#like the problem youre experiencing may be caused by: you following almost exclusively blogs you followed for uhh marvel dudes content

[lottieurl]

person only following blogs that spent their 2021 blogging about dean winchester being female coded: has anyone noticed that NO ONE on this site cares about women?

[system-of-a-feather]

Have you considered that the whole Super straight/bi/lesbian/gay thing came about specifically because y'all are so quick to call people transphobic? I don't understand why supporters of trans rights are so interested in whether or not people are willing to date trans people.

Like, if that's your biggest problem, you're doing well. Genuinely, what is this oppression trans ppl face if the biggest concern is getting a date? And if someone doesn't want to date a trans person, why, WHY would y'all wanna pressure them into it? What does that do for you? Isn't it dangerous for the trans person to pursue the issue once they've been turned down? Why are you encouraging them to be in a place of danger? Who cares if some people don't want to date trans people? If they're as oppressed as y'all say, that is literally the least of their concern.

I absolutely fully agree with that. It absolutely isn’t an okay thing to do and people aren’t transphobic for not wanting to date or be with a trans person. I have absolutely nothing against that.

What *does* bother me is how people go about using the “trans people are mad that we won’t date them” to straw man that most people that say that follow it up with saying “trans men aren’t real men” or combine it with “I only want to date real and natural men” which is inherently transphobic.

I fully support anyone who is just not interested in dating trans people. That’s fine, and I really don’t care. We are a blog of people who have been traumatized, abused, and sexually abused and forced upon. We would never put that upon anyone else. Our blog is first and foremost about trauma and consent and harassments is absolute big “N-O”s for us

If the majority of the people who said they didn’t want to date trans people didn’t start using “real” women and men lines, then I would have no issue with being “super straight” or “super lesbian”.

Similarly to you assuming everyone who is against it cares about if you can get a date or not and is upset about it, we are forced to assume everyone who thinks it is about that is going to use and talk like a transphobe / TERF and de-legitimize their gender identity. Most of the shit talking and memes in the Super Straight tags are dissing “new” gender labels like nonbinary or whatever and trans identities and all that, so don’t act as if this is all about predatory trans behavior and not about people being disgustingly transphobic.

If your tag and movement was solely about addressing toxic behavior in the trans community that is predatory, I would be standing with you and in support, but instead a large majority of the people in your “movement” take it as an opportunity to diss, disrespect, and let blatant transphobic / TERF rhetoric spew disgustingly on your floor and I just can’t stand for that.

As for the Trans community, our largest issue **isnt** getting a fucking date. It has never fucking been getting a date and if you really think that is the largest issue, god are you blind and deaf. 

I think the largest issue would be the overall stigma hatred and disgust many people in society hold towards people who are trans. There are also all the people who regularly threaten violence and state that they would kick the head in of anyone who they saw if they were trans or saw “a man in a dress.” There are people thinking people who are trans are secretly just pedophiles that want to fondle children. There are people who murder people for being trans. There are people who just regularly bully and make fun of people or completely cut ties with people because they are trans. There are people assaulting - physically and sexually - people who are trans just for being trans.

“In 2009, 17 percent of all reported violent hate crimes against LGBTQ people were directed against those who identified themselves as transgender, with most (11 percent of all hate crimes) identifying as transgender women.8 The remainder identified as transgender men, genderqueer, gender questioning, or intersex.” - x

“People may assume that being visibly transgender or having a transgender history is a direct cause of sexual assault. There is some truth to this: A number of murders of transgender people (particularly transgender women of color) have taken place when new sexual partners "discover" their sexual partners were assigned male at birth and/or have a penis. “ - x

I promise you, almost any of the bigotry and exclusion that people who are lesbian, bi, and/or gay experience, people who are trans also experience, but they also get it from people who are lesbian, bi, and gay.

If you want to have a discussion about the predatory nature of some people who use being trans as a means to attack and pressure people into sex or a relationship, we would be more than glad to sit down and talk about that. It is a huge problem and a disgusting one. 

If you are trans and you get rejected and then use your trans identity to try to pity and victim cry yourself a date or sex, then you are scum and worse than any transphobe out there. You don’t deserve to look at this blog or group yourself with us. Don’t be a fucking predator.

If you are one of those people, lick my boot and cry because fuck you. 

I’m not against “supers” because I think they have a right to your body. I’m against “supers” because they parade behind “I don’t like the predatory behavior!!” to be transphobic.

I understand that if some of your have been pressured into shit like this, it might be a trauma response and I understand that. I’m not actually mad at you for that because I very much understand how that works. We have been there before and have generalized horribly, but please do know a large majority of the community is not just about sexuality and who they will date. We aren’t predators. We are just people and most of us just will handle rejection like a normal god damn person. Please don’t generalize us with abusers because of a negative experience you or someone you know might have experienced.

A lot of people who are trans are far more busy and concerned with how having to choose between who they actually are and living in a constant lie to themselves and others, and being their true self and risking to upturn their entire life, loose many acquaintances, and naturally have a target on your back if you aren’t living in an area that is considerably tolerant and even then its still a risk. I don’t know where you got that getting a date is the largest issue about being trans because it never was and never is.

Please, take some time to really try to listen to us and our experiences and please don’t immediately group all trans people in with abusive people. A lot of us really don’t care about getting in people’s pants and most of it is really just about trying to live and be ourselves.

I understand the experiences are horrible and anyone who puts that pressure is horrible, but don’t let that be an excuse to spread rhetoric and hate on a group that already has an insanely high suicide rate. 

People aren’t killing themselves because they aren’t getting dates. They are killing themselves because being trans is hard and insanely difficult. Dating someone is a speck of sand in a desert.

Please don’t use that straw man on us and please don’t use it to paint all trans people as bad and worthy of hate.

Thank you.

-Ray (Gatekeeper)

[healingchildhoodtrauma]

My parents met in AA. They consider every day they don’t drink to be a success. But I look deeper and wonder, what caused them to drink? They’re both open about how they were abused as children. Neither of them have thoroughly worked through their trauma, other than AA meetings. They both had other addictions even when they stopped drinking. They basically “white knuckled” their way through life until they could vent at AA meetings. They took me to a couple meetings as a child and told me to never start drinking or I wouldn’t be able to stop. The more I read about the things wrong with AA, the more I understand my parents and how they raised us. My dad was a “counselor” in AA, which is horrifying.

“People with alcohol problems also suffer from higher-than-normal rates of mental-health issues, and research has shown that treating depression and anxiety with medication can reduce drinking. But AA is not equipped to address these issues—it is a support group whose leaders lack professional training—and some meetings are more accepting than others of the idea that members may need therapy and/or medication in addition to the group’s help.

The founder of AA based its principles on the beliefs of the evangelical Oxford Group, which taught that people were sinners who, through confession and God’s help, could right their paths.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-irrationality-of-alcoholics-anonymous/386255/

“Any certified professional in the field of addiction treatment can tell you that heavy drinking or drug use is most often times a signal of an undiagnosed mental health issue such as depression or anxiety. There is rarely, if ever, any talk about mental health in the rooms of AA. Therefore, someone who is self-medicating their depression with alcohol and who attends AA will be told that they have a ‘disease, for which there is no known cure’ and that the only solution is for them to attend meetings for the rest of their life.” https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/survivingmentalhealthstigma/2013/02/one-step-forward-twelve-steps-back

“Alcoholics Anonymous, Circular Reasoning, and Group Think

Alcoholics can engage in a dangerous form of group think. There is this ‘us and them’ mentality, and members are encouraged to think of themselves as this special group with special problems. This feeling of having a unique set of problems can border on the ridiculous – I’ve heard people in Alcoholics Anonymous suffering from the common cold who talk as if they have some type of special alcoholic’s cold.

Those who follow the AA program can feel threatened by any type of criticism, and they sometimes seem more interested in defending AA than in helping alcoholics. I can’t remember ever meeting even one member of that group who was willing to suggest any other option than the meetings. This is all made to seem acceptable by using some fancy circular reasoning – if you are an alcoholic your only real hope is AA, but if you manage to get sober without AA you were never a real alcoholic to begin with.” http://paulgarrigan.com/dangers-of-alcoholics-anonymous/

“Deprogramming From AA—When a Fellowship Resembles a Cult

Some report having been coerced into going off their psychiatric medications, against their doctors’ advice. Others became frustrated with the lack of scientific evidence behind AA’s program. Others still are angry that any inquiry into other options is not only discouraged, but sometimes actively punished—by exclusion from social events, public humiliation at meetings, and constant reminders of the AA saying that to leave the program can only result in “jails, institutions and death.”

Many feel that they replaced their addiction to a substance with an addiction to the program.

Another issue that departing 12-step members report as concerning is suddenly dealing with all the issues that drove them to substance use in the first place, but weren’t adequately addressed in the program. People with a history of trauma, in particular, can find that the onslaught of pain and memories—repressed while they were told in AA that “alcoholism,” was the root of all their problems—can be almost unbearable.

“I would venture to say three-quarters, if not more, of the people in AA are suffering from depression or anxiety or survivors of trauma, and were using alcohol to self-medicate,” said Rachel Bernstein. “So then you have people who are derailed from a more direct and relevant path to dealing with their particular issues, and instead they are told that alcohol is the only source of their problem.”

Regarding the nature of “sharing” in meetings, Bernstein said, “Within 12-step groups, there are people who can defend against the social pressures, and others who can’t. They don’t want anyone to be unhappy with them so they’ll say what they need to say, they’ll make commitments, they’ll ‘admit’ things about themselves even if they aren’t true.”

“They’ll do that in a room full of people who are not mental health professionals and do not know how to hold onto that information in a safe way or help you heal,” she continued.

Within AA, she experienced sexual abuse from her sponsor and men her sponsor insisted she date. She was told that the sexual abuse she endured as a child and the rape she experienced as an adult were her fault.

Even more frightening, Alice said, is that she looked and even believed she was happy during this time. “Upon hearing that I had a negative experience in AA, people that knew me during that 10-year period might be shocked. ‘But she seemed so happy,’ they might say… ‘How could she say that?’”

“My answer to this,” she continued, “is that yes, I was very happy–in fact, I was euphoric at times when I went to AA. This was because I was suppressing all of the emotions and things that AA told me would lead me to drink: anger, sadness, grief, critical thinking, negative thoughts, my intelligence. This led me to have a kind of false gratefulness, happiness and peace that only lasted for so long.”

Both Rachel Bernstein and Monica Richardson give concrete advice on how a person thinking of leaving AA or any 12-step program, and wishing to deprogram, should proceed.

Bernstein advises:

1. Learn about methods of control and manipulative tactics. Bring a checklist to your next meeting and check off the techniques as you see them. You’ll be able to see for yourself if this group is treating you respectfully and being open about its intentions, or if it’s using manipulation to not only keep you there but make you feel like you have no choice but to stay. Here is a checklist of tactics to look out for:

* You are taught that the teachings and techniques are perfect. So if they are not working as intended, it’s because you are not following them the right way, or trying hard enough.

* The organization defines you, tells you what you are, who you are, and how to see yourself.

* Questioning or doubting the teachings is wrong and seen as an issue/problem of yours instead of your fundamental right.

* The organization is a closed system, and any issues you have with it have to stay in-house; there is no outside and/or objective governing body to bring your concerns to.

* Dependency is built into the system by making you feel that you cannot trust yourself on your own, and left to your own devices you would always make the wrong decision and your life would spiral downward.

* You never graduate. You are never done. Your participation and adherence to the teachings are expected to be lifelong.

* You are made to feel these are the only people you can trust in your life, and those outside the group are not able to support and ensure the path you should be on.

* The influence technique of “scarcity” is used by conveying the message that this group is the only group in the world that can give you what you need.

* It has its own social norms and lingo that are different from those in the outside community, so you feel more understood by those in the group and more a part of the world of the group, and this can separate you from those in the outside community.

* The group has one system it provides. No other systems or philosophies are integrated. So, whatever the system is designed to address is the only thing that’s addressed, and other potentially primary issues are ignored. Part of the “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” idea, this can cause people to be misdiagnosed and to be derailed from getting help they may need with their true underlying issues.” https://filtermag.org/deprogramming-from-aa-when-a-fellowship-resembles-a-cult/

“And so, the AA accusation that alcoholics are people unable to recognize their wrongdoings and character defects sounded familiar to me. The “fellowship” had the same symptoms as a narcissist! And, once again, I was defenseless. A narcissist is never wrong, just as if you relapse in AA it is your fault, never AA's fault. Narcissists see everyone as their mirror, and if you agree with them all is well. If you disagree, you are an enemy. The AA members I met became instantly defensive whenever I criticized AA. They were like my mother!

If I asked questions, I was told "You think you know it all, but your own best thinking got you here." Hearing that I was powerless and that without AA I would die sounded very familiar to me. AA rules by the same fear and confusion abusers like my mother and my rapist use to keep their victims under control.” https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/addiction-in-society/201405/woman-fights-aa-alcoholics-anonymous-narcissist?amp

“AA was part of a Protestant evangelical group for the first several years of its existence, and its 12-step program is blatantly religious by any reasonable definition of the word. AA is supportive — as long as you parrot its party line. It’s nonjudgmental–again, as long as you parrot the party line. AA is not purely voluntary; over a million Americans per year are coerced into attending it via court orders and employee assistance programs, as a condition of avoiding jail or keeping their jobs; and many of AA’s promoters insist that AA doesn’t promote itself, even as they do exactly that. As for AA members being “better than well,” attend any meeting and judge for yourself. And AA does have serious negative aspects, both for its members and those merely exposed to it.” https://seesharppress.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/alcoholics-anonymous-does-more-harm-than-good/

Reading these things provides more context for why my family operated like a cult, headed by my narcissist mother and antisocial father. My mother went from being raised Catholic to AA.. both engaging in abuse, mind control, victim blaming and excessive confession of wrong doing/shame. This gives me a lot of insight into her patterns of black and white thinking, scapegoating, suppression, and abuse of power. It makes sense now why I was shamed/vilified for speaking out against the groupthink. Emotional abuse wasn’t an exception to the rule, emotional abuse was the way of life.

[mulechurchyard-blog]

What I mean when I say Ex-Gay

“Because you see we boys are like that. We are more afraid of the medicine than of the illness”

                                                                                   Pinocchio,Carlo Collodi

Over the 2015/16 festive period I had two epiphanies: (i) I wasn’t gay and (ii) there is a God.

There was a gap of around a month between the two. During that month, I unpicked my former identity, and I realised that I had been had: the concept of homosexual identity is lie, and the way that the lie is maintained is incredibly complex and damaging. At first, I wondered how I could become a secular voice who could help people see what I had seen, but God had other plans. In a few short weeks he had saved me for Himself, and now I knew that my message would be so outrageous there was no chance of being listened to. I knew what I was like before, and there was no way I would have listened… or maybe I would have listened a little bit, secretly. I might therefore have read on, if just to be outraged.

Having crossed the boundaries between the two worlds, I realised there is a problem to which there are four parts:

(i)            LGBT people do not understand Christianity

(ii)           Christians do not understand LGBT people

(iii)         LGBT people do not understand themselves

(iv)          Christians do not understand Christianity

So, as far debate and dialogue between LGBT people and Christians are concerned, things were never going to go well. As someone who has now experienced both, this blog sets out to address that a bit.

First, to state what I do not support. A couple of weeks back, there was an episode ofRupaul’s Drag Race (which I find fascinating) where one of the competitors broke down crying as he described his Christian parents subjecting him to an exorcism to rid him of a gay demon. That is spiritual abuse. No one can change for the sake of someone else. We each have a cross to bear, and it is our choice in how to bear it. It must be acknowledged that once a child is an adult, then they are on their own journey. Whilst love and guidance remain essential, that guidance must not be authoritarian (in fact authoritarian parenting may have been part of the problem in the first place). It goes without saying that verbal, physical, spiritual and emotional abuse (including shunning) play no part at all. I will write about parenting fully, later on.

However, there are a number of videos doing the rounds on YouTube, where people speak of amazing hole-on-one spiritual experiences where some charismatic preacher lays their hands on them, and they receive the holy spirit and “over-come” their sexuality all the same moment. If that is true, that’s great for them, I suppose, but it lies well beyond the bounds of realism for most. Maybe there is a leap of faith so profound that these people do just change their sexuality through belief, but as Rosario Champagne Butterfield, a Christian writer who also came through homosexuality, says, expecting it to happen is really prosperity gospel territory (the heretical and blatantly untrue belief that becoming a Christian is going to make you well, and bring financial prosperity because God knows you deserve it). What if these individuals discover that still struggle with same-sex desire? Who will they talk to about it? What if they don’t talk about it, and then act on it secretly? Either way, I am afraid to say that the euphoria of discovering God wears off overtime. You discover that you still do get ill, you still make terrible mistakes, your loved ones still die unsaved and you do still experience same-sex desire after all. Relying on Him and trusting Him can become harder. God doesn’t remove us from Earthly reality, he shows us what it truly is and if we understand what He is seeking in us, rather than us just expecting things of Him, He will help us to bear its challenges. That is why the prosperity gospel is absolute pap. There needs to be more credible and accessible explanations and courses of action, for the sake of everybody including charismatics.

It seems to be me, that most LGBT people who come to faith in Jesus, certainly within the UK evangelical culture in which I exist, still talk about experiencing same-sex attraction and choose to be celibate (Those who say that they are following Jesus and actively pursuing an LGBT lifestyle at that same time, aren’t Christians and I am not going to discuss that particular issue here). So, we have the two basic Christian views that seem to float around in culture and imagination:

I)              Over-the-top, all encompassing, instantaneous, spiritual theatrics/histrionics

II)            Celibacy

Celibacy is problematic though as it just says, “This is me and don’t ask question.” Although the way of dealing with it is different, this is basically the same thing as that that mainstream LGBT community says, often with extreme defensiveness, and there is a big reason for that. The thing that LGBT people fear above all other things is self-knowledge.

Self-knowledge is terrifying, because through self-knowledge an LGBT person will see that the person who is hurting them, the person who is humiliating them, who is filling their body with drink and drugs at the weekend (if they are that way inclined), who is causing their mental anxiety, who is generating these feelings of exclusion and who is preventing them from taking their role in God’s created order, is themselves. The sinful world has told them a lie about themselves, and they have believed it. They have not only believed it, they have run with it and through forging community with other LGBT people they have created a self-perpetuating social force that tells them that change is impossible, and any attempt to change is extremely damaging or laughable.

As these communities have sucked men and women in to them, grown ever larger and gained influence, they have taken it upon themselves to proclaim all science and psychology that suggest that homosexual or trans identity is even remotely changeable, linked to other mental health/personality disorders or liable to damage the individual further, have been irrefutably debunked. But they haven’t. My own lived experience show there is profound truths in much of the psychological writings of the pre-“liberation” era that have been excluded from contemporary discourse with such vehemence, it is almost impossible to access them, let alone hear them be discussed with any seriousness. There has been such a force of will and pressure from the LGBT community that they have managed to suppress the thought that these theories could have any truth in them at all. That is because discovering the truth in them is terrifying as it shows them that they are far less in control of their own bodies and minds than they think they are. This terror is as real for Christian LGBT people and those within the mainstream.

We can see this process happening just now with the gender-neutral debate. Previously, no one believed this thing existed as anything other than attention seeking linked in with certain pathologies, but slowly the debate is being crushed. Maintaining the idea that there even is a debate to be had, is portrayed as morally abhorrent. People become afraid to speak out. This is “not even up for debate” stance inevitably seeps in and affects the Christian world just as much as mainstream culture. Hence, I am not satisfied with the celibacy answer, because I think those who pursue it remain within the lie when greater and deeper recognition of your God-created reality is possible. And if full change proves elusive, at least there can come a greater ability to understand same-sex desire/LGBT-identity better and struggle with it less. To all intents and purposes, I am still celibate, and I don’t see that changing in the near future. But it’s not because I am resisting same-sex attraction, but because I am still beset with emotional issues from the past and I don’t feel able to cope with a relationship with a woman (again I will discuss this further later on). But more importantly I am saved, and I am not living within a lie that places a barrier between me and the true nature of reality anymore. In some ways, it is exactly like The Matrix. The world Neo wakes up can seem one hell of a lot harder to deal with than existing within the Matrix, but it is real, and that is profoundly more meaningful that living within the safe confines of a lie. And in reality, the lie is not safe at all. It cleverly disguises it dangers. Addiction issues, mental health issues, suicide, domestic violence, loneliness, anxiety, sexual promiscuity and narcissism are all far more prevalent in LGBT people than they are in the non-LGBT population. Their unacknowledged realties are screaming out against the lie that is being forced on to them, and this is without even going into the more metaphysical realms of damnation and exclusion from God’s Eternal Kingdom that lie will breed in time.

Christian celibacy is better, but it is not yet forceful enough to bring about the culture change that needs to happen. Ed Shaw has written a book called The Plausibility Problem, in which he discusses the problem of presenting celibacy as a plausible lifestyle choice for LGBT people as they seek Jesus. I think it is a huge problem, and it will always remain a minority choice. I think there is a more radical solution that even the church is now too afraid of. God create man and woman to be together. LGBT-identity is a lie, and we need to stop contributing to that lie. We need to undo it. Same-sex attraction is an issue deeply related to LGBT-identity, but it is also separate as it can exist independent of the LGBT-identity. Likewise, same-sex attraction is a lie. It is not part of God’s created order.  We need to undo that too, rather than preach repression. The solution to both lie in language and how people and feelings are described. This process of re-description is deeply disturbing, often very upsetting and above all, terrifying. The road down which I have travelled in the few years has often been hard to bare; and I have found myself gasping with desperation “but who am I then?” To endure such mental turmoil and chaos, the individual must have security in something larger than themselves. Therefore, whilst I believe that coming to faith and overcoming LGBT-identity/same-sex desire are separate things that require separate processes, I doubt that the latter transformation is possible without a total reliance and trust in the peace, love and purpose that God has provided for us.

God and the goodness of his created order are the medicine, but Pinocchio is right, they do seem more terrifying than the illness, even when the illness promises death. That is especially the case when that illness is sin of our own making. So, my last word is this; do not be afraid of the medicine. Although it may seem bitter thing to swallow at first, it is very good indeed.

[your-dietician]

Sleep Disorders 101: Insomnia - Sleep Dallas Blog

New Post has been published on https://depression-md.com/sleep-disorders-101-insomnia-sleep-dallas-blog/

Sleep Disorders 101: Insomnia - Sleep Dallas Blog

Insomnia develops in one of every four Americans each year, but despite its prevalence among the general population, insomnia continues to be vastly underdiagnosed. As explained in a 2016 study, patients should be screened for insomnia consistently as they age, as aging and diabetes are most commonly associated with insomnia symptoms.

And while aging is a very broad risk factor, screening is important to tackling insomnia head-on as 27% of insomniacs don’t realize they have the condition. 

Considering insomnia is such a widely documented sleep disorder, it’s fair to wonder how this is possible—but insomnia is a bit more complex than simply having it or not. See, 30-35% of people suffer from mild insomnia, meaning that their symptoms aren’t as obvious as someone who suffers from moderate or severe insomnia. On top of that, individuals can suffer from acute (short-term affliction) or chronic insomnia (long-term affliction).

Regardless of where one may fall on the insomnia spectrum, getting diagnosed is essential to getting on a path to effective treatment. Even with mild insomnia, a sufferer may continue to experience symptoms two years after the initial point of diagnosis. 

Has this gotten you thinking about those sleepless nights and exhausting mornings? Read on to see if you’re one of the 70 million Americans affected by insomnia. 

Do I Have Insomnia?

Insomnia can be experienced in three degrees of severity: mild, moderate, or severe. Insomniacs on the milder side of the spectrum may not experience a significant impact on their social functioning or work productivity, but as the severity increases, insomniacs can become crippled by conditions.

The challenge for those who have suffered from mild insomnia consistently throughout their lives is pinpointing the normal from what’s actually not normal and maybe having adverse health consequences.

Mild insomniacs report receiving inconsistent sleep—they may great sleep for a few days and then fall into a bout of restless sleep, which brings on the following symptoms:

Restlessness 

Irritability 

Mild anxiety 

Daytime fatigue 

Consistent tiredness 

For insomniacs who suffer from moderate or severe insomnia, it’s obvious that there is an issue because they experience a significant impact on their personal and professional lives. They experience all of the above symptoms but to a more severe degree.

Moderate insomniacs report almost never experiencing a good night’s rest and can feel the impacts of their sleep deprivation in all aspects of their lives.

 Severe insomniacs may feel completely suffocated by this disorder. On top of having trouble sleeping each and every night, there will also be noticeable differences in their ability to maintain relationships and stay on top of their work duties. 

Other important specifics about insomnia: 

You may be diagnosed with insomnia if your sleep problems persist for at least a month. 

Insomnia may lead you to become anxious about sleep, exacerbating insomnia-induced anxiety.

There isn’t a specific test that can be done to diagnose insomnia—it’s fully diagnosed based on patient-experience. The exception is if insomnia is an underlying condition of another serious sleep disorder, such as obstructive sleep apnea or narcolepsy.

You can also suffer from chronic or acute insomnia:

Chronic: A person with chronic insomnia consistently suffers from their insomnia for at least three nights a week, for three months, on a cyclical basis. 

Acute: Typically lasts a maximum of three months and stems from a stressful life event. As you recover from the event that triggered insomnia, symptoms should also begin to subside. 

Treatment For Mild Insomnia

If you suspect that you have mild insomnia, it is important to talk to your doctor and not ignore your symptoms. Insomnia, in any form, can be an indicator of a much larger, and potentially more serious, health issue. Luckily, for those who do have mild insomnia, there are some basic steps you can take to try and improve your sleep. 

Don’t nap during the day. Naps can offset your already precarious sleep schedule. Instead, plan to start getting ready for bed earlier than you already do and set an alarm at the same time every morning—even on the weekends. While getting up “early” on the weekends can be difficult, it’s important to maintain a consistent sleep and wake regiment until you start getting quality sleep.

Exercise earlier in the day versus in the evening. Being active can affect when we’re able to fall asleep. How? By working out in the evening, our biological clock starts to think we want to be more alert in the evenings. By exercising in the morning or early afternoon, we’re keeping a schedule that promotes our brain slowing down in the evenings and our body releasing the sleep-hormone melatonin before bed.

Your diet is intrinsically linked to your sleep health. Consume a balanced diet of sleep-promoting foods. Avoid caffeine starting at least six hours before bedtime, avoid drinking alcohol too late in the evening, and limit dense, heavy foods directly before bed. 

Your bedroom should be exclusively for intimacy and sleep. Working in bed/in your bedroom has been shown to be detrimental to our sleep health. Separate those spaces. 

Avoid screen usage right before bed. The blue light emitted by electronic devices keeps our brains active. Instead, take a bath, read, or journal directly before bed. 

According to the Mayo Clinic, certain forms of alternative medicine have also been shown to improve sleep:

Melatonin, which can be found at most groceries, pharmacies, and markets is a natural sleep hormone our body needs to have a regulated sleep cycle. While taking over-the-counter melatonin may improve our sleep that evening, it’s not considered a long-term solution for insomnia. 

Acupuncture is a traditional Chinese medicine used to treat pain and help with stress management. For insomniacs, this can help alleviate the stress that can leave our brains “running” from thought to thought when we lay down to sleep. Again, while acupuncture can temporarily relieve insomnia symptoms, it’s not a long-term solution. 

Yoga and Tai Chi are two stress-relieving practices that have been shown to improve sleep. Both practices relax the body, lower blood pressure and reduce anxiety. 

Meditation is full of benefits –not only is it shown to improve sleep, but it can also help control chronic pain, reduce anxiety, improve memory and attention span, and lower blood pressure. 

Treatment for Moderate and Severe Insomnia 

While all the above suggestions are great for anyone suffering from insomnia, for those that suffer moderately and severely from insomnia, non-pharmacologic therapies and pharmacologic therapies may be necessary. 

Stimulus Control Therapy: According to a 2010 NCBI study, “Stimulus control therapy is based on the premise that insomnia is a conditioned response to temporal (bedtime) and environmental cues that are usually associated with sleep.” In this form of therapy, the patient retrains their brain to associate their bed and their bedroom with sleep. 

Sleep Restriction Therapy: The same 2010 study defines sleep restriction therapy as a therapy that “…consists of restricting the amount of time spent in bed to nearly match the subjective amount of time spent sleeping.” Only sleeping five hours each night? That’s the amount of time you’re allowed in bed. By restricting sleep, sleep deprivation is slowly induced, causing the person to sleep more heavily when they do get into bed.

Relaxation Therapy: For some insomniacs, not only are their brains going nonstop during the day but at night as well—their arousal systems are constantly going. Relaxation therapy targets this. 

Cognitive Therapy: As mentioned above, some insomniacs begin to develop anxiety around their bed, bedroom, and sleep. Cognitive therapy’s aim is to break down the negative thinking around sleep and the sleep environment. 

Paradoxical Intention: This form of therapy works best on individuals who experience performance anxiety around sleep. The patient, instead of fixating on falling asleep, is encouraged to stay awake. Over time, this will change the way they think about sleep and the anxiety around sleeping.

All of the above therapies are best practiced under the supervision of a therapist, sleep physician, and/or general practitioner. Attempting to partake in any of these therapies alone or without the guidance of a professional may result in the insomniac’s symptoms worsening. 

Insomnia doesn’t have to be your normal. Sleep physicians, like our very own Dr. Dibra, can help. Dr. Dibra is board-certified in sleep medicine and specializes in the diagnosis, treatment, and management of sleep disorders. If you’re ready to take that next step to regain control of your sleep, click here to make your appointment.

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[crimsonrevolt]

Congratulations Taylor you’ve been accepted to Crimson Revolt as Daisy Hookum!

↳ please refer to our character checklist

Taylor lovely, your applications are always so full of beautiful characterizations and complexities (as is your writing in general) that it is a joy to get them and read through everything you provide! I adored Daisy from when you first played her in the rp and it’s so wonderful to think about having her back on the dash and to see you explore her character further! We can’t wait to see what you do with her and how she’s going to change as the war progresses! 

application beneath the cut (tw: Death)

OUT OF CHARACTER

INTRODUCTION

It’s Taylor! Currently 18 and residing in the midwest, in good ol’ CST and using female pronouns.

ACTIVITY

Er – well, currently around a six or seven out of ten, weekly? I have real life responsibilities of course, and dearest Marlene, but I try to generate about four replies weekly. Of course this depends on circumstance but for the most part I can stay caught up with little issue.

TRIGGERS

*removed for privacy

HOW DID YOU FIND US?

Originally, I think it was somewhere in an Andromeda Black tag way back in December. But I’ve been here nearly a year now!

WHAT HARRY POTTER CHARACTER DO YOU IDENTIFY WITH MOST?

Okay, don’t judge, and I’m sure this isn’t a great surprise but - Draco. I’ve been immensely attached to him for years now, for a variety of reasons, and I just have a lot of feelings. But also, Harry and Ron as well - for a very recurring theme we don’t need to get into, just know I love them all very much.

ANYTHING ELSE?

Nothing that wouldn’t absolutely just be my singing praise, which really I do enough as it is.

IN CHARACTER

DESIRED CHARACTER

Daisy Grace Hookum.

Her mother, Jocelyn, was a Muggle with a deep fondness for The Great Gatsby, and chose to name her only child accordingly. However, Daisy’s middle name was a hopeful sort of gesture from her parents, a suggestion and prayer that she would grow up to be eloquent and beautiful in all forms throughout her life.

FACE CLAIM

Katherine McNamara will always be my first choice for Miss Daisy.

REASON FOR CHOSEN CHARACTER

I tried.  I really, really tried to bid her ado, to tuck her away and move on but it’s proven impossible. Daisy is, and will always be, my first love, a part of me that is unshakable  - it’s that easy.

And oh man, oh man. How do I even begin to describe the deep rooted love and affection I hold for Daisy Hookum? She was my first character in CRT, and the first character in a Marauders rp that I truly fell in love with. I had dabbled with others before of course, but none enough that truly struck the way that Daisy did. She was the first character I understood without fault, that I could question and push and she would push back – I grew so much as a writer during my time with her and I know she has so much more to teach me.

She’s such a gentle, kind soul. Raised to have courage and be kind in all strokes of life, Daisy strives to do exactly that; she’s incapable of hate, because there has never been any reason for it. Even after the traumatic, devastating murder of her parents in the new year, Daisy cannot bring herself to hate the Death Eaters. Then again – she doesn’t know what truly caused such a horrendous crime to take place. If she did, it is completely possible that the tables would be turned, but well, she doesn’t. That in itself is an incredibly important facet to her personality, to her humanity; at nineteen to be faced with such a brutal loss is a hardship that I, thank the heavens, have never had to personally experience. To be so young and in the midst of way, to feel so wholly alone must be terrifying. It takes a toll on even the brightest rays of sunshine, which Daisy truly is.

But trauma is not all there is to a person, and there is a love and passion for the written word that was instilled into Daisy by her mother by such an incredibly young age that it is not just a passion, it is a very important facet of who she is. While she doesn’t believe her writing to be any good, it is her safe space, therapy from the world.

Her place in Aversio is one that is to be questioned. She doesn’t get her hands dirty, nor does she truly condone the things that they do – but she’s frightened of the Order. That is what it comes down to, the true reason she never joined. Members of the Order are brave, willing to take risks, be hurt. And while Aversio is very similar, they’re a bit more reckless, and therefore she is more capable of being hidden in the shadows. It has nothing to do with cowardice, it’s fear. Fear that she isn’t a good enough witch, not strong enough to hold her own, not magically, not emotionally. The self doubt is crippling.

But she’s strong, oh lord, is she strong. She has the temper of a red-head, even if it is very seldom seen to the naked eye. Very often Daisy hides her emotions, buries them in fear of becoming too much for someone to handle. But there is nothing she does not feel so strongly that it sometimes pains her in the most powerful of ways. Sometimes it feels as if she may combust with the pressure of it all. Especially now, with the loss of her parents. Moreso than anything else, Daisy is predominately lost now. Protecting her mother was her sole intent behind every motive, in the war, in life. And without her here, Daisy isn’t entirely sure where she stands; a typical teenage emotion, in a much more mature version of life.

There are so many layers to this character, things I still discover now, even after having parted with her. I love her with all of my heart and would be so grateful to write her beautiful mind again.

PREFERRED SHIPS // CHARACTER SEXUALITY // GENDER & PRONOUNS

Sexuality is not something Daisy thinks of, per se, for no reason other than it truly just makes her uncomfortable. Wildly unfamiliar with her own body and personal preferences, the concept of sex isn’t something that bodes well. Never having explored sexual experiences in the past, Daisy often considers the idea as something her body has now become incapable of such acts. However that aside, Daisy is truly demisexual. It takes true emotional connection to become sexually attracted to anyone, but Daisy isn’t convinced she’s ever experienced as much. But this does not specify female/male preference; when it comes down to it, Daisy sees people. That’s all.

Okay. Let me preface this by saying that Daisy views gender primarily on a spectrum more than anything else. There are those who identify as men, as women, and then a very broad area gray shades in the middle. She, predominately, is genderfluid but generally uses female pronouns. This is in part due to the time; they/them pronouns were not widely used in the 70s, and Daisy is not all that aware of her true gender identity. This meaning, Daisy goes between feeling predominantly feminine to out of place in her female body, almost uncomfortably so, almost as if she would feel better to be detached from the sex she was born with. It is something that confuses her greatly, that she does not very often think of - well, that she admits to - but it is always present in some way or form. Whether she knows it or not.

CREATE ONE (OR MORE!) OF THE FOLLOWING FOR YOUR CHARACTER:

Oh boy, oh boy.

Aesthetic1

Aesthetic2

Mock Blog

Pinterest Board

Caring (adjective) - displaying kindness and concern for others; there is not a bone in Daisy’s body that is not built on love. It is almost impossible for her first reaction to anyone to not care more about them and how they are doing, no matter what is going on in her own life. Daisy just wants others to be happy, and okay. Her heart is truly too big for her body, so much that it sometimes feels as if she might die from the weight of it all. Especially, and almost exclusively, when she is suffering - or if someone she cares for is.

Imaginative (adjective) - having or showing creativity and inventiveness; from the earliest days of the capabilities, Daisy has been writing. Creating ideas that simply won’t stay within her head, things that must be released onto paper. They strike at any moment and very rarely do they ever leave her be until the moment comes that she can release and truly do something with them. Otherwise they tend to circle through her mind like a carousel or broken record, repeating and growing, until something is done with them.

Timid (adjective) - showing a lack of courage or confidence; hoo boy, if there ever was a hamartia. A very prominent problem with Daisy is the fact that she doesn’t understand how strong she truly is. If she would only tap into her grief and pain, and true abilities more than just being ordinary Daisy could truly be extraordinary. She already is of course, but too afraid of rejection and criticism to realize it’s so close to her fingertips, so easy to reach out and grip. Daisy has a particularly hard time understanding that in the midst of war, especially, softness is strength. There is too much fear, too much self doubt that it is crippling at times, but so deeply embedded into the very core of being.

Reserved (adjective) - slow to reveal emotion or opinions; really, it all goes back to Daisy’s strong, innate desire to please others. It takes a very specific person for Daisy to feel safe enough to express opinion without fear of being shut down - so few of these exist they can be counted on one hand, and even fewer than truly see her angry.  It comes down to fear, and feeling safe. She had it once, at home. But with the loss of her mother and father it has become even more scarce than before, if possible. She puts others first, always, no matter how many times she is told not to.

Unsteady - X Ambassador Hold onto me ‘Cause I’m a little unsteady

Moondust - Jaymes Young I long to hear your voice But still  I make the choice To burn my love In the moondust

Jack and Jill - Katie Herzig She wore that dress Like it was a Saturday Pretty as a summer rose Picked in the morning Time ticked away, the way That it will

Turn it Off - Paramore I scraped my knees while I was praying And found a demon in my safest haven, seems like The tragedy, it seems unending I’m watching everyone I looked up to break and bending We’re taking shortcuts and false solutions Just to come out the hero

Beauty Queen - Ben’s Brother And her eyes shouldn’t have Blurred my vision I know that she, oh she Was a beauty queen And if you’re gonna cry Don’t cry for me

If You Could See Me Now - The Script (for her parents, rip) I’m trying to make you proud Do everything you did I hope you’re up there with God Saying ‘that’s my kid!’ Would you stand in disgrace or take a bow Oh, if you could see me now

IN CHARACTER QUESTIONNAIRE

♔ If you were able to invent one spell, potion, or charm, what would it do, what would you use it for or how would you use it? Feel free to name it: “Something to…help see what the most likely outcome of a situation would be.” Daisy said, a small nod of certainty following the words after a moment of quiet consideration. A moment to really think about it. “I have absolutely no idea what I could possibly name that, but it would be quite helpful.”

♔ You have to venture deep into the Forbidden Forest one night. Pick one other character and one object (muggle or magical), besides your wand, that you’d want with you: “Oh, that’s easy. Andromeda, and a flashlight. A bit of bravery, something to provide a vast amount of light. And then I would just have to hope Andy would know a spell to help keep us shielded.”

♔ What kinds of decisions are the most difficult for you to make? “The kind where someone could get hurt. Which I guess are…a lot of decisions these days.”

♔ What is one thing you would never want said about you? “That I…that I’m a failure,” it caught in her throat, the words. Thick and painful, almost like swallowing a cauldron cake whole. “Especially to Dora. I don’t think I could take it.”

WRITING SAMPLE

Warning: this is an old para I wrote for Daisy and for this case, I must prepare for the angst monster that exists in terms of Taylor.

Things had felt wrong all day. New Year’s Eve had come to pass, and Daisy couldn’t help the dread that swarmed in the pit of her stomach. It should have been expected, really – what with the events of the previous evening. The witch had yet to hear from any of her friends, to find that they were okay. But still…something felt off.

It had been the first holiday season Daisy had spent with no contact to her family. As horrible and painful as it was, the decision had felt like a necessity. She had spent months fighting her father. Begging him to help her master Fidelius, to protect her mother, only to be told no, again and again. If only she thought she could do it on her own, she would have…but she couldn’t.

Christmas and New Year’s had been increasingly lonely. Most of it had been spent in her tiny apartment with her cat, or at Aversio meetings, trying to remind herself why she had entered a place in the war in the first place.

Perhaps the loneliness was what left her waking up on the first of the new year with such a hollow ache in her chest. Or maybe it was the fact that now marked two months since she had returned home, had any contact with her parents at all. The truth of it was, Merlin, did she miss her mother. Her gentle eyes, and warm heart and the way she seemed to just calm the realities of what was happening.

Hours seemed to pass, simply sitting in her bed, frowning to herself, tiny grey kitten mewing quietly in her lap. Snow drifted down outside the window, cheerful chattering echoing up from the streets as London emerged into a new year. Once the afternoon sun shifted in the sky, only then did Daisy realized she had wasted so much of the day…realized that she still had yet to hear from her friends.

Impulse took over, blinding her, accompanied only by the desperate need she had to be in Jocelyn Hookum’s embrace again. To be promised that everything would be okay, if only for a moment – to be with her mother.  Preparing best she could, Daisy soon Apparated to her family’s home.

The house was still - just enough that Daisy hesitated on the doorstep, unsure of if either her mother or father were truly home. Regardless, she allowed herself in, stepping carefully through the house, unease spreading over her. Even in the January afternoon, the house was dark. It was still.

As she reached the sitting room, the dread, the unease she’d felt for months and even through the morning had nothing on the agony that replaced it all. There, lying on the floor, paled and cold, was her mother. A devastated scream burst from Daisy’s lungs, ringing out so badly that all else seemed to have faded away. There was nothing to give her the indication that she was still moving.

Her small frame dropped down next to her mother’s corpse, tears flooding out of her green eyes at such a speed that it was nearly impossible to see. Breathing had all but ceased. Several pained moments of sobbing later, she finally noticed her father, crumpled dead only feet away.

“No,” she cried, incapable of thought, of anything but just pain as she remained on the ground, desperately wishing for it all to be a cruel nightmare, knowing that there was no waking up.

[tinkiisms]

Tink & Simon || dealer verse

with @memoriies / @neverbcy

beginning: on the blog

continued on discord and compiled here, PART I

And then she was kissing back, pulling him in and he knew that he'd made the right choice. Some times he really need to listen to his instincts - his impulses.

So he allowed himself this luxury, the luxury of deluding himself into believing this was anything more than a fling between two people who pined for a love they would never get. It hurt to see Bell every time Peter rejected her, turning to his obsession with Wendy instead, but it hurt more to know deep down that he was doing exactly the same thing to himself, just with her.

Forcing himself to push those persistent thoughts down, Simon decided to just relish the moment. Never turn down the one thing that made it all bearable - the main reason he was still there. He could lie to everyone and say it was simply loyalty and fear that kept him in line, but he didn't have to share who he was loyal to. Who's life he feared for...

Hands sliding into her hair to hold her closer, pretending in that moment that she was all his and nothing was about Peter, he deepened the kiss - harsher, but the gentleness was still ever present. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her.

So he would just hurt himself to make her happy.

If Bell understood the consequences of partaking of the forbidden fruit, she might not have been so hasty to touch, to get her lips on Simon. Then again, if she were a pious woman to begin with she wouldn't have done any of the things in her life that had brought her here, to this moment. And as anyone--god-fearing or god-forsaken alike--knew, the problem with forbidden fruit was that it tasted so...

Good God. He made Peter seem like a boy.

Comparisons kept her grounded. Allowed her to remember who she was and pull herself back when she threatened to get lost in the feeling. What was that? The feeling that she was the ONLY thing in Slightly's world right now. He wasn't halfway to somewhere else, with someone else. She didn't get exclusive rights to Peter's thoughts even when she gave him every part of her.

This was new. Being kissed like she was the only one. For today, damn, she was lucky he wasn't in love.

He felt as though he were in a dream - surely none of this would be happening in real life... Life wasn't fair to Simon, never had been, so why start now? Then he remembered how unfair his life still was, because life liked to dangle happiness in front of him before ripping it away.

He'd been holding her close, letting Bell pick the pace, the intensity, not wanting to overstep. Losing himself in a false world where everything was kind to them both, and allowed the pair a happy ending.

Then a phone started to ring.

Her phone.

One glance at the screen told him who was calling.

Peter.

Of course there was an interruption now, when things were finally getting interesting around here. Right when she was in the middle of something good, a catch just had to pull her away. Bell only hoped Simon wouldn't take such an interruption as a sign that they shouldn't be doing...whatever this strange, wonderful thing was that they were doing.

Breaking away from their embrace was like coming up for air--resisting the temptation to dive back in almost impossible. She managed it with a flash of annoyance at their fun being disrupted, but that melted away like snow in spring as she checked the phone and saw who was calling.

Sitting up and adjusting herself mentally for a moment, she cleared her throat and picked up the call with a chirpy, “Hello.”

Simon moved further down the sofa from her as she answered, the fantasy world fading away into the bleak reality that he was in. He should have known this would happen - he never got to have too much happiness.

Something would always come along and snatch it up, telling him he'd had his time.

__

“Where are you?” He didn't bother greeting her, his goal was not to chat.

Peter glared around his room, eyes red and damp, body shaking with a mixture of anger, sadness, and craving.

She'd done it again. Floated into his life, told him this time it would be permanent, if he cleaned up. He'd been sober for a week before Wendy claimed he was too negative and upsetting to be around any more.

It should have been expected, they had a pattern now. She came, he tried to quit his 'nasty habits', she left, he went to Bell, repeat.

That tone was too easily recognizable. Bell was sure she couldn't keep her face from falling as she realized what state Peter was likely in, and exactly who had caused it. Wendy had reentered his life recently, pushing her to the sidelines; next step was pre-written. They'd been through the cycle plenty enough times before, and yet she had been swept up in it every time.

She still was. With her happiness so attached to, dependent on his, Peter's heartbreak was her own. And perhaps for selfish reasons, too, because she knew these times were the ones where he seemed to need her the most. It wasn't the same as wanting, appreciating, loving, but being needed was at least something.

Signaling to her guest with an apologetic expression and a motion that suggested she needed to handle this, she put their situation on the back-burner for Peter's without second thought. “I'm home. What do you need?”

Relief swam through his body and he stood from his bed, grabbing a jacket as he made his way to the front door.

"I'm coming over."

No questions, no asking if he could come over - it would be pointless to ask even if he had thought to, the answer was always yes. Peter simply grabbed his keys, tugged on some shoes, and was out of the door headed to Bell's home.

__

That signal was all he needed, to know it was that time of the month. Wendy had finally given up on Peter again, and he was building himself back up by using Bell as a way to feel better. It had taken longer than in the past, usually lasting only a few days before she left...

Simon knew that Wendy wasn't exactly good news, but he couldn't help but love when she was around. Perhaps it was because she made Peter slightly more bearable in those periods of time, or perhaps it was because it gave him the freedom to see Bell if he wanted.

Rising from the sofa, Simon didn't even glance back in Bell's direction before walking out.

Not two minutes after leaving was he suddenly slammed into a wall by a violent (and clearly experiencing withdrawals) Peter. He immediately regretted not leaving the instant he saw the caller ID.

__

Peter didn't live far from Bell, and when he was like this he really stopped giving a shit about road laws, speeding through the streets on his motorcycle. He'd not left the apartment long after telling her he'd be over, and it had taken him even less time than usual to make it there.

Which is how he saw Simon leaving the building. No one Simon knew, other than Bell, lived in that building.

Rage rolled over him, and he tackled the other man into the nearby wall. Not waiting for a response, he grabbed Simon by his collar and dragged him back inside, angrily knocking on the door. “OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!”

His blunt answer sent her heart into a dizzying spiral. He could be over in a matter of minutes if he was leaving from where he lived--the click of the call ending told her she didn't have time to explain to him that she wasn't alone or tell Simon to get lost. Luckily her fox boy was clever enough to clue in before she could say anything and had already walked, leaving her to head to the window and watch his exit. Was that twinge of regret she felt because she would have been happy to continue their tryst a little longer, or because she may have put him in a dangerous spot?

If Peter were to catch Bell with any of the guys--the closest things after her that he had to “friends”--the chaos that would follow was...was unfolding before her eyes. Flinching at the sight of the collisions, Peter into Simon, Simon into the wall, imagining the felt them in her own gut, she tore her gaze away. No, oh no no no. What could she do? Would her presence ease Peter's fury or agitate it further?

She didn't need to answer that. Bell found herself at the door moments later without knowing how she got there, ready to rush down and intervene, but something overwhelming and oppressive as a dark cloud stopped her from turning the knob. Visceral fear. She must have stood there long enough for them to enter the building and march upstairs, which she hardly realized until the banging and shouts of Peter's demand shocked her back into action.

Shaking, she turned the knob and let the door swing open. Took two steps back to allow Peter and his anger to fit through.

“What is this?” she asked, using her flushed face to her advantage as she improvised an ignorant reaction. For all she knew, one of her dealers had just left her apartment from a quick chat about business only to be accosted by Peter on the way out.

Simon was practically thrown into the apartment, stumbling into an end table, almost knocking objects off of it. His heart was racing, life flashing before his eyes. It was a shit one...

Full of fear, addiction, lies and pain. He only wished Bell wasn't also going to have to deal with this.

His one regret was not being fast enough to save Bell from Peter.

__

After unceremoniously throwing the taller man into the apartment, Peter slammed the door shut behind himself. He was like a thunder storm, ready to strike at these traitors with lightning.

“Don't try to bullshit your way out of this, Bell! What was he doing here?!”

An accusatory finger was pointed at Simon, who was trying desperately to make himself seem small and invisible whilst glancing at the woman between them. Those glances only served to make Peter angrier. He recognised that look - he'd seen it in himself, and he'd seen it in Bell. The fear of losing someone you wanted.

A small, unexpected noise escaped her throat as she saw Simon shoved into a table...She had messed up and Peter was taking it out on him. Punishing him for nothing but the transgressions SHE had pushed him into, because SHE had strayed. But despite the violence in his voice, Peter hadn't laid a finger on her yet; if he was lashing out at the other man because he couldn't hurt her...Well, it didn't make it okay, but maybe it was because he cared about her. Actually cared, enough to get jealous.

Hating herself for even wanting this sort of vicious, possessive attention, she felt the speed of her heartbeat increase to a hummingbird pace. Nevertheless, she didn't want to see anyone hurt, so she approached Peter with what she hoped was a calming demeanor as she tried to soothe his concerns. Bullshit excuses or not, her love was genuine. Couldn't that alone give him some peace of mind?

“He was here to talk pixie dust; that's all. I told him to go when you called because I thought you wanted to...have a private conversation.” They all knew what that meant. It was a believable enough reason for the situation he'd caught them in--all he'd seen was Simon leaving. Peter must have known that if Bell ever expected anything from him, she wouldn't hesitate to kick her own grandmother out.

The fire in his eyes was suddenly directed straight at Bell, no longer concerned with Simon. She was lying to his face, and being so fucking calm about it.

“How stupid do you think I am?” The volume had lowered considerably, to the point where Peter would have seemed calm if not for the fierce tone and the burning anger in his face.

“Do you honestly think I've not seen the way he looks at you? But I left it alone, because I believed that you were smart enough to not want anything to do with him. That he was smart enough to not even try.”

Peter then glanced back over at Simon, who was breathing heavily, eyes clenched shut. Regret painted across his face, it only proved Peter right. And then he was moving, towards Bell. She would either step back, until he trapped her, or stand her ground and get forcibly moved into the nearest wall. That was her choice.

His voice dropped to an almost whisper, dripping with a poison that threatened to burn her from the inside.

“I guess you're both talented at lying. I'd say you deserved each other if it wasn't for one thing.” A hand suddenly reached out and grabbed Bell's upper arm in a vice like grip - adrenaline overpowering the weakness that came from withdrawal.

“You both forget that I don't share my toys.”

“I don't know what you mean--” she began, looking for the right combination of words that would stop his anger, stop him in his tracks as he backed her against the wall. True ones or false, warm ones or bitter. Were there any words of any language to placate that hell-born passion? She could fight to be believed, but when Peter got something into his head, he was stubborn as a bull. Even if she had been telling the truth, he probably wouldn't have believed her anyway.

She had been lying, though. It was her fault they were in this mess. She couldn't meet his eyes even as he grabbed her in a bruising hold and whispered words that sounded like threats. Her own fell on Simon and she could have laughed at the irony if she weren't so distressed. Not half an hour ago he'd also been pressing her to the wall, yet with none of the force and ferocity of Peter's grasp. She'd been the one making teasing remarks about Peter's property. It was like he was now unwittingly giving her what she'd asked for.

But she wouldn't admit to betraying Peter if it killed her.

“You're the only one I want,” she said, looking back at him. Her voice rose in intensity as she continued, “You know you are. I've always been here for you!”

You're the only one I want. Those words sliced through Simon like a knife, unable to hide the slight flinch that came with the pain. He was just a placeholder - a way for Bell to entertain herself until the main attraction decided she was worth his time again.

And yet some small part of him still wanted to protect her.

“I was just giving her the money I owed her, that's all. She's already made it clear that you're the only guy she'll ever be interested in.”

He was staring intensely at Peter, refusing to give Bell the satisfaction of seeing him acknowledge anything they'd had before this moment. Only bitterness.

___

Simon's voice had his head whipping around to glare at him, taking in everything he said. That bitterness... He wasn't a good actor, and it amused Peter to know that Simon was so hurt by Bell's disinterest. There was no way that could be faked.

But he didn't quite believe the reason for Simon's visit. Letting go of her, as if she was a burning piece of metal, Peter marched over to Simon and punched him - the man reeling back with a hand flying to his now bleeding nose. Then there were more punches, and it pleased him greatly to know that even when experiencing withdrawals, he still had the upper hand.

Simon was on the ground, shaking and bleeding as Peter crouched down, forcing the injured man to look up at him.

“If I ever see you on the same fucking street as Bell or her apartment, I'll have your heart removed and I will give it to her as a gift, just to watch her reject it again.” He was grinning, the anger still in his eyes was now mingling with a sick amusement.

“Now get out.”

__

Almost immediately, Simon was scrambling to his feet and wrenching the front door open, the slam of it closing followed him down the stairs as he tried to stop the bleeding, any of the bleeding. He was done. Moving, gone. A ghost.

He'd sell the last of his supply, keep the money for himself (how could he pay his supplier anyway? It was Bell), sell his crappy apartment and find somewhere new to live. Audition for the band and hope more than anything that they'd take him.

Relieved of his painful grasp on her arm, she was actually thinking for the tiniest sliver of a second that her words had reached some small sensitive part of Peter deep down, that he'd leave off them knowing he had no reason to think Simon was a threat. How silly of her. Her delusion of peace--why should she ever have expected it--was shattered instantaneously, as was possibly Simon's nose.

“PETER!” Her shriek was so high and breathless it wouldn't have done any good even if Peter was inclined to listen to her protests. The rest of her screams to stop, don't take it out on him, he did nothing, stop, went similarly unanswered. She attempted to hold his arm, only to be thrown back with his next swing. Giving up quickly on fruitless efforts--it never helped--she defaulted to the other option: she scooted away and shut her mouth. That was all she could do in the face of the bloody mess being made of her dear friend right in front of her eyes. Too small, too weak, too useless to stop it.

And then he was gone, gone for good and she was to blame. He didn't have the kind of money for hospital bills, and who was there at home to treat an injury if it was serious? If she had just kept her big mouth shut to begin with, hadn't let her arrogance get the better of her in thinking she could slip something past Peter and drawn Simon into all of this...Did she dare to hope it was over with him now out of sight?

Her voice was hardly audible in the wake of the storm that had just come through as she said, questioningly, “Peter?”

The aftermath had him drained of all the energy his adrenaline had provided. Peter tentatively rubbed his split knuckles, shaking and sweating once more with need. Turning to face her, his chest rapidly rising and falling, Peter looked so vulnerable, as if he could break at any moment.

“Pixie dust...” He managed to mutter, before making his way into the living room, to collapse on the sofa as nausea rolled through him like an ocean wave. She would have some, she always did, and he could rely on that. He needed it, he felt like he was staring at death and unable to move away.

The anger eventually subsided into a sadness that clung to his heart, like brambles that stuck to clothes as you desperately tried to get out, tugging painfully. It was only due to his heightened emotional state, and lack of drugs in his system, that Peter started to cry.

His lack of an answer, the visible weakness in his physical and mental state were enough proof that his outburst was over. In the ebb she melted, and immediately metamorphosed from plaything to caretaker. No one else would pick up the pieces. Deciding to clean up the mess in her apartment later, check up on Simon after Peter had been handled, she moved to bring him a fresh packet of dust and a glass of water.

Kneeling beside his spot on the couch, she almost offered over the drugs, but paused. Times when Peter needed something from her were the only ones when he didn't speak over her. Whether he was addled with withdrawal or not, she had a duty to herself to at least try to make him understand what effect his actions had on those around him. Let alone the physical injury to one of her best friends and dealers, but the emotional distress he put on anyone and everyone who associated with him.

“Peter, you can't DO shit like this anymore. I know it's because of that...bitch, Wendy...but you can't just take it out on everyone else!” His tears were enough to push hers over the edge as well, and they trailed down her face undisturbed as she reached out to wipe Peter's away with a finger.

He seemed unresponsive to her words, just continuously shaking with tears rolling down his cheeks. Sure, there'd be a brief time when he'd listen - when his sadness over Wendy leaving turned to a bitter want of revenge, and he would self destruct instead. Attack the very thing that she'd tried to make 'perfect'.

That also wouldn't last long, because Bell would try to stop him and then it would affect how much money they were making.

The second her finger touched his face, his hand snapped up to hold her wrist. It took a couple of seconds before he then tugged her closer and buried his head in her shoulder, arms tightly wrapped around her as he cried into her. Muffled ‘sorry’s and ‘I'm sorry’s were spoken into her shoulder through the tears.

He was well and truly vulnerable in this kind of state. It was almost sad that it took so much to make him even remotely decent, even if it was just for a few moments...

No answer but his delayed embrace and the quiet apologies that poured out with his tears. No way to know if he understood her or was just so broken that he would say anything to earn a fraction of forgiveness in the aftermath of his outburst. But he had never had to beg for scraps with her. She was a goner by the time he pulled her in close and tied her up in his shaking arms.

Bell crawled the rest of her body onto the couch alongside him so she could make a better cushion for him to wrap around--cry into. She tried to soak up his sadness, but it didn't matter how much she took from him; it was an endless spring from within Peter. Nothing would EVER be enough to quell it. No amount of surrogate motherly affection from half-present girlfriends, mind-numbing hallucinogens or support from a silly girl who thought she could mean something to him. She would never be enough.

It was a masochistic game to be a player in. Give her heart away to a reckless boy who dropped it each time. Pick up the pieces and hand them right back. Watch him tear himself apart every day in the name of self-medication. Pick up the pieces. Watch him break his own heart every other week. Pick up the pieces. Watch as he brutalized one of the only people in her life who might genuinely like her. Pick up the pieces. Over and over.

The new position only had him holding her tighter, whispers subsided back into quiet sobs that echoed slightly through the room. He hated to cry, especially in front of anyone​, but his heart hurt too much for him to give a damn any more.

Eventually, after about half an hour, Peter's head rose from her shoulder, tear stained and incredibly pale.

“I'm done with her, Bell. This is the last time I let her in.”

Lies.

“She doesn't care about me - not like you do. I'm sorry I push you away,” a soft kiss was then pressed to the corner of her mouth. “I'll never do that again...”

More lies.

How long would it last this time? He acted as if there was a real choice between her and Wendy. Like he would actually stay by her side next time the perfect, polished primadonna came waltzing into his life and tried to change him. Bell had never been his first choice before--why would she start to be one now? She told herself not to believe it, not to fall for those pretty words that fell from tender lips. She told herself not to be drawn in by those eyes that promised peace but delivered poison.

But it had been really bad this time...Worse than ever before, and though it was record-breaking every time, it had been so bad he might truly refuse to go through it again. Bloody and tragic, and yet here she was, holding onto him despite it all. Had he finally learned who was always here by his side no matter the circumstances or the cost? She made herself sick by smiling into his kiss, but the slimmest possibility was worth the risk. If he wanted to feed her lies, she would make excuses to eat them up.

And so she picked up the pieces. And handed them back to the boy.

Her smile had him smiling softly, and this was perhaps the softest he's ever been. Moving in for another kiss, Peter closed his eyes and willed for his heart to heal once more. Let her put it back together again, and he wouldn't hurt so much.

Though a small thought in the back of his mind piped up, reminding him that he'd leave her again as soon as he was whole once more.

He probably should have cared, but he didn't.

Enjoying the small part of Peter's heart Bell could touch, the attention she so craved which he rarely allowed her, she allowed time to slip away as they held one another. After a while she noticed a fresh wave of his swetaing and tremors hitting him hard, effects she couldn't cure with all the affection in her arsenal, and gave him a fix of his favorite medicine. Poison in a pretty package. Eventually they moved to her bed and the rest of the night swirled by in a sweet blur, but as always he was gone by morning's light.

It took her longer than usual to get ready that day, head feeling full of cotton and eyes bleary but filled with a sense of strange calm and peace. Even numbness as she cleaned the dried blood from Peter's jealous attack on Simon the previous night and showered away the remnants of his scent on herself. She chose a top that covered the bruise blooming on her upper arm and set off to meet her sister.

Peri's apartment was in a much nicer area as opposed to the seedy neighborhoods Bell frequented, and she felt a small sense of relief at ringing the bell and not feeling the pressing need to look over her shoulder.

[realtalk-princeton]

same 2023 from the competitive question here: I have a slightly bigger dilemma. Maybe you can provide some clarity, maybe not. I feel like everything I read about Princeton from students is negative. People are talking about how the school is mean, people talking about how students are unfeeling, people talking about elitism and cutting others out. I want to love Princeton, I want to pick it for my next 4 years, but I feel like everything I hear about the place is miserable. Is there any hope?

Response from Maybach:

Hellow anon 2023! Thanks for checking in and your questions are totally understandable. I’m going to trying and dissect and answer many parts of your question all at once, but always feel free to ask again for more specifics. Furthermore, I would like to strongly state that while we all have our biases, I am not beholden to the university nor employed by it to paint it in any given light one way or another. My experience has certainly had ups and downs and this is my true “real talk”

Anyway, so let’s start with “everything I read about Princeton from students is negative.” On this blog (and perhaps certain other outlets), you’re going to have your perspectives shaped by samples and other factors that aren’t necessarily indicative of your future experience. On this blog, for example, we foster anonymous dialogue for real concerns that people often times have trouble even asking their advisors in real life for. As a result, the worst you will ever see here, is LITERALLY the worst that people can go through. That doesn’t mean it’s common or that it will happen to you. Quite the contrary in many cases as well. Furthermore, I would like to state that in my personal experiences, Princeton has provided numerous immeasurable positive events for my life that I would have never experienced had I stayed local in my upstate college town. They paid for me to go to South America for several months to work for non-profits while I ate luxury steaks (I didn’t know how bad inflation was until I arrived). They allowed me to be instructed by Carnegie-Hall performing Grammy-nominated Irish folk singers and play Bob Dylan tunes with them. They got me interviews with elite hedge funds paying six-figures straight out of college even though I don’t know what I was doing. These are just a few of the many things on an endless list that I could argue about Princeton uniquely giving me that very few institutions also do. I would know as well as I’ve studied abroad twice (with $1k from Princeton again I might add) as well as taken courses over the summer at NYU (not a bad college so I hear). Are all of these things I mentioned under your umbrella of “everything I read about Princeton from students is negative?”

Now that’s not to say EVERY waking moment of every day I’m feeling amazingly positive and love everything. In fact, my senior year has actually been the toughest years of my life in many ways. However, in 90%+ of the cases of negativity in my college years, the issue was not a Princeton-specific problem. What do I mean by that? Most of the negative challenging aspects that I’ve had to confront are not caused exclusively and directly by Princeton. They are either 1. related to completely non-academic things that I would be a jerk to blame on Princeton (e.g. relationship problems) or 2. common of pretty much EVERY other elite institution. If anything, we are superior to our peers because we aren’t ashamed to foster dialogue on hard issues such as mental health. If anything, we should be proud that we talk about the negatives as well, so that we can work to improve them instead of ignoring them. I was shocked to hear from a pre-frosh the other day that “ivy school x” (I won’t name it, but if you’ve read my past posts, you can make a guess) is so “fun and easy” while at Princeton people are depressed. It was total BS. Literally 9 people attempted to take their lives at this school in one year, but of course, NOBODY at admissions or on student blogs talked about it and this kid didn’t even know the truth until I told it. I wonder why? (sarcasm) This is just one example, but an important one. Mental health is a problem at Princeton, but it’s a problem pretty much everywhere else too. You want to know what the mental health services usage rate is at Yale? It’s 50%, practically the same here. Now, they don’t tell you that in the brochures. But my friends at Yale are actually starting initiatives to fix what they called “broken and garbage” counseling. As I said before, these are almost universal problems that may or may not affect you and certainly, choosing another elite school over Princeton might not “fix” what concerns you. This transitions well into the last part of my response.

Now I’ll answer the last part of your question “People are talking about how the school is mean, people, talking about how students are unfeeling, people talking about elitism and cutting others out.” I had to show this to my cousin who just visited campus a week ago and he almost started laughing. He texted me “Are you sure this person isn’t talking about Wharton?” Now let me say he still likes the school, but if you want to talk about cuthroatness, I haven’t seen levels here like they are over there. We talked a LONG time about how people really don’t know what it’s like until they are there and they often can’t separate from outside their bubble. Once again, I’m never going to lie and say there are NO aspects of elitism at Princeton. And for sure, is it worse than at some other ivies? Of course. That said, will it certainly ruin your life and make a Princeton experience bad for you? Of course not. It will shape you as much as you partake it in. “Mean” students are everywhere. When I studied abroad, I was in groups with kids from all ivies. I paid for someone’s lunch from Brown (the “nicest” school) because he didn’t have cash yet. He decided to never venmo me back and instead pretended like I didn’t pay (even though he spent over $30) and claimed this was my “payment for privilege.” Now this is just one story, and I don’t want you to get any false stereotypes in your head. But, the bigger point is that what you’re describing, while true in some aspects to a degree, doesn’t apply to Princeton nearly as much as you’re imagining. Furthermore, it’s not like it’s going to be instantly or in some cases even noticeably better at any of the other institutions. Trust me on this one.

So I’ll end with this. Do we (Princeton) have problems? Yes. Are most of our problems unique to only us among the ivies? Flat out NO. Is elitism, meanness, and cutting others out perhaps worse here than at some other ivies? Yes, it’s certainly possible, but not to the degree an outsider imagines and certainly not enough that should override all of the wonderful things we offer that the other ivies don’t. Are there problems that are unique to Princeton even if it’s only 10% of its total problems? Yes. And pre-frosh should be aware of them and I’m happy to talk about them. The ones you described above aren’t them though. I hope this long response was helpful. I don’t mind it at all as I hope that I can be a good resource for everone! Feel free to ask any follow-ups and as always, I don’t want you to come here for the sake of coming here. I want you to come here if it’s right for you. Likewise, I don’t want you not to come here for arbitrary misinformed reasons that will make you end up in a place that gives you a worse experience.

[idjurovic]

On Rewards in 2019, in Games and in Life

This is a tad off-topic for this blog, but a thought that’s followed me into the new year is the idea of rewards and how we expect feedback for everything we do, even outside of games (and perhaps because of games). With the new year rolling in, I’ve been thinking about my goals for 2019. I’ve always been a very results oriented person, for better or for worse. It’s certainly what’s gotten me some of the achievements I’m most proud of; there’s been a lot of opportunities given to me that never would have been possible had I not worked every angle in pursuit of some goal, whether it was fleeting or truly what I wanted. But that kind of thinking has also caused me a great deal of pain and anxiety. It’s a little sad to say, but I’ve never been the type to “stop and smell the roses,” and the saying “it’s the journey not the destination” has always eluded me. However, as I thought of resolutions these past couple of weeks, I found myself feeling so exhausted from the rewards thinking. It’s strange, because this is the only way I’ve ever lived my life, and also because games may have some role in molding the minds of highly engaged players like myself to expect payoff - or response at the very least - for the deeds we do. It got me wondering: is there another way to reward players? Is there a way to reflect experiencing something for pleasure and not for strictly tangible gains that is still satisfying? And underneath it all, past the surface-level fascination I have for rewards systems in games, what can I learn from them to better myself as a human?

There’s a lot of ways to reward players of your games. Feedback like I mentioned above is a great one; visual and aural feedback, balancing intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, variable vs. fixed rewards - and unexpected rewards even! - all for the player to see and understand. Showing task relevance and the value of behaving a certain way in the game is another big one; sometimes even learning itself is a great tool for rewarding the player - giving the player a brand new, interesting area to explore when they go off the beaten path for example, or allowing multiple solutions to a problem so the player feels like they found unique and unexpected ways to interact with the game... the list goes on. Maybe learning as a means for rewards is one of the better ways to fight the dangerous feeling I described above, where we start to only do things for the end results. Heck, simply showing a bunch of juicy particles when the right buttons are inputted feels like such a good reward in a lot of games! We game designers have a great responsibility to our players in how we reward them - if we don’t design these systems in a way that’s satisfying, our players will leave to find something more worth investing their time in. In life, as people without titles like “designer,” it’s not always so clear when you’re doing something to advance yourself. It’s not wrong for games to be different in this way - we do use games to escape the confusion of our daily lives and to amplify our desire to prescribe meaning to events that may otherwise seem unfortunately meaningless, after all. We want to believe there’s an order somewhere. At least, I do. Games really play up this part of my brain that is relying so heavily on the notion that the things I do matter somehow, and that all things that happen in the world are noticed and accounted for. It scares me to think of a life where even a small fraction of the things we do are possibly inconsequential. How can all our planning, all our tears and efforts and endurance, ever fall to the wayside when they matter so much to us? Can that ever really mean nothing? In most games, anything worth doing always matters.

Then something struck me. On New Years Eve I finished Season 2 of a show called The Good Place. The show is genius, if you haven’t seen it already - a great blend of comedy and thought-provoking concepts about morality and the afterlife. An idea relevant to rewards systems that kept appearing in the show was the concept of “moral desserts.” The show describes this as the idea of doing something good for the sake of the anticipated reward, as opposed to doing something good because it’s good. In other words, it’s the idea of doing something almost exclusively for the dessert you’re expecting and feel you’re owed at the end of the meal. This is a huge dilemma in reward systems design; many times you want a reward to feel like icing on the cake, not like the sole reason the player will do that cool quest you spent so much time creating and tuning. There’s the idea that content, if it’s cool enough, will be reward in itself to play, and satisfaction will arise from play itself. Is this a naive thought for designers like us to believe, if so much of what we do in our day-to-day lives is with a specific reward in mind (like recognition, or social or financial gain)? It seems at odds with how we operate, but perhaps it’s another form of idealism we’ve woven into games: deep down, we want to do things for the sake of doing them, NOT for the fleeting reward itself. But boy does the carrot taste sweet once you finally reach it.

The term “moral desserts” is so aptly named and so relatable that I can’t help but find myself recalling these last few months where all I’ve been doing is moping over the dessert I feel I earned but didn’t receive. For me, 2018 was so life-changing and full of newly found joy... but it also felt cruel in a lot of ways, like it was overflowing with moments from start to finish where I did my best, put my heart and soul into a thing, and was left with an empty plate when all I wanted was to dig into some metaphorical cheesecake and call it an experience. (Who doesn’t love cheesecake?) I found myself obsessing over it all - through researching and playing with rewards systems in games, actually! I found myself studying all the different kinds of ways games would make me feel good - or bad - for the actions I took, and reveled in how immediately the world took notice of me. I dissected all the dissatisfying moments of my year that haunted me, and put them up against a chart in my mind of ways it could have felt rewarding and wasn’t, or why exactly my enormous efforts in situations that were so important to me felt so meaningless in the end when I had all the words in the world to explain why it felt good to do simple fetch quests in an RPG. I thought about how a reward can seem like a punishment if it’s not the one the player expects and wants, or how failing to give a reward when the player feels they did something to earn one is demoralizing and threatens their capacity for long-term engagement. I blamed everything around me for threatening my “long-term engagement” with my dreams for game design. I’m not exaggerating when I say I wrung myself out with this line of thinking. Indeed, I’ve been a child crying for dessert.

But as I watched The Good Place and waited for midnight to strike on New Years Eve, I really pondered moral dessert. Had I done any of the things I did in 2018 for the dessert? I felt I didn’t get any, and had nothing to show for all my efforts - I even thought for so many months that I had even less than what I started the year with, and that I may have even regressed. But could that really be true, if time passed and I matured? It’s not tangible, but does that mean it doesn’t exist? What if my mind and expectations was in the wrong place all along, and that’s why it didn’t turn out the way I wanted; in other words, what if I was expecting the kind of reward I might get from a strategy game when all along I was playing a hack-and-slash? Of course I’d be disappointed as a player; I was setting myself up for disaster. In that line of thinking about the “why’s” instead of the “what’s” of the year, it occurred to me that as much as I mourned the endings... the “why” in the things I did was never for the result. Maybe I wanted the dessert in the end, but really I did what I did because I wanted to pursue it at the time. Maybe my growth isn’t tangible, but saying it doesn’t exist would be totally negating those 365 days that I really believed I wasn’t wasting as I lived them. I wanted to know it was noticed, but if I were to go back now, I think I would do the same knowing I wouldn’t get the results I wanted. It really isn’t about the dessert in the end, and growth is not material but it exists and is something to be proud of. Maybe the game of 2018 was trying to show me that.

Some say there are two different kinds of players to identify when you’re conducting a playtest: the kind that blames themselves when an interaction is confusing or unexpected, and the other kind that blames the game itself. Maybe this time it wasn’t a problem with the rewards system itself, if I’m to be so bold to say that there even is one in life, but rather a problem with me, the player, for blaming the game when I could be more balanced and look to myself for how I can improve despite how the game is structured. We don’t really have a choice in life but to adapt, do we? So, reader, I’m going into 2019 now with a new mindset thanks to games, the pain of living, and Kristen Bell. I’m cutting down on moral desserts.

[regulardomainname]

Select One Of The 5 Best Hosting Services For Your Website

When a website has been built exactly as specified what could possibly go wrong? It’s further assumed that the product the website promotes should draw large amounts of traffic. Yet its expectations somehow fall short. There are a few reasons that could cause that to happen. A common one is a performance issue that you can trace back to the web hosting service. The website owner pays a big price when the hosting doesn’t do what it should. For example, when it cannot deliver adequate page loading speeds. Or when it doesn’t handle the information capacity a website requires.  Also, when it’s not reliable and/or offers substandard support. It’s no secret that few website owners understand the impact a hosting service can have on a website’s performance. There are plenty of hosting services that would like the opportunity to serve you. Some are better than others in terms of the services they provide. Here are 5 sure winners. 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Each account on SiteGround’s shared hosting platform is protected in critical situations via account isolation through a chroot environment. SG Site Scanner is another tool crafted by SiteGround and powered by Sucuri. It detects and warns you in the case of a malware issue. Their support is very fast and knowledgeable in questions that go beyond hosting. All that is noticed by WordPress.org where they officially recommend SiteGround as one of the brightest hosting providers. A2 Hosting A2 Hosting’s brand is centered around speed and performance. Today’s website users barely tolerate moderate page loading times. They quickly go elsewhere when a site’s page loads take more than a few seconds. This premier web hosting service lets you put behind you whatever problems you may have experienced with website server speed or performance. You have multiple server options open to you as well; one or more of which should admirably address your needs. They include Cloud VPS hosting and managed VPS hosting. Select a private server option if that will best suit your needs, or opt for a managed or unmanaged dedicated server. Whatever your choice, you’ll be pleasantly rewarded with page loading that is not only fast, but “screaming fast”; and A2 Hosting can offer something even faster. Their Turbo server and SwiftServer capabilities can produce page loading speeds that exceed what most hosting services provide by a factor of 20! 99.9+% uptime is routine, plus you can expect to receive speedy around-the-clock support 24/7/365. WordPress VIP Website hosting fee structures that are subject to change with changes in website traffic or capacity can sometimes create unanticipated problems for the website owners. The WordPress VIP team believes that owners should not be penalized for running a successful website by being required to pay more due to increasing web traffic or a need for more capacity. Their flat fee structure lets you avoid these issues. WordPress VIP also provides other helpful services. GlowHost If you’ve outgrown the limits of your present shared hosting plan, and your hosting service has recommended upgrading to a managed VPS plan, a better solution might be to consider GlowHost as a replacement. Their Elastic Sites Plan (actually 3 different plans), provides the dedicated resources you require, it’s reliable, and from your perspective, it’s just as easy to manage as is a VPS service. Pagely – Premium WordPress Hosting Solutions Pagely’s premium Managed Hosting service caters exclusively to large WordPress sites and is a solid solution for publishers, universities, and enterprise level companies. Pagely is a market leader in speed, scalability, & security, and as a top-tier host they provide tech-focused support plus their own security suite, CDN, and caching system. Fully revenue funded, with no outside investors to answer to, their team’s first priority is always the customer. Follow These Tips for Choosing a Web Hosting Service One or more of the 5 hosting services discussed here should more than meet your needs. Making a wrong choice on your part is highly unlikely; but by following these few tips, you should find it easier to choose among 2 or more solid candidates. * The first thing you should do is to explain to yourself what your website does, what its purpose is, and the type of website it is. A hobby website, or a blog or personal site,would typically have quite different hosting needs than a company site or an online store. * Where is your website heading; or where do you want it to go? If it will grow because your business is expanding and you’re getting more and more traffic and customers every day, you might eventually find yourself having to change hosting options or services. 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Don’t simply scroll to the bottom and place a checkmark in the box to indicate your agreement. See what the host’s refund and upgrade policies are. * Don’t sign up for any hosting service that doesn’t have a clearly spelled out backup plan. A disruption in service can be annoying, but a permanent loss of data or of your website is far worse. * If security features are not spelled out, you should ask about them. Those things happen, and you want to make sure any private information you have about your customers and their transactions will always be kept safe. Summarizing These 5 hosting services are the best that money can buy. At least one of them, and probably more, should fully meet your needs; both now and in the future. Each offers superb customer service, or they wouldn’t be on the list. We still suggest checking out the reviews before you make your final choice. 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[manualarticlespinning]

The Considerable Benefits of Top Quality Manual Article Spinning

Lots of people who know how web content works will also grasp that duplicate content is a greater or lesser evil that needs to invariably be averted wherever practical: it's never wise to just copy another person's work to another location. Copied content is proscribed to the point of having with it legal penalties, and among professional web writers it brings a major stain. As a writer as well I will go to substantial lengths in order to keep clear of having duplicate content personally, at times - and this is the paradox - to the extent of actually making use of a software package to help me achieve this!

Furthermore, there is a powerful consensus that Google will likely penalise duplicated content to the extent that it will downgrade or devalue website pages which contain content that it is aware is located elsewhere from a previous date and time, or else pull your web page from cyberspace entirely.

Among the many undisputed tenets of inventive thinking is the fact that there is simply no copyright concerning ideas. It is always appreciated that the same idea could be conveyed in numerous diverse ways, to the point that this is appreciated in the law, which safeguards creative work from getting replicated when written with precisely the same words.

Accordingly, to what degree is a rewritten article plagiarism, and just how is this to be prevented?

Often I'm invited by to rewrite pre-existing subject matter, as they have come across articles they like but they understand that you can’t simply copy someone else’s work.

Every now and then people ask me to "spin" articles, even though what they really mean is that they want me to rewrite the content. And now and again clients want me to rewrite some content over and over again even though manual spinning would prove the clearest and most economic approach. The thing is that here is plenty of genuine bafflement regarding the distinction between rewriting and spinning.

Article spinning and article rewriting are not the same, either when considering methodology or with regard to final results attained. Moreover, they are often very different in in terms of how much they cost, which needs to be a crucial thing to consider for all who want such work completed. See a detailed description of the top of the range spinning solution that I am able to supply at this website.

And it undoubtedly does not help matters that one major article spinning software application brands itself a rewriter when it is, very clearly, a spinner.

From the practical point of view, article spinning can be undertaken when you wish a similar notion recreated as varied unique documents and shown in a number of (potentially hundreds) totally different websites across the web. It might be especially practical in SEO, in which the point is to obtain a large amount of good quality backlinks from a reliable diversity of sites, back to your own site.

There are certainly a large number of websites that could perhaps support your own exclusive material, every one created by spinning. This tactic would likely lead to lots of people reading this on their Web 2.0 site of choice and then possibly following the link (physically, as a person) straight back to your site. It might also mean an increase in positioning of your site as a direct consequence of the hyperlinks from all the different sites pointing to your own website or blog, through a wider SEO methodology.

It ought to be remembered that this type of approach is almost certainly "grey hat" and that any linking system that uses this Web 2.0 element will need to at the same time accommodate back-links made by other means, and hopefully a healthy and balanced diversity from other means.

Spinning sets the original content into an article spinning software application, then splits each one of the portion of your content up into much smaller components, and subsequently replaces each one of them for a synonym or paraphrased phraseology; this may be achieved at the hierarchy of the word, the phrase, the clause, the entire sentence and finally each paragraph. When all those different versions are exercised together, the outcome is a distinctive and unique document which would clear Copyscape (the definitive judge of originality in the Internet Age) and so relieve you of any allegations of plagiarism.

Article spinning must always be a manual techniques, and the individual undertaking it will need to not only be a native speaker, but additionally be highly attuned to the nuances of the language, and alive to the smallest dissonance that the process has an inclination to deliver even when it's carried out really well. This is because the end result must read as if it was newly penned by a human writer.

If anyone was foolish enough to hire someone who was not a native English speaker to carry out the spinning, or if this individual did not have a sufficiently analytical and tidy brain which was up to the project, then they should expect the outcome to be unreadable trash – exactly that and nothing else. They should also expect this rubbish to have a very toxic influence on their image. And what’s more they would deserve it!

Precisely what makes an outstanding spun piece of writing is certainly not the software application but the particular person undertaking the spinning as a profession. The application is the necessary environment, able to organizing and comprehending spun syntax, or spintax (or "spyntax") then able to output hundreds of articles from that "seed" document, usually substituting the alternative words and phrases in a random manner (while some spinner software applications enable you to spin every nth variation).

But that is all the software can do. Please do not believe statements that these spinners, endowed by using artificial intelligence (AI), can easily deliver many hundreds of totally readable documents using a crafty algorithm, as though every single one had been written by a capable individual; that occurrence is a full age bracket off at the very least. These types of boasts are undoubtedly phony, and are as nonsensical as the rubbish they constantly produce, as the despair of anyone who is persuaded by them should confirm.

The English language isn't simply something to be reverse-engineered by an algorithmic protocol. However smart the individuals who designed it, it can never perform the function that it claims. It may provide, to give an example, the one article which turned out adequate, but it will keep hidden the remaining 999 documents that came out drastically wrong.

The spinning procedure, in theory, performs perfectly on all occasions, though it is only likely in the hands of a competent and experienced individual. It is important to carefully concentrate on every single step of the entire task. Three years’ practical experience might be the bare minimum necessary. You have to have made all the mistakes and recognised them so that they are not caused just as before.

Especially, make sure that you fully grasp that a synonym is an extremely duplicitous actor. You trust them at your peril. A classic illustration of this booby trap had been in the demo video recording from the developers of a very early release of SENuke, during which the video's narrator was revealing how their built-in spinner was wonderful at making word substitutions, and opted for the string of words "Shoes are worn on the feet" to show this. Very quickly, he became entangled in the trap of dealing with a replacement of "worn" with the definition of "old and dirty", demonstrating completely the problem that content spinning carries with it if you lose concentration for a second or used in its automatic mode.

Content spinning is incredibly time-intensive when it's done correctly: each and every word and clause should be kept in your mind along with each of its conceivable contexts if it's to be implemented successfully and without horrifying mistakes of all descriptions. Right after a three hour article spinning period your mind is itself spinning and buzzing. And then you check and realise that you’ve just compiled three or four paragraphs!

This is exactly why it is comparatively expensive, in comparison with rewriting. With content spinning, each individual word will need to be thought about systematically. With rewriting, you need to simply recompose the information. But with rewriting you just get one fresh document; whereas with article spinning you might get several hundred of professionally-written content, on condition that a true professional carries it out.

If you only want one version of another article on your website then you should seek a rewrite. You mustn't request this article to be spun. (What could be the point?) In a similar way, if you require a hundred or so completely different and completely readable articles you will not wish to pay for every one of these to be rewritten one at a time: only then is article spinning your best solution, for reasons of economy, if nothing else.

Consequently, article spinning is only able to be validated financially in the instance that the project results in lots of exceptional content pieces, so the cost of each and every piece of content results in being relatively very inexpensive. Provided this is the case, and if the proficiency of the professional creating this is impressive enough, then that is when wonderful things really come to pass. Superbly written articles which read just as if they’d recently been penned newly by a talented copywriter can be produced, each perfectly produced, with each one unique, for just a modest amount of cash.

You should just seek out skillful professionals to carry out these things. The high quality or standard ought not to be in any doubt: it ought to be presumed that the quality should be awesome. Your only factor to consider in choosing one over the other should be the cost per article. Rewriting a 2,000 word article post will cost perhaps (for example) $80. Then you would have just one article which you could call your own for $80. Spinning a two thousand word document would cost you (for example) $250. And yet at the end of the whole project you will own five hundred entirely unique content articles coming in at just fifty cents each! Go figure.

Furthermore from an SEO and promotional view, that will be remarkably significant.

So content and content rewriting happen to be a pair of totally unique and distinct skills. At times the same person will have both those abilities, although usually they will not. You should not expect somebody who is an author, or a rewriter, to be able to spin; neither should you assume an established spinner to have the ability to rewrite content pages, though that will be much more likely as compared to the other way round.

Only a small number of people can correctly rewrite articles and other content, and a miniscule number of people know how to spin articles or blog posts to a level that is even good enough. In the end, the customer only has themselves accountable if they call for one when they essentially need the other, and if they engage an inappropriate individual to accomplish it.

By the way, the above content was written by using my high quality manual spinning technique (and additionally a couple of my own procedures no one else knows about). Pretty good, wouldn't you agree?

For more information about the best content spinning service on the Internet, see https://www.quality-manual-article-spinning.inteltab.com/

[krisiunicornio]

“The Healthlete” blogger, yoga teacher, and brand strategist talks about performative and optical allyship on social media and how to effectively create change in real life.

Mia Caine is a wellness blogger who’s created a brand that stands for the values she believes in: integrity, inclusion, and self-care. Known by her community as The Healthlete, Caine’s passion for health and wellness is inspired, in part, by an earlier athletic career as a track star in one of the toughest races in the sport: the 400 meters.

Caine spent most of her young adult life training and competing at her high school in Boone, North Carolina, nestled in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains. She always imagined there was more to life than this homogenous small town, and dreamed of moving to New York City. She was accepted to Columbia on a full scholarship and says she became the only student at her school at the time to attend an Ivy League university.

During the summer that followed her sophomore year, Caine traveled to Nigeria for the Olympic trials for a shot on the Liberian team, where her family of origin is from. She and her 4x4 relay squad missed their chance by a tenth of a second, which, after 16 years of running and competing, marked a turning point; it was time to try something else. After being told all her life what to do by coaches, Caine found herself wondering what other people did for fitness. She joined ClassPass, and entered her junior year with an open mind. She tried it all, from Pilates to cycling to yoga, which appealed to her in a holistic way that other forms of exercise had not.

See also What Most People Get Wrong About Self-Care

After graduating with a degree in political science and sustainable development, Caine worked briefly as a brand-to-brand strategist for an agency in Manhattan before she set out to work for herself. She aligned her yoga practice with a desire to start her own health and wellness blog, and has found that her studies from college inform the work she’s doing today. Caine splits her time between New York City and Miami, and recently launched Shop Wellthy, a conflict-free minimalist jewelry line she designs herself using sustainable materials. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Shop Wellthy is donating 100 percent of the profits to the consumer’s charity of choice. “I’m doing my part to move the Earth forward in a sustainable direction,” Caine said.

Yoga Journal caught up with Caine to learn more about The Healthlete’s philosophy and discuss inclusive wellness and the problematic and illusory nature of optical allyship on social media.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

YJ: What does conscious and inclusive wellness mean to you?

Mia Caine: Wellness shouldn’t look one way. What I do in my day-to-day that makes me feel healthy and well is my choice. For each of us, the things we do to put our best foot forward are different. So much of wellness is based on what you need to buy: a $200 product or a $20 green juice. Wellness is centered on those with privilege and a certain amount of expendable income who can afford to spend the money to be well. But wellness can come from the small habits in your everyday life that can influence the rest of your life; the little things like meditating. I write in a journal every morning and night, and that's really helped my goal setting and keeping up with my intentions. There are just so many ways to be well beyond buying product after product. When I started blogging, I felt this pressure to go to all these boutique fitness places; that I needed to be wearing a certain type of athleisure wear. But when you do the math and add up the dollars it just doesn't make sense. Financial health is an important part of living a healthy life, and it’s unnecessary to spend all this money just for the appearance of being healthy and well. You can’t put a price tag on real wellness.

See also The Time to Rest is Now

Is part of your work to remedy wellness’s exclusivity problem?

I recognize that the industry isn't as inclusive as it represents itself. Wellness brands and companies need to understand that there is no formula for trendy buzzwords or tokenizing of BIPOC images to appear inclusive. Much of their audiences are savvy and can see straight through that performative allyship. Real inclusivity is about breaking stereotypes, amplifying minority voices that already exist within their niche, valuing the work of those same voices equally, developing a brand voice that is not afraid to speak out on humanitarian issues, and then aligning with those values by ensuring that they’re shared within the workplace and with their consumers. By doing these (and more), inclusivity stops being a conversation and starts happening in real life. As someone who blogs and gets reached out to by brands every single day, I've had to really dig deep and recognize that while it's great to have all these partnerships, I have to make sure that what I'm putting out there for my audience is in alignment with my message [of saying No to brands that aren't aligned with the message of inclusivity that I'm putting out there. I won’t partner with someone who has a product at a price point that is only realistic for a small percentage of people. I'd be doing my audience a disservice by telling them that a product like that is necessary.

What practices have you leaned on during these times of uncertainty and upheaval to steady yourself and stay motivated?

It's OK to slow down. There's this sense of urgency all the time, but not every single thing is of the utmost importance all the time. Time is a construct—if we can't get it all done today, it'll be OK. Instead of trying to do everything all at once I’ve tried to schedule things so that I can focus on one thing at a time. I also make time to breathe, and I meditate almost daily. But I don't put the expectation on myself that I have to every single day. So it's OK to skip a day, a few days, whatever it may be. But meditation is really a key part of it—it's a nice way to wake up, tune in, and focus on my breath—and just celebrate that I am alive to see another day. After about five to ten minutes of meditation, I write down in my journal three things that I'm grateful for, three things I can do today that can further my goals, and how I can make someone's day better. Recognizing that there's a lot for me to be grateful for, and that I can continue to do the work that I do from a grateful heart but still meet my goals, helps keep me in a positive mindset.

See also 18 Reasons to Practice Self-Care

Is this inner work an integral part of the anti-racist work that’s needed now?

Definitely. There's just so much going on in the news—every single day I see another name added to the list. I need to stay centered while I’m also trying to do as much as I can to help, whether it's donating, signing petitions, sharing information on my social media, or having conversations with the people in my life. It’s hard not to get emotional about this stuff because it just keeps happening. As a Black woman, I have had my own disadvantages, but at the same time, some of my struggles have afforded me some privileges. Could I turn away and say that I just can't handle it? Yes, I could, but I don't, because I recognize that there are so many people who can't, and I need to stand up for those people, too. I need to do whatever I can to amplify their voices to support this movement, to make sure that more people can live their lives the way that I do now—and not live in a place where they experience fear on a daily basis. I just learned of Elijah McClain’s story; he was put in a chokehold by police in August 2019. There are so many stories like these that we never heard about that just swept under the rug; that are treated as normal and acceptable. It just frustrates me so much. But even as an entrepreneur in the wellness space with an Ivy League education who has experienced many great things in life, there's no amount of acceptable blackness that protects me from this. These are not isolated incidents that only happened in certain places—it can happen anywhere.

There's so much sadness, uncertainty, anger, frustration, and grief in the collective psyche right now. What advice do you have for those who are struggling with their emotions?

While it's important to show up as much as we can to keep moving this cause forward and keep fighting for justice and equality, it's OK to take care of yourself. If your cup is empty it helps no one; you need to take time for self-care and healing. It's also important to not just protest or donate, but to have conversations with the people around you. I really encourage everyone to not only discuss how all of this has disproportionately affected Black people—especially police violence and systemic oppression—but also to talk about white privilege. I know that it's a hard topic for some people and that the concept of privilege is uncomfortable. But privilege manifests in both small and big ways. To understand white privilege is to really think and reflect on the ways in which your white privilege might have helped you or might have put someone else down. When people start to look at their own life and try to understand the moments in which they’ve experienced white privilege, it helps them to notice when it happens in the future, like, wow, I see something really wrong happening here. That’s your moment to speak up. That’s your moment to be of service and actually stand up in the face of injustice—and not just post something on social media, which is just optical allyship since you're already in solidarity among like-minded followers. Whether you’re walking down the street, sitting at your desk at work, or headed to the grocery store—it’s those real-life moments happening right in front of you and how you respond to them that really matter. Social media is not the only world in which you can make a difference.

See also Why Every Yoga Teacher & Practitioner Needs Inclusivity Training

[cedarrrun]

“The Healthlete” blogger, yoga teacher, and brand strategist talks about performative and optical allyship on social media and how to effectively create change in real life.

Mia Caine is a wellness blogger who’s created a brand that stands for the values she believes in: integrity, inclusion, and self-care. Known by her community as The Healthlete, Caine’s passion for health and wellness is inspired, in part, by an earlier athletic career as a track star in one of the toughest races in the sport: the 400 meters.

Caine spent most of her young adult life training and competing at her high school in Boone, North Carolina, nestled in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains. She always imagined there was more to life than this homogenous small town, and dreamed of moving to New York City. She was accepted to Columbia on a full scholarship and says she became the only student at her school at the time to attend an Ivy League university.

During the summer that followed her sophomore year, Caine traveled to Nigeria for the Olympic trials for a shot on the Liberian team, where her family of origin is from. She and her 4x4 relay squad missed their chance by a tenth of a second, which, after 16 years of running and competing, marked a turning point; it was time to try something else. After being told all her life what to do by coaches, Caine found herself wondering what other people did for fitness. She joined ClassPass, and entered her junior year with an open mind. She tried it all, from Pilates to cycling to yoga, which appealed to her in a holistic way that other forms of exercise had not.

See also What Most People Get Wrong About Self-Care

After graduating with a degree in political science and sustainable development, Caine worked briefly as a brand-to-brand strategist for an agency in Manhattan before she set out to work for herself. She aligned her yoga practice with a desire to start her own health and wellness blog, and has found that her studies from college inform the work she’s doing today. Caine splits her time between New York City and Miami, and recently launched Shop Wellthy, a conflict-free minimalist jewelry line she designs herself using sustainable materials. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Shop Wellthy is donating 100 percent of the profits to the consumer’s charity of choice. “I’m doing my part to move the Earth forward in a sustainable direction,” Caine said.

Yoga Journal caught up with Caine to learn more about The Healthlete’s philosophy and discuss inclusive wellness and the problematic and illusory nature of optical allyship on social media.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

YJ: What does conscious and inclusive wellness mean to you?

Mia Caine: Wellness shouldn’t look one way. What I do in my day-to-day that makes me feel healthy and well is my choice. For each of us, the things we do to put our best foot forward are different. So much of wellness is based on what you need to buy: a $200 product or a $20 green juice. Wellness is centered on those with privilege and a certain amount of expendable income who can afford to spend the money to be well. But wellness can come from the small habits in your everyday life that can influence the rest of your life; the little things like meditating. I write in a journal every morning and night, and that's really helped my goal setting and keeping up with my intentions. There are just so many ways to be well beyond buying product after product. When I started blogging, I felt this pressure to go to all these boutique fitness places; that I needed to be wearing a certain type of athleisure wear. But when you do the math and add up the dollars it just doesn't make sense. Financial health is an important part of living a healthy life, and it’s unnecessary to spend all this money just for the appearance of being healthy and well. You can’t put a price tag on real wellness.

See also The Time to Rest is Now

Is part of your work to remedy wellness’s exclusivity problem?

I recognize that the industry isn't as inclusive as it represents itself. Wellness brands and companies need to understand that there is no formula for trendy buzzwords or tokenizing of BIPOC images to appear inclusive. Much of their audiences are savvy and can see straight through that performative allyship. Real inclusivity is about breaking stereotypes, amplifying minority voices that already exist within their niche, valuing the work of those same voices equally, developing a brand voice that is not afraid to speak out on humanitarian issues, and then aligning with those values by ensuring that they’re shared within the workplace and with their consumers. By doing these (and more), inclusivity stops being a conversation and starts happening in real life. As someone who blogs and gets reached out to by brands every single day, I've had to really dig deep and recognize that while it's great to have all these partnerships, I have to make sure that what I'm putting out there for my audience is in alignment with my message [of saying No to brands that aren't aligned with the message of inclusivity that I'm putting out there. I won’t partner with someone who has a product at a price point that is only realistic for a small percentage of people. I'd be doing my audience a disservice by telling them that a product like that is necessary.

What practices have you leaned on during these times of uncertainty and upheaval to steady yourself and stay motivated?

It's OK to slow down. There's this sense of urgency all the time, but not every single thing is of the utmost importance all the time. Time is a construct—if we can't get it all done today, it'll be OK. Instead of trying to do everything all at once I’ve tried to schedule things so that I can focus on one thing at a time. I also make time to breathe, and I meditate almost daily. But I don't put the expectation on myself that I have to every single day. So it's OK to skip a day, a few days, whatever it may be. But meditation is really a key part of it—it's a nice way to wake up, tune in, and focus on my breath—and just celebrate that I am alive to see another day. After about five to ten minutes of meditation, I write down in my journal three things that I'm grateful for, three things I can do today that can further my goals, and how I can make someone's day better. Recognizing that there's a lot for me to be grateful for, and that I can continue to do the work that I do from a grateful heart but still meet my goals, helps keep me in a positive mindset.

See also 18 Reasons to Practice Self-Care

Is this inner work an integral part of the anti-racist work that’s needed now?

Definitely. There's just so much going on in the news—every single day I see another name added to the list. I need to stay centered while I’m also trying to do as much as I can to help, whether it's donating, signing petitions, sharing information on my social media, or having conversations with the people in my life. It’s hard not to get emotional about this stuff because it just keeps happening. As a Black woman, I have had my own disadvantages, but at the same time, some of my struggles have afforded me some privileges. Could I turn away and say that I just can't handle it? Yes, I could, but I don't, because I recognize that there are so many people who can't, and I need to stand up for those people, too. I need to do whatever I can to amplify their voices to support this movement, to make sure that more people can live their lives the way that I do now—and not live in a place where they experience fear on a daily basis. I just learned of Elijah McClain’s story; he was put in a chokehold by police in August 2019. There are so many stories like these that we never heard about that just swept under the rug; that are treated as normal and acceptable. It just frustrates me so much. But even as an entrepreneur in the wellness space with an Ivy League education who has experienced many great things in life, there's no amount of acceptable blackness that protects me from this. These are not isolated incidents that only happened in certain places—it can happen anywhere.

There's so much sadness, uncertainty, anger, frustration, and grief in the collective psyche right now. What advice do you have for those who are struggling with their emotions?

While it's important to show up as much as we can to keep moving this cause forward and keep fighting for justice and equality, it's OK to take care of yourself. If your cup is empty it helps no one; you need to take time for self-care and healing. It's also important to not just protest or donate, but to have conversations with the people around you. I really encourage everyone to not only discuss how all of this has disproportionately affected Black people—especially police violence and systemic oppression—but also to talk about white privilege. I know that it's a hard topic for some people and that the concept of privilege is uncomfortable. But privilege manifests in both small and big ways. To understand white privilege is to really think and reflect on the ways in which your white privilege might have helped you or might have put someone else down. When people start to look at their own life and try to understand the moments in which they’ve experienced white privilege, it helps them to notice when it happens in the future, like, wow, I see something really wrong happening here. That’s your moment to speak up. That’s your moment to be of service and actually stand up in the face of injustice—and not just post something on social media, which is just optical allyship since you're already in solidarity among like-minded followers. Whether you’re walking down the street, sitting at your desk at work, or headed to the grocery store—it’s those real-life moments happening right in front of you and how you respond to them that really matter. Social media is not the only world in which you can make a difference.

See also Why Every Yoga Teacher & Practitioner Needs Inclusivity Training

[amyddaniels]

Blogger Mia Caine On Conscious, Inclusive Wellness

“The Healthlete” blogger, yoga teacher, and brand strategist talks about performative and optical allyship on social media and how to effectively create change in real life.

Mia Caine is a wellness blogger who’s created a brand that stands for the values she believes in: integrity, inclusion, and self-care. Known by her community as The Healthlete, Caine’s passion for health and wellness is inspired, in part, by an earlier athletic career as a track star in one of the toughest races in the sport: the 400 meters.

Caine spent most of her young adult life training and competing at her high school in Boone, North Carolina, nestled in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains. She always imagined there was more to life than this homogenous small town, and dreamed of moving to New York City. She was accepted to Columbia on a full scholarship and says she became the only student at her school at the time to attend an Ivy League university.

During the summer that followed her sophomore year, Caine traveled to Nigeria for the Olympic trials for a shot on the Liberian team, where her family of origin is from. She and her 4x4 relay squad missed their chance by a tenth of a second, which, after 16 years of running and competing, marked a turning point; it was time to try something else. After being told all her life what to do by coaches, Caine found herself wondering what other people did for fitness. She joined ClassPass, and entered her junior year with an open mind. She tried it all, from Pilates to cycling to yoga, which appealed to her in a holistic way that other forms of exercise had not.

See also What Most People Get Wrong About Self-Care

After graduating with a degree in political science and sustainable development, Caine worked briefly as a brand-to-brand strategist for an agency in Manhattan before she set out to work for herself. She aligned her yoga practice with a desire to start her own health and wellness blog, and has found that her studies from college inform the work she’s doing today. Caine splits her time between New York City and Miami, and recently launched Shop Wellthy, a conflict-free minimalist jewelry line she designs herself using sustainable materials. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Shop Wellthy is donating 100 percent of the profits to the consumer’s charity of choice. “I’m doing my part to move the Earth forward in a sustainable direction,” Caine said.

Yoga Journal caught up with Caine to learn more about The Healthlete’s philosophy and discuss inclusive wellness and the problematic and illusory nature of optical allyship on social media.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

YJ: What does conscious and inclusive wellness mean to you?

Mia Caine: Wellness shouldn’t look one way. What I do in my day-to-day that makes me feel healthy and well is my choice. For each of us, the things we do to put our best foot forward are different. So much of wellness is based on what you need to buy: a $200 product or a $20 green juice. Wellness is centered on those with privilege and a certain amount of expendable income who can afford to spend the money to be well. But wellness can come from the small habits in your everyday life that can influence the rest of your life; the little things like meditating. I write in a journal every morning and night, and that's really helped my goal setting and keeping up with my intentions. There are just so many ways to be well beyond buying product after product. When I started blogging, I felt this pressure to go to all these boutique fitness places; that I needed to be wearing a certain type of athleisure wear. But when you do the math and add up the dollars it just doesn't make sense. Financial health is an important part of living a healthy life, and it’s unnecessary to spend all this money just for the appearance of being healthy and well. You can’t put a price tag on real wellness.

See also The Time to Rest is Now

Is part of your work to remedy wellness’s exclusivity problem?

I recognize that the industry isn't as inclusive as it represents itself. Wellness brands and companies need to understand that there is no formula for trendy buzzwords or tokenizing of BIPOC images to appear inclusive. Much of their audiences are savvy and can see straight through that performative allyship. Real inclusivity is about breaking stereotypes, amplifying minority voices that already exist within their niche, valuing the work of those same voices equally, developing a brand voice that is not afraid to speak out on humanitarian issues, and then aligning with those values by ensuring that they’re shared within the workplace and with their consumers. By doing these (and more), inclusivity stops being a conversation and starts happening in real life. As someone who blogs and gets reached out to by brands every single day, I've had to really dig deep and recognize that while it's great to have all these partnerships, I have to make sure that what I'm putting out there for my audience is in alignment with my message [of saying No to brands that aren't aligned with the message of inclusivity that I'm putting out there. I won’t partner with someone who has a product at a price point that is only realistic for a small percentage of people. I'd be doing my audience a disservice by telling them that a product like that is necessary.

What practices have you leaned on during these times of uncertainty and upheaval to steady yourself and stay motivated?

It's OK to slow down. There's this sense of urgency all the time, but not every single thing is of the utmost importance all the time. Time is a construct—if we can't get it all done today, it'll be OK. Instead of trying to do everything all at once I’ve tried to schedule things so that I can focus on one thing at a time. I also make time to breathe, and I meditate almost daily. But I don't put the expectation on myself that I have to every single day. So it's OK to skip a day, a few days, whatever it may be. But meditation is really a key part of it—it's a nice way to wake up, tune in, and focus on my breath—and just celebrate that I am alive to see another day. After about five to ten minutes of meditation, I write down in my journal three things that I'm grateful for, three things I can do today that can further my goals, and how I can make someone's day better. Recognizing that there's a lot for me to be grateful for, and that I can continue to do the work that I do from a grateful heart but still meet my goals, helps keep me in a positive mindset.

See also 18 Reasons to Practice Self-Care

Is this inner work an integral part of the anti-racist work that’s needed now?

Definitely. There's just so much going on in the news—every single day I see another name added to the list. I need to stay centered while I’m also trying to do as much as I can to help, whether it's donating, signing petitions, sharing information on my social media, or having conversations with the people in my life. It’s hard not to get emotional about this stuff because it just keeps happening. As a Black woman, I have had my own disadvantages, but at the same time, some of my struggles have afforded me some privileges. Could I turn away and say that I just can't handle it? Yes, I could, but I don't, because I recognize that there are so many people who can't, and I need to stand up for those people, too. I need to do whatever I can to amplify their voices to support this movement, to make sure that more people can live their lives the way that I do now—and not live in a place where they experience fear on a daily basis. I just learned of Elijah McClain’s story; he was put in a chokehold by police in August 2019. There are so many stories like these that we never heard about that just swept under the rug; that are treated as normal and acceptable. It just frustrates me so much. But even as an entrepreneur in the wellness space with an Ivy League education who has experienced many great things in life, there's no amount of acceptable blackness that protects me from this. These are not isolated incidents that only happened in certain places—it can happen anywhere.

There's so much sadness, uncertainty, anger, frustration, and grief in the collective psyche right now. What advice do you have for those who are struggling with their emotions?

While it's important to show up as much as we can to keep moving this cause forward and keep fighting for justice and equality, it's OK to take care of yourself. If your cup is empty it helps no one; you need to take time for self-care and healing. It's also important to not just protest or donate, but to have conversations with the people around you. I really encourage everyone to not only discuss how all of this has disproportionately affected Black people—especially police violence and systemic oppression—but also to talk about white privilege. I know that it's a hard topic for some people and that the concept of privilege is uncomfortable. But privilege manifests in both small and big ways. To understand white privilege is to really think and reflect on the ways in which your white privilege might have helped you or might have put someone else down. When people start to look at their own life and try to understand the moments in which they’ve experienced white privilege, it helps them to notice when it happens in the future, like, wow, I see something really wrong happening here. That’s your moment to speak up. That’s your moment to be of service and actually stand up in the face of injustice—and not just post something on social media, which is just optical allyship since you're already in solidarity among like-minded followers. Whether you’re walking down the street, sitting at your desk at work, or headed to the grocery store—it’s those real-life moments happening right in front of you and how you respond to them that really matter. Social media is not the only world in which you can make a difference.

See also Why Every Yoga Teacher & Practitioner Needs Inclusivity Training

[beesandbooks1]

Discussion: Female Fantasy Authors

Hello book bees and welcome to another discussion post! For this post, I will be discussing the differences in reading fantasy books by male authors and fantasy books by female authors. To keep things simple, I will mostly be considering the divide in gender representation. I will discuss intersectionality in a later section, and may reference representation of BIPOC and LGBT+ people but today I will not be diving in depth into those topics. Additionally, when it comes to intersectionality and the discussion of BIPOC authors and characters I am a white person, so it is important that you listen to BIPOC writers and what they say on the topic over what I may say.

CW: This post will feature discussions of sexual assault, rape, misogyny, homophobia, racism, and other sensitive topics. I will be including further content warnings where appropriate, but please be aware that these topics come up and read with caution.

If you’d rather read this post on my blog, follow this link! Also, feel free to comment, on my blog or in the tags, with your thoughts on this topic! 

Problems I have with Male Fantasy

I do enjoy fantasy books written by men, and I have read plenty of them. But there are a lot of problems that often crop up. This isn’t exclusive to fantasy, of course, but I’m focusing on fantasy in particular because this is something that actually led me to abandon the genre for a few years. Something about fantasy settings can bring out the worst in male authors, as though the presence of fantasy elements gives them liberty to introduce sexist and horrible plotlines for their female characters (if they have any).

The first issue I usually have with a male written fantasy book is the lack of female characters, or at least the lack of good female characters. A lot of the generic high fantasy produced by men imitates Tolkien’s gender ratios without the payoff of the female characters that are present in that seminal work of the genre. Nine times out of ten when reading a fantasy novel by a male author, I find that I can count the amount of female characters on one hand. I also find that those characters fall into archetypes such as the damsel in distress, are victims of sexual assault (something I’ll come back to in a bit), or are irredeemably evil in a way that is intimately tied up in their gender. It’s frustrating to read entire books and series in which all of the representatives of my gender are boring, annoying, or otherwise flat.

CW for following paragraph: Sexual assault, rape, abuse

The second problem I have is that the worst and most graphic depictions of rape and sexual assault I have ever read have been in male-written fantasy novels. I don’t know exactly what causes this to happen, but I have definitely noticed a pattern that male-written fantasy seems to often portray the worst in men. To give credit where credit is due, the authors generally make it clear that the rape and sexual assault is bad. Revenge and punishment is often had, and the male heroes and protagonists don’t partake in sexual assault. However, the descriptions are still there, and often with zero content warnings. I’m privileged that these descriptions while uncomfortable are not strong triggers for me and I am able to read and process them without detriment to my mental health. However, I often skip these descriptions and DNF these books because of them. I have experienced enough threats, misogyny, and sexual harassment that I have no need to read about those experiences in fantasy–a genre that I consider an escape from the ills of real life. There is not and never has been a plot purpose to the inclusion of such graphic depictions of rape and sexual assault. And yet, rape, sexual assault, and sexual abuse in relationships are often used by male authors to explain a character’s personality. These are used as character backstory to either demonstrate how good and moral a character that opposed these actions is, or to demonstrate how horribly abused a character was (usually female, but not always), or to demonstrate what a monster an antagonist is. While including characters who are rapists is one thing, including graphic depictions of their crimes is an entirely unnecessary other thing.

I find that fantasy novels by men are also often less well rounded and yet lauded as better than female authors’ works. Women write some incredibly unique fantasy worlds with interesting and surprising twists and turns, and yet are passed over for awards and recognition in favor of male authors whose stories are predictable at best. This is not to say that every fantasy novel by a man is poorly written and unimaginative, but to point out the discrepancy that exists in recognition and famous names. The gender gap in fantasy has led to a variety of tactics and techniques to promote female authors. The most commonly known one is the use of initials instead of full names because of the demonstrated bias that readers have against picking up a fantasy novel with a woman’s name on the cover. Different worldviews and experiences lead to different writing styles, worlds, and plotlines. It’s time that the voices of women writers in fantasy were bolstered.

“Strong” Female Characters

I am hardly the first to point this out, but male authors (and some female authors, to be fair) tend to write what are supposed to be strong female characters that just…aren’t. A good example of this not in the fantasy genre is the way Joss Whedon writes Black Widow in the Marvel universe. In Whedon’s writing of her, she is considered strong and badass but only so long as she conforms to a certain ideal of feminine and mourns the fact that she cannot have children. Female characters written like this–supposedly strong but ultimately weak when stripped of their fighting prowess–are frustrating to read. You see this a lot in fantasy where a female character is constantly touted as the best fighter, or the strongest mage, but is stripped of her power as soon as the main male protagonist with his lack of experience and lack of talent bests her in battle (usually only because of sexual tension).

There are a lot of tropes and characteristics of this type of female character in fantasy. Usually, she is bitter and mean due to some trauma in her past that either isn’t all that traumatic (reinforcing the idea that women are hysterical) or is all that traumatic but she isn’t given the character development to move past her grief unless of course the main male protagonist offers her love and affection. If she is a skilled warrior, she learned so by being trained against expectations of women usually by her father or brother(s) and is constantly underestimated by others despite also having a reputation as a warrior. She fought and clawed her way to where she is and she disdains all women who didn’t do the same, isolating her from literally everyone because the men don’t respect her either.

Yes, there are women in the real world who did claw their way up to the top of male dominated fields, and there are women who did that to the exclusion and isolation of their peers of all genders. However, there are a lot of women who use their positions of power to bolster other women and help others and have a lot of friends, family, and coworkers that like and respect them. It doesn’t make a female character strong to be a loner who hates everyone and is equally hated for their nonconformity. In fact, it creates an unrealistic expectation for young and impressionable readers that in order to be powerful and strong you need to be alone.

Experience: Reading a Female Fantasy Author

I have at various points found myself reading a good fantasy book and then looking up the author to discover they were a woman. It’s no surprise to me, considering my lack of patience for overhyped male authors, that my favorite authors are almost always women and my favorite books inevitably written by women. The experience of reading fantasy from a female author is one I enjoy immensely. I find the characters more diverse, well rounded, and respected. I find the plot focuses less on imposing trauma and pain on people and more about the hope that rises up in a dark fantasy world. The villains have more interesting motivations, or at least are more interesting people to read about, and the worlds are explored more. A lot of the fantasy written by men that floods the cheaper shelves of bookstores and the free ebook world is self fulfillment in the form of a fantasy world, largely based in the author’s preferred fantasy world of choice and pursuing the traditional adventure and romance plot the author aspired to have when younger.

There’s also not a lot of respect for female fantasy authors as compared to their male counterparts. I had a creative writing professor in college who disparaged any popular series written by a woman but was unable to see that he didn’t feel the same about works by men. This bias is everyone from writing professors to literary scholars to publishers to literary agents and even down to authors and readers themselves. While I simply don’t have the time to really delve into the facts and figures about gender bias in the fantasy genre in this blog post, I can cite my experiences as writer and reader. In that same professor’s class I worked on a fantasy project with a group of four other women and one man. Guess whose parts of the project the professor praised most? Guess whose parts the professor though worthwhile despite his strong bias against fantasy writing? Male fantasy writers are more respected for going against the masculine grain to write still highly masculine stories but in a fantasy setting. Female fantasy writers are considered just another one of the pack of wildly delusional women.

There is a lot of room to be creative in fantasy. If you want to see just how nuts people can get, look up anecdote threads on any social media site for Dungeons and Dragons tales. Everyone who’s played had a crazy idea that somehow worked during a campaign. The same can often be true of fantasy stories, because ultimately if there’s dragons and magic and whatnot then the limit is only your imagination! And yet. Women who write diverse worlds in which racism (fantasy or otherwise) never existed, or world where women have always been in charge, or worlds where gender doesn’t even exist are often criticized for having created unrealistic worlds because apparently despite fantasy being what it is we still have to include all the pain and trauma of the real world.

Intersectionality

Intersectionality was coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a black feminist scholar, to describe the experiences of black women within the framework of feminism. Historically and still today, discussions of feminism and the experiences of women worldwide tend to focus by default on the experiences of white women. Crenshaw thus introduced intersectionality as a framework with which to understand that the experiences of a black woman can be significantly different than those of a white woman due to the multi-faceted nature of the discrimination against people of color, black people in certain countries such as the United States, and black women specifically who face many levels of oppression within the frameworks of whiteness, wealth, sexism, etc.

Intersectionality is often used by feminist and queer scholars to describe the social stratification that needs to be considered when discussing oppression and privilege. This stratification considers a variety of factors from sexuality to gender presentation, education and wealth, to race and skin color. This framework considers that looking at different women’s experiences requires an understanding of the different factors at play in each one.

The reason I am including a brief discussion of intersectionality is that this conversation has largely lumped all women together in the face of fantasy writing. But it’s important to understand that even within the texts of female fantasy authors, there can be factors of racism, colorism, internalized misogyny, privilege of wealth and education, homophobia, and transphobia. I’ve read one fantasy author’s entire body of work–almost thirty novels–and she has never featured a gay or trans character. I’ve read other female fantasy authors who despite best efforts represent racist tropes in their attempts to include diverse characters without sensitivity readers. As a white woman, it is my responsibility to understand my privilege in seeing myself in fantasy writing which should be some of the most diverse in fiction but frankly isn’t.

As a queer woman I can speak to the under representation of queer characters in fantasy. Often times, queer characters are sidekicks and side characters that are just there for the representation points. A lot of fantasy writers (some female but most male) argue that the inclusion of queer characters in a high or epic fantasy setting based weirdly on incorrect assumptions about medieval Europe is unrealistic. If you’ve got dragons, though, you can include a gay person. Or five. Or fifty. Heck, I wrote a fantasy novel for NaNoWriMo one year that featured exactly zero male characters and only one straight woman! And it still made sense because the whole time they were dealing with a dragon, and magic, and witches.

The point I have briefly wandered away from is that fantasy authors tend to present diversity in fantasy elements but don’t seem to ponder presenting real diversity. Using fantasy racism as a metaphor for real racism is a tired trope often poorly done by white authors without a full understanding of what the very real effects of long term racism and racial oppression are like. Including queer characters in your story only for them to still fear discrimination and violence isn’t new or gritty or interesting or diverse, it’s tired and harmful.

Conclusion

There’s been a lot to chew through in this post. Admittedly, this topic is probably better discussed in literary theory journals and by more seasoned scholars, but a lot of those journals are also behind academic paywalls and filled with academic jargon that isn’t always easily accessible to readers. I’ve discussed these topics before in academic settings and in personal conversations, so I feel comfortable transitioning some of the ideas I’m accustomed to discussing to talking about the differences I have observed in my experience reading fantasy novels. I do think that people in the bookish communities are aware of gender gaps and intersectionality, and that there’s interest in promoting more diverse authors in our favorite literary genres.

How about you book bees, what are you thoughts on this topic? Please feel free to share in the comments!

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[whitelabelseoreseller]

Google Review Stars Drop by 14%

Posted by Dr-Pete

On Monday, September 16, Google announced that they would be restricting review stars in SERPs to specific schemas and would stop displaying reviews that they deemed to be "self-serving." It wasn't clear at the time when this change would be happening, or if it had already happened.

Across our daily MozCast tracking set, we measured a drop the morning of September 16 (in sync with the announcement) followed by a continued drop the next day ...

The purple bar shows the new "normal" in our data set (so far). This represents a two-day relative drop of nearly 14% (13.8%). It definitely appears that Google dropped review snippets from page-1 SERPs across the roughly 48-hour period around their announcement (note that measurements are only taken once per day, so we can't pinpoint changes beyond 24-hour periods).

Review drops by category

When we broke this two-day drop out into 20 industry categories (roughly corresponding to Google Ads), the results were dramatic. Note that every industry experienced some loss of review snippets. This is not a situation with "winners" and "losers" like an algorithm update. Google's changes only reduced review snippets. Here's the breakdown ...

Percent drops in blue are <10%, purple are 10%-25%, and red represents 25%+ drops. Finance and Real Estate were hit the hardest, both losing almost half of their SERPs with review snippets (-46%). Note that our 10K daily data set broken down 20 ways only has 500 SERPs per category, so the sample size is low, but even at the scale of 500 SERPs, some of these changes are clearly substantial.

Average reviews per SERP

If we look only at the page-1 SERPs that have review snippets, were there any changes in the average number of snippets per SERP? The short answer is "no" ...

On September 18, when the dust settled on the drop, SERPs with review snippets had an average of 2.26 snippets, roughly the same as prior to the drop. Many queries seem to have been unaffected.

Review counts per SERP

How did this break down by count? Let's look at just the three days covering the review snippet drop. Page-1 SERPs in MozCast with review snippets had between one and nine results with snippets. Here's the breakdown ...



Consistent with the stable average, there was very little shift across groups. Nearly half of all SERPs with review snippets had just one result with review snippets, with a steady drop as count increases.

Next steps and Q&A

What does this mean for you if your site has been affected? I asked my colleague and local SEO expert, Miriam Ellis, for a bit of additional advice ...

(Q) Will I be penalized if I leave my review schema active on my website?

(A) No. Continuing to use review schema should have no negative impact. There will be no penalty.

(Q) Are first-party reviews “dead”?

(A) Of course not. Displaying reviews on your website can still be quite beneficial in terms of:

Instilling trust in visitors at multiple phases of the consumer journey

Creating unique content for store location landing pages

Helping you monitor your reputation, learn from and resolve customers’ cited complaints

(Q) Could first-party review stars return to the SERPs in future?

(A) Anything is possible with Google. Review stars were often here-today-gone-tomorrow even while Google supported them. But, Google seems to have made a fairly firm decision this time that they feel first-party reviews are “self serving”.

(Q) Is Google right to consider first-party reviews “self-serving”?

(A) Review spam and review gating are serious problems. Google is absolutely correct that efforts must be made to curb abusive consumer sentiment tactics. At the same time, Google’s increasing control of business reputation is a cause for concern, particularly when their own review corpus is inundated with spam, even for YMYL local business categories. In judging which practices are self-serving, Google may want to look closer to home to see whether their growing middle-man role between consumers and businesses is entirely altruistic. Any CTR loss attendant on Google’s new policy could rightly be seen as less traffic for brand-controlled websites and more for Google. For more tactical advice on thriving in this new environment, there's a good write-up on GatherUp.

Thanks, Miriam! A couple of additional comments. As someone who tracks the SERPs, I can tell you that the presence of review stars has definitely fluctuated over time, but in the past this has been more of a "volume" knob, for lack of a better word. In other words, Google is always trying to find an overall balance of usefulness for the feature. You can expect this number to vary in the future, as well, but, as Miriam said, you have to look at the philosophy underlying this change. It's unlikely Google will reverse course on that philosophy itself.

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