#tangentially related but it's the source of my anxiety so tagging it anyway

[ladytemeraire]

The overwhelming urge to not buy anything and buffer my savings as much as possible in preparation vs the equally overwhelming urge to buy everything I can afford that will potentially get much more expensive/unaffordable in about a month or two

[esseastri]

All right, fronds, Tor has announced that starting August 22, they’ll be posting Oathbringer chapters! This is terribly exciting for people who want to read the preview chapters, but for people like me, who want to wait and savor (and liveblog) the whole book at once as opposed to piecemeal and spread out over several months, it’s kind of a source of anxiety...

I know that I’m going to be dodging spoilers for almost three months now (thanks, tor). And while I would never want to dampen people’s enjoyment of the preview novel chapters, I’m adding my request to the pile of people saying, yo please please please tag your spoilers!!! 

Aaaaand as much as I love tumblr, it can be kind of...a complicated endeavor making sure that posts end up where you want them--or don’t. So here’s a friendly review of how to make sure spoilers don’t end up where people who don’t want to see them...won’t.

Read mores are your friends. That little line makes everything so, so much easier to avoid. Read mores are your friends.

Wait until the fifth tag. Here’s one of tumblr’s less well-known features: only the first five tags on a post will show up in the public tag. So if the FIRST tag you put on a post is #brandon sanderson, that shit’s showing up in the #brandon sanderson tag. BUT if you put #one #two #three #four #five #brandon sanderson, (or similar “junk tags”--I tend to use // marks), then we’re all safe. It won’t end up in the tracked tag and it’ll be easier to avoid spoilers in the public, tracked tags. You still maintain organization on your personal blog, because it’s still in YOUR #brandon sanderson tag, but you won’t ruin someone else’s day by having it show up in the public tag with spoilers attached.

The first five tags work the other way, too! No one wants to scream into the void and not get a response--I’m on board with that. So somewhere in your first five tags, put #oathbringer or #oathbringer spoilers or even #stormlight archive spoilers. That way, people reading the preview chapters have a place to go to interact with other people reading the preview chapters, and people who want to go into November fresh and clean and unspoiled can still check the regular SA and Bsandy tags without fearing they’ll get spoiled.

Don’t put reactions in the tags. A lot of people have blacklist settings so that even if a post is blocked, the tags still show up as readable--this makes it easier to see why things were blocked, but it also runs the risk of tags like “#omg and then JASNAH did the THING and I DIED” spoiling even tiny things. Keep tags for...well, tags for a few months, and add additional screaming or reactions to the bottom of your actual post.

Discord and Mibbit are your friends. The nice thing about both messaging services is that you can set up different chats and servers that are subsets of the regular ones. So make a spoiler chat separate from the regular, spoiler-free chat, and go wild.

TAG EVERYTHING! Even if it’s a meme or a stupid shitpost or a vagueblog or something that doesn’t seem like it’s spoilers--TAG IT ANYWAY. If it’s even tangentially related to Oathbringer, TAG IT. Especially memes, tbh. Memes are insidious, and often innocent, but with a closer look, they reveal more than they might have intended. Tag literally everything, even if you don’t think it’s spoilers, even if you think it’s annoying. Those of us avoiding shit will thank you.

KEEP tagging stuff, even after the book is released! Maybe you read the preview chapters and so you’ve got a 300-page headstart, or maybe you speed-read, or maybe you took time off from work just to read, and maybe you finish two days after the book comes out. Keep tagging spoilers. Some people read slower, or have time commitments or work keeping them away from the book, or simply read a few chapters a day to savor it, or want to read faster but can’t because they’re liveblogging it (hello, fronds!). But just because you are finished doesn’t mean everyone else is, and continuing to tag for spoilers is super necessary, even six months--or longer--out from the release date.

All right, I hope that didn’t come out as patronizing or anything. I’ve just found that an occasional reminder of the ins and outs of tumblr’s more useful systems can be super helpful, especially if it’s stuff that newer users might not have encountered yet, like the fifth-tag-rule.

ANYWAY, for everyone starting with the preview chapters, ONLY SEVEN DAYS UNTIL OATHBRINGER!!!! Those of us waiting the remaining 90 days until November 14 thank you in advance for tagging your shit. <3

....shit, 90 days? that’s closer than I thought it was.....guess, I need to get a jump on my WoR reread!!

[theconservativebrief]

Every boy on Bumble seems to have taken a trip to Thailand this summer. Was it a group thing; did they go in shifts? And every girl was apparently cruising off the coast of Santorini. I guess I missed the memo.

Spend 30 seconds on any dating app and it makes the world seem like it’s packed with well-traveled singles. On Hinge, prompts like “Best Travel Story” encourage users to dredge up some unique adventure. Tinder’s sparse bios are littered with plane and beach emoji. And, of course, on any app there is the inexplicable-but-always-included skiing photo where four goggle-wearing men pose on a white-capped mountain. Who is the boy you’re supposed to be evaluating? Who knows! Whichever one he is, he’s super adventurous.

Travel is integral to how we market ourselves while dating. There is no doubt that we take some of our best pictures while traveling, but dating and travel are connected beyond the photo-ops. People find others who value travel more desirable, despite the fact that vacationing is usually a tangential part of our lives. Why is an activity that most spend upward of 350 days a year not doing seen as an attractive expectation and not a preference of the privileged? And what does the prioritization of travel say about who we are and who we want to date?

According to a 2017 study by Hinge, travel photos receive 30 percent more likes than the average photo. Research from Match Group, which owns Tinder, found that 62 percent of men and 74 percent of women want a partner who shares their travel interests. Research for a Delta X Tinder marketing campaign found that 50 percent of singles say travel is their favorite thing to do, and Sam Dumas, co-founder of dating app Chappy, says those who include travel photos in their profile are more likely to get matches than those who don’t.

Travel makes a person seem adventurous, rich, and interested in their own self-development, a.k.a. an ideal mate. With a travel photo, we can sell the very best idea of ourselves to whoever may be swiping by.

Hinge

Dating coach and founder of Growing Self Counseling and Coaching Lisa Marie Bobby says most people don’t think of their everyday lives as a true reflection of themselves. “People feel locked into a job and a routine that they just show up and do and it isn’t really meaningful,” she says. “When they are able to be their real selves is when they’re outside of that day-to-day system.”

The idea of being a different person when you travel can be seen in the very things you pack. When I shove four sundresses, two pairs of heels and every scarf I own into a suitcase, that is not to dress my everyday self, that is for my Travel Self. No one imagines their day-to-day self wandering the markets of Morocco or hiking Yosemite — we imagine the self we most want the world to see.

Bobby explains that when people are doing things like “trekking around Iceland,” that’s when they feel the most sexy, interesting, and fun. And couples who travel together often recall the experience as the happiest time of their lives. “What I hear in couples counseling is [traveling] is when people have the best sex, that’s when we have the most vivid memories of life, that’s when things really are the most fun,” she says. Travel photos may be predictable dating profile fodder, but, ultimately, everyone wants that euphoric couples’ vacation.

Many people choose partners in the direction of their own aspirational growth, Bobby says. So even if you’re not well-traveled, there’s a belief that a well-traveled partner can pull you into their beautiful life.

There are also similarities in the ways we romanticize both travel and dating. “Romantic love begins very much as a fantasy that’s based on just a little bit of information,” Bobby says. When we imagine ourselves on vacation, we omit the anxiety of flying or frustration of a language barrier. We don’t know what a vacation will actually be like, so we predict it in rosy vignettes, much how we predict a date with someone who we’ve only seen in a few pictures.

Dating coach Kevin Murray has helped online daters converse for years, first at eFlirt, a company that manages online profiles, now at Icebrkr, a startup he founded that sends users matches and helps them home in on the best topics of conversation.

Murray says that when creating Icebrkr, travel was the number one topic he knew he had to include. “It’s easy, low-hanging fruit to start a conversation with,” he says. And as a professional profile maker, his number one priority is creating avenues for conversation. He says that including travel photos makes the other person’s job easier, something crucial for those dating on platforms where even the slightest bit of effort can be a deterrent.

Travel photos also allow people to start a conversation without doing any reading, Murray says. “If they don’t want to read and [they can] just see the picture, they can be like, ‘Oh, when did you go there?’” he says.

But what if traveling isn’t part of your life? Include it anyway. “If they’re not well-traveled then it’s like, ‘shit,’ and you try to find that one trip to showcase,” he says. Even though it feels like “grasping at straws,” it’s worth it to include the suggestion that they enjoy vacationing.

Another way he coaches non-travelers to engage with the phenomenon is to list where they would like to go and invite others into a sort of daydream. “Whether you’re talking out of your ass or actually well-traveled, I certainly like to make a point of talking about travel,” Murray says.

Hinge

But some people aren’t talking about of their asses. Users at eFlirt pay $4,000 a month for full management of their dating profiles. “If someone had a Match.com or eHarmony profile we would run everything,” Murray says. “Part of that process was writing messages and also writing their profile. One of the things we’d often start conversations with was travel.” Someone with the income to pay for this service may actually have the ability to travel often and want a partner who could keep up with them.

But there are levels between the frequent jet-setter and perpetual homebody. Bumble sociologist Jess Carbino says travel photos can indicate where a person lands on this spectrum. “Travel for many is a signal of cultural capital,” she says. “The ability to talk about having been to certain places displays class privilege that isn’t displayed by being into another activity, like sports.”

Say you’re living in Chicago. Is your idea of travel driving to a beach house on Lake Michigan, road tripping to Austin for a music festival, or flying to Portugal for a week? All of these indicate an interest in travel, but each comes with a different price tag, which could reveal one’s socioeconomic class.

But it’s not only the price that insinuates higher socioeconomic class, it’s the desire to spend money on intangible things. Financial stability can be indicated by a picture of an expensive car or sporting expensive jewelry, but according to a 2017 study of social class and purchase satisfaction, whether a car or a vacation makes you happy is an indicator of class in itself. According to the study, those in lower socioeconomic classes gain more happiness from material purchases as opposed to experiential purchases.

The term for deriving happiness from experiences more than material goods is called the experiential advantage. The experiential advantage more often applies to those who are in higher income brackets, but also to those who value “self-development, self-expression, and uniqueness.”

A 2014 study investigated the link between experiential purchases and happiness and found that, as time passes, satisfaction with the purchase of experiences increases while that of material goods decreases. We can candy-coat memories in a way we cannot candy-coat an outdated television.

The study also states that the satisfaction gained from purchasing experiences is related to the perception that our experiences are closely tied to our self. The study notes, “we are not the sum of our possessions,” and people believe their experiences as most reflective of who they are.

But perhaps the most compelling aspect of the experiential advantage is in the way it facilitates relationships — the exact goal one has when puzzling together the perfect dating app profile. The study found that an experience’s enduring satisfaction is caused by its ability to “more readily, more broadly, and more deeply connect us to others.” Experiences were rated higher on the enjoyment scale because of their “relatedness.”

In one experiment, pairs of unacquainted participants were given 20 minutes to converse freely about purchases. Half were told to only talk about material purchases, and the other half was told to talk about experiential purchases. Results proved that participants liked the conversation and their conversational partner better if they talked about experiential, not material, goods.

Melding the two points together, sharing an aspect of your life that you believe is most demonstrative of who are, can create a “greater feeling of kinship and connection than something more peripheral.”

But for most people, traveling is peripheral. Regular experiences like going to a concert or playing kickball would be much more illustrative of who you are. Still, it seems many believe that travel is an integral part of who they are, and, more importantly, who they should be.

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Original Source -> Lust meets wanderlust: why everyone uses travel photos on their dating profiles

via The Conservative Brief