we learn from its history?

People want to know how the world works. They want to know why the things that are happening are happening. They don’t stop wanting to learn when they get out of school.

So journalism is inevitably shifting. These days, it is less about producing new information than it is about gathering information already on the record, evaluating it, and explaining and contextualizing it for an audience, perhaps with some analysis and argumentation for good measure.

Don’t get me wrong: There’s still plenty of information to be dug up. Investigative journalism still very much exists, though it is under-funded everywhere. I look on it with great admiration and some awe, but it’s not what I do. And though many are loathe to admit it, it’s not what most US journalists do these days.

Investigative journalism is still a life-and-death business in some places.

AFP/Getty Images

Most journalists are, whether they think of themselves this way or not, explainers. They are in the business of making sense of the torrent of information constantly deluging us all.

That obviously can and does include an enormous range of journalists and an enormous range of voices, formats, and subjects. Some journalists prefer the “objective,” distanced tone that marked most journalism in the late 20th century. Some prefer to have a distinctive voice and perspective. Some prefer to focus on daily developments, others prefer to step back and analyze trends.

And there are many voices in between, many legitimates subjects on which to focus, many valid media in which to work. As I will argue later, none of those choices are what separate good from bad journalists. My advice is to find the subject and voice that feel authentic to you and don’t worry too much if it fits in an established model.

The internet offers freedom, but remember that freedom is a double-edged sword. You can do anything, adopt any voice you like, investigate anything you want, but that lack of constraints is a constant invitation to indulgence. You (and your editors) must impose your own constraints, maintain your own discipline, and keep your focus on the needs of the audience.

The good and bad news about internet journalism

There’s good news and bad news about journalism on the internet.

The good news is, it’s fairly easy to become a journalist.

I used to hate-watch Aaron Sorkin’s show The Newsroom, a sappy paean to network TV news, and I would laugh when they panned back to show shots of the newsroom itself. It was just a bunch of people on computers and telephones.

Guess what? You can Google stuff and call people too. You don’t need to go to journalism school. There’s no necessary badge or accreditation (at least in most circumstances). You can just identify yourself as a journalist and start doing it. Call someone. Read a new report. Go see something. Figure out WTF is going on with some subject, explain what you learned, and publish it on the web. Voila — you are a journalist.

The arcane tools of the modern journalist.

Shutterstock

It’s not that there are no unique skills involved. There are. But experience teaches them a hell of a lot faster and better than journalism school.

Your goal is to get good at gathering facts, perceiving patterns, and telling stories. And the way you get good at that the same way you get good at anything else — by doing it a lot.

The bad news is that, while it’s easy to become a journalist, it’s very difficult to make a living as a journalist. It is becoming more challenging all the time to accumulate the two things a journalist needs most: trust, and money to pay the damn rent.

Jobs in US journalism have been on the decline, with the rise in digital journalism failing to keep pace with the loss of newspaper jobs.

Pew Research

And the jobs that do exist are still staffed disproportionately by a mostly white “elite” who went to a few high-end colleges.

The internet has not, contra its early advertising, done away with gatekeepers or created an egalitarian meritocracy. It has simply enabled new gatekeepers — the fickle billionaires who buy and sell media properties, the social-media companies who hold traffic and readership in their hands, the ad networks whose power dwarfs that of any individual media outlet.

It can be difficult to find paid work if you’re not already in the right circles. (Same as it ever was.)

On top of that, America is experiencing an epistemic crisis, and with that has come a crisis of authority in journalism. Ideological camps live in different worlds served by different media. Articles bounce around social media, one as plausible-looking as the other, unverifiable or bunk news mixed in with the real stuff, and no one knows what (or who) to believe.

The single most important currency in journalism is trust — to be seen as a signal amid the noise. And trust is in short supply these days.

Nonetheless, all that said, an aspiring journalist cannot single-handedly control industry trends or defeat structural forms of discrimination. There are all sorts of things they can’t control. Just about the only thing an aspiring journalist has direct control over is the quality of the work. So my advice is: Try to do good work.

How to be a good explainer journalist

1) Learn about something

There are many ways to do journalism, many voices and styles to adopt, many subjects to focus on or media to work with. Journalists come in all different flavors.

But the rarest creature of all, in this age as in all ages throughout history, is someone who knows what the fuck they are talking about.

It might seem paradoxical that, though the amount of available information continues to increase exponentially, most people remain ignorant about most things. But it isn’t, really.

People have limited emotional and cognitive bandwidth (and there’s no app to expand it). They have lives. They are busy. They learn about stuff relevant to their families, jobs, and hobbies, and not much beyond that. Even those eager to learn can only hope to keep up with a few subjects on their own.

There’s nothing wrong with any of this; it is true of all of us. But the upshot is that, for any given subject, it is fairly easy to learn more about it than most people know.

I think of knowledge on most subjects as a logarithmic curve that rises quickly at the far end. On a given subject, 90 percent of people know virtually nothing. Maybe 7 or 8 percent of people know a decent amount, 2 percent know a lot, and maybe 1 percent are deeply expert. (I’m making these numbers up, but you know what I mean.)

A highly scientific representation of knowledge distribution on a given subject.

Javier Zarracina

There are exceptions, of course — on certain concentrations of attention like national politics or Star Wars movies, lots of people know everything there is to know, quickly. But in between those peaks are huge valleys of knowledge that are simply lost in mist to the vast majority of people.

Developing a reasonable expertise in something, from US-China relations to renewable energy to school desegregation to fashion trends in Italy to terraforming Mars, requires no magic or secret guild training. It just requires sustained attention, like anything else — putting in the hours. Most people don’t.

If you become known as a person who knows a lot about something and who can explain it well, you will find a niche. There are all sorts of trade journals and specialist publications these days where you could get your start. But you don’t have to wait for a job. Learn, and share what you know. Become useful, even if only to a small community. Useful people are rare.

From that niche, you can spread out. But the surest way to get a foothold is, on at least one thing, to know what you’re talking about.

2) Network, but don’t “network”

Psychologists will tell you that the best way to be happy is not to pursue happiness directly. It should be a side effect of a life lived with purpose. So too with networking.

You should be interested in your subject. If you are, you will seek out people who know more than you and learn from them. You will share what you know with people who want to know more. You will trade stories with people engaged on the same subject. As a side effect, you will network. Let your curiosity be your guide.

The people who have come to my favorable attention over the years have done so because they ask smart questions, or point to information or sources I hadn’t seen, or connect me with other useful people. Whatever their roles or intentions, they know and care about the subject matter; they want to learn and they want to share what they know.

The same basic principle applies to social media, which is, regrettably, still a great way to get your name out there. (I say regrettably only because it is also destroying society.)

Remember: Useful people are rare. Being useful on social media — stimulating good-faith discussion, offering relevant information, providing fresh analysis — is rarer still. The people I notice and follow on Twitter don’t necessarily have blue checkmarks or big follower numbers. It’s just that they keep popping up, having something relevant and interesting to say — being useful.

3) Be diligent, humble, fair, and try to write well

There are all kinds of debates about journalism these days, about “bias” and whether journalists ought to have opinions or share them, and what kinds of standards real journalists ought to follow. Much of it is BS. I spent too long studying philosophy to ever believe that any of us can escape our presuppositions or that it’s possible to present facts — at least facts that matter to human societies — without our presuppositions shaping and framing them.

Journalistic objectivity, basically.

Shutterstock

We see the world a certain way, and not other ways. We cannot escape being human. Pretending to do so only leads to a bunch of awkward, brittle conventions that conceal as much as they reveal.

In my estimation, the values that matter in journalism are somewhat more old-fashioned: diligence, fairness, humility, and craft. (And yes, I have transgressed against all these values over the course of my career. Who among us, etc. etc.)

The most important thing for anyone writing about any subject — and I really can’t stress this enough — is knowing what the fuck you’re talking about.

That takes diligence: being the one who reads the whole report, the one who checks the appendix, the one who makes the extra call, the one who gets some extra background from podcasts or recorded lectures while doing the dishes or walking the dog.

Knowing more about a subject does not solve everything. Plenty of people learn more only to better serve their priors. There’s even a name for it: “motivated reasoning.” I’ve encountered many, many climate deniers who know far more about climate science than most people. They are like lawyers, gathering information to make a case they took on long ago.

But knowing more makes everything else easier. It makes you vastly more likely to be useful. And there’s no way to know more other than to be diligent and keep at it.

Then there’s fairness, which is what I think most people (of good faith) are grasping at when they talk about “bias.” One thing you notice when you learn more about a subject is that it’s more complicated than you thought it was — for any value of “it.” There’s always more to it than you thought, no matter how much you thought before you started looking.

Though social media might lead you to believe otherwise, there are ambiguities and good-faith arguments to be found in and around any subject. Even on matters where you think the correct answer is obvious, you will understand the answer, and your own thinking, much more clearly if you understand the best argument for the other side.

Fairness does not mean refraining from conclusions. (What are you being paid for, if not to look into things and figure them out?) But it does mean doing your best to get in the headspace of a reasonable opponent, trying to articulate the best argument against your conclusions.

And it means acknowledging doubt and uncertainty. Which brings us to humility.

Humility is perhaps the most difficult thing of all in the social media age, which endlessly rewards the sharp, clear take, the one that might go viral.

I’ve written plenty of those myself — hundreds! — and obviously don’t see anything wrong with it. The key, in journalism as in any truth-seeking pursuit, is to try your best to keep all your beliefs and conclusions at arm’s length, at least somewhat provisional. Don’t get your identity mixed up with your beliefs or you’ll end up defending them come what may.

Even if you get above the 90 percent knowledge threshold on a subject, there’s plenty of climbing to do, and each increment gets more steep. We are all of us in this business dancing at the edge of what we know, so it pays to be open to correction or revising your conclusions.

That is, of course, easier said than done. I’ve changed my thinking on plenty of things over the years, but not always with grace. Listening and being willing to revise your beliefs is rarely rewarding in the short-term, especially give the tribal incentives of social media. But it is worth it in the long run. You will be more interesting and more useful, for longer, if you cling to your curiosity and humility.

Finally — and here I will definitely start sounding like an old man — there is craft. It is a lamentable fact of modern journalism that there are fewer and fewer venues or opportunities for “slow journalism,” i.e., carefully assembled, edited, and fact-checked work. Taking time, doing the legwork, going through multiple drafts, fact-checking, it all costs money, and in an economy that rewards clicks, few outlets can afford it.

One of the odd but charming illustrations Outside ran with my piece.

Grant Cornett

When I wrote a piece for Outside magazine a few years ago, we went through probably 50 drafts all told, making increasingly fine-grained changes. For a piece of day-to-day web journalism, it’s generally two drafts, three at most, sometimes just one. It’s all speed and triage these days, doing as well as possible in the short time allotted.

But still: Words matter. And good writing always outs.

Caring about craft does not necessarily mean writing in stuffy New Yorker voice (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I always think about Lindy West, the feminist journalist who got her start here at Seattle’s local alt-weekly, the Stranger, writing in an utterly idiosyncratic voice that involved frequent ALL CAPS for emphasis. It was nobody’s house style, not even the weirdos at the Stranger. But it was good — funny, observant, and sharp. And her audience found her.

For my part, I’ve always taken a somewhat informal tone, balancing facts and analysis with jokes, polemics, and the occasional picture of a cute animal. When I’m writing, I like to imagine I’m talking with a friend at a bar (a curious friend, but not a friend with endless patience). I try to be engaging, to vary my pitch and tone and the length of my sentences, to intersperse serious or technical passages with bits of levity, to coin the occasional evocative phrase. I try to be accurate, yes, but I also try to be interesting, because either without the other does a disservice to my friend.

Whatever your tone or approach — objective reporter, storyteller, wry commentator, nerdy explainer, table-pounding polemicist — it is possible to do it well or poorly. So much writing on the web these days is mush, of low-to-middling nutritional value. Writers (and editors) who take a little extra time to make their writing more useful, economical, and (hell, I’ll say it) beautiful are showing that they care for the reader’s time. It gets noticed.

Advice in a time of chaos

So, Advice Seekers, that’s what I’ve got. I can’t tell you what to do on Monday morning, who to email or what to pitch, but what I know — or at least believe, or at least hope, or at least sometimes hope — is that even in this crazy age of “fake news” and information junk food, when everyone has retreated to tribal borders and no one trusts anyone, there is demand, and an audience, for quality.

People are genuinely curious. They want help making sense of the thicket of information that surrounds them. Vox’s success, and the broader success of explainer journalism, is a testament to that fact. There is a bottomless public hunger for in-depth understanding. People crave and appreciate it — not everyone, but enough people to sustain an audience. Vox wouldn’t be letting me publish a 6,000-word explainer on power grid architecture if it hadn’t learned that lesson again and again.

Professional insider journalists sometimes mock the explainer conceit, as though it is arrogance or pretense, but they are missing the point. Journalists are those society has charged with figuring out WTF is going on and explaining it to everyone else. It’s not arrogance to take that on. You don’t have to be smarter than anyone else, or have any special credentials. You just have to be willing to put in the hours. It’s work — honorable work, a sacred public trust, but in the end, just work.

There are many different ways to do good journalism, but there is no way of becoming a good journalist that does not involve learning, trying, and practicing: doing the work.

Learn a lot about something. Practice sharing it with people in an engaging way. Find and occupy a niche. Then learn more, share more, expand your niche, and keep on learning. Good luck.

https://ift.tt/365MNwN via Vox October 27, 2019 at 11:54AM

[itsfreshbelievercollectorblr]

Blogs For Beginner

Excitement 

Need to know what Angelina Jolie is up to this week? What about the most recent new music or film industry numbers for your most loved motion picture? Man does not live by work alone!

1. Huffington Post 

"HuffPo" has some expertise in announcing news stories and occasions in pretty much every real class and subcategory you can consider, and some you presumably could never consider! Established by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, and Jonah Peretti in 2005, the blog was bought in 2011 for $315 million by AOL. Huffington Post highlights a large number of bloggers that contribute newsworthy substance on a wide scope of points.

2. Buzzfeed 

BuzzFeed centres around internet-based life and stimulation focusing on recent college grads. It's popular, picture overwhelming, and fun read. BuzzFeed's substance frequently turns into a web sensation because of its conspicuous designs and inside and out detailing. The extent of their crowd is stunning. Statista's May 2016 research discovered that 7 billion watchers got to their video content every month.

Educational blog

In the data age, instruction ought to be a lifetime interest. At no other time in written history has so much data been accessible to everybody so effectively. The web makes it conceivable to build your incentive as a representative, join and find out about social causes, and make change through training.

3. Coursera 

Coursera offers more than 2,000 classes from a portion of the top colleges on the planet directly in the solace of your lounge room. Courses by a portion of the top educators at Stanford, MIT, Penn State, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and more are accessible, a considerable lot of which are free or low estimated. In the event that you need to proceed with your instruction or spotlight on a point, you'll discover a seminar on Coursera! Furthermore, their blog is truly cool – find out about new course contributions, meet the educators, and investigate the subjects they instruct.

4. Khan Academy 

Khan Academy is another incredible asset for web-based learning. They offer a wide scope of courses in arithmetic that is sorted out by subject and grade level, science and designing, figuring, expressions and humanities, and financial aspects and account.

Travel 

We as a whole love to travel! Regardless of whether your fantasy excursion comprises of taking a wine visit through Tuscany, an eco-voyage through the Central American rainforests, or an adventure to ride the 10 best crazy rides in the United States, you'll find all that you need on the web!

5. Meraviglia Paper 

The slogan on this blog says it consummately: Meraviglia encourages you to choose where to remain! It pinpoints the most heartfelt spots to remain in a cosy way, regardless of whether it's in the author's lawn in northern Italy or a palace in Denmark! It incorporates heaps of idyllic photographs and expressive stories offering a superb look at probably the most lovely travel goals on the planet!

6. The Everywhereist 

Geraldine DeRuiter's exceptional voice is a much-needed refresher in the sightseeing blog world. At the point when she's not grovelling over Jeff Goldblum or tweet-playing with her better half, Moz organizer Rand Fishkin, she's composition silly close to home expositions, thoughts, and travel guides. Her blog is an absolute necessity perused, particularly her viral post on Mario Batali's sexual offence conciliatory sentiment and how she tends to Twitter abusers. Be that as it may, you additionally can't pass up her movement journal All Over The Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft.

Entrepreneurship Blogs 

7. SolopreneurHour.com 

A great structured and smooth blog that is tied in with working for yourself and making your very own riches. It's a blog with an extremely dynamic digital recording feed. Their web recordings are madly well known on iTunes, and no uncertainty they make a reasonable piece of cash from selling advertisement space on those web recordings. Webcasts are something to consider while making your blog as it could be an extraordinary adaptation apparatus.

8. BreakingintoStartups.com 

An exceptionally moving online journal that contains persuasive anecdotes about new businesses and the general population who work in them and make them. On the off chance that you need a stimulating beverage following a terrible day at the workplace or feel that you can't turn into that individual who goes it along and begins up something marvellous, at that point why not have a perused. You'll before long catch wind of individuals who truly just had the shirt on their backs and who ascended to be an achievement in business and throughout everyday life.

Instances of Tech Blogs 

One of my most loved kind of Blog is the "tech blog". Presently this isn't something new to blog about, as Tech bloggers have been blogging about innovation news and contraption surveys in detail online since the start of the web, But in light of the fact that it's such a tremendous speciality, you could cut out yourself a great edge inside the tech blog circle.

9. Knowtechie.com 

I've been following this site since it began and has seen its movement from only one person expounding on stuff he cherishes, to a site that gets nice traffic and has a group of scholars. Knowtechie is an incredible case of a site that began as an interest however has quickly turned into a business. I like the edge they have also. "Tech News For The Non-Techie". KnowTechie is a blog for individuals who love tech, yet live outside the air pocket.

Instances of Making Money Blogs 

Like economical web journals, making cash related online journals have turned out to be madly well known since the worldwide economy has declined as of late. The need for making more cash so as to have an "alright" personal satisfaction, is expanding year on year. Wages are not rising, employment is ending up less secure and the typical cost for basic items is always rising. This is the reason destinations like the ones beneath in this area are ending up increasingly mainstream.

11.SideHustleNation.com 

Side Hustle is an online network of business people goal's identity's to increase monetary opportunity by making organizations that can enable them to accomplish that. There's a gathering of profoundly significant blog entries on the most proficient method to make extra pay over your normal everyday employment wage. They utilize the web recording mechanism of substance advertising by making different webcasts with specialists discussing an entire scope of points around the business enterprise, profiting on the web and making riches.

12.MyWifeQuitHerJob.com 

An incredible site, which is profoundly helpful and rousing for individuals needing to change their 9 to 5 lives for something that will enable them to carry on a little and invest more energy with the family. The site is extremely basic, and something you could construct yourself on WordPress in merely day, yet the substance is the place this site exceeds expectations. Digital broadcasts, apparatuses, instructional exercises and blog entries that objective a particular speciality is the place this person profits. His digital broadcasts are extremely well known and when you have content that gets a lot of ears and eyes to it, at that point so will the publicizing pay.

ladies Blogs 

Mama online journals are a blog that is focused on guardians, especially ladies. Here's my single out the best mom blog models that I believe merit taking a gander at. They offer data that is creative and that can make parenthood that tad simpler. Most are monetised by supported post and show advertisements.

13.iovannaFletcher.com 

Giovanna is an author, blogger, vlogger and mum. Her blog content is predominantly about her life as a mother and a spouse. She has an extremely famous web recording called Happy Mum, Happy Baby Podcast. I cherish the assortment of substance on her blog. She blends it up between instructive blog entries about family life, what's happening in her reality and tips for mums and truly cool web recordings that spread an assortment of subjects to do with child-rearing and being a mum. The way that she's not by any stretch of the imagination hard selling is reviving.

14.CupOfJo.com 

A standout amongst the best mama bloggers around, Joanna has an extremely straightforward looking online journal, full to the overflow of helpful stuff for old and new moms alike. What I cherish about this site is the straightforwardness of the subject, the extremely current structure highlights and the typography. The blog entry thoughts are extremely astute also and separates Jo's website from various mom bloggers.

15. motherhooddiaries.com 

Parenthood Diaries is a web-based child rearing stage where guardians and guardians to-be can impart their insights, skill and arrangements on all themes identified with pregnancy and child-rearing. Leyla, who possesses and looks after MHD, manufactures her traffic by focusing on explicit watchwords identified with child-rearing and making assets around those expressions. She's additionally focusing her endeavours on social channels like Pinterest and Facebook to make worthwhile gatherings of people by means of an elective traffic source to Google.

Instances of Food/Wine Blogs 

16.Pinch Of Yum 

My most loved nourishment blog is this one. I think the style, plan and manner of speaking is simply the first rate. Lindsay truly has to blog down to a compelling artwork, with the composition as well as in realizing how to profit from blogging. I figure she has a gigantic email list which she has developed throughout the years, that she can use to actually print cash with. Focusing on her email list with her most recent blog entries, subsidiary connections, bargains, offers, coupons will make her a lot of money every month.

17.Cookie and Kate 

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18.iamafoodblog.com 

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19. 12×75 

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There's truly a huge number of writes on the Internet in some shape or structure. It's a prevalent speciality and one that can be rewarding on the off chance that you advance the correct item or offer something other than what's expected to the remainder of the wellness writes out there. Beneath, I have included wellness writes that do what they do staggeringly well and models that you can pick up bits of knowledge and motivation from.

21.NiaShanks.com 

A well-known wellness blog predominantly focused towards ladies, where there's positive support of ladies of every kind to get fit and begin loads and quality preparing. Nia composes rousing and enabling blog entries about how ladies can be fit, sound and tore by doing viable bodyweight works out. She likewise advances the mantra that activity ought to never be viewed as discipline for eating. I adore this site since it has a reason and an unmistakable message, which reverberates with her perusers. An extraordinary tip that you should take a route with you and attempt and use when beginning your very own wellbeing and wellness blog. Instances of WordPress Development Blogs Here's a couple of instances of web journals that assist individuals to build up their own web journals in WordPress and that offer counsel and instructional exercises on the improvement of WordPress sites. These locales will, in general, adapt their traffic by having Adsense promotions on their pages or have joined to different offshoot projects to push certain items around web improvement and WordPress topic and administrations.

22.SiteBeginner.com 

A perfect and basic plan with simple to devour data on an entire scope of subjects around web advancement on the WordPress.org blogging stage.

23.Wptavern.com 

WordPress Tavern is a site that is basic in development and configuration, yet is amazingly prevalent with the WordPress dev network. It centres around all things WordPress, from modules to WordPress instructional exercises, they spread most things you'll need to find out about WordPress. What this demonstrates is that your blog doesn't need to be garish with fancy odds and ends joined. A basic topic with creative and accommodating substance is sufficient for your site to be an enormous achievement.

24.Erickimphotography.com 

I think the manner of speaking on this blog is remarkable. In the event that just everything was composed thusly. It's well disposed, clear, simple to peruse and rousing. I like the manner in which they spread the basic things about photography with posts like "Shoot Different" and "Why your advanced mobile phone is the best camera". Appreciate this site. I did. the way of life websites

25. Sunday Chapter | Travel and Lifestyle Blog 

Sunday Chapter | Travel and Lifestyle blog about Blog Travel and way of life blog with tips and motivation for movement, style, excellence and wellbeing by Australian blogger, Angela Giakas.

26. THIRTEEN THOUGHTS | Beauty and Lifestyle Blog 

About Blog Thirteen Thoughts is a marvel and way of life blog. Notwithstanding sharing my affection for a portion of my most loved cosmetics and skincare items, I share photography and blogging tips just as some guidance for self-esteem, self-awareness, and satisfaction.

[politicsiscomplicated]

Instead of Punching Nazis, Steal Their Target Audience From Them

If America today is analogous to Nazi Germany, the people I'm arguing against act like we're in 1938, with annexations of our neighbors and Kristallnacht looming near.  We're not.  We're not even in 1933 at the beginning of the dictatorship yet.  We're still somewhere in the 20s.  The Nazis are clearly, obviously evil, going around attacking people and screaming about how the Jews/liberals/non-whites/foreigners/etc. are ruining the country, and even have some friends in high places.  But most of the country still isn't willing to vote for them.  We the enemies of Naziism, all of us from ultra-conservatives like Orrin Hatch all the way to leftists and progressives like many of you my friends are, aren't in the place of some underground resistance movement fighting a guerrilla campaign against the omnipresent Nazi menace.  We are right now all in the place of the other political parties that fucking failed to fix Germany by peaceful means after WW1.  And there are a lot of disgruntled but politically detached people out there who aren't Nazis but might be persuaded to vote for Nazis if we don't get to them first with better ideas.

We saw this last year when millions of disgruntled former Obama voters and millions of voters who said they normally don't vote at all came out to support a notoriously incompetent asshole who stumbled into being the first major presidential candidate since Wilson to receive the endorsement of the Klan and not disavow it.  Never forget that Hitler didn't gain power through coercion like Mussolini or revolution like Franco.  He was the leader of a major political party, elected partially because of terrorism, but also largely because his party was able to convince the public that they could solve their problems.  The Nazis and their ideological cousins in the alt-right are competing with us now to win over the people who are, frankly, ignorant of or disinterested in politics and therefore vulnerable to Nazis winning them over by presenting their mix of paranoia and outright lies nicely.

The people we are competing with them over, or ought to be, are the people I've heard ranting my entire life — and I know, any of you New Englanders, that you have heard them too, and are probably related to some of them — about "reverse racism" and "handouts", and how the Clintons are secret murderers, and so on blah blah blah.  They're wrong, and they don't understand what we're talking about.  But that's not how we respond to them.  Instead, we respond to them by writing them off as unfixably hateful and accuse them of lying rather than not understanding.  We push them away into the waiting hands of Nazi propagandists.  Nazis, like the toxic right-wing talkshow media, respond to them by egging them on to embrace and use their anger, Emperor Palpatine-style.  Any chance we give the Nazis to portray themselves as the victim of leftist aggression is another voter who, when it is time for our equivalent of the 1932 elections, will go to the polls and support the Nazis even though they may not personally be a Nazi.

But the propaganda is out there, and the rallies are happening, and they have an audience.  Clearly something must be done.  So what is to be done about the Nazis themselves?  How can we possibly avoid seeming to engaging them as equals, which would give them the same false balance legitimacy currently enjoyed by creationists and anti-vaxers and climate change deniers?  Not through preemptive violence.  We should certainly be willing to fight in self-defense, or in the defense of another we can help, but remember, there is already a narrative out there of "violent leftists" who need "law and order" brought down upon them.  The president himself buys into and spreads this.  We need to make him look ridiculous.

When the NAACP took up the case of Rosa Parks, rather than any of the other people who defied bus segregation before her, it was because they and Parks understood how easily-swayed people are by victim-blaming.  When a bad thing happens to someone, it seems to be a baked-in human instinct to examine the victim to see why they "provoked" something bad, rather than examining what's wrong with the offender to make them think victimizing someone could possibly be okay.  They sought out a person about whom the fewest negative things could be said.  This is an effective tactic.  It anticipates and shuts down the stupid but popular arguments people are drawn to.  By showcasing the most clear-cut, inarguable cases of injustice, that bulk of disengaged public sees that a system they were previously indifferent to ought to be actively changed or destroyed.  By fighting only defensively, I believe we can preempt any attempt by the Nazis to use that tactic on us.  Make it clear that the victim of an act of racist or other bigoted violence did nothing to provoke it, and you turn the public's outrage on the offender, and maybe even on the ideology that encouraged the violence.

It is also worth remembering at this point that, as Jon Stewart put it, the bias of the mainstream media is towards sensationalism, conflict, and laziness.  They want someone to get pundits enraged at because enraged pundits get them viewers or listeners or readers, and viewers or listeners or readers get them ad revenue.  Let someone make a heinous speech and the news cycle will be about what a fucking piece of shit that person is.  Punch someone making a heinous speech, and the news cycle will be fake-balance arguments about how there's "anger on both sides".

So what about "fighting" metaphorically, by disrupting the lives of Nazis (or Nazi-allies)?  Public shame will do something, right?  Well, maybe, if you get the right person.  A friend did a back-of-the-envelope-type estimate using some demographic data about this.  If we assume for the sake of argument that every alt-rightist is a white American man, distributed randomly among all white American men in general appearance, and we have pictures of every single alt-rightist based on estimates of how many of them there are, and we only make mistakes 1% of the time in matching the alt-rightists' faces to the faces of all white American men, the number of innocent people we falsely identified as alt-rightists would be over 24 times the number of correctly-identified alt-rightists.  Indeed, we've already seen some false identifications based on pictures of people from the "Unite the Right" rally.  (And just a few years ago, internet vigilantes also came to confidently wrong conclusions about the identities of the Boston Marathon bombers in exactly the same way, by poring over mediocre-to-poor-quality photos of the event, although thankfully police realized quickly these were incorrect.)

And even if you do get the right person, are you sure you want to actively encourage managers to fire people for their activities outside of work?  Remember those people I mentioned earlier who are outraged about "reverse racism" and so on?  Some of those people are managers.  Some managers will fire Nazis because, quite accurately, they understand that Nazis are bad.  But other managers will, based on the same encouragement, fire Black Lives Matter protestors.  It's not hard to find examples of political commentators or even politicians calling BLM black supremacists or even terrorists.  Because you know what?  People don't make rational decisions based on what is actually true.  Ever.  About anything.  They make vaguely-approaching-rational decisions based on what feels true.

You may trust yourself, or a really good boss you have, to make this sort of decision.  I may even agree with those judgements.  But recall the worst boss you've had, or the worst boss someone you know has had.  Someone obnoxious, petty, ignorant, mean, or clearly looking for an excuse, any excuse, to fire someone.  Now imagine how they'd react if you said "you should fire people for being hateful outside of work".  They might fire a Nazi, but I'd place my bet on them firing a BLM supporter, or someone with a different religion than them (because, of course, disagreeing with someone's religion is blasphemy, and blasphemy is hate speech!), or someone who is very much not a Nazi but the manager falsely thinks they are because they just read a wrongheaded book or blog post that argues that some group of people actual Nazis hate, like gay people, or completely mainstream moderates, are the "real" Nazis.

If you really feel compelled to take matters into your own hands, proceed with the extremest of extreme caution, understand your own ignorance and failures and biases, admit to and suffer the consequences of your mistakes if you harm the innocent, and absolutely do not fire unless fired upon.

The last several days of arguments I've seen, and occasionally participated in, online have just gotten nasty and frustrating.  So this post is all I intend to say on the topic.  I am sick of being misconstrued by people I would otherwise firmly agree with.  I would just like to remind them that I understand exactly what is on the line if the Nazis actually win; just off the top of my head, there are at least three, maybe seven if you really reach, reasons I will be sent to a concentration camp if America truly follows the trajectory of Nazi Germany.  That's why I am so emphatic that we must head off the Nazis.  We must stop them from using the media to their favor, and we must win over their target audience of people who are vaguely upset and frustrated but do not know at whom their frustration should be directed.  We must reach out to the angry but not very politically engaged public and do a decent job of explaining ourselves to them and debunking Nazi paranoia and lies before the Nazis have the chance to suck them in first.