#or how tumblr only promotes your work the bigger your notes numbers are

[zhongrin]

everyday, i see so many numbers.

on screen, on paper, handwritten, printed, messy scrawls, block lettered. 7197 likes. 58 reblogs. 10937 notes. 12940 retweets. 628 kudos. 8094 followers. 14 works. your salary of $4060 has been credited to your account. you have $510 savings in the bank. your groceries amounted to $367 this month. someone just bought you 3 cups of coffee. you graduated with a gpa of 3.8. 27 years old. 87kg. 3mg. 2 tablespoons. 155cm. 5'4. 5,5 hours. 12 days 4 hours 46 minutes 11 seconds. 72. 80%. 30:70. 88198. 12-01-1990. 29,273.

it's all numbers, numbers, numbers.

perhaps with time, i'll learn which numbers truly matter in life.

[gatheredfates]

What's this? Two updates in a weekend? Yes, and I regret nothing. I'm going to try and do bigger updates where I can, but I also don't like waiting to promote resources where I feel like they can be useful and utilised. Because of that, here is update round two. 🍹

I forgot to mention this last post, but I'm trying to get a headcount going with Dawntrail's release! I probably did it a bit too early, to be fair, but I'm insane like that. If you're looking for people to follow, I highly recommend replying to that thread because I'll reblog any that come my way.

With that said, however, as of today (07/07), the following resources have been added to Sea's Community Compendium for XIV Creatives.

FREE COMPANY / COMMUNITY FOCUSED / EVENT SPACES

Final Fantasy XIV Roleplay (Tumblr Community) — A Tumblr community focusing on XIV roleplay! Share your LFRP posts, partake in the polls, prompts and whatever else FFXIV-Related RP stuff you can think of.

LORE

Dawntrail Pronunciation Guide — Ignorance begets strife, understanding begets fellowship. A guide on how to pronounce the various locals, concepts, societies and other content in Tural. Will contain spoilers for the expansion. Created by @pimpylala on Twitter. Constantly being updated as they play through the expansion.

SEAFLOOR

We're a Tumblr Community now! For people unfamiliar with the concept of Communities, I encourage you to check out the tumblr post by staff made about them here. However, copy/pasting what I have written in the Compendium, the Community functions as so:

SEAFLOOR (A FFXIV Community) is a Tumblr community whose duel-purpose focuses on my projects — the Compendium, question drives and screenshot events — whilst also reblogging member created works, resources (including events, commissions and looking for content/roleplay/free company posts), affirmations and other xiv-related content. If you are interested in supporting my projects without the social aspect of a Discord, I highly encourage you to join the Community. Everything hosted on the Discord will be cross-posted there; you will not miss out on anything. As Communities are still in beta, members need to be manually invited. If you would like to join, please like the tumblr post here. Once Communities are out of beta, I will remove this section to better reflect its true public status.

I'm hoping the Community will function as a member-curated dash, resource hub and visual diary for my projects and member created works. There are no hard feelings if you want to leave the Discord and only join the Community. Please do what makes you comfortable!

Want to submit? You can either fill out the google form here or send me an ask with the relevant information!

Is my space suitable for the Compendium? Most of the time, yes! Below the read more is some more information/stipulations. Again, all the below information is accessible on the document! 🦈

Below are the following things I do not accept on the Compendium:

Personal/Single-Character LFC ads.

Content intended for or can be used for bullying, harassment and OOC gossip. E.g. ‘Secrets’ blogs, receipts, callout posts, etc. This does not include in-character tabloid blogs used to generate RP.

Communities that do not have an RP/writing element (large-scale exempt).

Anything I find personally distasteful or goes against the spirit of this project.

Common-sense rule applies.

FAQ.

I want to put my community on the compendium but we have an application process. Is this okay?

Yes! Just note somewhere in your application that's a requirement. The only thing that is mandatory for the Compendium is that you must be open to new members or have a public-facing/accessible facet. There's no point advertising a community if no one can join it in some way!

I want to put my community on the compendium but I only have x number of members —

Also totally okay! People don't start with large communities. Activity is a must but, whether your server has two or two thousand members, if you're looking for new people to join, I'd love to help you find people.

I want to put my community on the compendium but I worry its too niche?

Okay, and? If your Eorzean Fishing Alliance has four members but you roleplay every second weekend, I still want to know about it.

What resources/communities can I add if I'm not the owner of them?

Mutual consent is extremely important to me, so anything that isn't a large-scale community OR a publicly accessible resource must be endorsed by the owner/admin/moderators in order to be added to the compendium. I operate under the assumption that a resource posted to a public space (tumblr, googledocs, youtube, etc) is open to all. A large-scale community is one with a significant member count or openly advertises itself as being accessible to everyone for whatever purpose it serves. If in doubt, please get in touch with me. I'm happy to contact your community owners for you!

How active does a community need to be?

If you find a community has not been active in about two/three months, send me a message and I'll take a look at it. Communities have ebbs and flows, especially event spaces that may take hiatuses depending on member interest/life events. I'm not strict in my implementation provided a space isn't dead. If a link or anything is broken, absolutely contact me about that.

I have [insert a question not stated here]?

No drama! Send me an ask or use the #Compendium channel in my Discord!

[beautifulpaxielreads]

Attention all Booklrs

EDIT:  Bec has just informed me I incorrectly named her co-team member and website creator as Sarah. Her name is actually Rachel - now FIXED.

I want to say firstly, this is not going to be a “reblog this or else!” sort of post - I hate those with a burning passion. I don’t want you to feel any pressure at all if you’re not comfortable interacting with this post. I don’t mind.

I’m writing this because a few days ago, I found a fantastic online resource that I think a lot of readers would find incredibly helpful.

It’s called...*insert drum roll here*

The Trigger Warning Database

Click underneath for a full (ish) explanation of what this website is about and how it works.

“This website, this database, is a place for readers like us. It’s for readers with triggers, readers on their own trauma recovery journeys, readers who just want the safe, enjoyable reading experience they deserve.

I know the idea of content warnings is controversial. Meme culture has slowly eroded the legitimate definition of ‘being triggered’ to the general public but it is real, valid experience. We know that and hope this website can help you out, even just a little.”

-- “Our Mission”, The Trigger Warning Database (https://triggerwarningdatabase.com/about/)

The Trigger Warning Database (TWD) was launched in June 2020, and is run by two Australian book bloggers, Rachel and Bec (click the links for their social media pages). 

As the mission statement suggests, TWD is a searchable online database of books and trigger warnings.

When you click on the link in my intro, it brings you to a page that should look like this:

Hopefully you should be able to make the screenshot bigger (on desktop) by right clicking it and opening it in a new window. Sorry for the folks viewing it on mobile, I’m not sure if it will come up any bigger. Let me know if you have any viewing problems and I’ll see what I can do.

See the blue circle on the far left?  That enables you to search by trigger.

If you click on it, it brings you to this page:

If you scroll down the page, you will find a list of triggers in alphabetical order.

Just click on the trigger that you want to look up, and it will give you an alphabetical list (by book title) of all the books in its database that have those specific triggers.

For example, here we have  a sample of the list that comes up if you click on the “Ableism & ableist language” trigger.

Are you starting to see how it works?

A few things to note:

Once you start navigating through the website, you will notice the following menu:

When you’ve left the homepage, you can also use this menu to help you navigate through the site.

Another thing you will notice as you browse through the site is that the suffix:

 “-phobia”

is not used anywhere, eg “homophobia”, “transphobia” etc.  Instead, you will find the suffix:

 “-misia” pronounced “my-Zee-ya”

Here is the site’s explanation as to why:

“Homomisia means a strong dislike of homosexuals and homosexuality; it refers to people bigoted towards gay people, and anti-gay rhetoric. We don’t use the term homophobia because it is misleading and inaccurate, literally meaning ‘a fear of gay people’. It is also belittling and insulting to people with legitimate phobias. Most people mean homomisia when they say homophobia.

It can also be swapped out for other prefixes, such as queermisia or bimisia.”

--”Why don’t you use the term homophobia? What does homomisia mean?”, https://triggerwarningdatabase.com/disclaimers/

Finally, you will notice the number of books in the database is quite limited. Understandably so, given it’s been running less than year! Is there a way you can help to grow this database? 

YES!

From the menu, hover over the heading labelled “Contact”. You will see the following:

Click on “Contribute”.

This will bring you to a submission page, where, if you want to add a book that is NOT already in the database, you can fill in the required details, which includes a list of any triggering content.

The database creators are quick to acknowledge that sometimes the emotional labour required to fill in said content can be extremely taxing. In recognition of this:

“If you choose to accept, as a sincere thank you, I will be listing contributors here with a link to whatever you to choose to promote (your blog, Twitter, BookTube etc). I will only be doing this with express permission however, so please know that entering your information above means you’re accepting that I will acknowledge your support and links on a public website.”

-- “Contribute”, https://triggerwarningdatabase.com/contribute-3/

You’ll notice I haven’t included every single detail about how to navigate this site. One, it would take too long for me to do (it’s already taken quite a while already), and two, I reckon you would find it easier to just navigate through the website itself.

Lastly, I’ll just tag a few people to help get the word out:

@thereadingchallengechallenge

@storytime-reviews

@books-and-cookies​

Also, if someone wants to make this post friendlier for vision-impaired folks, please go ahead! @youthbookreview​ I know you do this - feel free to ignore, though, if the task is monumental. My fault!

Acknowledgments: Bec, member of the TWD team for letting me spread the word here on Tumblr. All images included belong to TWD.

I hope the Trigger Warning Database will help you to have a safe and pleasurable reading experience. 

[n1ghtcrwler]

So there is a post that I recently saw that I just don’t want to add notes to for a number of reasons, not least of which being that I’m about to go on a significant tangent, so I’ll just say what I needed to say about it here.

The post is screenshots of a tweet thread about how bad “Cuties” actually is, from someone who claims to have watched it, and that’s fine. I haven’t seen the movie, I have no input to give on that matter. My concern arises in a reply offered by one user, who goes into more detail about how disturbing it is to consider that someone had to, at minimum, be comfortable putting the underage actresses in the situations depicted for the sake of filming them for the movie, and again, that is probably a valid point. But they ended their tirade with this:

“If you didn’t believe it before, the fact that this movie was even released and is being defended by the elite is proof that there is a deliberate plan to normalize and eventually legalize pedophilia and child porn.”

And that, my friends, is some QAnon bullshit.

See, this is a great example of how conspiracy theories work. We tend to only think of them in terms of their major propositions and the implications of those propositions--that the Earth is hollow, your average garden-variety antisemitic caricature of a shadowy society controlling you, that sort of thing--instead of talking much about how people fall into that hole in the first place. And, in our day-to-day lives, it’s really where the theories start that we need to be vigilant about more than where they end. Where they end is important, obviously, but no one buys the end product immediately. They get there through a process. And the user who posted the above quote is playing into that process.

Here’s the process that I want you to see in that paragraph, and to look out for elsewhere:

0: ‘Facts’ that are viable, and possibly even true

Step Zero is not to lie or even to introduce new information. I call it Step Zero because it isn’t automatically part of a conspiracy theory; obviously, if we’re going to talk about the impact of anything on the world, we have to talk about what is actually happening. But I point it out because conspiracy theories always start with a premise that you can accept. Always. Every time. You cannot assume that you will recognize a nonsense theory based on immediate nonsense. No one starts there. They start in the real world. As above, where they are describing very real or at least realistic consideration for the ways filming such a movie can groom young actresses and audiences.

1: Framing facts through key concepts

A good conspiracy theory begins not in the facts provided, but in the way they are provided.

Consider the bit of the paragraph I copied where it said, “the fact that this movie was even released and is being defended by the elite.” Who are the ‘elite?’ See, the use of that wording is intentional. What the user has done is frame the delivery of the fact or near-fact (that the movie and its mode of production are abhorrent) in a way that an elusive enemy is embedded in the fact or near-fact itself (that the elite are defending the abhorrent thing, making ‘them,’ whoever they are, also abhorrent) such that it is difficult to separate that idea from the rest of the fact or near-fact. In fact, I expect that if anyone wishes to argue with me about this post, they will do so by framing my dismissal of a mythical elite with being part of their work; that is, the primary means of arguing against this post, based on the way people have argued with me about similar things in the past, will be to hold that if I doubt that part of the sentence I must doubt the whole sentence and doubting the whole sentence means not finding pedophilia abhorrent and that, by extension, must make me either a pedophile myself or a man comfortable with pedophiles.

I’m sure you’ve seen that play out before in some context or another. This is why it plays out that way: the fact or near-fact has been married, unsuitably, to a claim that sets up Step Two.

2: Using the altered fact or near-fact to demand a pre-determined conclusion

Here’s the thing. If there is an elite who are actively trying to make and promote and defend “Cuties” (which is a highly suspect claim already), then the logical question is why they are doing so. Well, by golly, our friendly neighborhood conspiracy theorist has an answer! See, it’s “proof that there is a deliberate plan to normalize and eventually legalize pedophilia and child porn.”

That conclusion is not demanded by the agreed-upon facts. That is, if I agree with the theorist that the movie is, indeed, a work that grooms actresses and audiences, there are actually a variety of conclusions we can draw about why the movie was made. Maybe it was filmed with entirely different intentions and the end result is because of editing, or license taken by questionable cameramen. Maybe the version shown at Sundance or whatever was not actually the version currently on Netflix, so the people defending it were defending something other than what the twitter thread author saw. Maybe the producer really did have terrible motives but managed to convince someone at Netflix that that was not what was happening. Some or all of these may be false. I have no idea. But here’s the thing: neither does the person who posted the paragraph in question. The facts given in the post are actually pretty sparse as far as coming to a certain conclusion about intent are concerned. You need more information to know what is really going on here.

But see, that’s why they added information in Step One. By making it a behavior of that conspiracy’s boogeyman, they can easily come to a conclusion. The facts or fact-adjacent statements made in the body of the post, paired with a conspiracy-based understanding of who the elite are and what they want, is enough information to come to a conclusion. And it’s a conclusion that is only reasonable if the elite are real and are who the conspiracy says they are. See, the goal of getting you to believe the bigger conspiracy isn’t by telling you who the elite are, but by getting you to accept something that requires them. Which is why

3. Frame the delivery in a way that hides the conspiracy

The post leading up to the quoted paragraph is actually fairly long (admittedly, not as long as this post), and every part of it fits the conversation that has been had about the movie and is presented in a way that makes sense. So while the average tumblr user is scrolling along, if they read through, they’re being hit with a lot of sensible discourse about a movie they probably haven’t seen but have seen more discourse about, and then that bit of QAnon is just kinda slipped in without any major change to wording and presentation. It’s bolded for effect, but the content itself seems to flow naturally from the rest of the post. It’s only in stopping and thinking seriously about what has been said that the diversion away from a discussion of facts gets noticed.

The point is to be distinct enough to set up the conspiracy theory, but subtle enough that you accept it as part of the rest of the post’s claims. See, because, what happens there is that if the rest of the post makes sense to you, and you aren’t thinking about the fact that the post has taken a left turn, you accept the conclusion being given as a natural part of the post. And accepting the conclusion requires that you have, maybe without realizing it, accepted the claims about the ‘elite.’ And that sets you up.

4. Go Deeper

Because once you have accepted the conspiracy’s claims about the elite, preferably without recognizing that there was a claim about the elite, you are ready to accept other things that connect to that. Someone comes along and says something that also sounds plausible, and also ties into the conclusion that the elite are trying to legalize pedophilia. Well, because you’ve already accepted that this was a reasonable conclusion elsewhere, and it seems reasonable enough here, you accept it here as well. And this is solidifying in your mind the idea that it is known that there is an elite working toward that goal. But the questions remains of who the elite are. So, when someone finally comes along and ties the ‘elite’ to a specific person or group of people that you do recognize (usually Jewish people or some caricature thereof), and offers some evidence that is pretty flimsy but plays very nicely with claims you’ve already accepted, you buy it. Or you don’t, but you’re so deep now that you have to provide an alternative if you want to reject the answer you’ve been given, and so you start to spin your own theory.

Either way, the end result is the same: you are convinced of a claim that would have sounded crazy to you a year ago, and your family is trying to tell you how crazy it sounds to them now, but they just don’t know! They haven’t seen all the facts! You should probably show them the facts. Ideally, by starting with something they already know to be true. And the cycle continues.

Please. Be careful out there, folks. Don’t be that guy.

[rhysand-vs-fenrys]

The problem with having followers in this fandom are the anons you get. Any tips to deal with them?

I've got a few-

Anon's Opinions Mean Very Little- An anon is just one person at a keyboard, at most they bring a friend or two along (usually they pretend to be multiple people agreeing with each other). Don't take their opinion on anything from fandom things to page admin as law. Consider what they're saying, talk to other large 'blrs to get their opinions, and then weigh it to decide where you stand.

If you reblog an opinion, either say what you don't agree with or take responsibility for every word- I've seen people reblog posts, face a backlash, and then claim they didn't agree with all of it and besides, they only reblogged it isn't like they wrote it. But that's now how people read these sites. If you reblog, you are standing behind the post. The responsibility is not just on the author, but on you too for boosting their work. Good or bad, if you reblog it you stand by it. **That is only to the post itself, sometimes anons deep dive into source blogs and say you can’t reblog a post about like Supernatural from them because they have an opinion on Stargate the anon finds problematic... Just... delete them for their own sake.

Tumblr exists in a bubble- Opinions on this site may seem like the end all be all of the universe, people treat things as gospel... but I've found many things labeled "Controversial" that when I dug into it outside of tumblr I've found specific mentions that the thing is only controversial ON tumblr. So if an anon attacks you for something, remember that first bullet point up there- anons opinions mean very little. Do your own little research, decide where you stand.

Don't answer unless you want to deal with it- General rule of thumb, responding to one negative anon will generate 2 additional anons. Even if you're pointing out how toxic that anons take is, they'll pull friends in to send messages too (or again just send with alternate writing voices) and make it look like they have bigger numbers. Deleting messages is deeply satisfying to you, and aggravating to them. It's your best tool.

Don't argue with anons, just delete them- This goes to the above point, but also it's just exhausting and you'll end up hating the fandom you're part of eventually. I've had an anon ONCE apologize for mis-reading a post I made (I admitted first that my wording wasn't clear to what I was saying). That was my first year on this site. 10 years ago. Statistically you're not changing their mind, you're just wasting your own time.

Don't let anons- or even face-first blogs- dictate page admin- I get messages every now and then from people telling me how I *should* have answered asks or what I *should* be doing in my page management. First off, the ones who come out URL-first are always smaller and relatively new blogs, and secondly, anons opinions do not matter in arenas of page admin. If you notice a theme in messages check with tumblrs whose opinions you value and respect and decide for yourself if change is needed.

It's not your fault people follow you- IDK if it's still happening, but there are flair ups of people who either demand you follow back or who say that your follower size makes you responsible for promoting the works of smaller pages with lower follower counts. Neither of those things are true. One of my favorite things to say is that the bad decisions in life that led to someone following my blog is their ill fortune. You don't have to use your followers for any causes unless you want to. And if you do it once, people will demand you do it over and over again. I've seen people chased off the site because their favorite fics lists didn't include people with no followers who only have 1 note. Your job isn't to be anyone else's PR rep. If you want to make that your thing, go ahead, but don't let some anon try to convince you that you're somehow responsible for the entire fandom's experience.

Your language is not everyone's first language, and what you're reading isn't always what is meant- Sometimes you get a message that is super blunt and reads like a challenge or an aggressive message, but the person who wrote it didn't intend for that at all. I've noticed that my non-English-as-a-first-language followers tend to message me on Anon more often because they aren't confident in their language skills and are afraid of making a mistake. If you get a message that seems blunt or confrontational, don't automatically assume the negative. Be patient in your answer, and give them the benefit of the doubt. You'll never apologize for responding to a hateful message in kindness, but you will if you reply to a kind message with hate. Save yourself the trouble of apologizing.

But also don't be afraid to apologize- If an Anon sends you a message calling something out and you honestly consider their opinion and come to the conclusion that they are right and you were in the wrong, just say so. Obstinately holding to something for the sake of not admitting you were wrong is stupid. Admitting you were wrong and having the maturity to own that is wise and mature. And don't use the word 'but'. As Drew Barrymore said in 'Santa Clarita Diet'- "'Buts' are for assholes."

The deep, dark secret of tumblr is this: Overall, anons are kind people who are shy, friends who want to cheer you up and think a kind word from a stranger might carry more weight than one from them, or people who are a bit nervous but still want to reach out. We bitch about the rude anons but they are the overwhelming minority. The vast amount are simply kind and curious at heart. And for those who aren't, just be kind and courteous back at them, it pisses them off to no end :)

Oh, one more: If you lose your temper, you lose. Approach everything with patience and maturity, hold the high road as much as you can, and don't let anyone say you're unreasonable.

[merakiaes]

hi, as you already know, one of your myriads of fans here. so i was wondering what would be steps to take, in your opinion, to start writing imagines/fanfics? Reading your stories makes me wanna take part in this amazing creative world, but i have no idea where to start:) i have some ideas to write, but what would be the things to consider? thank you and much respect and love♡

Oh, wow, that’s a tough question😂 I don’t think there’s anything to do other than just start🤷🏻‍♀️ You have to get your work out there and awaken the interest in order to get followers and more requests, so you should definitely go for it and write the ideas you have. There are things that make one-shots more appealing though so I’m going to try to list them down below. 

- Having a nice aesthetic is probably the most important part to ME as a reader. If the post looks messy, chances are high that I won’t read it, no matter how good the fic actually is😅 A nice aesthetic can include a neat foreword section, like I write “pairing”, “requested”, “prompts”, “warnings/notes”, “wordcount” and “summary” before every fic, for example. It gives the post a certain structure. Using a gif of the character you’re writing for is also really important in my opinion. It makes it look more structured, aesthetically pleasing, and inviting. ALWAYS remember to credit the gif-owner if you know who they are, though. 

- Paragraphing is BY FAR the most important thing, and that’s just when it comes to writing in general. Some people might not care but I know many people, me included, who just turn back around and go “nope” at the sight of a fic/one-shot where there is no paragraphing. It gives off a very messy vibe and makes my head hurt seeing as you have to concentrate a lot because it’s so hard to keep track of where you are in the text. I know things like that aren’t easy at the beginning for some, it wasn’t for me either, but it’s something that needs to be said so that people know what to practice. 

- Insert the “read more” link after a few paragraphs so that your one-shot doesn’t take up the entire searching feed. There will be lots of people who will want to read your fic but there will also always be people who aren’t tempted and in cases like that, it’s annoying to have to scroll for your life to get to the next one. 

- TAGS are the most important thing because it’s them that are going to get you promoted in the first place. Some people search for “imagine” while others search for “x reader” so I always make sure to tag the character’s every name/nickname with both “imagine”, “x reader”, “one-shot” and “fanfic” to really get my fic out there, and also the show’s name with all of the above. To further understand what I mean, check out the tags on one of my fics. DON’T tag characters that are not included in the fics with the “imagine”, “x reader” and “one-shot” tags. You’ll get a lot of haters real quick. 

- Write in a word document on your computer, NOT directly on Tumblr. I’ve lost count of how many times I wrote oneshots directly on my Tumblr only to accidentally reload the page and lose everything and have to write it all again. It’s really heartbreaking when it happens and it is so time-consuming and not worth the risk. 

- Not a must, but I find it easier to put out longer, more filled-out fics by writing the dialogue first and then filling in time and place, etc. If you ever find yourself with writer’s block, try this!

- Also not a must, but I find that this has helped me A LOT on Tumblr. Download the plugin “Grammarly” from www.grammarly.com. The free version doesn’t allow you all properties but it does provide you with the most important one; spelling and grammar correction. I’ve used the free version for the past 6 months now and it’s a great help when you don’t have time to fully and carefully read through your fics. Sometimes it will show the wrong things though so keep an eye out for that. It doesn’t fix all mistakes but it usually takes care of the bigger ones. 

- I don’t know how you work as a person but I, myself, get really stressed out if I answer the requests, promising to write them, BEFORE I write them. Knowing that I’ve made a promise and that someone is waiting for me to post their request really pressures me and gives me unnecessary stress. To avoid this, I usually answer the request AFTER I’ve posted the one-shot. That way, I can also link the one-shot in the request so that the requestor, if anonymous, can easier find their way back. 

On My Block is a fandom that’s pretty active now after Season 3 so I have no doubt in my mind that you could get requests immediately if you posted a post saying that you’re open for requests. Just specify which characters you’ll be writing for and tag all of said characters with the tags I mentioned above and I guarantee you that you’ll get requests. 

If you ever decide to write for other fandoms too, it’s important to remember not to get discouraged when you don’t get much feedback on fics that are in smaller, less popular fandoms. For example, I’ve written a few one-shots for the tv-show Grimm and that’s an extremely small fandom so as you can guess, I didn’t get much acknowledgment for it. It will, naturally, be discouraging seeing as a lot of thought and time is put into the fics, but at the same time it’s only logical. 

It’s also important that you know that it’s okay to set boundaries. As a fanfic writer, you provide people with alternate endings and scenarios to their favorite shows, you take time out of your spare time and put a lot of thought and energy to give them entertainment pretty much on demand and for free. Some people don’t understand that fanfiction is a privilege and not a right and will get really whiny/grumpy about the fact that you might be taking a long time to post their request. In that kind of scenario, you have the right to put down your foot and tell them off. It doesn’t make you a bad guy but rather on the contrary, you speak and stand up for all fanfic writers. 

While we’re speaking of boundaries, it’s also completely fine that you make a little disclaimer saying that you would appreciate more feedback if you notice that you’re not getting any. The number of likes and reblogs/comments are always going to be uneven but sometimes readers need a little reminder that comments are appreciated, and asking for them doesn’t make you a bad person or anything like that. It’s only natural to want to get acknowledged for your art and if you ever feel like you’re not getting the attention that you deserve, point it out. Fanfic readers are really understanding and appreciative, sometimes they just forget to leave behind a comment <3 

I make the mistake really often to force myself into writing even though I shouldn’t. For example, I could have a headache, be sick, tired, or just not feel like it and not have inspiration/motivation to do it. I tend to push myself into writing despite all this and take my word for it that you shouldn’t. I put waaaay too much pressure on myself and by doing that, I usually tend to grow tired of fandoms real quick so that I get left with a lot of unfinished requests that I in any other case would have loved to write, which sucks. 

So don’t push yourself. If you don’t feel like writing, don’t. If writing starts feeling more like a burden and a job than a joyful experience, you’re doing it wrong. 

There will also be requests that you simply don’t feel interested in, and at those times it’s really important to remember that you have no obligation to write them and that it’s alright to delete them/say no. Again, writing things that you don’t want to will make it feel like a burden and that’s not how it’s supposed to be. Writing is always supposed to feel fun and good, or you’ll burn yourself out pretty quickly. 

Every writer has their proud moments and their less proud moments. If you write a fic that you’re really happy and proud of, brag about it! Lift yourself up and other people will jump on the train! And if, in a worst-case scenario, you don’t feel happy with the outcome at all, it’s okay. We all have fics that we love and hate, but just know that from a reader’s perspective, everything you do and put out is going to be greatly appreciated. 

Every writer starts off somewhere so don’t be too discouraged if it goes slowly to a start. I hope my pointers are to some help even though I mostly rambled about pointless stuff😂 If you ever need help with anything or if you have more questions, my inbox is always open. I look forward to reading what you have planned, good luck!💕

[pens-swords-stuff]

How to gain attention in the Writeblr Community

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about this lately, so instead of replying to each one, I decided to make one large post. Please note that these are based off of my personal experiences, and how I run my writeblr. This is what worked for me, but you might run your blog differently, you might post different things, and that’s perfectly fine.

Post Frequently

If you don’t post, people won’t be able to find your blog! Try to post as often as you can so you’ll pop up on people’s dashboards, and remind them what a cool Writeblr you are.

Obviously real life comes first, and you should never feel pressure to continue posting if you don’t want to. Breaks are absolutely okay and understandable, but if you feel up to it, try to keep your blog going! Use the queue, schedule some posts if that will help you.

They don’t all have to be original content either — reblogs work too, and in fact, probably work better because I know how difficult it can be to come up with original content everyday.

Make your original content when you feel like it, and use reblogs to keep your blog alive and active!

Be smart about your tags

A quick rundown on how tags work

Only the first five tags will show up in tracked tags. (i.e., if you tag your post #writeblr, and I’m following the tag #writeblr, it might pop up on my dashboard even if I’m not following you.)

Only the first twenty tags will show up in tumblr search.

Reblogs will not show up in tracked tags or search.

That’s a lot to remember, are you still with me? The most important thing to remember about tagging your work is that the first five tags are the most important. You want to use your biggest, most relevant tags in the first five. All of your organizational tags for your personal blog tags (i.e., I use #undine writes stuff to organize all of my original writing) and all of your fun tag comments should come after the first five at the very least.

So you know that the first five are most important, but what tags should you use? What tags are the best?

Here’s what I usually use and though I don’t know if they’re particularly popular or not, but they’ve worked for me just fine.

A basic guide on what tags to use

#Writeblr and #writing for any writing-related post that you make. I also sometimes include #writblr because some people use that tag instead.

#creative writing, #amwriting, #original writing work really well for your original writing content.

#WIP and #OC are also popular for your WIP and OC posts.

I’ve written a more in-depth guide on tagging, and what to use here in my “How to use tags effectively in the writeblr community” post! Please check it out if you want more information. It includes a more comprehensive list of what tags to use for what posts.

Engage with the community

When people ask me how to gain attention on writeblr, I often feel like they’re expecting me to have some magical solution that will make them popular.

Well, that one magical solution doesn’t really exist, but engaging with the community is the closest thing I’ve got for you. I cannot emphasize the importance of this enough.

At its core, this is a community; a way for writers to find and support each other. If you ignore the community aspect, you are not utilizing a vital part of Writeblr, and you will probably not gain a whole lot of attention and support.

The absolute best advice I can give you is this: If you want attention in the community, you have to start by appearing in people’s notifications.

It is the one guaranteed way to make sure that you’re on people’s radar. That’s really valuable because the writeblr community is massive and it’s really easy to get lost in the shuffle. The more people that notice you, the more likely they are to gain an interest in you.

For example: I don’t know who all of my followers are, and I don’t know who all reblogs and likes my posts. However, if someone is consistently popping up in my notifications, I take notice. I recognize who they are, I’m grateful for them (and probably consider us friends, honestly), and I’ll check out their blog since they’ve been such a massive supporter of mine. Then I decide to follow them and we become mutuals because I’ve noticed them, and I’m now interested in what they do. Then, because I follow them, I’m more likely to reblog their posts because now they pop up on my dashboard.

This is how it works for the majority of writeblrs; we follow people that have supported us, so we can support them in return. It’s a win-win situation, really, so you should really take advantage.

So reblog and comment on people’s stuff consistently! Send them asks, slide into their DMs, tag them in stuff! Become friends with people! Participate in their ask games! Send them things that you think they’d like!

Doesn’t it feel great when someone reblogs your posts and writes a nice comment? Isn’t it wonderful when someone is genuinely interested in your stuff and sends you an ask? Be that person for other people! It’ll benefit you in the long run, I promise.

Don’t be shy; Kick down the door and barge in!

I get it — It can be really frightening to talk to people, especially on the internet. But like I said, Writeblr is massive, and it’s not that people don’t want to notice you, it’s just that there’s so many other things going on that they might not see you. So assert yourself! It’s okay to message your favorite writeblrs, it’s okay to reblog and comment. Make sure that people know you exist, and that you’re awesome!

As a bonus: It’s easier to talk to people who talk to others publicly and visibly. By having conversations with other writeblrs on your blog, and interacting with others, it shows your followers that you are open to conversation, and that you are accessible, and they will be more likely to engage with you. 

A lot more important advice under the cut! Be sure to keep reading!

Make writeblr friends

If you make a friend, you guys can both support and promote each other! It’s also really fun to have a writing friend to talk to, and talk about writeblr things. Some of the closest friends I have were made on the internet, and they can be a huge support system, and your biggest fan.

Participate in tag games

If tag games aren’t your thing, you don’t have to participate in them; that’s fine and it’s your choice.

However, writeblr tag games are a fantastic way to engage with the community, post about your WIPs and OCs, and make sure people see your content, all in one.

A lot of tag games involve talking about your WIPs and OCs, and you can directly tag other writeblrs without being annoying and invasive! I’ve gotten a decent number of followers, and people on my tag lists because I tagged them in a tag game, and they liked what they saw!

Even if you aren’t tagged any, if you see one you like, go ahead and participate! Tag your favorite writeblrs and ask them to join! By actively participating in tag games and tagging people, you’ll get tagged more often in them as well. It’s a great way to jump in if you’re a little nervous about tagging people!

Reblog your own posts

There are a lot of reasons why you might not be getting notes, and one of them might be that people just haven’t seen it. Time zones, and when people are active, the other posts on their dashboards, maybe they weren’t even following you when you posted it — they all contribute.

So reblog your own posts every so often! It’s okay, it’s not as annoying as you think, and a lot of new people will see it every single time.

Especially reblog your WIP posts!

Promote yourself; Be your own biggest supporter

No one wants to read things if they’re bad. So saying stuff like “It’s not very good, my writing is bad,” isn’t going to make people want to read it. Learn how to sell yourself! Try to be as confident as you can — fake it if you aren’t!

Talk about how much you love your WIP, sell people on it. There’s a lot of other WIPs people can be reading on tumblr, why should they check out yours? What are your strengths? Really push those forward; talk about yourself as if you were talking about your favorite writer.

Be confident! Confidence will bring people in.

Keep talking about your writing, keep posting about where you can read it, keep reblogging your favorite posts. People will take notice eventually, and you’ll find your audience!

Build up your followers with non-WIP content

It’s an unfortunate reality that it’s really difficult to gain interest and followers by just posting about your WIPs and OCs alone. Is it impossible? Absolutely not! A handful of Writeblrs have found success doing this, but realistically, it doesn’t happen very often.

So my very realistic and cynical advice to you is: reblog a lot of other posts. Reblog writing advice, memes, something that’s popular in Writeblr right now, etc., to draw people in initially. They can all be stuff that’s popular, but also make sure that you want to reblog it! Make your blog your own, and unique, don’t force yourself to reblog things that you don’t want to. But if you like it even a tiny bit, consider reblogging it.

People are more likely to reblog things that they can relate to like writing memes, and writing problems. People are more likely to reblog positivity, than they are WIP posts. If that’s something up your alley, try making some posts like that!

By building up a bigger follower base with non-WIP related stuff, you can make sure that more people will see it when you do post about your original content.

Other things that work really well, it following other writeblrs and posting stuff like “Reblog if you’re a writeblr, and I’ll follow you!”, “Looking for more mutuals, I’ll follow anyone back”. (Make sure you actually follow people if you say this though!). I cannot think of a single writeblr that won’t reblog these posts, because we all want followers. And a lot of people will follow back, and be a new mutual, which means a bigger audience who might be interested in your WIPs.

Also you’ll find a lot of awesome writeblrs to follow, and that’s a win in it of itself.

Gaining attention takes time and won’t happen immediately

I know how hard it is to feel like you’re shouting into the void, and no one cares. It really sucks to post something you’re proud of and have it get maybe two likes at most. I’ve been there — I’m still there. It’s a struggle that I think every single one of us here can relate to.

Realistically, overnight successes are something that probably won’t happen to you. Even the biggest, most successful writeblrs have started out with less than a hundred followers, and they slowly, painstakingly increased their audience one-by-one over a really long period of time. 

You can get there too, if you keep at it. I know it’s hard when you feel alone. I know it’s discouraging, and I know how disappointing it is. Take a break if you need to, but there is no magical way, no quick solution to being a popular writeblr. You have to work at it, and revel in the small victories as you slowly grow.

You’ll reap success if you keep at it, I promise.

Here’s a post I wrote about how to deal with not gaining follower and notes if it ever gets really hard.

Be a writeblr for yourself, not to gain attention

At the end of the day, there is absolutely no guarantee whether you’ll gain followers or not. You can try things, but ultimately it’s out of your hands.

The best way to deal with that hard truth, is to be a writeblr for yourself. Do what you want, run a writeblr because you want to, and it’s fun. Don’t expect notes, instead let every note you get be a pleasant surprise. Run your writeblr to engage with an amazing, kind community, not to be popular. Have a writeblr so you have a place to talk about how much you love writing, not so other people will love your writing.

Don’t tie your self-worth and measure of success into your writeblr, because you are so much more than note counts and follower counts. Your writing ability is not measured by your popularity, and it’s important to remind yourself of that every now and then.

It’s just like writing, write for yourself, and the audience will follow. Run your writeblr for yourself, and your supporters will follow.

It’ll be a lot more fun that way, and a lot more genuine. 

You can do it. Don’t get discouraged, and keep at it! Remember that it’s okay to take breaks if you need to, writeblr should not be your entire life. You’re a great writer no matter what, and I really hope that this will help you gain some new friends!

If you’d like to ask me for advice on writing or running a writeblr, please check out my Ask Guidelines and FAQ first.

Ask Guidelines | FAQ | Advice Masterlist

[nanamis-bigtie]

hii!! i wanted to ask you, what’s the best way to promote fics? my problem is that i suck at interacting with people and i personally don’t take requests because i usually write based on my emotions and imaginations but i really want to promote my fics :( any tips or advise? thank you ❤️

Um... Dunno, if I’m the best person to be asked this question, since the numbers of notes I have under my writings is relatively low, comparing to other blogs, but I might tell you what I learned from other bloggers and which strategies I tend to use, when promoting my own work.

Basically, the begginings are the hardest, because you need to build yourself a fanbase. Tumblr is based on two main cores - tagging system and sharing the content from each other. Tagging system... sucks. It is tameable, but don’t expect fireworks from here. Grasping attention of people who are ready to reblog from you is essential - so, unfortunately, you’d have to interact with people at least a bit ( ╥ω╥ ) It doesn’t have to be something big, if you’re afraid asking straightforward for a promotion, you can simply leave nice comments under work of other writers. We check out our regulars, especially those who comment - it’s not that often, so it stands out like a highlighter.

(It’s easier once you find it in your heart to write to people. I might not look like one here, but irl I’m really a walking Gremlin Trafalgar and interacting with me outside the blog is hard - so I know what I’m saying  (￣▽￣*)ゞ )

This being said, I’ll copy advice I already shared with one other blogger:

1) Tagging system. Tumblr in general sucks when it comes to exposing text-based system. You need to remember that even the best writing will lose the fight with anything graphic-based within a tag, because Tumblr focuses mainly on those. The bigger the tag is, the more you need to avoid it – because readers do it too, they know they won’t find what interest them there. Most of us writers use system like this – general tag (one piece headcanon(s)/one piece scenario(s)/one piece imagine(s)) > character x reader tag (for example: trafalgar law x reader) > character tag (for example: trafalgar law) > any tag you use for keeping posts in order > personal commentary.  

2) First 5 tags are most important, because those are counted into Tumblr search engine. This is one of the reasons we have number of characters limits – the more characters we have in a request, the harder it gets to properly tag it. When you have more than 3, you would need to skip the general tag and focus on character x reader tag. Always tag more popular characters first (those who grasp more attention are, from my experience: Law, Kid, Ace, Sabo, Sanji, Katakuri, Zoro).

3) If you have or will have scenarios or ficlets, post them on AO3. It has a search engine prepared exclusively for fanfiction and it’s much easier to get attention there. Just remember to expose your Tumblr url (in fic description, in notes, in your profile description etc. – the more, the better). 

This is an example how I self-promote my url on AO3

4) Masterlist is important. The sooner you start making it, the better – you won’t get lost. It’s the quickest way to present your work to your readers, because they don’t have to scrape through your all posts to find content they are interested in. Tumblr is a shit when it comes to linking, so I’d recommend using google docs for that (you can check mine as reference).

5) Try to add a gif or a screenshot, or a manga panel to your writing. There’s a reason most of us do it – it grasps attention. Most of people are visualizers. Text is easy to scroll away, but a picture automatically makes a person stop and stare at it, even for a second. It increases your chance of being exposed to new readers.

6) The more you post about a particular topic, the more efficient the search engine is. So – try to post not only your writing, but even random thoughts or shitposts about characters. Reblogs count in it too! Don’t be afraid to reblog fanarts and stuff other writers do, a lot of people look through reblogs to find blogs with similar topics.

7) Try to follow current events in anime and manga. Sometimes a character or plot popularity bursts just because something happens there – and people will look for a new content. For example, Kid was not as recognizable in writings before Wano arc as he is now, with more exposure he got in both manga and anime. With some luck and experience you can predict what will be exposing you more – and aim for those tags. 

And if you’re still alive after reading this wholeass essay bullshit, drop me your url, because now I’m curious who you are and I can place a bet that few of my mutuals won’t let me live, if I won’t share a fresh writing gem (*ﾉωﾉ)

[publishinggoblin]

How to Run a Kickstarter pt 6

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

Yesterday I covered the final steps you have to take on their website before you can submit your project to be ready for launch. So today... we do it.

                            LAUNCHING YOUR PROJECT

Make Sure People Know: By now, you should have been sharing the project preview link around a bunch. You can see on the project preview page itself how many people have actually hit the “Notify me on Launch” button. Note that while that number might even look big-- big enough to fund you day one-- it is tricky.

It’s not that people are liars. It’s not that they actually hate the project. It’s just that hitting a button that says “notify me” is so much less of a commitment than actually going and pledging your money. It’s like when people say “Oh my gosh this design is awesome, if it was on a shirt I’d buy it!” It’s a throwaway motion of support, meant to make you feel good and loved and seen. It’s almost always done with love. That being said, you will probably have a 20-30% conversion rate of people ACTUALLY backing it from that notify number. Don’t be discouraged. This is normal.

Pick a Good Time: Do not launch at 1 AM. Do not launch at 11 PM. Consider your time zones a bit if you think most of your backers will be international, but otherwise try for sometime in the late morning or around noon. People are active on the internet during lunch time, and shortly after work, around 5 or 6pm. Also consider the date while you’re doing it. A Kickstarter around Christmas sounds nice, but then you consider that you won’t actually get the item to them until AFTER Christmas, and it doesn’t sound as nice of a time. Last I looked, October is one of the best months, but otherwise you should feel free to launch almost whenever. I’d just avoid November/December/January, personally.

When You Launch, POST EVERYWHERE: Have a twitter? A tumblr? A facebook? A reddit? Post on your own wall, make a tweet, tumble a tumbl, then find communities on reddit, on facebook, groups on pillowfort, all your discords-- wherever you are. Make sure everyone you have any connection to knows you launched.

Then do it again. You should be doing it around noon, around 5/6pm, and again in the morning the next day. Rinse and repeat. Some people might see the multiple posts and be annoyed, but most people won’t see any, or will just happen upon one of them. You’re less annoying than you think.

This is different for groups, circles, or reddits you are not a regularly active member of, or who have rules of any kind. BE MINDFUL! If you break their rules spam posting, you will lose that avenue entirely for sharing your post in.

                   AFTER LAUNCHING YOUR PROJECT

Your Work Has Just Begun: Reach out to online blogs, websites, review places for your product type, and begin pitching your project to them immediately. If they can do a story with a link to your campaign, perfect. For most of the bigger ones, this is actually something to do BEFORE launching, as they have a backlog of articles. Try to line it up to match your launch if you can, and make sure they have your project preview link, as that will go to your project once it’s live.

Day 1 is the most important. As noted before, it creates the standard for how visible your project will be on their site, since their algorithm cares about unique backer count per day. So the more people you get day 1, the more visible you are day 2, and the more likely you get more people just perusing which feeds into the cycle. Make day 1 count. Be active. Post a lot.

You will want to post once a day or so on your various social media about the state of your campaign, how much money you are away from the goal (or how many backers, ie “We need just 10 more people to make our goal, are you one of those 10?”), or from the next stretch goal.

Then there’s all the management to do.

Following the Numbers: Do not watch a pot. It won’t boil. But do feel free to check in from time to time to see how the pot is doing. Basically? Check in hourly on the first day to see how the money/backer count is going. After that, you can check a few times a day, but don’t make it overly habitual. You will burn out and begin to over worry. 

Cancellations: You will have people pledge, only to later cancel, sometimes the same day! Unless you get a ton of them all at once, you didn’t do anything wrong. It always happens. People realize they want that money for something else, won’t have that money when they need it, or just couldn’t afford it in the first place. It’s okay, don’t take it personally. 

Post Updates: I prefer to post one update at the end of the first 24 hours, when we meet the base funding goal (and each stretch goal), and otherwise once a week. Some campaigns update each day. This is up to you, but make sure you are posting some. If you post none, it looks like a dead campaign with no one watching it. Do be mindful that each one you post sends an email out to backers, so don’t spam, and avoid doing multiple a day if you can help it. 

If you are getting lots of questions in comments or direct messages, answer them in updates as well as replying to those comments and messages.

Comments and Messages: Kill them with kindness. Some people say shitty things, and you need to just smile through it. Mostly you’ll get compliments in comments. Reply to them! Show them you are engaged. Same with messages.

Note that you will get lots of messages from people claiming their can boost your numbers if you sign up with them. Report it for spam and never, ever reply. They have basically all been shown to be scams. 

The Lull: After the first few days, or the first week, the campaign tends to stagnate a bit. You keep getting more people or money, but way less than before. This is normal. It will pick up again near the end. You can afford to be a little more lax in posting about it at this period to give people a cool down from your constant marketing. 

Keep it Fresh: If you have stretch goals, now is the time to really bust them out and show what they are. Change your marketing to be about what else can be unlocked. If your campaign is struggling to hit its mark halfway through, now is the time to include an extra incentive or two. Find things that are price-negligible or free to include-- such as your signature on every copy, a PDF for everyone of something else you made, or an extra digital copy. 

That Final Week: If the first few days are the most important, the final few are equally so. You will often see almost as many people or as much money, as you begin to ramp up your promotion again and as people who favorited the project will get notifications in the final 48 hours by email that the project is nearly ended, and now is the time to back.

It’s okay to become annoying during this time. Post a ton. It’s almost over, so people won’t have to live through it for too long.

Then it ends. If you were successful, congratulations! If you weren’t-- that’s okay! Take a look at the numbers, what happened? Was it a lackluster first day? Then next time, you need to capture more people’s attention before launch. Build up a following, and try again later.

If you realize you set the goal too high? You can always relaunch with a lower goal that’s more attainable, and let people from this campaign know.

In either case, ABSOLUTELY POST AN UPDATE WHEN IT ENDS.

Tomorrow, we talk about what to do AFTER the Kickstarter ends.

[path-of-my-childhood]

New Reputation: Taylor Swift shares intel on TS7, fan theories, and her next era

By: Alex Suskind for Entertainment Weekly Date: May 9th 2019

Snakes begone. The 29-year-old superstar is back with a new album and a new outlook on life. We go inside the pop monarch's latest chapter.

THE PALM TREES ARRIVED IN FEBRUARY, seven in all, set against a pastel blue backdrop with superimposed stars. It appeared that a new Taylor Swift era was upon us — that the old happy-go-lucky Taylor was not, in fact, dead. Or did it? It was only an Instagram photo, just one more picture in an infinite content scroll. But it also came from a pop star known for prodigious hint-dropping, whose fans turn every piece of info into an online archaeological dig.

As expected, the summery post sent Swifties sifting through each detail with a fine-tooth comb. What did the trees symbolize? An overdue vacation? A recently purchased beach house? A secret palm-frond collection? Or maybe, as many surmised, it was new music. One Twitter user predicted that the number of stars in the background of the photo hinted at a single drop: “There’s about 60/61 [stars]️. There’s 61 days until April 26, FRIDAY, a SINGLE RELEASE day!” Another said it was the unofficial announcement of her next LP: “Okay so in this picture there are 4 palm trees on the left (4 country albums). There are two palm trees on the right (2 pop albums). There is one large palm tree in the middle. This represents her new album.” These may sound like ludicrous conspiracy theories — for the record, they were mostly correct — but they fit firmly within the Taylor Swift Musical Universe (it’s like the Marvel Cinematic Universe but with more guitars and fewer Stan Lee cameos).

“I posted that the day that I finished the seventh album,” says Swift about the photo. “I couldn’t expect [my fans] to know that. I figured they’d figure it out later, but a lot of their theories were actually correct. Those Easter eggs were just trying to establish that tone, which I foreshadowed ages ago in a Spotify vertical video for ‘Delicate’ by painting my nails those [pastel] colors.”

It’s now April, and the 29-year-old pop star is in a Los Angeles photo studio, giving her first sit-down magazine interview in three years. She wants to discuss the art of placing hints inside her work, as well as the upcoming record, which she recorded as soon as she finished the Reputation Tour. She’s also keen on detailing her own obsessions, talking up the TV shows, books, and songs that help shape her outlook on life.

Over the past 13 years, Swift has perfected the pop culture feedback loop: She shares updates about her life and drops hints about new music, which fans then gobble up and re-promote with their own theories, which Swift then re-shares on her Tumblr or incorporates into future clues. It’s like a T-Swift-built Escher staircase of personal memories and moments that tease what’s next. “I’ve trained them to be that way,” she says of her fans’ astute detective work. Swift is a pop culture fanatic herself (see: the jean jacket she’s wearing on the EW cover) and has an innate understanding of the lengths her audience will go to be a part of the original creation. “I love that they like the cryptic hint-dropping. Because as long as they like it, I’ll keep doing it. It’s fun. It feels mischievous and playful.”

Through this approach, Swift has designed the ultimate artistic scavenger hunt — and it’s easy to get swept up in its drama, even if you don’t listen to her music. Her moments aren’t always hidden, either. Sometimes Swift highlights aspects of her world just so fans feel like they’re on the journey with her. Like the time in March 2018 when pop singer Hayley Kiyoko was accused of shading Swift after mentioning her name during an interview. On Tumblr, Swift re-shared a fan’s post, adding commentary that defended Kiyoko, which immediately dispelled any conflicts between the two artists; Swift’s post subsequently received more than 29,000 notes. Four months later, she invited Kiyoko on stage during the Reputation Tour to sing her hit “Curious.” Kiyoko returned the favor when she had Swift join her that December at a benefit on behalf of the LGBTQ organization the Ally Coalition to perform “Delicate.” Fans of both artists were elated by the mutual support.

The feedback loop also extends outside of music. In October 2018, Swift broke her silence about politics by publicly endorsing two candidates for office in her adopted state of Tennessee, while encouraging her followers to register to vote. She kept up the civic momentum through Election Day when she asked fans to post selfies after voting; Swift then eagerly re-promoted her favorites on Instagram stories.

This practice of sharing and re-sharing and sharing again is why listeners consider Swift one of the world’s most accessible pop stars, someone willing to not only interact with her audience but invite them to secret listening sessions, or make the occasional surprise visit to their wedding or prom. It’s a symbiotic relationship, one that, as Swift tells EW, helped her dig out of the darker era of reputation. “It’s definitely the fans that made that tonal shift in the way I was feeling,” she says. “Songwriters need to communicate, and part of communicating correctly is when you put out a message that is understood the way you meant it. reputation was interesting because I’d never before had an album that wasn’t fully understood until it was seen live. When it first came out everyone thought it was just going to be angry; upon listening to the whole thing they realized it’s actually about love and friendship, and finding out what your priorities are.”

Then, during the Reputation Tour, she had an epiphany: that despite the caricature that she thought had been created of her, there were many people who saw what others had simply refused to. “I would look out into the audience and I’d see these amazing, thoughtful, caring, wonderful, empathetic people,” she says. “So often with our takedown culture, talking s— about a celebrity is basically the same as talking s— about the new iPhone. So when I go and I meet fans, I see that they actually see me as a flesh-and-blood human being. That — as contrived as it may sound — changed [me] completely, assigning humanity to my life.”

At tour’s end, she channeled that positive energy into the studio, recording the new album in just under three months. But the fast pace won’t mean a short LP. Swift confirmed that her seventh record (she hasn’t announced a title yet; the working nickname among fans is TS7) will include more songs than any of her previous releases. “I try not to go into making an album with any expectation,” she says. “I started to write so much that I knew immediately it would probably be bigger.”

The project will also feature a mix of old and new collaborators (on the candy-coated lead single “ME!” Swift brought in Panic! At the Disco frontman Brendon Urie and coproducer Joel Little, both of whom she had never worked with), but she is unsurprisingly coy about doling out much more information, as if doing so would break the carefully honed T-Swiftian feedback loop. “There’s a lot of a lot on this album,” she says. “I’m trying to convey an emotional spectrum. I definitely don’t wanna have too much of one thing…. You get some joyful songs and you get the bops, as they say.” There’s also, she adds, some “really, really, really, really sad songs,” but “not enough to where you need to worry about me.”

She gives us one more clue: The true distinction between TS7 and reputation is in the delivery. “This time around I feel more comfortable being brave enough to be vulnerable, because my fans are brave enough to be vulnerable with me. Once people delve into the album, it’ll become pretty clear that that’s more of the fingerprint of this — that it’s much more of a singer-songwriter, personal journey than the last one.”

The past month has seen a deluge of Swift activity, from the release of the new single to dropping more hints in interviews about the record and its title, which is apparently hidden somewhere inside the “ME!” music video (current fan guesses include Kaleidoscope and Daisy). But if the Easter eggs from the pop star seem like a business-as-usual routine, she says this album does indeed mark a new era of her life, where she’s been better able to prioritize what’s important to her.

“Our priorities can get messed up existing in a society that puts a currency on curating the way people see your life,” she says. “Social media has given people a way to express their art. I use it to connect with fans. But on the downside you feel like there are 3 trillion new invisible hoops that you have to jump through, and you feel like you’ll never be able to jump through them all correctly. I — along with a lot of my friends and fans — am trying to figure out how to navigate living my life and not just curating what I want people to think living my life is. I’m not always able to maintain a balance, and I think that’s important for everyone to know about. We’re always learning, and that’s something that I also had to learn — that I’ve got to be brave enough to learn. Learning in public is so humiliating sometimes… Do I feel more balanced in my life than I ever have before? Um, probably yeah. But is that permanent? No. And I think being okay with that has put me in a bit of a better position.” Strong words to live by, to quote, to re-share, to tweet back to her, and see if she’ll respond.

You can read the original article HERE.

[panelshowsource]

a note about women’s month 💘

thank you to everyone who voted in the fave female panelists poll this year! last year was a blast and this year was even better! we’ve seen more woman on tv this year — and some improved, though grossly insufficient, diversity within that — and i love celebrating that with you everyday!

last year, i wrote this:

the lack of diversity in british comedy is an alarming issue that has only recently become headline news. statistics presented by this study, based on 50 years of panel shows and over 4,700 individual episodes, are beyond disappointing for women (here is an easy-to-read graph by series & by year); similar disappointment stems from the lineups at popular comedy festivals, like edinburgh. in 2014, the head of tv at the bbc promised to end all-male comedy shows, a “step in the right direction” that hasn’t been without fear of tokenism, fair criticism as well as some naysayers. women, people of colour, lgbt peoples, those differently-abled and those all of the above and in between are just as funny as cis-identifying white men and deserve a place on our screens. watch their standup, buy their books, stream their videos, listen to their podcasts, comment on and like their content, follow their social media. this support can directly help women become more visible in british comedy.

in the last year, have you been actively conscious of supporting women in comedy? i’d like to take a moment to talk about some ways you can do that :)

➡ from feminist discourse to tales of humans & their dogs to ghost stories, these women are providing some of the most touching, stimulating, and funny reading coming out of comedy:

How to be Champion: My Autobiography by Sarah Millican

Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body by Sara Pascoe

The Guilty Feminist: From our noble goals to our worst hypocrisies by Deborah Frances-White

The Actual One: How I Tried, and Failed, to Avoid Adulthood Forever by Isy Suttie

Cheer Up Love: Adventures in Depression with the Crab of Hate by Susan Calman

The More You Ignore Me by Jo Brand

Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down: A Memoir by Jo Brand

Look Back in Hunger: The Autobiography by Jo Brand

Born Lippy: How to Do Female by Jo Brand

Is It Just Me? by Miranda Hart

Peggy & Me by Miranda Hart

Nina Is Not OK by Shappi Khorsandi

A Beginner's Guide to Acting English: A Memoir by Shappi Khorsandi

Spectacles: A Memoir by Sue Perkins

East of Croydon: Blunderings through India and South East Asia by Sue Perkins

Once More, with Feeling: How We Tried to Make the Greatest Porn Film Ever by Victoria Coren Mitchell and Charlie Skelton

For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker by Victoria Coren Mitchell

Dead Funny: Horror Stories by Comedians featuring Sara Pascoe, Katy Brand, and Danielle Ward

...and that’s just to name a handful! my fingers would need a 5 min power nap if i tried typing out all of susie dent’s books 💪

➡ this is a list of a lot relevant active podcasts coming out of britain right now (though it is missing, most notably, off menu). for example, if you liked alice levine on taskmaster, why not listen to her podcast? or watch/listen her on rhlstp? this is such a fun way to get more deeply involved in the comedy of some of your favourite ladies! might i recommend isy suttie’s the things we do for love, anneka harry’s brown bread, or box set go! with nicola stephenson (the newest ep features rebecca front!)? most of these are free, or they can be found/requested at /r/notapanelshow p.s. suzi ruffell, rosie jones, tiff stevenson and more are scheduled to appear on rhlstp this season 😍

➡ here is a list of some radio programmes currently on the air. while it does look stacked with men (because it is), women do feature on so many of these series and absolutely smash it! did you know sandi toksvig hosted the news quiz for almost ten years, and its regular panelists include susan calman, rebecca front, zoe lyons, and more? or that victoria coren mitchell has hosted heresy since 2006 (because there’s nothing she can’t do)? or that sarah millican, jo brand, and sally phillips have each hosted series of the museum of curiosity? these are all on the masterpost! 👏 p.s. you can always search for and/or request more radio shows at /r/panelshow or, if they’re not panel radio shows, /r/notapanelshow :)

➡ social 👏 media 👏 determines 👏 relevancy 👏 do i agree with this system? no. is this the system entertainers are currently slaves to? yes. do you follow your favourite women on twitter, instagram, youtube, etc? one click. one like. one retweet. one reblog. here is a list of some of the comedians i follow on twitter to get you started — all of your faves are on there! when you like something they are on, tweet about it! tag them, the network, the channel, use the hashtags, post pictures! tell channels like dave or people like richard osman who your faves are, who deserves more exposure, who you want to see in the future! we’re already obsessing over how much we like these ladies anyways, so why not make that obsession even more visibile?

➡ we have a really sweet, modest community here of at least 10,000 people. this is not something i’ve ever talked about because i don’t want what i’m going to say to be misconstrued as begging for notes — that is not my concern. but you may have heard people on this site talk about something called the like/reblog ratio. a lot of creators are concerned that, apart from tumblr’s ever-evolving ludicrous algorithms murdering their visibility, people are so obsessed with their blog aesthetics that they’re not actually reblogging everything they like. here’s a couple of my gifset details, one from a nicher post and one from a more popular post:

while i appreciate any notes, numbers likes these aren’t always encouraging. i’m not here to tell you how to enjoy your spare time and interests, or to criticise people who enjoy aesthetic. i just want to point out that if you want someone to be successful, you play a direct part in promoting them and spreading their art. as the years pass, this becomes more and more true. i know how much you all love these ladies — i get messages about them every single day — but it’s a simple fact that a gifset of james acaster or noel fielding or richard ayoade or david mitchell is going to get more notes than a post about any of the women who placed in the top 5 of this poll. i am not bringing this up to this make anyone feel guilty about what they enjoy; i only hope my mentioning this encourages you to be conscientious when participating on social media, especially when your interest lies in the products of a grossly unjust industry that is taking a lot fucking time to get itself on the right track. more followers on a comedian’s twitter = more work for that comedian, because that’s simply the direction the film & tv industry is going. if your follow yields that much power, why not use it for good?

please support women. if you buy one of their books, please message me and tell me which one! if you think one of them is shining on a radio programme and we’re sleeping on her, please let me know (timestamps appreciated!)! if one starts a gofundme or patreon to start a podcast or a tour, please donate 50p and then send me the link! there is always more we can be doing and we are always underestimating what even smallest amount of support means for their bigger picture. i don’t have all the answers, but i love the feeling i get when i believe society is evolving in the right direction. rose matafeo won the edinburgh comedy award in 2018, and sarah keyworth and kiri pritchard-mclean took the top awards at the 2019 chortle awards. women are here to stay and they’re fucking killing it. because duh ❣️

if you took the time to read this, i appreciate you x

[thevortexofourminds]

On leaving Tumblr

I’ve been on Tumblr for about six years with this blog. It’s a niche blog with a small number of followers (but WHAT amazing ones. I love you guys and girls) - at least when we look at the numbers that some of the bigger blogs have. Numbers are not important to me. And the number of followers doesn’t say anything anyway. I love this blog, and my only interest always was to create a blog that I would want to follow. And apparently, there are a handful of people who have the same kind of interests as I have. My photography-blog @tvoom is bigger. The number of people following this blog and the number of notes on some of my photos - to me personally - are mindblowing. Even though this blog probably still doesn’t count as a big blog, I would have never expected that my photos will ever attract this attention. My more experimental photo-blog @tvoom365 is very small. One reason certainly is that I rarely post anything and hardly ever “promote” it. Or maybe the photos are not as good ;) But the feedback was always astoundingly positive.

One of the biggest mistakes I made in my time on Tumblr was to delete my writing-blog. Two years of writings and recordings were gone. I deleted the blog because I realized that the reason I made that blog in the first place was not a “reason” for me anymore. I was stupid enough to think that just because that one thing in my life which made me start writing (again) changed, I will have no reason to write anymore. HA! Well... at least I still learn. I might be stubborn but not THAT stubborn.

I learned two things through that:

a) Stories don’t have a meaning beyond the meaning that we assign to them. And we can assign any meaning we want to. So a story changes by how we read a story. You as the reader and I as the author are equal parts in the creation process. And neither your opinion nor my opinon is the “right” opinion or the “correct” way to understand or interpret a story. Because what’s in your head is nothing I can change anyway. So... I will not apologize for what’s in your mind. Because I didn’t put it in there.  It’s the old “When a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it - does it make a sound?” thing. No, it doesn’t. The falling of the tree creates changes in air pressure. But "sound” is only created by the listener. And what that specific sound means to the listener... that’s dependent on the listener and highly personal. So much for “objectivity” ;P After this face-palm moment, I started to write and record again and gathered a tiny but wonderful audience.

b) Tumblr is not @staff or @support or a CEO or any person who “pulls the strings”. Tumblr is you, and me, and everyone who has a blog. A community only exists because of the people who take part in it. Agreed, the boundaries changed, but what we put within these boundaries... that is upon us. In the last five years or so, I put a tremendous amount of time and effort into doing my part in creating an environment in which a community can grow. I met dozens of wonderful, creative and amazing people, I was fortunate of having the privilege of being part of some of the coolest projects that I can imagine. And all of these things are and were only possible because of the people involved. People who do and did what they do and did DESPITE all the hardships. DESPITE all the problems. Who just did what they love doing and not to gain anything from it. I have the deepest respect for all the creators and curators of all sorts of genres on Tumblr. Because I KNOW how hard it is to keep something going for years and years and years. Thank YOU for doing what you do. And to those of you, that I have the privilege of working with directly (too many to mention): I love you all. And I am grateful for you. All I did and all I do was only possible because of you and the thousands and thousands of supporters, artists or no.  Leaving Tumblr would mean that I’d not only give up on what I’ve achieved and what I’ve been doing for years, what I was part of building up, but it would also mean that I’d be giving up on myself. Heck... it took me decades to find out who I am. I will not give up on this crazy dumbfuck that I am ;P Because that is what I am. I am a person who creates, I am a person who loves to share knowledge, beauty, art, and sometimes (well... quite often) a stupid joke. I love to share my experiences and art in all sorts of ways. And since Tumblr never was a platform that allowed me to do this in exactly the way I wanted to, I always used other platforms as well. Tumblr’s video-player is probably the worst in the history of the internet, so I’ve been posting my videos to YouTube. Tumblr’s audio-player is a bad joke, so I post my audios to Soundcloud. And I embed that all in my Tumblrs.

Tumblr’s “adult content ban” will most certainly go down in internet-history as one of the most hypocritical “internet moves” ever. The interesting bit is that it probably will be known as “the porn ban”. Which is not even true. I’ve seen people post claims like that “Tumblr now defines nude-photography (or anything that the dysfunctional algorithms flagged) as porn and therefore bans it”. That’s not true. The truth is worse. The truth is not even that Tumblr bans genitals and therefore also porn. Yes, nudity and genitals are banned. And porn is banned. Smarter people than I wrote in much more intelligent ways than I ever could what’s bad about this. But rarely have I seen anyone write about the real big problem. The big problem is that the new community guidelines of Tumblr are sexualizing women by banning female nipples except for photography of breastfeeding and medical reasons. So, the legality of showing parts of the female body is based on the function. If the photo does not depict this function, the photo is deemed sexual. And sex is forbidden. While male nipples don’t have any other function (at least not that I’m aware of, please educate me) other than being an erogenous zone. Just think about this for a moment. Male nipples are allowed. Because banning male nipples... that is prudish, isn’t it? But looking at how incredibly hypocritical and bigoted the western world (and especially the US) is at the moment, this just fits, doesn’t it?

The question is: Should we let the idiots win? Only the unorthodox, the ones that pushed boundaries, the non-streamlined, the experimentalists - in short - the “un-normal ones” make the world evolve. “Conservatism” derives from “to conserve”. And we only conserve what is already dead so that it doesn’t start to smell. It’s too late Tumblr. This doesn’t smell. It already stinks.

Some people will HAVE to go to other places to not compromise on their art or self-expression, leaving Tumblr only a stump of what it once was and maybe will never recover from. Unless we creators find a way to stay true to ourselves and use the base of what is still here to create something new and amazing. As a curator of (also) artistic nude-photography, an occasional artistic nude-photographer myself, and an artist who also makes “adult-themed” art, Tumblr is dead for me in this specific area. Will I use a different platform for these things? Since “adult writing” is not banned (yet) I can continue here. For the rest: Maybe. I might re-open my Flickr (Flickr belongs to the same company btw... and allows artistic nudes... hypocrisy much? Edit: I learned that Flickr was sold to SmugMug) or I might start a DeviantArt account. I don’t know yet. I will certainly reference these new places in case I’ll decide to give it a go. Fact is that I will expand. Creativity is change. And no, we will not like each and every change. But hey... that’s life. As long as we change, we live. Also, I will certainly not let stupid, bigoted, greedy, hypocritical liars limit me. And the big lie is that it was never about “making Tumblr a better, more positive place”. It very much sounds like “Make Tumblr great again”, doesn’t it? It’s the same set of mind. The same priority: Greed. It was always only and exclusively about money. And apparently, Tumblr can make more money with actual Nazis still around and with nudity banned. I am German, my great-grandparents lived through a time in which real artists had to flee a place and the Nazis stayed...

Another thing: How is Tumblr a better, more positive place with the porn-bot problem still not being solved? Granted, we will not see any visual porn anymore, but the bots are still there. And they still follow and reblog posts, they add or even replace the original content (”thanks” to the prior Tumblr “improvement”) with links to shabby sex-sites and “sex offers”. That is your more positive Tumblr, @staff . Congrats! You fucked up royally. Because now it’s even evident that this was never your concern anyway.

Since @pwsfineartnudes cannot continue after December 17th, 2018, and I was asked to join @abstract-challenge (after Amy sadly left Tumblr for personal reasons), maybe that is one way to expand. So I will happily and gladly try to find ways to contribute to this - for me - very new and very different fascinating photographic adventure. Thank you for the challenge and the trust you put into me.

Rock on, my friends! You are Tumblr! You will only get out of it what you put in. You are amazing! Always have that in mind.

- Pete 

[gendercensus]

A survey on the prevalence and pronunciation of the title Mx

I’ve run two surveys that focused on Mx in the past. One was in 2014 and had 118 responses, and the other was in 2016 and had 505 responses.

This one ran from 5th until 19th January 2019, and there were 3,204 responses, of which 3,179 were usable, meaning I deleted 25 responses that were abusive or obviously duplicates. Of the 3,179 that were usable, 579 were in the UK. (I single out the UK here because I’m in the UK and I’m particularly interested in collecting UK-specific data.)

The survey was promoted on Tumblr, Twitter, Mastodon, and /r/samplesize on Reddit. The promotional text that I wrote didn’t mention the title Mx at all, in an attempt to get more diverse points of view into the results.

Ultimately my goal was to find out how people are pronouncing Mx these days. I ran the first Mx pronunciation survey in 2014 because I kept seeing people condemning Mx on the basis of not knowing how to pronounce it, so I thought information about how it is most commonly pronounced might help. I’m curious to see if over time people are asking that question less and whether one pronunciation is becoming more popular than others.

Plus I figured it might be interesting to find out a bunch of other stuff along the way while I’m there quizzing you all anyway, so I collected information about

where people were raised and with which first spoken languages (so that people can compare the responses to all the other questions to this information and find out, for example, how Mx is pronounced in Australia or how often it’s on forms in the US vs. the UK)

gender

whether Mx is your title or you’ve just heard of it

how often you see Mx on forms

whether you think it’s gender-inclusive (anyone can use it) or gender-exclusive (nonbinary-specific title)

You can see the spreadsheet of responses and the associated tables and graphs here.

~

FAMILIARITY WITH MX

Here’s the ten countries whose participants are most familiar with Mx:

United Kingdom: 85.5%

France: 71.7% *

Australia: 71.6%

Finland: 70.4% *

Germany: 66.4%

United States: 65.9%

Ireland {Republic}: 65.5% *

Sweden: 61.8% *

Canada: 60.9%

Netherlands: 40.8% *

All countries had at least 27 responses. Countries with less than 100 responses are marked with an asterisk (*).

So at first I was like, “whaaaat, how is France more familiar with Mx than the US, even though the main language of France isn’t even English?” But France had only 53 respondents, compared to over 1,500 from the US, so I imagine there is some bias involved. People filling in the survey will notice that a lot of the questions are about Mx, and when at the end of the survey they’re prompted to share the survey URL they are more likely to do so if their title is Mx or they have friends whose titles are Mx.

So then I moved onto which participants had seen Mx on forms, and which countries they were from. Here’s the top 10 for “participants have seen Mx on English forms in the wild”:

United Kingdom: 36.7%

Ireland {Republic}: 21.7% *

Netherlands: 20.0% *

Canada: 18.0%

Australia: 17.0%

United States: 15.4%

Germany: 10.6%

Finland: 9.5% *

France: 7.3% *

Sweden: 4.5% *

Again, the asterisk (*) specifies that a country had under 100 respondents.

Someone from Australia said in the feedback box that Mx is on every government form, which I thought was excellent! It may not be surprising, since they were the first country to grant a passport with an X gender marker on it to someone who couldn’t be categorised as M or F, way back in 2011.

~

PRONUNCIATION

I guess the thing you’re most interested in here is the way most people pronounce it, right? If you answered an earlier question by saying that you had heard of Mx, this question asked: “How do you personally pronounce Mx when you're speaking English?”

For this question it was possible to select multiple answers, and there was an “other” textbox. None of the “others” got more entries than the least chosen pre-written option (Mixture, 4, or 0.2%).

Mix: 25.5% (573 people)

Məx, with a schwa (ə, toneless vowel): 9.5%

I don't know: 8.0%

Em Ecks, spelling out M-X: 3.9%

Mux: 2.7%

Mex: 2.3%

Mixter: 1.1%

Mixture: 0.2%

In the UK the pronunciation varied from this significantly - Məx (the schwa option) was in the lead with 41%, though this percentage is lower than both previous surveys.

The spreadsheet goes into more detail on pronunciation, including chart for pronunciation in the 10 most popular first spoken languages, but to summarise: In the US go with Mix, and in the UK go with Məx (with a schwa).

This is the biggest survey I’ve seen on the pronunciation of Mx in the UK at least, with 506 participants in the UK taking part who had heard of the title, so this is probably the best we have to go on right now.

~

MX AND GENDER

I did ask about gender in this survey, in quite a roundabout way. I wanted to group people into roughly three groups, while also acknowledging that gender is ridiculous and a lot of people who’d be categorised as cis and binary wouldn’t necessarily feel 100% their gender all the time.

Which of these statements is most true for you?

I'm a man/boy pretty much all the time

I'm a woman/girl pretty much all the time

Neither of the above options fully describes me

It was possible to check more than one box for this question, and several people did.

I then made a few comparisons between gender and other answers.

So we have some obvious details first. For example, of the people who said their title is always Mx, most people checked the “neither of the above” option (89%). And then there were more interesting details, such as that women and girls were significantly more likely than men and boys to use Mx for themselves “sometimes”. Could this be related to a few comments entered into the feedback box expressing discomfort with Mx because it sounds too much like Miss?

I learned that people who checked the “neither of the above” option for gender were the gender group most likely to have heard of Mx at 94%, and men/boys were least likely. Of the people who had not heard of Mx, men and boys made up over half. I’d love to suggest that men and boys are least likely to have heard of Mx in part because their privilege permits more obliviosity, but that would be pure speculation and possibly impure judgemental attitude and nothing more.

~

INCLUSIVE VS. EXCLUSIVE

I asked participants whether they thought Mx was gender-inclusive (anyone of any gender can claim it) or gender-exclusive (generally used when addressing or referring to someone of a particular gender, denoting that gender).

Do you consider Mx to be a title that is gender-inclusive or gender-exclusive, generally speaking?

Gender-inclusive - anyone of any gender can claim it for themselves

Gender-exclusive - it's broadly a title for nonbinary people, in the same way that Mr is broadly a title for men and masculine people and Ms is a title for women and feminine people

I don't know

People whose titles were not Mx considered it to be a nonbinary title by a wide margin, but people whose titles were Mx considered it to be inclusive. This is interesting compared to several of the comments written into the feedback box, which I would paraphrase and roughly generalise into the following:

I’m cisgender and binary and I would really like to have a title that doesn’t express a gender, but I’m scared that it’s a nonbinary title and I don’t want to take it away from nonbinary people.

I’m nonbinary and my title is Mx and I wish some binary people would start using it because I would really like to be able to have a title that doesn’t cause dysphoria but also doesn’t out me as nonbinary.

That’s going entirely on what was typed into the feedback box, of course. There were many other diverse points of view, this was just a pattern that I saw while browsing. It’s possible that other comments were entered elsewhere in the form that I didn’t pick up on, too.

It might be interesting to note that of the people who only said they were men/boys, 14% said their title was sometimes or always Mx. For women/girls it’s 15%. Because of other biases I’ve mentioned above this is probably not representative of the general public, but it shows that binary people are using Mx for themselves in a gender-inclusive way, and over half of people who claim Mx think of it as an inclusive title, the most popular combination on this board:

When you split the inclusive/exclusive vote by nonbinary/binary participants instead of people claiming Mx, the results are much closer:

But again, nonbinary people are more likely to see the title as inclusive and less likely to see it as exclusive.

~

NOTES

In most surveys I usually just ask whether or not someone lives in the UK, but this time I tried asking which country people lived in as a sort of experiment. I’m interested in collecting country-specific data for the much bigger annual survey, and I wanted to see how things might work out on a larger scale.

My hope was that enthusiastic people in other countries might be able to use the data specifically about their own country for their own cunning ends.

What I found was that lots of people said “I actually live in [location] but it wasn’t on the list” when [location] was a territory of another country that is probably culturally and linguistically very different from the governing nation. There were also a lot of people who complained about having to scroll too much to find their country (and language) on the list, so I’m sure there were many people who started to fill in the survey but then gave up and left no feedback.

The most popular country by a long way was the US with 49.6% of responses (1,567), and after that the number of people per country dwindled fast. Number 10 on the list, Finland, had only 27 responses (0.8%).

I think I will omit this question in the annual survey, and stick to “UK or not UK?”

~

CONCLUSION

Mx is pronounced Mix or Məx, with a schwa.

More nonbinary people use it than men or women, but there are binary men and women using Mx in a gender-inclusive way and most people whose titles are Mx are pretty okay with that actually.

The UK are totally winning at adoption of and familiarity with Mx, followed by (eyeballing it) Australia and the Republic of Ireland.

Nonbinary people and people whose title is Mx are both more likely to consider the title to be gender-inclusive, open to anyone who wants to use it regardless of gender identity.

~

CLOSING COMMENTS

Thank you everyone! Thank you for your honest and open answers, thank you for the interesting and helpful feedback comments (shoutout to the sweethearts who commented just to remind me to take regular breaks and to thank me for my hard work, ilu), and thank you for helping to boost the signal and get as many eyes on the survey form as possible. Without you, my survey and spreadsheet obsession would be 95.36% more boring. <3

So, this was kind of a warm-up. The past few weeks have been intense, and more intensity is coming, but I feel a bit more prepared for starting the 2019 survey. Hopefully I’ll be able to get started in a few weeks. Stay tuned...

[icypantherwrites]

Just a quick request for some advice, I've noticed you seem to be very good at promoting your works, requesting feedback and actually getting some, and reposting on Tumblr and such. Now admittedly, you are an awesome author and I pretty much love everything you write, but I have to think your promotion abilities are part of what brings you hits, kudos, likes, and feedback. Do you have any advice on the best ways to promote my fanfiction, build a fanbase and short of begging, get more comments?

Self-promotion and marketing definitely are a large part of my fanbase. I’ve seen it go both ways; amazing writers and fics that don’t have much attention and not-so-great ones that have huge followings because of social media presence of the author. So while having quality stories is still a large part of it, so too is marketing.

My background is not actually in marketing but journalism, but I did run a number of social media pages and have always been a very big people-person and engager, which I’ve applied to pretty much all aspects of my life. One of my favorite slogans I’ve learned from retail (and marketing) is you can’t sell what’s not out. i.e., if you don’t present your product you can’t expect to have any customers (or in this case readers).

In my case, I’m a very prolific author, meaning I have a lot of stories under my name and I’ve been fortunate that a couple of those have become bigger name ones in this fandom for extra exposure. The more you have, obviously the more you will “sell” and therefore, generally, the more exposure you’ll get and then comments (comments though are a fickle beast and it really really varies). 

I’m borrowing some of the advice from a previous post (you can always search my blog with “#writing advice” for more things) but these would be a couple of strategies I would recommend you try out :) Not all of them may be applicable to you either, as all authors write at different paces and volumes and have different time constraints, but maybe something in here will help ;) 

1. Have an update schedule! This one is really important. Whether that means you pre-write the entire fic or you buckle down and commit to a regular posting (which is how Color was for me for the first couple months until I pre-wrote enough to kick back and relax a bit xD) be it weekly or bi weekly or every two weeks (the other bi weekly? Such a weird word) you do that.

When you get people on a schedule and they are more likely to come back and comment with something other than the dreaded “update soon!” because they know you are going to update soon and when exactly that is. Give readers something to plan and look forward to, just like a favorite TV show that airs weekly.

2. Respond to comments. Whether you write giant-ass paragraph responses or even a simple “thank you ♥” it goes a long way. I know I always am more inclined to really keep up on a fic where the author has shown to appreciate their readers (although if I read your fic and like it I will comment regardless ♥). I know for me right now I have stopped doing this as it just got... draining for me, to respond in detail and never see those readers again and it felt hurtful to me. But I still make a point to say thank you in the author’s notes and if anyone has a question I do try to answer that too.

3. Read other authors’ works you enjoy but do not self-promote. Please don’t do that. I hate it when I see that and it makes me even less inclined to check out a fic (I’m already very picky with what I read and don’t read much at all). By all means comment on the fic and be like “I headcanon Keith is a good cook too!” because those personal details are lovely and maybe that’ll inspire that other author to click on your profile to see if you’ve got a fic with such a theme to go read.

But otherwise, keep your comments about their fic (or your reaction to it) and show your excitement and passion for that fic. Bookmark too (and Ao3 lets you add comments; you can bet if I see a nice comment on a bookmark tag I’m clicking on that author to see a; what else they’ve bookmarked and b; if they’ve written anything). Well written and passionate comments tell a lot about a person and if they can write a nice review they likely can write a nice fic and could be worth an extra click to see their profile. That is indeed how I’ve found several authors and fics I now read :)

4. Chapter length. This I have noticed over time but shorter chapters (for me around 3k-4k) tend to get more comments than longer ones because people have “more time” upon finishing to leave a comment. It doesn’t always work but it is something I’ve witnessed on more than one occasion. That said, don’t write a chapter of only 1k words and think they’ll pour in because it’s short. Leading on to…

5. Whatever your chapter is, make sure it has content that people will want to respond to. Not every chapter has to have explosions and action and intense heart-to-hearts, but every chapter should have something memorable. Filler chapters are unavoidable, especially in longer fics, but do what you can to make them not quite so “blah” and give them some heart.

6. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, meaning write multiple things (although perhaps not as much as me ^^;). Having a mix of a longer running chapter fic (for those “episodes” back in bullet point one) to keep people coming back and having a few shorter fics (be one-shots, two-shots, or shorter chaptered fics) to draw in new people and help you out when you get stuck on your other fic is invaluable. I definitely expanded my audience and brought in new readers that gave me little boosts of support when I started publishing one-shots semi-regularly. 

7. Don’t be afraid to self-promote on your blog. Reblog your works, pull out snippets to share, reblog those too if you don’t get many notes. I don’t really get how Tumblr’s tag system works, but tag your first few tags with the biggest ones that those browsing might stumble across. Ao3 does let you link to your Tumblr so long as you aren’t advertising commissions or patreon or the like in said blurb so make sure you link to your tumblr too to get cross-traffic.

8. Post sneak content on your blog; previews and snippets. Get people excited about the work before you post it. 

9. I don’t know how reasonable this is for most, but holding little games or contests can really up the engagement. Starting out, doing something like a bingo card prompt event could be one to consider; the “prize” is writing the prompt which gets you both more content, therefore more eyeballs on said content, and hopefully a very grateful fan who will leave you a nice comment and reblog it for their page. 

10. I like ending on this number. Um, oh, okay! This is both great for writing experience, content and engagement! If you see a piece of fanart you like that you feel compelled to write a bit for, do so and reblog it! Anyone who clicks on that art will see your reblog of it and maybe, maybe, the original artist will reblog your selection too! Not just artists either, but there are lots of “prompt” type posts I see that you could do that for as well. 

AO3 | Ko-Fi | Patreon | Discord

[nomediaplay]

If Tumblr shuts down, where do you go?

Most likely nowhere. In my good-bye note on onehallyu I said I might decide to answer questions somewhere. Then I regged this tumblr, but after a while decided to not do that as I wrote in the first post on this page. But with my usual “luck” in timing, Jessica left SNSD just some days later so I ‘had’ to post a bit.

supermofficial.*com/#events weren’t you bragging SM never forces their artists to do free events             

Sigh. All artists of course have to do promotional events for new releases. And this is even some new group. And not just artists. If an author has a new book coming out, he’ll have to be on TV shows to promote it. If there’s a musical, the cast need to promote it on TV etc. Heck even the very top star Hollywood actors have to go all around the world and be on TV shows and events to promote their new movies.

What I’ve complained about is how many shitty idol companies make their celebrities constantly do lots of promotion for free, and also especially when they use very big established celebrities for events to which fans get “free tickets” by buying CDs.

What would happen to Taeyeon’s music if she were to leave SM? Would she still be able to perform these songs or she’d literally have to start anew?

She (and anyone else) can continue to perform her music however she wants, but she (presumably) can’t make new recordings without SM’s permission. Look here: when it comes to music, there are 2 different types of intellectual property rights:

The first is for, so to say, the ‘creation/invention’ of the song, and belongs to the composers/songwriters.

The second is the copyright of a specific recording. This typically belongs to a record label. That’s literally what record labels do: they organize the recording of music, then market and sell copies of that recording. And the record label will typically sign deals with songwriters, producers and singers to make a recording from which these get a royalty % cut of the total sales of that recording.

Anyone can perform whatever song anywhere without needing anyone’s consent. But if you do it for commercial purposes you need to pay the songwriters. This is handled by collective agreements and organizations such as ASCAP in the US, JASRAC in Japan and KOMCA in Korea which work to collect money for song usage and distribute it to the songwriters.

But to make a new recording of the song (for commercial purposes) you need explicit permission of the songwriters. However, whenever any record label signed a contract for a recording to start with, that agreement would typically stipulate that the record label now has the right to determine who can make new recordings of the song.

So, surely, if you’re a fan of a kpop group, you must have experienced that members of the groups have performed covers of other songs in concerts (because they can perform whatever song they want) - but if there’s a DVD release of the concert some of those covers might be missing (because record labels have refused the right to make recordings of the song).

What does it mean for an idol to have a lot of copyrighted songs, like the ones on those lists?

Per the above answer: it means he/she is listed as one of the ‘creators/inventors’ of a song as composer and/or lyricist. So whenever that song is used for any commercial purpose (such as played on TV, played on radio, performed by at any concert/event, etc) he/she will get paid some money.

However, as I’ve said countless of times before: for any really successful artists the payments from songwriting are really small compared the very big money they can get paid in other ways, particularly from performing at concerts and from doing CF/endorsement deals.

Also, I’d like to point out that it’s difficult to know how much an artist really have contributed to creating a song. Sometimes I get the feeling that YG lists whatever people that happened to sit next to Teddy while he composed a song. And it’s well known that many big western artists throughout history have demanded to be credited as songwriters even though they didn’t actually contribute anything at all.

Does Jessica have the right to use Girls’ Generation’s name to promote herself? Other girls who left SM - left the group as well (at least for now) but they all still use GG’s name when promoting their new projects. OT8 stans believe GG should never be mentioned anywhere near Jessica but I don’t think their situations are that different actually? but maybe I’m wrong?

I doubt that there are any legal constraints, but really, your question is strange because she’d be laughed at if she went around saying she was still an SNSD member. Any ‘group’ in society is defined by how the members of the group recognize each other as part of the group. The other 8 members have made it quite clear that they define SNSD as 8 members without Jessica, so it would be ridiculous for her to call herself as SNSD. Of course, she could if she want have journalists write news-articles calling her ex-SNSD Jessica and she could do interviews talking about her time in SNSD etc. I’m not sure if that would help her or not.

How so many bands and solo acts in japan are able to survive for a long time even though they don’t have good digital or physical sales?

But the Japanse music sales have been completely fucked up for the last 15 years as I’ve ranted about plenty of times before.

Can those bands and solo acts actually sell decent amounts of concert tickets in Japan? If yes, they’re living a good life no matter what their music sales are.

what is more important for a company, the success of their newer groups or their established artists? sorry if it’s a dumb question

Err, it’s not entirely black and white. But for a company to make really big profits (as in money for the owners of the company) it’s most important to get a new group to become really big really fast. This is partly about how new groups are on worse contracts and partly about how fans of these new fresh trendy groups spend huge money on buying albums and streaming like maniacs etc which are things from which the company gets most of the money (unlike for example concerts).

But it’s not all about contracts. Several of these smaller companies have absolutely horrible contracts. That doesn’t mean the companies make any profit. Because their acts simply aren’t successful enough. They spend so much money on everything from music videos to stage outfits and make up to road managers and security guards so there’s no money left.

And so on the flip side, for most of the normal employees who work in these companies to sort everything from music videos to stage outfits and make up to road managers and security guards, it’s really just important to have successful acts period (no matter if new or old) in order to make sure they get paid safely.

It is true that GD alone bring as much money as blackpink?

Per above: yes, GD alone would generate much more revenue than Blackpink. But they are both profitable in the sense that they generate much more money than what’s spent on music videos, outfits and managers etc. And obviously Blackpink has a much worse contracts than GD, so after splitting profits per their contracts YG probably makes bigger profits on Blackpink than GD.

Why do you think YG did a fanmeting in seoul for blackpink instead of another concert?      

Well, considering the amount of negativity YG has ended up in recently:

I thought it had been well established that much of the audience at their previous Korean concert was in fact not paying for tickets, but people who had been given tickets through corporate sponsorship of the concert. In this current situation, there’s probably not a single company willing to sponsor a concert.

Secondly, even with regards to that fans actually would pay to go, I think it’s likely that media would have put out critical articles about YG doing concerts in this situation. By calling it a fan-meeting they’re pretty much making it impossible for journalists to write such negative articles.

Did that super junior member really leave because he got married or there is something more to it?

As I’ve always expressed: save humanity - disband Super Junior.

So no I really have no idea about what they’re doing. But I used to say some 7 years ago that there will probably be a Super Show 10. And we’re soon there. Because members seem to be aware of their own short-comings and their joint success and are OK with doing group activities.

But it was my understanding that this member not only didn’t really contribute with anything to the group, but that he also really pissed off the few fans he had with his actions (such as drawing symbols for his girlfriend when signing autographs for fans).

Is Mnet bigger than SM and YG?

If you just mean Mnet as in the cable-TV channel, the answer is that SM/YG are bigger. But this question is not straight forward to answer. First off it’s difficult to define what one mean with ‘bigger’ company:

By profit? By market cap (value)? By number of employees? By revenue?

My take would be to in most cases (such as this) go by revenue as the most relevant measure of ‘big’ company.

Secondly, in Asia in general and in Korea in particular they have this horrible habit of building conglomerates and interlinked companies. And it just runs in their culture/society. Both SM and YG were new small independent startups initially. But look at them now. They have used all the profits they’ve made over time to start all kinds of businesses very vaguely related to their core businesses and invested in a myriad of other companies and started to become big conglomerates in entertainment.

And Mnet goes way back and to the very top. Mnet is just one cable-TV-channel. The actual company here is CJ ENM. CJ ENM also has a lot of other cable-TV-channels and a huge home-shopping-channel. CJ ENM are also very big in for example producing musicals and concerts in Korea. CJ ENM once upon a time also almost had a monopoly on music distribution in Korea, but nowadays the music distribution business (now called Stone Music Entertainment) is far from the leading distributor. CJ ENM is also the biggest producer of Korean TV dramas and films. That was spun off into a separate company (Studio Dragon) but CJ ENM own like 75% of that company still. CJ ENM has also spun off its music streaming business (but they own like 15% of Genie Music) and its gaming business (but they own like 25% of Netmarble). So CJ ENM is a very big and powerful company in the Korean entertainment industry and much bigger than SM and YG.

And CJ ENM is in turn owned by and part of the CJ Group. The CJ Group also own a whole lot of other companies primarily into food production, restaurant chains and entertainment. Most known to kpop fans is probably that they also own the biggest cinema chain in Korea, but the main businesses are food related.

And CJ Group was in turn part of the absolutely gigantic Samsung chaebol group. CJ was one of the parts of the Samsung chaebol that was split off around 1990 following the death of Samsung founder Lee Byung-chul. It’s a separate group now, but basically, CJ Group is run by 2 siblings who are grandchildren of Lee Byung-chul. Other parts of the former Samsung chaebol are run by other relatives of Lee Byung-chul.

(PS, Lee Byung-chul had TEN children who in turned had a lot of grand children, hence why his gigantic corporate empire is nowadays a bit of a drama mess)

[kaleid-tay-scope]

New Reputation: Taylor Swift shares intel on TS7, fan theories, and her next era

Snakes begone. The 29-year-old superstar is back with a new album and a new outlook on life. We go inside the pop monarch's latest chapter.

Alex Suskind

May 09, 2019 at 12:00 PM EDT

Peggy Sirota for EW

THE PALM TREES ARRIVED IN FEBRUARY, seven in all, set against a pastel blue backdrop with superimposed stars. It appeared that a new Taylor Swift era was upon us — that the old happy-go-lucky Taylor was not, in fact, dead. Or did it? It was only an Instagram photo, just one more picture in an infinite content scroll. But it also came from a pop star known for prodigious hint-dropping, whose fans turn every piece of info into an online archaeological dig.

As expected, the summery post sent Swifties sifting through each detail with a fine-tooth comb. What did the trees symbolize? An overdue vacation? A recently purchased beach house? A secret palm-frond collection? Or maybe, as many surmised, it was new music. One Twitter user predicted that the number of stars in the background of the photo hinted at a single drop: “There’s about 60/61 [stars]️. There’s 61 days until April 26, FRIDAY, a SINGLE RELEASE day!” Another said it was the unofficial announcement of her next LP: “Okay so in this picture there are 4 palm trees on the left (4 country albums). There are two palm trees on the right (2 pop albums). There is one large palm tree in the middle. This represents her new album.” These may sound like ludicrous conspiracy theories — for the record, they were mostly correct — but they fit firmly within the Taylor Swift Musical Universe (it’s like the Marvel Cinematic Universe but with more guitars and fewer Stan Lee cameos).

“I posted that the day that I finished the seventh album,” says Swift about the photo. “I couldn’t expect [my fans] to know that. I figured they’d figure it out later, but a lot of their theories were actually correct. Those Easter eggs were just trying to establish that tone, which I foreshadowed ages ago in a Spotify vertical video for ‘Delicate’ by painting my nails those [pastel] colors.”

It’s now April, and the 29-year-old pop star is in a Los Angeles photo studio, giving her first sit-down magazine interview in three years. She wants to discuss the art of placing hints inside her work, as well as the upcoming record, which she recorded as soon as she finished the Reputation Tour. She’s also keen on detailing her own obsessions, talking up the TV shows, books, and songs that help shape her outlook on life.

Over the past 13 years, Swift has perfected the pop culture feedback loop: She shares updates about her life and drops hints about new music, which fans then gobble up and re-promote with their own theories, which Swift then re-shares on her Tumblr or incorporates into future clues. It’s like a T-Swift-built Escher staircase of personal memories and moments that tease what’s next. “I’ve trained them to be that way,” she says of her fans’ astute detective work. Swift is a pop culture fanatic herself (see: the jean jacket she’s wearing on the EW cover) and has an innate understanding of the lengths her audience will go to be a part of the original creation. “I love that they like the cryptic hint-dropping. Because as long as they like it, I’ll keep doing it. It’s fun. It feels mischievous and playful.”

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Through this approach, Swift has designed the ultimate artistic scavenger hunt — and it’s easy to get swept up in its drama, even if you don’t listen to her music. Her moments aren’t always hidden, either. Sometimes Swift highlights aspects of her world just so fans feel like they’re on the journey with her. Like the time in March 2018 when pop singer Hayley Kiyoko was accused of shading Swift after mentioning her name during an interview. On Tumblr, Swift re-shared a fan’s post, adding commentary that defended Kiyoko, which immediately dispelled any conflicts between the two artists; Swift’s post subsequently received more than 29,000 notes. Four months later, she invited Kiyoko on stage during the Reputation Tour to sing her hit “Curious.” Kiyoko returned the favor when she had Swift join her that December at a benefit on behalf of the LGBTQ organization the Ally Coalition to perform “Delicate.” Fans of both artists were elated by the mutual support.

The feedback loop also extends outside of music. In October 2018, Swift broke her silence about politics by publicly endorsing two candidates for office in her adopted state of Tennessee, while encouraging her followers to register to vote. She kept up the civic momentum through Election Day when she asked fans to post selfies after voting; Swift then eagerly re-promoted her favorites on Instagram stories.

This practice of sharing and re-sharing and sharing again is why listeners consider Swift one of the world’s most accessible pop stars, someone willing to not only interact with her audience but invite them to secret listening sessions, or make the occasional surprise visit to their wedding or prom. It’s a symbiotic relationship, one that, as Swift tells EW, helped her dig out of the darker era of reputation. “It’s definitely the fans that made that tonal shift in the way I was feeling,” she says. “Songwriters need to communicate, and part of communicating correctly is when you put out a message that is understood the way you meant it. reputation was interesting because I’d never before had an album that wasn’t fully understood until it was seen live. When it first came out everyone thought it was just going to be angry; upon listening to the whole thing they realized it’s actually about love and friendship, and finding out what your priorities are.”

Then, during the Reputation Tour, she had an epiphany: that despite the caricature that she thought had been created of her, there were many people who saw what others had simply refused to. “I would look out into the audience and I’d see these amazing, thoughtful, caring, wonderful, empathetic people,” she says. “So often with our takedown culture, talking s— about a celebrity is basically the same as talking s— about the new iPhone. So when I go and I meet fans, I see that they actually see me as a flesh-and-blood human being. That — as contrived as it may sound — changed [me] completely, assigning humanity to my life.”

At tour’s end, she channeled that positive energy into the studio, recording the new album in just under three months. But the fast pace won’t mean a short LP. Swift confirmed that her seventh record (she hasn’t announced a title yet; the working nickname among fans is TS7) will include more songs than any of her previous releases. “I try not to go into making an album with any expectation,” she says. “I started to write so much that I knew immediately it would probably be bigger.”

The project will also feature a mix of old and new collaborators (on the candy-coated lead single “ME!” Swift brought in Panic! At the Disco frontman Brendon Urie and coproducer Joel Little, both of whom she had never worked with), but she is unsurprisingly coy about doling out much more information, as if doing so would break the carefully honed T-Swiftian feedback loop. “There’s a lot of a lot on this album,” she says. “I’m trying to convey an emotional spectrum. I definitely don’t wanna have too much of one thing…. You get some joyful songs and you get the bops, as they say.” There’s also, she adds, some “really, really, really, really sad songs,” but “not enough to where you need to worry about me.”

She gives us one more clue: The true distinction between TS7 and reputation is in the delivery. “This time around I feel more comfortable being brave enough to be vulnerable, because my fans are brave enough to be vulnerable with me. Once people delve into the album, it’ll become pretty clear that that’s more of the fingerprint of this — that it’s much more of a singer-songwriter, personal journey than the last one.”

The past month has seen a deluge of Swift activity, from the release of the new single to dropping more hints in interviews about the record and its title, which is apparently hidden somewhere inside the “ME!” music video (current fan guesses include Kaleidoscope and Daisy). But if the Easter eggs from the pop star seem like a business-as-usual routine, she says this album does indeed mark a new era of her life, where she’s been better able to prioritize what’s important to her.

“Our priorities can get messed up existing in a society that puts a currency on curating the way people see your life,” she says. “Social media has given people a way to express their art. I use it to connect with fans. But on the downside you feel like there are 3 trillion new invisible hoops that you have to jump through, and you feel like you’ll never be able to jump through them all correctly. I — along with a lot of my friends and fans — am trying to figure out how to navigate living my life and not just curating what I want people to think living my life is. I’m not always able to maintain a balance, and I think that’s important for everyone to know about. We’re always learning, and that’s something that I also had to learn — that I’ve got to be brave enough to learn. Learning in public is so humiliating sometimes…. Do I feel more balanced in my life than I ever have before? Um, probably yeah. But is that permanent? No. And I think being okay with that has put me in a bit of a better position.” Strong words to live by, to quote, to re-share, to tweet back to her, and see if she’ll respond.