#which just links to the european category anyway

[smt-smash-or-pass]

[batsplat]

always am obsessed with motorsport champions that decide to run the number 1 plate vs those who’ve stuck with their number. because it reveals so much of each of their inner philosophies, whether they are deeply superstitious, or seek a tangible everyday proof of their victory, or concerned with branding/legacies, or trampling the inner critic that believed deep inside of them that they were cut out to be a champion. just so interesting to parse through possible motivations

you're so right anon!!

of course, a big part of it is historical context... you can't really disentangle the choice of whether to run the number one plate or not from the era within which they made said choice. until fairly recently, it was entirely the norm to pick the number one plate - and beyond that, even those who didn't finish in first tended to just adopt the number that represented the place they had finished in during the previous year's championship. so for instance in 1987, gardner was first, mamola second, lawson third, haslam fourth, macckenzie fifth, and so on. in 1988, gardner ran the number 1 plate... mamola 2, lawson 3, haslam 4, mackenzie 5, etc etc. the only champion who broke with tradition was british racer barry sheene (500cc champion in 1976 and 1977), known for being a rebel - and even the styling of his iconic number 7 was apparently a wee bit controversial:

sheene stuck with the 7 both after his formula 750 title and then after his two 500cc titles:

there's some ways in which sheene is kinda the prototype of the modern rider, and he was the first to reap the benefits of having a distinctive number associated with him

in the eighties and nineties, it was all back to number one plates - but then of course another rider decided to break with tradition

incidentally, the generally purported story for why valentino took the number 46 is that it was his father's number. if his autobiography is to be believed, the truth is a little different:

I am Valentino. Graziano chose that name for me because he wanted to honour the memory of his best friend, who drowned at sea, near Pesaro, at the age of eighteen. The fact that St Valentine's Day is just two days before my birthday was also a reason. Number 46 originated when I raced minibikes. I was on a team with two kids from Gatteo a Mare, Marco and Maurizio Pagano. They are the brothers who lent me the Aprilia 125, which I used for my debut at Misano. All three of us had number 46 because we raced in three different categories. They too loved Japan and Japanese riders. One day we were mesmerised by a wild-card entrant at the Japanese Grand Prix who pulled off the most amazing tricks and seemed to have no fear whatsoever. He was number 46. And from that day on, so were we. For me, that lasted until I moved up to the Italian championship and, later, the European series. But when I finally made it to the world championship, I was asked to choose a number. I discovered that 46 was Graziano’s number when he won his first Grand Prix on a Morbidelli 250cc, back in 1979. Which was the year I was born. That’s why I decided that I, too, would be number 46. For me that number represents my career and, partly, my life. It certainly symbolises my massive, incredible, adventure. 

so valentino was only the second premier class rider who stuck with his number. the norm of just following the previous year's standings to choose your number was kinda starting to die out in the late nineties anyway. by 2002, when valentino was defending his title for the first time, if you look down the list it's basically personal numbers all the way. still, valentino was the one to break tradition for champions - the first to do so in a couple of decades. valentino did also know sheene personally as a result of the link through his father, who was a friend of sheene's and had raced him:

^valentino with sheene, valentino wearing a tribute helmet with the iconic '7' on it after sheene's passing (also with the rainbow helmet colours and the word 'pace' or 'peace' on the back during the 2003 invasion of iraq), and valentino's 2005 championship celebrations for his seventh title, his shirt again featuring sheene's seven

hayden didn't follow valentino's example and instead went for the number one plate in 2007. casey made the same choice for the 2008 season, then jorge in 2011... so for a hot moment it really did look like valentino had been just another blip. if anything, the trend was going the other way, with a couple of high profile instances of riders who hadn't won the title rejecting their established numbers:

this particular trend didn't catch on, and from 2010 onward dani decided to just stick with the 26. because all the non-valentino aliens just couldn't stop faffing about with their numbers, 2010 is the only year in which all four aliens are actually concurrently running the numbers we most commonly associate them with

then, by 2012 apparently people were starting to get a bit superstitious about the number one plate. here, from an interview with casey:

the idea is that you can't defend the title if you're sporting the number one plate. which is true! in the 21st century, three guys chose the number one plate, and they defended their titles a grand total of zero times. one bloke stuck to his number, and he defended his title five out of seven times. so yes, it is technically correct that nobody with the number one plate had defended their title, though it is equally true that nobody not called valentino rossi had defended their title. I suppose we'll never know what the bigger factor was

anyways, if picking the number one plate was already a sure thing before, I reckon this sort of silly talk about 'jinxes' would have made casey even less likely to change his mind for 2012. not only is he stubborn, but he also takes an extremely dim view on superstitions

That race was the twelfth in a row that had been won by a rider not starting from pole, which was a new record. People were making a big deal about it and questioning whether, psychologically speaking, it wasn't a good thing to qualify on pole position at all. Maybe to the superstitious riders out there it had become an issue but I have never allowed myself to be affected by outside influences like that and I put an end to the stat by winning from pole in the next round at Laguna Seca in California. It is amazing how many riders have superstitions, which to me are completely ridiculous. Pretty much every one of them has a little mascot or a lucky pair of undies that they once had a good result in and have been stuck with ever since (so to speak!). Superstition is basically just fear and as an athlete my view is that by allowing it to enter your mind you are effectively handing over control. My approach has always been to deliberately tackle it by doing things differently to the last time, just to make sure I don't get into a restrictive habit. Some riders look at their qualifying position and think, I never go well from fifth position, or arrive at a circuit thinking about past results there and say, 'I've never done well here before, it's not my favourite circuit.' You have to be in the mindset that every day is a new day, a new set of circumstances. Every corner is different, every situation is different, and if you are not prepared to open your mind to that then you will always struggle more than necessary. You might have been through one particular corner a thousand times before but with a slight change in temperature, a new bike, a different tyre or a rider trying to pass you on the inside it becomes a completely different challenge and you have to be ready to deal with that.

given that casey is like, neurotically anti-superstition - well, he was probably always going to do the same thing as he did in 2008, but now he definitely would never just stick with his number. unlike jorge... who did change his mind, having run the number one plate in 2011 - but decided against making the switch in 2013. funnily enough, this did not help him defend the title. the eventual 2013 champion ended up also opting to stick with his number... and, well, marc's title defence went a little bit more smoothly. after jorge's 2015 title, he once again stuck to his 99, while marc has used the number 93 throughout his career. by the time you get to 2020, it's easy to have a warped perception of how common it is to keep your number. if you're born in, say, 1997 or later, you think it's basically the done thing to stick to your number, and it's really only a few outliers who use the number one plate. but even in the 21st century... it's really just valentino and marc who were doing it, plus jorge two out of three times. but between the two of them, they sure were winning enough of the titles to make it feel like the established norm

by this point, there really was a bit of a superstition about how the number one plate was 'cursed'. obviously, this wasn't actually a 'curse' as much as it was 'the dominant force in the sport in the noughties decided this number one plate thing wasn't for him and the dominant force in the 2010s who also happens to a massive fan of the other guy also decided not to make the switch either so that probably explains it'. it's not 'you won't defend your title if you're sporting the number one plate', it's 'you won't defend your title if your name isn't valentino rossi or marc marquez'. but obviously, sports drives people insane, so it was always going to be something that prompted a lot of speculation until someone finally managed to defend the plate

following his 2020 championship, mir didn't depart from the new tradition, with a suzuki video to announce his decision:

and fabio did likewise after his 2021 title:

obviously, sticking to their numbers didn't actually help joan and fabio defend their titles, and after his 2022 championship it was pecco's turn to make the choice. pecco went about this in the most pecco way imaginable, with just a touch of public hand-wringing about the whole thing:

just as a quick reminder, before pecco there had been 28 premier class champions. five and two thirds decided against the number one plate - sheene, valentino, marc, joan, fabio, and jorge twice. "I have always been fascinated about riders with number one" describes something that until very recently had been completely normal. not even remotely noteworthy. cheers valentino

eventually, presumably after some extremely extensive introspection, pecco decided to go for the number one plate:

and also this:

and also this (look he's got a lot of thoughts on the matter, please allow him):

and talking about defending the number one:

pecco has continued talking about it sporadically since then. he's spoken about it in the context of defending his title, which as he points out he can only remember marc and valentino doing:

and then the pressure inherent to sporting that plate, from after he'd successfully completed his title defence:

hm. right. let's unpack

the thing about this whole 'running the number one plate' business is that in motogp, each rider's individual choice has to be read with that history in mind. for many years, this wasn't even really a question... it's just what you do when you win the title. sheene was the rebel, the one who decided to do things differently, who wanted to be associated with his very own number. and valentino, who himself knew sheene and was already attached to his own number and has always had a good sense for personal branding, decided to stick with 46. of course, valentino being valentino, he's inescapable enough within motogp that ever since he made that choice, every single champion after him has had to actively make a decision one way or another

so you've got jorge, who had used the number one plate in his title defence during his 250cc campaign in 2007 - and also used it in 2011 as motogp defending champion. he ended up changing his mind for his following two campaigns... remember, he only started using the number 99 in 2009 after his fractious split with his manager during 2008 (see more on numbers lore here). here was what he said about his decision in 2011:

versus his decision in 2015:

jorge in particular does of course have a bit of a complicated relationship with the numbers he's used during his career - and unsurprisingly he's clearly put quite a lot of thought into the whole matter. he's determined to still have the number 99 represent him in some way even in 2011, while also thinking about how he can integrate the number one into his initials - and since it's jorge, of course it's particularly important that his fans approve. he "won't forget" his 99, it was still on his leathers because it's still 'in his heart'... but he explains it by saying he has "earned the right", that it's a "unique opportunity". then, a few years later, his main cited reason for sticking with the number 99 is how it 'represents' him

very much a question of identity, then, something about how jorge made the choice to use the 99 and how it was an expression of liberation for him... he was tempted by the number one once and only once - a statement in itself, following on from jorge's title win in 2010 where the oppressively popular defending champion had been taken out of contention through injury. jorge says he's 'earned the right' because he feels like he deserves it and he wants to tell the world as much. did his failure to defend the title play into his decision not to run the plate again or did he just decide it wasn't really for him after all? did he realise he had grown so attached to the number 99, what it symbolised to him, that he didn't want to give it up again? or did he just realise it was better for personal branding?

last year, here's what casey had to say:

it's fun how the perception of it has changed so drastically, hasn't it? now it's kinda the brave decision to take it... and that's mainly the legacy of two blokes who happened to monopolise this century of racing and decided to make their numbers their own (you may have noticed that there's considerably less material out there on why they made the choice they did). it's gone from something that you just sort of did automatically to something that puts a bit of a target on your back. because that's the subtext, right - everyone wants to 'take the number one plate'... which obviously they do anyway, but all this talk of curses and jinxes attempts to give it a bit of extra weight. is it presumptuous to take that number? valentino and marc made the call to stick to their numbers - and years later it's become a statement to deviate from that path. in that fabio quote above, in context he's really just trying to say he feels like he's the number 20 and nothing other than that - but "I feel like I'm not number one" is still a teensy bit loaded. how did marc's injury affect the choice made by those in his absence?

casey is unsurprisingly very firm on the whole thing, "you are world champion and you should be wearing number one". as if doing anything else is shying away from this duty. defending the title is another "challenge" that he says he likes - almost like a way of putting extra pressure on himself. though in a different interview, casey also says this:

just a number after all, then? it's also interesting how they frame it in different ways, isn't it? for casey it's "recognition" of an achievement, for jorge it's something you've "earned"... and for pecco, it's something you "need to respect". it's about something that puts "pressure" on you... perhaps that's partly because so much of the discourse about the number one plate has become about defending the title (or failing to do so), but pecco discusses it more as a responsibility than something he deserves. you can tell that it's clearly preoccupied him for a while - it's something he's "fascinated" by, he's "admired" people who have done it, he's "always loved it". for both casey and pecco, part of it seems to be about respecting the history of all the blokes who have used the number in the past, like it's an act that pays tribute to that heritage. you'd think this shouldn't have been such a tough choice in the first place, wouldn't you? goes to show how much of a break with tradition it's become - tradition, of course, that was really started by pecco's own mentor. would it be that surprising if that's part of the reason for the reticence? and, at the same time, would it be that surprising that his mentor's long shadow might make him feel like he needs that big and bold number one? what does pecco think it's saying that he went a different way? all this public hand-wringing just because he's breaking a trend

for jorge, the number one plate was a public declaration that he'd made it, naysayers be damned. to pecco, "the number one plate means you need to demonstrate you are number one". it's like giving yourself a point to prove... is it mainly a matter of pride or giving yourself something to live up to? both of them go to great pains to stress their continued attachment to their original number, how they're continuing to integrate it into all their cute designs... and that is something that has changed pretty definitively - not entirely as a result of valentino, but around the same time as valentino emerged as the figurehead of the sport, and he's certainly a big part of it. even the riders who go with the number one still want to have their number and to be known by it. the numbers have become such an integral part of branding and rider identity that riders want to make clear how important they are to them, whether they stick with the number as defending champions or not

at the same time, the fact that taking the number one plate has been de-normalised means that this decision places extra focus on the challenge of defending the title. pecco might not frame his choice in opposition to valentino and marc's to keep their numbers, but he does repeatedly link it to how they alone had been able to win successive titles. for him, then, it becomes an indirect way of living up to a legacy - counterintuitively by doing the opposite of what they did. "since I remember, was just marc and vale have repeated the title" “I thought about it many times this season in all the races we were struggling that the only two riders able to win two years in a row were marc and valentino"... that's what he's trying to live up to, this simultaneous source of inspiration and insecurity. are you lacking confidence if you need to see the number one to believe yourself that you are the number one? or is it conversely shying away from something you have rightfully earned if you can't bring yourself to take the plate? is it an expression of ego if you think your personal number is more meaningful than the number one could ever be? personal branding decisions aside, wouldn't manufacturers much rather you display the number one plate proudly on their bikes?

kind of remarkable, isn't it? it should be such a simple choice... and yet. not only is it now a question of branding and identity, but within motogp it's also become one of how you relate to the legacy of two specific riders. maybe it'll gradually become more common again to take the plate - after all, the curse has now been broken. or maybe it will be the source of much hand-wringing forevermore... we shall see. we shall see

[coimbrabertone]

A Self-Indulgent Blogpost About My Motorsports Fiction

So, this weekend, MotoGP had a good sprint while the main race was a snoozer, and NASCAR ended with a twenty-eight-car pileup followed by a plate merchant winning the race.

Which makes me not really want to talk about either of them.

I could talk a bit more on Andretti - Michael revealed today that stepping back was a personal decision after forty years of being involved in Indycar, half as a driver, half as a team owner - but I don't really have a ton more to say on that either.

So, what do I want to talk about?

Well, I kinda want to talk about my writing.

I've kinda wanted to do that for a bit now, but I always thought that one: it was a bit self-indulgent to promote my fanfic on here too much, and two: I wasn't sure if people would particularly care. Well, I talked to some friends about it, and they encouraged it, so I figured...why not?

Thus, today I'll be talking about my motorsports fiction, my racing fanfics that I primarily post on AO3. I've completed one story Life at the Speed of Formula One, I wrote a 1950s Grand Prix one-shot called A Beautiful Race, and I'm currently writing two stories: An 1980s CART Indycar story called The Fastest of the Prancing Horses, and a 2000s NASCAR story called Racing in the Golden Age.

For this blogpost, I will mainly be talking about LatSoF1 because it is finished and because as my first real motorsports story, it more or less set the mold for the rest.

The link:

So...where to begin but the tags?

I have this story labeled under two fandoms, Original Work and Formula 1 RPF, why is that?

Well, it boils down to the fact that I don't quite think it fits firmly into either category. It is an original work about Formula One, but it's not really RPF either.

RPF, for those unaware of fanfic terms, means Real People Fiction.

In my stories, however, I've decided to fictionalize living people, particularly those central to the plot. There's a few reasons for this, one is that I felt odd having my OC (original character) interacting with real drivers - and admittedly a part of that is that I didn't really want this to read like a self-insert fic, where my Mary Sue gets to race with Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel and all that - especially when I'm going to tackle things like tabloid rumors and opinions on homosexuality and driver feuds in these things.

The long and short of it is that I feel more comfortable having fictionalized driver Felipe Alvarez as an antagonistic figure rather than Fernando Alonso himself.

Does that matter to people reading it who are just going to connect the dots and see Alvarez as Alonso anyway? Maybe, maybe not.

Anyway, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. Let's get back to establishing the context.

The story begins in 2007, with Kazakhstan-born ethnic-Russian driver Tamara Shchegolyayeva signed to Williams banked by Kazakhstani oil and gas companies.

Let's unpack that a bit.

Why 2007?

The initial idea of the story, before it branched off into something larger, was to cover the tight and dramatic 2007 championship battle from the perspective of someone in Formula One but outside of the proper title battle. Almost like a third-person view on the title challenge from a first-person perspective.

Tamara Shchego-what's it?

Okay, so admittedly Kazakhstani driver with a really long name probably isn't the most believable package for a late-2000s Formula One driver, but I think that's part of what made this idea interesting to me.

I'm a geography and history nerd, so I'm drawn to off-the-wall places where so many different cultures and histories intertwine. Kazakhstan has the Silk Road, the Mongol Empire, Russian Imperialism, and Soviet Communism all in its history. Its people are like a microcosm of all of Asia with East Asian, Turco-Persian, and Indo-European phenotypes all present, with people ranging from literal nomads to Kazakh Muslims to ethnic Russians.

Thus, I decided that it would be interesting to write a protagonist from there.

However, Formula One is also...Formula One. So how does a person from there get to the cynical, cutthroat world of big money global motorsport?

Well, I made her the daughter of a petty oligarch and sponsored by oil money.

This also allowed me to explore a number of things. The legacy of Russian Imperialism, the question of where she belongs - I placed her ancestry right on the tripoint border of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, had her born in Kazakhstan, and had her grow up and live in Monaco - the morality of oil money, the morality of sponsorships in general, and, eventually, of being a gay woman in a male-dominated, conservative, globe-spanning sport.

I won't pretend I covered these areas perfectly - and at least in some cases, I wrote Tamara as having complicated, potentially problematic feelings on things - but I think it was at least interesting.

Fictionalized Drivers.

My general rule with people in the story is that the more involved in the plot they were, the more I'd differentiate them from the drivers they were based off of.

Thus, German Nico Rosberg became Finn Tommy Koskinen. The background was generally the same - Finnish father, German mother, raised in Monaco - but by distinguishing him from the driver he was based off of in these ways, I felt more comfortable having him interact with Tamara, to show his opinions, to have a teammate dynamic with her.

This extended to Anthony Harrison, probably the most fictionalized of the drivers. Based loosely off of Lewis Hamilton, Anthony is the son of a black American army mechanic and a white Englishwoman, growing up in that background to become a top Formula One prospect with McLaren.

He enters the plot as a fellow rookie to Tamara, and eventually, the two of them bonding leads to tabloid rumors that they're a couple. A bit of drama that Tamara wants no part in, but foreshadows a later storyline that turns her career upside.

Kazakhstan and Russia.

I mentioned before that Tamara struggles a bit with representing Kazakhstan as an ethnic Russian, but as part of her caught between two worlds storylines, I also had her struggle with her Russian identity as well. She's got it in her blood, but she wasn't born there, didn't grow up there, and has no love for the regime there.

This got more complicated because, in real life, Russia escalated the war in Ukraine a month after I started this story.

One of the cited reasons was Russian-speaking minorities in Ukraine.

That made writing about a Russian from another post-Soviet country awkward, and I wanted to find a way to address it within the context of this story.

Thus, during the 2008 season in LatSoF1, I talked a lot about the Russian invasion of Abkhazia and South Ossetia within Georgia, where Putin and Medvedev tried more or less the same tricks. Using Russian minorities in those countries to justify naked landgrabs.

This allowed me to solidify Tamara's position as someone who was born in Kazakhstan and is of Russian descent, and loves the people of both countries, but does not love either regime.

And come 2009 and 2010, the final two seasons featured in the story, and she gets away from depending on either country for sponsorship.

So, that's a whole lot of background out of the way, now...let's talk about how I wrote the story itself.

Writing Races.

LatSoF1 was my first real racing focused work and therefore in the early days, there were some adjustments to how I wrote things.

I decided on two races a chapter being the norm, thinking it would be an efficient way to get through the season without getting bogged down too much in yapping about a fictionalized version of a real race.

And to a degree, it did its job.

However, I did also end up more or less skipping the Malaysian Grand Prix that first year as I jumped to the race results. I don't think I'd do that now. I'd write about how the race was going overall and what Tamara was doing and then end on the results.

How did I get the results? Well, to keep things grounded in reality, I based Tamara's 2007 results on what Alexander Wurz achieved in that 2007 Williams irl. I can get the results real quick on Wikipedia, maybe go to Racing Reference for an obscure race or if I need more detail, and another thing that helped a lot for LatSoF1 specifically is the old F1 season review videos. I watched the reviews for 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 in the making of LatSoF1.

For CART stuff more recently, it's been a bit harder to find some specific information for like qualifying sessions from 1989. Some of that stuff is preserved on VHS rips on youtube and I've used those before, but what I've found to be helpful is actually some skills I picked up as a history major in college: old newspapers.

The LA Times and Chicago Tribute have tended to be my personal favorites because they have a significant digitized backlog, and don't require signing up to read through it like the New York times.

Hell, earlier this very day I was looking for some information on the Galles-Kraco merger ahead of the 1989 season - I wanted to know if Kraco stayed in the Compton garage or if they moved in with the Galles team in Albuquerque - and finally found the information in a brief mention at the bottom of an LA Times article.

This one, to be exact:

Thank you very much LA Times for making random stories from June 1989 accessible.

So yeah, sometimes it's easy and I can just get what I need off of Wikipedia and work from there, other times I need to go digging deeper, but the point remains: I find the real results and use them a s a baseline.

All that being said, it would be a bit boring to just slap my OC's name on a real driver's results and call it a day, so once I find what I need, I tend to change things around a bit.

First thing that comes to mind from LatSoF1 is the 2007 European Grand Prix, where Mark Webber finished third, just barely holding off Wurz.

In LatSoF1, Tamara got him in the last corner and took a podium finish.

That being said, I made sure not to get too carried away either.

At the end of 2007, Tamara finished on 18 points with two third places (Canada and Nürburgring) being the highlights of her season. In comparison, Nico Rosberg - and indeed Tommy Koskinen - finished 2007 on 20 points, whilst Wurz irl finished on 13.

Five points gained on real life is hardly Mary Sue behavior imo, so i don't consider that too obscene.

Who did I take those points off of? Well, I tried to keep that pretty even-handed as well, switching Mark Webber's third for Martin Weaver's fourth place in Europe.

Tamara also took Ralf Schumacher's eighth place in Australia from Roland Ziegler. Another eighth in Turkey off of Robert Kubica/Piotr Kaminski, a third eighth place in Italy off of Jenson Button/James Buxton, and a fourth eighth place in Brazil off of Jarno Trulli/Ivan Tripoli.

Pretty even-handed overall. No one driver was bullied for his results, and I didn't cause any massive swings in the championships.

Speaking of all those drivers I just named...

Fictionalized Names.

How did I come up with driver names? It varies.

Some names, particularly for people who didn't feature too much in the story, were just playing around with their real name. I'd put Martin Weaver for Mark Webber and James Buxton in that category.

Other names are little inside jokes I have with myself. I can't think of any from LatSoF1 off the top of my head, but in my CART story, real life driver Rich Vogler is renamed after Saints Row 2 antagonist Dane Vogel.

Why? Because I love Saints Row 2 and that popped into my head when I saw Vogler. Vogler-Vogel, it makes sense.

A good amount of names are ripped from players I had in Football Manager saves. Piotr Kaminski (Robert Kubica) I had at Cracovia in a save on FM21, and later on that same manager moved to Napoli, where I had a Japanese winger named Yoshikazu Higashiyama. I loved that player so much I used his name for Kamui Kobayashi once I included him in the story.

And other names are in reference to other drivers. In the late 2000s, Red Bull had a fetish for drivers named Seb: Sebastien Bourdais, Sebastien Buemi, Sebastien Loeb, Sebastien Ogier, and of course Sebastian Vettel.

In LatSoF1, that's replaced with a fetish for drivers named Max, in reference to their current boytoy Verstappen: thus, it's Maximilien Lecroix for Bourdais, Maximilien Longpre for Buemi, and Maximilian Renner for Seb Vettel.

Oh, and I made Longpre a Luxembourger in place of Buemi who is Swiss. Why? Because I like throwing in a comparatively underrepresented country every once in awhile.

Fringe Benefits.

On a lighter note, this is something I enjoyed about LatSoF1 a lot: it was a Formula One story, but being set in the near past, there was so much little stuff I could touch on. Tamara would have thoughts on geopolitics, video games, TV shows, other racing series, other sports, she'd get to tour a nuclear reactor at one point, she's get to rock some cool outfits, and she'd build up a bit of a car collection.

It was cool!

Most of the stuff I wrote before LatSoF1 was like historical fiction or Star Wars stuff, so it was nice to just be able to write about a person who, outside of an extraordinary job, is more or less just a regular person.

When I was getting into MotoGP for the first time, I could write a scene about her discussing MotoGP with some Italian engineers.

When I was watching Chernobyl, I got to have her tour a Soviet nuclear reactor in Saint Petersburg.

When I wasn't loving Formula One as much as I used to, I had her dabble in sports cars and Indycar during a bit of a sabbatical I had her in.

Speaking of, that brings me to...

What I'd Do Differently Now:

I started LatSoF1 in January 2022 and finished it in June 2023. I still consider it to be one of my best works and I'm proud of it, however, part of writing - and this is for everyone, not just me - is that you're always learning more. I'd say my writing back then was good, but I think it's gotten better now - certainly not perfect, but better - so...what would I do if I was doing it now?

The first two things are more technical:

One: I think I'm better at breaking up big blocks of text now, alternating between paragraphs and short lines, which I think makes for a more readable experience.

Two: I was getting better at this as I was writing LatSoF1, but I still think I could've been better about dialogue. I think dialogue is a bit of a weakness in my writing, one I'm working on, but a weakness nonetheless.

I probably could've done a better job with dialogue in LatSoF1.

Beyond that...I struggle at having my protagonists do things that are out of my character. Part of that is inevitable - write somebody long enough, particularly in first person, and parts of you will bleed into that character whether you like it or not - but it also led to me dropping one and a half plotlines.

One and a half? Let me explain.

There is a part of LatSoF1 after the 2008 season where Tamara loses her sponsorship in F1 and goes on a bit of a downward spiral. I initially had the idea that she'd develop a drinking problem during this point and eventually recover for it, to the point where she wouldn't drink podium champagne and would always just spray it before handing it off to the team.

I chickened out on this because I didn't feel comfortable writing about someone struggling with alcoholism given that I don't drink.

Then we move onto the half.

I initially wanted Tamara to be a bit more promiscuous once she comes out, and she'd have a few different girlfriends and maybe a few one-night stands throughout the storyline. It the end, I chopped this storyline way down.

Roksana is her first girlfriend, she has a one-night stand with Daniella, and then she's with Ysabella for the rest of the story.

Alexis was supposed to be another girlfriend, but in the end she's just the Ferrari PR that follows Tamara around for that little half a season she did there.

Again, my only romantic experience has been monogamous, so I chickened out of writing something I didn't know.

Now, who knows if writing out of my comfort zone would be any good, but I do wish I tried.

As I move on from LatSoF1 and onto new projects, I'm trying to be better about writing outside of my comfort zone. Right now with the CART story I have Vincenza Taghzouti becoming more assertive and combative in the media, arguably taking a bit of a villain role as she battles the American "boys club" of established drivers.

Meanwhile in the NASCAR story, Lilith Zilinskas has been more promiscuous and had a bit of a self-destructive streak for awhile, and now is dealing with her ex-girlfriend reentering her life...with a daughter, no less. This lets me explore some of the themes I chickened out of doing with Tamara, and also adds in a bit of a parenting aspect in the current day that I've never touched on before.

I'm excited to see how these attempts play out, and I hope that by the end of them, I'll have sufficiently differentiated my three protagonists.

Anyway, this has been a long and self-indulgent blogpost, but I very much enjoyed writing it. Please feel free to ask questions below, because I could go on much, much longer about my writing if given the chance.

[gorseflowers]

feel like i really should make a post about primitivism in yellowjackets given how much of my dissertation was about primitivism in art, which is a different area but its the same principal like its the creation of a romantic ideal of the primitive usually from the misinterpreted imagery/beliefs of a marginalised culture and the idealisation of that ideal as better/purer than the present state

much like how primitivist painters lifted imagery from cultures they were interested in without caring about the context/meaning/importance of the imagery to those cultures, it feels like yellowjackets is doing the same with the wilderness ritual stuff like the animal mask parade symbolic burial nat walked in on in the present, the ash anointing smoke smudging thing lottie was doing before nat and travis went out hunting in the 90s, it seems like theyve taken generically recognisable “wicca shit” as nat put it, that the audience will immediately understand as “primitive” and therefore associate with a level of mystery and power that’s accentuated by the lack of context or tangible link to anything explicable.

and i get that, at least in the 90s plotline, it kind of has to be generic wicca shit because the girls are literally making it up and assigning meanings to the materials they have available like ash and blood, but to have this ~mysterious primal power~ coming from the only character with indigenous heritage is like. really transparently primitivist in the most original sense. its the idea that there’s gotta be something ~cool/mysterious/spooky/powerful~ about this culture thats ~soooo connected to nature/primal states of self~ that always leads to white europeans (like myself full disclosure, im white/scottish) strip mining that culture for this sense of the primitive. its not about that actual culture or those actual people, its about what a white audience reads into it and what they want to see it as.

obviously the second season has only just started so they could well be setting up to subvert what theyve been doing so far, but two things are making me think thats not gonna be the case -- the way the mysterious ambiguous and supernatural elements of the plot are directly linked to the two main characters of colour (which has been discussed in more depth by other ppl), and the way that the wilderness itself is framed as a category of place that diametrically opposes “civilisation” without considering the concrete reality of the location in Real Life Canada which has a Real Life Indigenous Population who go completely unmentioned so far. its definitely indicative of how the writers want to frame “the wilderness” as some kind of other-place devoid of humanity that they have pointedly ignored the people who originally inhabited/still do inhabit other areas of that landscape. potentially also because the realities of modern (or 90s-modern) indigenous people dont fit the primitivist romantic ideal.

once again i am white/european so despite having studied like the art context of this im really not Qualified and i’d be greatly obliged for anyone else’s input. also this isnt totally slagging off the show i do enjoy it i just feel like they could be really doing better here. anyway!

[lowkeyclueless5137]

So I had this random idea for a P5/TWST au, where Riddle and Ren (the p5 protag) somehow become penpal. They're totally from different worlds. But they had meet a few times. Somehow.

In this random idea I made with my friend, they're bestie and have been influenced each other's lives that resulted in some changes in their future.

Riddle could or couldn't be OB, but if he do, he totally told it to Ren who know about magic and blots, but not overblot, and since he already encountered Kamoshida(?), he just assumed Riddle had a palace and managed to get his shadow self defeated. Riddle then share a photo of his OB self that Cater somehow find the time to take to Ren. Ren was angry that Riddle was slaying as a shadow, yet he has to fight a disgusting creature that was his PE's teacher shadow.

Anyway, the main point of this idea was that both of them have a big miscommunication problem in which both of them assume the other is living the same live as them.

:0 creative juices are going all over the place

Well... One thing that I imagine could link the 2 worlds together would be an intermediate world, such as the metaverse.

Under the cut I made the whole damn thing, because it's interesting to see what universe theories can connect the 2 worlds.

I imagine Mrs Rosehearts does get mail, so imagine little Riddle being asked to bring the mail for today, only to notice among all of those letters addressed to his mom, one little letter with some foreign coordinates:

From: Ren Amaya, *insert city* Japan

To: Pen pal :3

Ren was a kid and he had a project to make a pen pal(we can say it's an international project). He forgot that he had to write the country he would want to send the letter to. :v

Unfortunately, the letter gets lost via metaverse shenanigans and instead of returning to Ren's world, it ends up at Riddle's.

Of course. Riddle hid the letter from his mother and then proceeded to open it when he had that free study time. The letter had some sloppy and grammatical errors here and there, but it was in all sense, a legit letter, from a legit kid the same age as Riddle.

And you know... Riddle's tiny kid brain just makes the connection that HE is the pen pal that the letter was sent to. So in response, since he was excited, he used his free study hour to make a response letter. The same thing as Ren: a friendly introduction and some responses to some trivial questions Ren put in his letter, such as what's your favorite color or if he likes candy.

So because of the metaverse imprint the previous letter had, Riddle had that imprint transfered to him as well or developed some of his own, therefore allowing his own letter to be 'lost' again through the metaverse and end up back at Ren. This time, the mailman knew where to send the letter, since Riddle wrote the address on Ren's letter, adding his own at the 'from' category instead.

We can say that it is some wildcard thing, like both developing that metaverse imprint since young, which would allow them later on to have more than 1 persona. So the letters are basically taken from one wildcard imprint through the other via ✨magic✨.

So they start pen-paling. The letters follow the same route: Ren-metaverse-Riddle and vice versa. Sometimes Ren would send some Japanese treats, while Riddle would manage to snuggle in some little things, sometimes pressed flowers. Ren's letters are playful, full of stickers and doodles, while Riddle's are always elegant and with perfect grammar.

Since they both used English, at one point Ren teaches Riddle japanese basics via letters.

On one side, Ren thinks that the whole 'magic' thing is his pen-pal's spiritual traditions, as he doesn't mention it often. On the other hand, Riddle never heard of Japan, so he believes is some very very retreated foreign country.

They both start high-school around the same time. It was wierd since NRC went by the standard european school system, while japan had it's own. This didn't really affect that much their letters tho.

Since Ren had some sort of sense of justice as well as being mischievous, he does advise Riddle to not go to dormleader position right off the batch. He was the one who actually convinced Riddle that rules aren't the great sometimes. In twisted wonderland tho, Trey thought that he actually managed to talk sense into Riddle, so he took credit for it, since no one knew of Riddle's pen-pal.

On the reverse side, Riddle's more controlled nature, teached Ren about rules and more often than not, a lot about learning methods and fast memorising. Therefore Ren's grades suddenly skyrocketed and as if it was magic(pun intended), he became top of his class and very popular among his peers. He gave away homework and was helping others learn as well, hence his good reputation.

But things get to shit when one day. Riddle receives a letter from Ren, which is titles 'Urgent'. It doesn't have any stickers or doodles and in there, Ren explains that he got on probation and why that happened. He said that for the year, his address will be changed to Shibuya, Tokyo. And that was a prime example on how judgement doesn't need to be given so quick and rash. Riddle of course is very down because of it. Like his pen-pal was doing something morally good, but because of how rotten some authoritary figures can be, his pen-pal now is on probation.

Which wasn't fair at all. :v

But here we go to the real deal: because of alignment of mentality(both hating the rotten system), their metaverse imprints also allign, allowing to create a far stronger passageway to the metaverse, which was basically the bridge of the 2 worlds. This alligment only needed a tip to be fully stabilised.

And our Boi Ryuji is that tipping point.

So imagine the next scenario: Cannon P5(royale version) first interaction in between Ryuji and Ren. The metanav app was acting up and the 2 end up in the metaverse.

Except that they immediately meet up with a very confused Riddle, who initially just wanted to go to the dorm, since he had afternoon classes.

Cue the infamous spiderman pointing meme, but Ryuji is just there, confused on main. Ren makes a short introduction in between the 2. And together, the 3 explore the palace.

Except that when they get ambushed, Riddle initially tries to use his magic, only to not work. They get knocked out and brought into the dungeon.

Cue Kamoshida making the grand entrance and BOI does it go to shit quickly. Ren awkenes and Riddle does the smartest thing ever: borrow a halebard from a shadow guard and use it to knock some shadows off. Like... This is survival rn... Who cares if those things are alive or not? Riddle sure not.

And you know, Kamoshida was the 'king of the castle', but how he behaved sure sparked smth in Riddle's mind.

Cue another awakening. Ryuji had 2 almost heart attacks in a row today. Yay! :D

We meet ✨le cat✨ who gives us drugs medicine(that was one joke from a yt walk through that I found it hilariously funny)! Yay! It can't get more weirder than that! :3

They manage to get out, but unfortunately, Riddle was also with Ren and Ryuji at Shujin. And this was a panic moment, since this guy was supposed to be at NRC for f's sake.

Everyone except Morgana thinks they are tripping shit and it's beautiful. :'3

To blend in, Riddle tries again to use his magic and ya know? It works this time. He changed his NRC uniform to a more baisc one. Ryuji is baffled while Ren is all like 'oh so you actually were SERIOUS on the magic part'. Riddle gets confused and Ren explains that in here, magic didn't exist. A lot of back and forth before Ryuji draws the simplest line in between them over all this confusion.

Now Ryuji also realises that he could perfectly understand Riddle. He wasn't that good at English and the redhead spoke in very complicated language. Riddle also realises that he perfectly understood their japanese, even if he knew only the bare basics. It seems like the metaverse bridge altered their cognitions so they could understand each other.

That also explained the talking cat thing back there :v

So they get to Shujin. Ren invents a story about how Riddle is his cousin and he lives around in Tokyo. Using magic, these 3 also forge a small slip for the redhead to get in the school. Their excuse? They got on the wrong train and fortunately were in Riddle's aera, so he helped them walk to Shujin. That explained the big time gap.

Why did Riddle have a slip tho? Well because his 'cousin' was on probation, he was the only relative around here who could actually look out for Ren. He stood in a dorm, hence he couldn't have accommodated Ren in there.

Very elaborate lie aside, now these 3 had to retrace their steps. Riddle slept for the night at Ren's, after he sneaked off Sojiro's watch. (again, bless magic)

And the next day, the group returned to the metaverse, trying to retrace everyone's steps and all that(not before exchanging phone numbers in there :3). They re-meet Morgana and Ryuji also awakens to a persona because he is cool like that. >:3

Cue more shenanigans, but this time, when they return to the real world, Riddle was back in NRC and Ren with Ryuji were back in Tokyo. Their phones seem to have registered each other's numbers and so, they messaged. Like this shit was crazy. Crazy for Ren and Ryuji bc 'magic, shadows, their PE teacher in a speedo', But crazy for Riddle because 'It's a different magic world and I was burned alive and I might be possessed, also Ren's PE teacher in a speedo'.

Yeah... On both sides, that would sound crazy af, so better keep it to yourself Bois :'3

But since they have the same timezones, just different school periods, it was much more easier to synchronise and both meet up in the metaverse.

Ps: Ann absolutely adores Riddle, because he's small and cute looking like a dollie. She is surprised that he is a 2nd year just like them, but eh... Still cute boi.

Things get far more confusing when overblots get added to the mix.

Like in between Kamoshida and Madarame palaces, they discover Leona's palace, which varies significantly from Kamoshida, despite the distortion keyword being the exact same. They tried to change his heart and all that, but they were too late on it, since in twisted wonderland, already overBlot was triggered and this affected the palace by making it even more messed up and morbid. The palace still exists, no more treasure, becoming slowly weaker and more of a ruin. It was a sign that real life situations affected this palace to auto-destruction.

I just realized I missed the entire point of miscommunication theme :'(. But most of the miscommunication in this one is due to the fact that on both sides everyone keeps mentioning buddies from the other and so the people both in Tokyo and NRC just think that 'Huh, pen-pals from another country are wierd' :'v

One thing I would also find hilarious is their coping mechanisms and how they are relevant to the metaverse. It goes like:

Rando: how do you cope with anger?

Ren: Steal shiny shit :3

Riddle: Homicide :)

None of them mentioned it was in metaverse :v

For the overBlot part... We can say that since Riddle never became Dormhead, his overBlot could've been caused by something else, not necessarily having a palace(as overBlot basically just fucks up a palace entirely). I would personally put it in between chap 5-6, and make it as a result of peer pressure(mainly trey because I have a sadistical urge to antagonise him before making him better :'3). So imagine that the overBlot occurs and none of the Tokyo PTs find out about it, until Riddle comes to them, telling about everything that happened. It will follow with cuddles and a nice group time together. Cue Trey feeling murderous intents from 'miles' away :v

Which can also lead to sum fun chap 6 shenanigans. (let's assume that they do keep their phones, but without signal, which doesn't affect the metanav, so Riddle just messes up with Idia) :'3

Smol chap 6 spoilers:

But also since Idia was forced into overBlot, I see that him having a palace prior might not be affected that much as expected. Since it wasn't an overBlot that was caused from inside, rather external factors, Idia still would have his palace as normal, but it might evolve or get new aeras to explore. Possibly spreading more will seeds or making the palace ruler more volatile.

Spoiler free now :3

And also events! The Tokyo PTs would 100% get invited to NRC events like Halloween or Sports/culture fests.

Tbh, there is many more possibilities if other NRC guys also found about the metaverse. I would see Kalim be one, mostly since he's so social and friendly that he might just walk through the metaverse along Riddle without any of them realising it at first :v

But also rich guy who would go to Tokyo and pawn a gold bar for some 'pocket change'.

That's kind of all that I have rn :v

Tbh, there is a lot that can be done, but for now, I made some stable lore structures and I'm happy with that :3

Until next time! Buh bye!

[blondiest]

Can you imagine an easily flustered, shy mello or Near? Who's harder to picture with this personality.

hahaha, i have to say neither of them are particularly easy to picture this way,,, mostly bc i don't actually think Near would fluster that easy (i can more easily see him getting slightly overly enthused / overwhelmed if that makes sense??) and Mello defaults to getting A Little Mad About It whenever confronted with an unfamiliar / uncomfortable emotion (some exceptions for this ofc).

overall i think it's easier for me to imagine Near getting a bit more flustered, esp in a situation in which they're already involved with one another, since i think perhaps in that case he'd feel less of a need to hide his reactions to things?? i'm gonna be totally real right now, it's pretty late here so i reserve the right to clarify / retract some of this tomorrow when i'm more coherent hfhfhggfhfgfgh.

all this being said i'll add that i personally enjoy writing Mello getting flustered more. in his own way, though. TO THE EXCERPTS, FOR CLARIFICATION.

oh. first. special treat for you, since you specifically asked about them being shy. unpublished bit of a WIP that i currently am not actually working on, linked here ❣️

okay. aside from that. literally the entirety of there's nothing i hate more than what i can't have falls into the "mello falling apart" category, but here's a bit i like particularly well:

Near pokes his head in the door, and Mello is hit with the smell of burnt bread. To his great dissatisfaction, the white-haired boy’s eyes don’t stray from Mello’s face for even an instant.

“I burned it the first two times,” Near says. “But I’m trying again.”

“Okay,” Mello says, shifting slightly to let the shirt— Near’s shirt, which by all logic should make it even sexier— fall open a bit more.

Near doesn’t react. The blonde finds himself almost wanting to scream, but instead runs a hand through his hair and looks at Near through half-lidded eyes. It’s a move that, to date, has had a one-hundred percent success rate in getting the attention of potential sex partners.

“I have white grape juice if you would like any,” Near informs him blandly. He is not giving Mello do-me eyes, or any other sign of being affected.

“I’ll pass,” Mello says, trying to sound like he isn’t edging into hysteria.

okay spoilers below this for two other fics lol

from chapter 5 of hot soup on a cold day:

A high-pitched beeping sound pulls Near from slumber a distressingly short period of time later. His head aches slightly from too little sleep, but he hits the “off” button and silences the alarm. Beside him, Mello stirs, blinking blearily up at Near for a few seconds before seemingly waking up all at once. Near watches with dread as the blonde’s face shifts from sleepy relaxation to embarrassment to panic.

“What—!” Mello stammers, mostly failing to muster up a glare. “What the hell are you doing in my bed?!”

The acting is not Mello’s best, to say the least, but he is clearly having a crisis of some kind.

chapter 2 of what doesn't kill me makes me want you more:

Near tilts her head. “You didn’t complain before, when you were kissing me.”

It’s as if a rod is slipped into the other girl’s spine; she goes rigid, then sneers. “That’s because I feel bad for you.”

Near bites back a question— is it common practice for you to kiss people you consider charity cases?— because it’s pointed enough that it could only worsen the situation. “Mello has a kind heart,” she says instead.

That doesn’t go over well, though, anyway.

“Don’t fucking mock me,” Mello spits. “You’re the one who has— you’re the one who’s obsessed with me. I was just taking pity on you.”

uuhhhhh. yeah. anyhow. thank you for the ask!! hopefully this made some kind of sense? it's genuinely hard for me to tell when it's this late in the day jhjgjghfhhhfhh (<- temporarily a european timezone girlie) but it was fun to answer anyways!

[mapsontheweb]

Map of percentage of people with European* ancestry, largely based in Ethnic self identification in censuses and in a broad ethnoreligious approach.

The very concept of "European peoples" is contested. "Europe" itself is not a geographical accurate term, given the fact that the borders between Europe and (specially) Asia are historical, cultural and political more than physical. Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundaries_between_continents#Europe_and_Asia

In the latest version of this map I'm considering all ethnic groups with an European homeland since at least several centuries as "Europeans". So all North Caucasus peoples, Bosniaks, Albanians are considered Europeans.

Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Cyprus and Israel are shaded in turquoise due to lack of consensus in their "Europeanness".

Some groups in the Ural/Volga border as the Nenets and the Kalmyk peoples are not considered Europeans due to their strong historical ties to Siberia and Mongolia, but this is debatable.

West Afroasian Christians as Egyptian Copts and Arab Christians are not considered European.

Mixed race people: different criteria so explanations are given. Mixed race people are often counted separately in  many censuses and follow the one drop rule (one drop of non European blood means that people is out of the European ancestry group and into the Mixed ancestry or even African/Asian group). Whenever this is the case, I just follow the census country criterion. For example, the USA follow the one-drop rule, so African-Americans with 20% African ancestry and  80% European would count  as 0% European ancestry in this  map). Given the fact "Mestizo" and "Colored" are separate categories in many censuses (in Latin America or South Africa) from "White" or "European", I'm considering those 0% European ancestry despite the fact those people probably have European ancestry, because of lack of genetic data (the answer to questions like "are Mestizos 10% European or 90%?" is really hard to find in many countries, so I'm being conservative). Other issue can be found in how people identify themselves in Latin American and other mixed-race countries: a 80% Amerindian 20% European mixed race population self identified as "White", "Caucasoid" or "European" is counted as 100% European ancestry in this map. So numbers are sometimes inflated, and sometimes reduced to some point. Obviously no massive DNA analysis are performed in censuses so we rely on the information they gather based in self identification and this map has to be read in that way. Anyway, I'm not using the one-drop rule, but the genetic admixture rule, in some  cases when the census is not explicit about this and I have to take a decission  AND I happen to have genetic precise data: for example, mixed Asian-European groups in Russia (like Mari people) are counted as (for example) 30 to 70% European ancestry following genetic studies on Mongoloid admixture (which I managed to find) in every Eurasian ethnic group . Also check the sources for more information, a lot of data is gathered from the European Diaspora article so I'm not deeply following every link, but just assuming that data is acceptable and accurate in a broad sense. Ask the original editors of this article for further information. Anyway, numbers and percentages probably  don't change so much after all these calculus, so the map is correct in general (maybe take a +-10% error in Eurasia and +-20/30% in Latin America, where ancestries are much more mixed). In Chile, lack of self identification ancestry in censuses led me to search genetic data as well.

This is NOT a map of the White race, just an "European ancestry" map. Thats the reason North African, Middle Eastern and Indo-Iranian peoples majority territories are not shaded. Anyway, some countries don't specify the origin of "White people" in their censuses so I'm taking "Caucasian" and "White" self identified people in censuses mostly in countries in the Americas as having "European ancestry", so Lebanese ancestry people in Colombia or Morocco ancestry people in the USA are counted as "European ancestry" peoples in this map because of lack of data. Despite of that, numbers and percentages wouldn't be so different considering those details and I encourage everyone who is reading this to do the math and realize these facts.

To sum it up all, generally conservative criteria are taken: the geographical criterion (Middle Eastern Christians and Indo-Iranians are not considered European because their historical roots are in zones of the Asian continent) or the census one-drop-rule criterion (Mixed race peoples with lack of genetic data are not considered European). With other and broader criteria, the map would be completely different and it could be redrawn.

Kurds, Iranians and Kazakhs are not considered here Europeans as ethnic groups that are related or belong to Asian territories.

Source base map: File:Blank_Map_World_Secondary_Political_Divisions.svg

My original sources were a mixture between data in the article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_diaspora ) where the map is, and in countries where the information is detailed enough are taking numbers from censuses from the Russian Wikipedia for all the provinces, oblasts, autonomous regions, etc(see below), censuses from the USA 2010 (numbers listed in https://www.census.gov\/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-05.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_American ), Australian 2011 census http://www.abs.gov.au/census , and Canada (numbers listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Canada ), and taking into account the number of non-European migrants in the countries of the EU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Europe .

Kazakhstan: Each province was searched, I went to the russian article where ethnic compositions are given (in Russian). For example, the Akmola region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regions_of_Kazakhstan https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%BA%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8C Same with the rest (take all the provinces, look for them in the Russian wikipedia, etc): https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%BA%D1%82%D1%8E%D0%B1%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8C https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8C I continued with the rest. Russia: http://pop-stat.mashke.org/russia-ethnic2002.htm  Brazil: File:People_of_European_Ancestry_in_Brazil.png

Bosnia-Herzegovina:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina

Kosovo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Kosovo#Religion

Albania:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Albania

Venezuela: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_of_European_descent#White_Venezuelan_population_by_Venezuelan_state

Colombia: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etnograf%C3%ADa_de_Colombia#Blancos

This numbers are for "blancos+mestizos", as Brazil and Venezuela separate White and Mixed peoples in  separate categories, I do the same here correcting this numbers using a 0,43 coefficient according to "The 2018 census reported that the "non-ethnic population", consisting of whites and mestizos (those of mixed white European and Amerindian ancestry, including almost all of the urban business and political elite), constituted 86 percent of the national population. The 87 percent figure is subdivided into 47 percent mestizo and 40 percent white " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_Colombia#cite_note-3

Mexico: Censo de 1921 http://www.inegi.org.mx/prod_Serv/contenidos/espanol/bvinegi/productos/censos/poblacion/1921/EUM/RCGH21I.pdf

Quite old but good approximation, mixed race people is excluded as in Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia due to lack of genetic data. Modern Mexican censuses do not provide ancestry data.

Bolivia: http://bolivia.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/Censo_Poblacion_1900_T2.pdf

Old Census but the last one including ethnic selfidentification, probably numbers are not so different today.

Cuba: http://www.one.cu/publicaciones/cepde/cpv2012/20131107resumenadelantado/tablas/4.pdf

Peru: http://espejodelperu.com.pe/Poblacion-del-Peru/index.htm

guided by http://www.forosperu.net/temas/composicion-etnica-y-racial-del-peru-por-departamentos-actualizado.210657/

Ecuador: http://www.ecuadorencifras.gob.ec/resultados/

Chile: http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0034-98872014000300001&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en

Turkey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Turkey

Azerbaijan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_minorities_in_Azerbaijan

Argentina:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317552097_Admixture_in_Argentina?_iepl%5BviewId%5D=7mgiM9aS1rLkhmJH6Fx6jHsg&_iepl%5BprofilePublicationItemVariant%5D=default&_iepl%5Bcontexts%5D%5B0%5D=prfpi&_iepl%5BtargetEntityId%5D=PB%3A317552097&_iepl%5BinteractionType%5D=publicationTitle

[thorraborinn]

I know you've likely got this ask before, but what does "folkish" mean? (Sorry)

It's all good. It's a term that's not very well-known outside of certain populations, but it should be, so this is an opportunity to help with that. There's more to it than just defining it, as it has a particular history that I'm deliberately invoking when I use it. This is more info than you need but there are probably others who don't know it either so I might as well long-form it.

The word folkish is an English equivalent of the German völkisch (Wikipedia link), used by racist Norse/Germanic neopagans who simultaneously want to avoid saying völkisch and giving themselves away as ideologically connected to Nazi Germany, and can't help blurting it out anyway. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, a historian and expert on Nazi occultism, described it as referring to a "national collectivity inspired by a common creative energy, feelings and sense of individuality. These metaphysical qualities were supposed to define the unique cultural essence of the German people."

An oversimplified summary off the top of my head would be something like that it's a belief that race/ethnicity exists implicitly (i.e. not as a sociohistorical construct); that there is a 1:1 relationship between ethnicity and genetic ancestry; that there is a metaphysical aspect to race ("folk soul" or similar) expressed in the customs and traditions of that race; that preservation and advancement of the race is the mission of all of its members; and that the Aryan race is the highest and must consolidate and purify itself to "reclaim" its position at the top of the hierarchy through war, subjugation, and reproduction. These things are, especially when taken together, totally incoherent, and antisemitic conspiracy theory plays an important role in maintaining this belief system by providing a buffer between it and reality. Folkish people strategically keep some of these points quiet sometimes.

The idea of pre-Christian religion is important to folkish people whether they are pagan or not themselves because it's seen as a "pure" expression of the folk identity. Modern heathenry developed out of this constellation of beliefs and it forms the ideology of groups like the Asatru Folk Assembly.

Within paganism the most salient feature of folkism is the belief that all religious traditions that are identifiable with a specific cultural-ethnic group should only be practiced by people whose genetic ancestry is traceable back to that group. I.e., only white North European-descended people get to be Norse pagans, only Greek-descended people get to be Hellenists, etc.

Some people use it synonymously with "racist pagan" or "Nazi pagan" but while these are overlapping categories I tend to say "folkish" or "völkisch" when it's appropriate because there are many kinds of racism that aren't folkish, and very many folkish people are not full-blown Nazis (which is not a defense of them, there are many forms of scumbag that aren't Nazis). Folkism is a particular constellation of racist ideas that is especially relevant to pagans, especially Norse pagans, and it's necessary to be able to identify its influence in modern pagan ideas; likewise it's necessary to be able to identify racism in paganism that isn't folkism and conflating the two terms makes it harder to do that. I put "folkish fuck off" in my bio because writing "racists fuck off" doesn't tell anyone anything; a folkish person will see that and go "oh yeah that's not for me, I'm not racist, it's not racist to secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." But if I say "folkish" they know who I'm talking to and what I'm about.

For decades "folkish" heathenry was contrasted with so-called "universalist" heathenry (in this context meaning that anyone can join) but the term "universalist" has been phasing out of use because it already means something totally different in religion and philosophy and "inclusive heathenry" is the more common term now.

For in-depth reading, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism and Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity are good reads on the broad subject of völkisch ideas; Stefanie von Snurbein and Jennifer Snook are authors who have written about it within the context of modern heathenry.

[stovepiperat]

TERROR & EREBUS PUB QUIZ NIGHT: EACH TEAM’S WORST QUESTION

(teams from original post and follow up. PLEASE click those links i just reread the memes for the first time in like a month and there are tears in my eyes i laughed so hard i scared my roommate. all questions from freepubquiz.co.uk for realism)

Lieuts (Little, Irving, Hodgson) - What is the smallest unit of memory? (they spent a long time debating if a jiffy or a twinkling was the shortest unit of time possible to remember and the answer was “kilobite”)

Stewards (Jopson, Bridgens, Gibson) - In football, which team has won the Champions League, formerly the European Cup, the most? (they don’t know this.) 

Formidables (Stanley, Sophia, Lady Jane) - What is the stage name of the rapper born Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr.? (with clenched jaws Stanley and Lady Jane disagree strongly trying to reverse engineer the rap name from the birth name which does not work because the answer is “snoop dogg” (dogg father, snoop rock etc would have also been accepted. I think actually this one goes to the Lieuts who for some reason know that he briefly went by “Snoop Lion”)

Franklingore (Sir John, Gore) - (sorry i could not come up with a fun category name for them lmao. The Drew Barrymores?) Who was the first female artist to achieve a UK number one with a self-written song? (i don’t believe either of these men have heard a kate bush song in their lives)

Women Want Me Fish Fear Me Club (Crozier, Blanky, Silna) - One Direction is known for being the runners-up in The X Factor in 2010, but who came first? (I can’t decide if this or the BTS question feels meaner. either way they’re not going to get it)

Nice Boys (Goodsir, Hartnell, McDonald) - Spell “millennium.” (Goodsir and Hartnell panic and cannot do this, McDonald claims he got it but his handwriting is so bad they don’t get the point anyway)

Fitzvoeuxconte (Fitzjames, Des Voeux, Dundy) - Which nationality was the polar explorer Roald Amundsen? (i don’t think any of them could find norway on a map)

Headache Squad (Heather, Collins, Morfin) - True or false: Edinburgh is further east than Carlisle. (by the time the true-false round is reached, headache squad has already gone home to lie down with a cool cloth on their faces)

Hickeytozer plus adult adopted child (Hickey, Tozer, David Young) - Who discovered penicillin? (a very standard easy piece of trivia which they ought to know but do not. Hickey very confidently guesses that the answer is “Irish luminary Robert Penicillin” and then tries to gaslight the judge into thinking that’s correct (which also does not work))

[writingwithcolor]

Patrilineal Jewish girl, Sephardic culture

@feminismandsunflowers said:

hi! my character is a patrilineal Jewish girl in the usa, she didn't convert but still considers herself Jewish. her mom is Christian. her g-grandmother/father were undocumented refugees from Europe (antisemitism) and her g-grandmother was v closed off abt her origins but my character's dad thinks she said something abt being Sephardic. her fam has a fair amount of Sephardic culture. but could she claim Sephardic culture to any extent if they don't know? trynna get a handle on how to present her.

"My character's dad thinks she said something about being Sephardic"

and

"her fam has a fair amount of Sephardic culture"

are inconsistent statements. 

The first statement sounds like the only indication Dad has of which Jewish culture they are is a statement he's not even sure about ("thinks"?) and the second statement sounds like Dad considers himself Sephardic and practices Sephardic traditions.

So, to me personally, this would depend on the level of Sephardic cultural practice she grew up with. If she grew up with those traditions and Dad sharing them with her, then yes, that's who she is. If Dad isn't even sure he's Sephardic and what she practiced in her upbringing wasn't distinctively Sephardic in any way, I have a hard time seeing why she should claim the culture if she's not even sure if her ancestors were Sephardic.

Disclaimer that the Reform position is to 'count' patrilineal Jewish people as long as they were raised in the traditions. This is not the Orthodox position but I am Reform.

--Shira

I'm also a bit confused about this situation. I think it would be helpful if you start by specifying where in Europe the family comes from and what anti-Semitism they were fleeing from. I'm Ashkenazi and not the most knowledgeable about Sephardi history, but as far as I know it wouldn't make sense for a Sephardi family to be seeking asylum from the pogroms in Russia or Poland, for example. I guess it could make sense if they were from Spain, France or Italy, but we would have to know more, and I'm wondering if this isn't a 'trace your logic' situation. Why do you want them to come from Europe? *Quickly cracks open a Claudia Roden book* Sephardi Jews have origins in many North African and Middle Eastern countries, such as Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Syria, Iran and Iraq just to give a few examples. If you want Sephardi characters, why not represent those cultures instead of re-hashing the same Euro-centric Jewish stories?   

In terms of whether she could claim Sephardi heritage of any sort if they don't know, I'm interested in what Sephardi followers think. Religion-wise, I don't think there would be too much of a problem with it. Yes, Sephardim are more lenient on some things and stricter on others, so by picking the wrong one she may be following some of the rules wrong, but that's just a matter of tradition really. If someone was a ba'al teshuva and had no way of finding out which population their family came from, I imagine a rabbi would advise to choose one and stick to it without worrying too much about which one. I don't know 100%, though. 

Culture-wise, I don't know if this is what Shira was getting at but I wonder if it would be cultural appropriation due to Ashkenazi Jews being more likely to be white-passing and getting more media representation. Is Jewish lineage enough to claim Sephardi traditions and culture, or do you need to know for sure that you're Sephardi - that will be for Sephardi followers to decide. 

To build on Shira's disclaimer:

I'm Modern Orthodox and I would describe your character as someone who is not halachically Jewish, i.e. not in Jewish law. In most situations, this would be a technicality for me and I wouldn't hesitate to treat her as Jewish if she identifies as such. In particular, with her family history it makes sense that she considers herself ethnically Jewish and the legacy of discrimination is part of her identity - that's not something we can erase or overlook. It would be different if my kid wanted to marry her, I think (not that I ever plan to be one of those parents who would disown their kid or something for marrying out but I'm not going to pretend I completely wouldn't care, either). Then I might be hopeful that she may formally convert, especially if she had always lived as Jewish anyways.

 Other things she may experience if she hangs out in Orthodox circles: a few people might act like jerks and be iffy around her like she's 'not really Jewish', probably the same people who are pro-Trump and mansplain why women's exclusion from parts of Orthodox worship is actually protecting us. On the subject of women's exclusion, if you have any male characters with a similar parental background, they can't get an aliyah in shul or count towards a minyan - the character you're describing couldn't anyway, though. 

Hopefully if your other Jewish characters are nice people, they take to heart the teaching that you should rather throw yourself into a fire than humiliate someone else in public. When I was a student, there was a patrilineal man in our community who once entered the shul just in time to be the tenth man, making a minyan. A Chasidic man in the congregation quickly stood up and said "Oh no, I left the gas on!" and left. That way no one had to make a whole song and dance about the other guy not being allowed to count. Patrilineal Jewish followers, feel free to add more! 

-Shoshi 

I'm going to add some things here, about the terms Sephardi and Ashkenazi, that I think might be partially tripping the author up.

Sephardi and Ashkenazi are terms used to describe the traditions that a person follows. Those traditions are heavily linked to the land where they rose up, and to parentage, as people are typically encouraged to follow the traditions they grew up with. However! Converts exist, and converts are usually encouraged to join in on the traditions in their community. So, as an example, a person can be from anywhere in the world, of any racial or ethnic background, convert in a Conservative synagogue, and follow Ashkenazi traditions. A person can be from a place that is usually seen as very Ashkenazi-heavy, like Germany, and then end up converting in an esnoga (synagogue) in Spain, and practice Sephardic traditions. Either of those converts might have children, and those children will take on their minhagim (traditions), and will be a part of the culture their parents joined just like their parents were.

It can be confusing for many people because the terms are so often conflated with ethnicity, which is in turn conflated with genetic lineage. The trouble is, the groups they describe are older than the modern, western conception of race, and ethnicity,  and we don't completely fit into these categories. Ashkenazi Jews don't all come from Europe, even their ancestors might not. In the US it's been estimated that at least 12-15% of American Jews are Jews of Color, and those JoC are very, very often Ashkenazi. Some converted, some didn't, but they are still following the traditions, and are still Ashkenazi.

So it's fair to say that the traditions of Sephardim grew in the Iberian peninsula, and North Africa, but they also moved along with those Jewish people as they dispersed, and were expelled. Jews from Portugal fled to the Azores, but also to the Netherlands, where there is a large Sephardic presence, right in the middle of a space that is assumed to be all Ashkenazi! Scores of Jewish people from Morocco moved to France. Then too, people marry folks from other groups. Often they will pick one family's traditions to follow, but sometimes they mix and match, and sometimes they end up moving somewhere else and taking on those traditions.

Because so many people have traditions that match their genetic background we've begun using the term Ashkenazi to mean strictly white, European Jewish people. Sephardi we have taken to mean strictly white, Iberian Jewish people (which doesn't even include the massive number of North African Sephardim). We've forgotten entirely to cover Mizrahim (a tradition associated with the Middle East), or the Romaniote, or Cochin Jews, or any number of other groups. Yes, genetic background accounts for a large portion of those people, but it doesn't map completely, and it's important not to forget that.

This complexity is why the statements Shira drew attention to:

"My character's dad thinks she said something about being Sephardic" "her fam has a fair amount of Sephardic culture"

Don't make sense. You would know you are Sephardic, because it's something you do first, and may be, secondarily, directly linked to something in your ancestry.

Finally, since you are showing a patrilineal Jewish person, I really encourage you to show them consistently engaging with their Jewishness, and actively participating in Sephardic culture. I'm the Conservative one here, and my movement, and Sephardi tradition (there are no movements for Sephardim, just varying observance) don't allow patrilineal descent to give a person Jewish status halachically. This is not something I endorse. Patrilineal descendants really struggle outside of Reform communities, to be seen as Jewish, and often to just be treated with respect, so it's important that you give this character every opportunity to participate, and show who they are.

-- Dierdra

[blackjack-15]

Silly Rabbit, Ecological Terrorism is For Kids! — Thoughts on: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek (ICE)

Previous Metas: SCK/SCK2, STFD, MHM, TRT, FIN, SSH, DOG, CAR, DDI, SHA, CUR, CLK, TRN, DAN, CRE

Hello and welcome to a Nancy Drew meta series! 30 metas, 30 Nancy Drew Games that I’m comfortable with doing meta about. Hot takes, cold takes, and just Takes will abound, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll all be longer than I mean them to be.

Each meta will have different distinct sections: an Introduction, an exploration of the Title, an explanation of the Mystery, a run-through of the Suspects. Then, I’ll tackle some of my favorite and least favorite things about the game, and finish it off with ideas on how to improve it. As ICE sends off the Jetsetting Games category and moves into the Odd Games category, there will be a section between The Intro and The Title called The Weird Stuff, where I’ll go into what storyline marks this game a bit Odd in the Nancy Drew series as a whole.

If any game requires an extra section or two, they’ll be listed in the paragraph above, along with links to previous metas.

These metas are not spoiler free, though I’ll list any games/media that they might spoil here: ICE; TRT; mention of FIN; mention of CUR; mention of TRN; mention of SEA.

This meta is under a read more because of its sheer length.

The Intro:

Ughhhhh. UGHHH.

The White Wolf of Icicle Creek has a lot of things that make it distinct in the Nancy Drew video game series — it sports the first new interface since SHA, it has the world’s most boring list of ‘enticing moments’ from the game on the back, its assets look like they were forcefully molded out of gummy bears, it randomly was released on Wii, it’s the best-known game among non-fans thanks to the Game Grumps — but it also stands out because not one of those things make it enjoyable to play or to watch without a heavy amount of MST3K-style commentary.

Also because it features the fandom’s least favorite puzzle of all time…but more on that later.

A point to get out of the way before we get into the game proper is that this game feels a lot like a cheap knock-off of Treasure in a Royal Tower. Like, a lot like a cheap knock-off. One of those animated films called “Bemo’s Lost in the Ocean” or “A Toy Tale” that come out around Disney/Pixar films to try to trick hapless grandmas into buying them.

Just lining it up, we have Nancy stuck in/around a lodge in winter, an edict from the owner of the lodge to figure out what’s up with repeated Incidents and possible sabotage while most guests have left, an academic around Nancy’s age, an Old Coot, an Olympian whose grandparent was important, chores (including food related chores) to do in order to progress in the story, a suspect you can only talk to face-to-face for part of the game…the list honestly goes on in both big and small ways.

While ICE isn’t the only one that tries to do this (since I’m not doing a SEA meta, I won’t get into the fact that SEA literally just remastered DDI’s characters and said ‘good enough’), it does feel particularly egregious because, for all its copying, there’s not enough in the game to distract from it even a bit.

ICE is a game searching for an identity and unable to find one, no matter how many plot points, chores, or games (horrible, unskippable games) they throw at the player. We have full on international espionage and ecological terrorism here (more on that in the next section), and it just…doesn’t matter, at the end of the day. It also takes place in Canada, but your only clue to that is that one of the characters says “eh” a lot, so that’s not great either.

If ICE is a new game to you (it can be a bear to install and even worse to complete, so I’m going to go off the assumption that not everyone will be familiar with it), you’ve probably only heard of the cooking chores, fox and geese, and that this is the game with the Return of Tony Balducci, previously of TRN fame. (Honestly, ICE had a big enough cast without its phone characters, but HER decided to shove three phone characters along with one partial phone character at us anyway.) And, to be honest, that’s pretty much all there is to the game.

Now I know this sounds harsh, but there is a possible explanation to the lack of content in this game. In my previous meta (link at the top of this post) I made a note that CRE’s production in all likelihood suffered because the company was focused on ICE’s new interface. I don’t think it’s a leap at all to say that ICE’s story and characters could also have suffered because of the same thing.

The biggest problem with ICE — besides the weird stuff we’ll get into below — is that it’s a shallow game. None of the characters have any real depth, the plot is a paper-thin copy of TRT, the puzzles are alternatingly impossible and extremely easy, and in an effort to add “depth”, we get…well, we get this next section.

The Weird Stuff:

With each of the Odd Games (ICE through RAN, Heaven help us all), there’s something that makes the game truly…well, odd. Odd for the Nancy Drew series, odd for the age range specified on the front of the box, and odd in general when you look at the rest of the plot.

In this game, it comes in the form of terrorism — or rather, two types of terrorism. Guadalupe is our first (and only, in this series) ecological terrorist, belonging to a fringe group called “Run and Go Free” and being perfectly fine with illegal acts (destruction of the fishing lodge, sabotage of personal property), even telling Nancy that she’s done worse in the name of Run and Go Free.

Nancy Drew Games are no stranger to hippie/naturalist types (see DOG, DDI, CAR, etc.) but Lupe is our first to be legitimately dangerous. Sure, she doesn’t end up being the ultimate Bad Guy, but she is A Bad Guy, and it really does seem very odd to me that after everything Lupe does (and insinuates that she’s done), that she gets away with barely a slap on the wrist in having to leave the lodge.

Lupe in no way fits in with the rest of the plot; there’s nothing to justify her being present in the game, she can appear about halfway through the game and then leaves to become a phone contact soon after, she’s not present enough to be an actual suspect — she has no place in the plot nor the game, and it really does just boggle the mind that a character is in it at all, especially with ICE having a greater than average number of suspects to begin with.

On the other hand, however, we have Yanni, an Eastern European Olympian spy/terrorist, sent by the Fredonian (a commonly used fake country) government to bomb around the lodge to find uranium under the cover of training for the next Olympics.

That is a whole lot of things for one character.

You’d think with the presence of Lupe that Yanni would fit right in, but he doesn’t make her — or himself — any less odd or out of place than he would have been alone. It’s a ‘suspicious Olympian’ character that we already got with Jacques, but he’s a million times worse, setting off friggin bombs to find a metal that his government wants for…well, the normal reason that governments want uranium.

So we can add in “reference to ongoing nuclear warfare” as another thing that makes this game Odd.

Yanni doesn’t fit the game or the plot, which is pretty bad considering he’s responsible for about half the plot in the first place. He also has that weird aside about his grandmother being eaten by wolves, as if HER wants the player to suspect him because of some twisted revenge against wolves plot (which would have been Very Weird) so that they can pull the rug out at the end and be like “see?? He’s a political terrorist looking for uranium for nuclear bombs for his country!!! Gotcha!!”.

Like, it’s not a Gotcha if it’s absolute lunacy. My land.

With that explanation out of the way, let’s get to something a little less Odd.

The Title:

 I actually don’t have much to say here. The White Wolf of Icicle Creek is honestly a great name; it tells us the focal point of the game (the wolf), the location, (Icicle Creek), and even pretty much tells you the season that this game is happening in (white, icicle). It accomplishes a lot in a very short amount of words, and pertains accurately to the game we’re dealing with.

We’ll chalk that up in the “Win” category…especially since we’re going straight back into the “Lose” category with the next section.

The Mystery:

The mystery is a mess, full stop. There’s way too much going on for the amount of payoff (i.e. little to none), and the plot, thin at best, completely drops off at the 2/3rds mark when all the player has left to do is wait for random events to occur and keep putting off fox and geese.

Anyway.

We begin with strange, destructive incidents of sabotage happening at a renowned winter resort. Most of the guests have left, and there’s been some damage to parts of the resort. Asked for help by the owner of the resort who’s away on business, Nancy must pick up the slack left by staff who have quit, run food-related errands, and discover who might be behind these attacks before it’s too late.

Oh wait, that’s Treasure in a Royal Tower. Lemme start again.

We begin with strange, destructive incidents of sabotage happening at a renowned winter resort. Most of the guests have left, and there’s been some damage —

You get the picture.

The biggest difference pre-game is that after every incident, a white wolf is spotted, only to disappear before the police get there. People start connecting the wolf to the crimes, and go as far as blaming it for cases of food poisoning and slashed tires, as if the wolf is cooking food and using a knife with its paws.

Just as Nancy’s arriving on scene, the bunkhouse is blown up and she hears the wolf howling — so obviously there must be a connection there, and a wolf definitely isn’t just responding to a loud noise.

This part honestly feels a bit like the beginning of CUR, where the game tries to establish Scary Feelings and Ominous Threats and just comes off ham-fisted.

The back of the box features three ‘exciting’ things that Nancy gets to do in this game, which are as follows: cook lunch and dinner, ride a snowmobile and wear snow shoes, and do snowball fights and ice fishing. While it’s sad that those moderately exciting things are the best that the box can boast, it’s even sadder that they really are the best the game has to offer.

It’s easy to lose thread of the mystery nearly as soon as Nancy gets to the lodge, because she’s immediately bombarded with laundry that has to be done before a certain time, meals that have to be done within a certain hour or two, and a suspect (Lupe) that can just refuse to show up.

Oh, and the return of Tino Balducci.

Returning in a game where he doesn’t fit in and where no one wanted him in the first place, Tino’s there to “help” Nancy solve the mystery by giving her a questionnaire for her suspects to fill out that asks what planet they see themselves as, among other inanities.

Honestly, this whole section could be summed up as “Tino returns, among other inanities”.

Nancy, throughout all of this, somehow has time to do a bit of detective work, interviewing a cast of rather one-note suspects, figuring out that more than one person is responsible for the many accidents. Guadalupe’s sabotage is discovered and she’s sent home, Yanni is increasingly unavailable (which is hugely suspicious), snowball fights are more prevalent than necessary, and finally the villain is exposed, all culminating in a glitchy, nigh-impossible snowmobile chase.

Oh, and there’s a half-tamed wolf storyline that kinda pops up every now and again.

All in all, the mystery is a weak thread throughout the game — which is a problem, because it’s the only thread throughout the game — that’s easily overshadowed by the chores, games, and frankly awful visuals throughout the game.

Now, to those who contribute (in a way) to the non-entity that is ICE’s story:

The Suspects:

Ollie Randall is our resident grumpy caretaker and is Chantal’s right-hand man, along with being on the Avalanche Patrol and a firm believer in the bad luck that wolves bring. His wife can’t handle cold temperatures due to a nerve condition, so he’s also his daughter Freddie’s sole parent during the winter.

As a culprit in the game as it now is, Ollie would have been the only sensical option; fed up with the awful guests that come and cause havoc, he starts causing little easily-solved accidents to spook away the less hardy-type guests, but it keeps spiraling as it doesn’t keep out everyone but people like Bill Kessler. Frustrated by the treatment the lodge gets, he decides that if people don’t treat it nicely, they can’t have it at all…

Unfortunately, Ollie is limited to being Grumpy, and not a lot else.

Freddie Randall is Ollie’s daughter and the self-proclaimed Snow Princess due to her ability to stay out in the cold for hours in her snow fort, and to take repeated snowballs to the face courtesy of a teen detective.

Freddie is…I know I talked about how Yanni and Lupe don’t really fit into the game, but Freddie really doesn’t fit any version of this game. She’s there for a mini game, she doesn’t have a personality, you can’t skip her mini game, she’s voiced by Lani Minella…the list goes on and on. Her shining moment of glory is acting as a red herring by throwing a snowball through Lou’s window.

She’s pointless to talk about as a potential culprit, even though she would have been an interesting “culprit” in a case where all the incidents are actually Freddie accidentally causing trouble, but that probably would have been even less satisfying than how the game actually went, so we’ll just move along here.

Our cross-country skiing Olympian from the fictional Eastern European country of Fredonia, Yanni Volkstaia is both our only suspect wearing a onesie and our only suspect with a family member eaten by wolves.

I know, that’s already a high bar to top. Don’t worry, he’ll fall very, very far below it.

Yanni, as mentioned above, is our odd spy/terrorist villain who is disguising his being there for uranium by saying that it’s his Olympic competitors trying to throw off his training. Why an Olympian is training alone without any coaches or security…well, let’s just say that Yanni didn’t really think his cover story through.

Just because Yanni’s the obvious culprit doesn’t mean he fills the role well; Yanni is obvious, annoying, and his paper-thin cover is just annoying enough to be…well, annoying. He throws out that his grandmother was “killed and devoured” by wolves as if he wants Nancy to believe that that’s the reason he’s targeting the lodge but…it still points directly to him. It’s just not great all the way around.

Joining Yanni in terrorism is Guadalupe Comillo, activist from California and hard-to-find suspect. Lupe can, as mentioned above, literally just not appear for a bit, stalling out the game and making her even more annoying than she already is.

Lupe’s cover is that she’s a bird watcher, but she knows absolutely nothing about birds — like honestly nothing, even though she had time to make her cover story (not unlike Yanni).

She gets sent away by destruction of private property (Ollie’s gun – super dangerous to make a gun misaim out in the wild and she’s lucky he didn’t hit anything problematic [like another person] because of it) and good riddance, but appears as a phone friend to rather pointlessly exonerate herself and do pretty much nothing else but stop the game in its tracks until she lets it proceed.

As a culprit, Lupe would have been the other obvious choice, but she’s just not in the game enough, so she’s easy to ignore. Her cover is thin, but so is her motivation (!!! Save the wolf!!!), so she’s one of the most annoying non-entity suspects in this series.

Our second Californian in the cast is Lou Talbot, who is a college student, master of ‘earthitecture’ (inspired by Poppy Dada) and stealer of dinosaur bones for money. He also plays fox and geese with Bill in his spare time. He does a really good impression of the Guy in my MFA twitter as well, but that’s literally it.

No, really, that’s his entire character. I can’t even posit what he would be like as the culprit because that is LITERALLY all we’re given on him. End of bio. My gosh, what a waste of pixels.

Lou’s partner in fox and geese is Bill Kessler, who loves to fish and whose grandmother used to own the lodge before Chantal. While he feels that his grandmother Tilly was cheated out of the lodge, he has little desire to get it back, and really just wants to hide the fact that he’s been to the lodge before (an odd thing to hide, but whatever makes him feel better.)

Like Lou, apart from that, he really doesn’t have any character. He basically is a mix of TRT’s Jacques in his family connection to the lodge and SHA’s Dave in actual amount of motivation (i.e., 0 motivation) to do anything about it. He is, however, the person who makes Nancy play fox and geese, and for that alone, I hate him.

As a culprit, Bill’s played as a red herring for a solid 5 minutes of gameplay (though not very well — why would an avid fisherman blow up a fishing shack?), and then totally discounted the moment Nancy finds out his backstory. He’s really just there — like most of the cast, worryingly enough — to pad out the number of suspects and to give Nancy a taste of Hell through fox and geese.

The Favorite:

There are a few bright spots in this confused mess of a game, so let’s go through them.

My favorite moment in the game is when Nancy, after Yanni says the horrific line about his grandmother being killed and devoured by wolves, can ask “how”. As if that’s a sentence that needs a ‘how’. It’s a great moment of Nancy being absolutely tone deaf, and I giggle like a madman every time I think about it.

My favorite puzzle in the game is probably the cooking minigame, which I dislike in frequency and time requirement, but do love in actual practice. It’s fun to cook in every Nancy Drew game, and this one is no exception. I just wish it wasn’t regimented so heavily.

I love the atmosphere of the lodge; it’s beautifully animated (in fact one of my favorite locations in the ND games), big without being too big, and is never boring, even by the end of the game. The lodge is largely a character unto itself, and is quite successful as a wonderful location.

The Un-Favorite:

There’s a lot to unpack here, but we’ll keep it short because the fix section of this meta is gonna have me by the throat.

My least favorite moment in the game is the moment Tino comes into the game. As the game now stands, there’s no reason for him to be involved, and short a comment about him by the Hardy Boys, which would at least justify it a little, he’s purposeless. He’s worse than that, actually — he’s there to slow the game down, and that’s a cardinal sin.

My least favorite puzzle in the game is a tie between fox and geese (UGH) and the final snowmobile chase. My problems with fox and geese are obvious — they’re everyone’s problems with fox and geese: it’s a required puzzle, it’s hard to do, there’s no way to cheat through it, and it takes forever.

The final snowmobile chase is somehow even worse. It’s buggy, laggy, has nothing to do with the actual plot, has arbitrary win conditions — it’s the worst (or at least among the worst) that HER has to offer with final puzzles. If everything else about ICE was perfect, engaging, fun, and thought-provoking, this final puzzle would still put me off of playing it. It’s just that bad.

The storyline with Isis and that whole backstory isn’t treated well in game; it’s almost as if they came up with the title and then remembered at the last minute that there’s supposed to be an actual wolf. I would have loved more of a focus on that storyline; as it is, it barely counts as a blip on the game’s radar — which is a shame.

The Fix:

Gosh, how on earth will I fix The White Wolf of Icicle Creek? The answer is that I don’t feel like I can just apply a few quick fixes and be on my way; the only answer I could find is to approach this as if I was at the proposal meeting for this game — how would I outline the barebones scenario?

This section will be long, as I’m going to start just from the skeleton and build things in. What follows is my own imaginings of what my own personal ideas would be to create ICE, rather than to fix it from what the finished product was. As an important note, the side-plot with the wolf, as it was really neglected and bare-bones to begin with in the game, is mostly removed.

The first section I’ll work on is structure. Though it wasn’t done perfectly in FIN, I feel like the pacing of ICE could be vastly improved by putting a clock on the game by assigning designated days and tasks. Three days is still probably a good idea, as it lets us easily break the story into a 3-act structure and delineate certain tasks for certain days without overloading one day in particular. We’ll get more into what should happen in Days 1, 2, and 3 later in a general overview of how the plot would go.

The mechanism used to get Nancy there — Chantal being a friend of Carson’s — isn’t bad, but I’d change it up just slightly. Nancy’s not yet a “professional” detective, but we’re only 2 games from her being hired by a foreign country’s authorities, so she should be making her way up there. It stands to reason that Nancy would attract some attention from the business in CRE since the Hardy Boys would definitely mention Nancy in their de-briefing and Aikens is a big name, so let’s build on that from here. Chantal is still Carson’s friend, and she still wants to get these incidents solved while she’s away from the Lodge for legal matters — someone got injured at the lodge and is now suing.

Carson decides to officially hire Nancy — paperwork, legal documentation, etc. — as a “concerned third party” in Chantal’s problems, telling her that her job is to find out two things: find out what’s causing the incidents of sabotage, and give Carson enough evidence in favor of the lodge’s safety that he can prove reasonable doubt against the people accusing Chantal. Nancy will be there undercover as a family friend of Chantal’s, with only Ollie knowing that she’s there in an official capacity.

ICE has a cast that is both unwieldy and characterless, and I feel like the way to fix that is through combining characters. Starting out we have Ned, Chantal, Tino, the ex-maid, her boyfriend, Ollie, Freddie, Lupe, Yanni, Lou, and Bill — 10 characters that we deal with in the present, plus one other player (in the boyfriend/stalker guy). 11 in total. That is a huge, huge cast that we definitely need to pare down.

The first thing to do is to take out Tino Balducci. He slows down the plot, is completely unnecessary, and isn’t even entertaining. Since there’s no Hardy Boys to play off of him (and I would keep the Hardy Boys out of this game, even with my love for them), Tino needs to go the way of the dodo. And good riddance to him, honestly.

Freddie, an obvious subject to axe, should instead be aged up to around 20 and combined with the maid whose ex-boyfriend’s letter Nancy finds at the beginning of the game. Freddie would handle all the chores the first day except the cooking.

Instead of a nebulous, incident-causing ex-boyfriend, Freddie would have just started a relationship with Lou, keeping our cast tight and visible, rather than one-off characters with nothing else to give to the story.

By now we’re down to Carson, Ned, Chantal, Freddie, Ollie, Lupe, Yanni, Lou, and Bill. I think we can do a little better than that.

The next step I’d take is to remove Yanni entirely. Yes, I know it’s a big change to remove the canonical culprit, but bear with me. With Yanni and Lupe having so many similarities and together being guilty of 99% of the Crimes in this game, I’m pretty comfortable in combining them. I’d also make the minor change of having Lupe be an Indigenous Canadian rather than Hispanic and from California, since our game is set in Canada and there’s absolutely no reason for a large portion of our cast to be American.

With Yanni gone, Lupe (or whatever her new name would be, since the name ‘Lupe’, all nationality changes aside, in a game ostensibly about a wolf makes me want to kill myself) assumes a few of his personality quirks – most importantly, a family member with a past with wolves. It doesn’t really matter if it’s positive or negative, you just want the association there as a herring (red or otherwise).

That puts us down to 5 suspects to talk to and three phone friends for a total of 8 players in the present. Since Chantal is supposed to be busy, I’d remove the ability to talk to her entirely — anything that Chantal could offer can come through Carson as Nancy’s official “employer”, which brings us to a nice 7 players — an entirely manageable number.

So let’s begin.

The beginning of the game with Nancy at her desk always includes a case file, so this time the case file would say that Nancy, at the behest of her ‘client’, Carson Drew, is flying out to Alberta to investigate strange happenings at Chantal Moique’s lodge. Chantal is trying to settle with people who got hurt there and are trying to sue her, and Carson’s helping to advise her. Nancy’s mission is two-fold: figure out what’s causing the incidents at the lodge, and find evidence that Chantal can’t be held liable for the injuries incurred by the guests suing her.

Wolves are commonly seen around the area of the lodge — Northern Alberta has some of the highest population of wolves in North America — and there’s a rumor at the lodge that the spirits of the wolves that are hunted in the area every winter are causing some of the sabotage.

Chantal thinks the rumor is being spread by whoever is doing the actual sabotage to make her guests leave and force her out of business, so Carson tells Nancy to pay attention to the stories about the wolves — and one snow-white wolf in particular, who is often sighted very close to the lodge. Carson suspects that, if it exists, the white wolf is actually a trained dog (a white/white and silver Siberian Husky, for example) being used to whip up panic, but tells Nancy to keep an open mind.

As Nancy’s arriving at the Lodge, an explosion occurs in the distance, causing the rumbling of snow to start. Ollie, who’s picked up Nancy from her plane, says darkly that he’s been waiting for something like this to happen, and that this will probably cause a minor avalanche (his opinion as the head of Avalanche Patrol in the area), making it impossible to leave the lodge for a few days. He tells Nancy to head straight to bed once they get to the lodge, as she’s in for an exhausting time dealing with the “weirdos” still left at the lodge.

Nancy wakes up and Day One begins with Freddie freaking out outside Nancy’s door. After explaining that the regular chef (who was off for the last month visiting family) can’t get back to the lodge until tomorrow and that Freddie’s only manned the kitchen once or twice, Nancy says that she has experience cooking and offers to take the chef’s duties for the day.

Day One has Nancy meet all the suspects – Bill’s playing a game (I don’t care what it is as long as it’s something that involves writing things down) with anyone who passes by and talks about how out of all the lodges in Canada, this one’s his favorite; Lou hangs out near the bones (make him an archeology major or something related to but not exactly paleontology) and Definitely Doesn’t Know the Cute Girl Who Works at the Lodge, How Dare Nancy Assume; Not-Lupe is gone until 4pm when it starts getting dark because she loves spending time in nature, especially with the Super Special Wolf running around the place; and Ollie’s in the workshop fixing the things that have been sabotaged, worries about his daughter being away from her mother and about her ‘cavorting’ with a guest.

Nancy still preps lunch and the day goes on without a hitch other than Lou having an overheard argument with someone at around 6. Nancy cooks dinner, accidentally (due to smudged instructions from Freddie) sprinkling paprika in everyone’s food and setting off an allergic (mild to moderate anaphylaxis, helped by an epi pen) reaction + hives in Freddie, who they fly out via helicopter that night.

Ollie, feeling hostile towards Nancy, takes a look at the instructions/recipe that Nancy worked off of and says to her that the first page is Freddie’s handwriting, but the second page isn’t — someone did this on purpose. Nancy calls Carson, who says that the soonest he can get there is the day after next, and to keep herself safe above everything — he’ll check in with the hospital Freddie’s at since it’s also in Edmonton, where Carson and Chantal are. Carson warns Nancy that the guests were about to settle the lawsuit when the news about the explosion hit the news, and are now more determined than ever to sue for all Chantal’s worth.

Day 2 opens with the cook (who’s unseen and just exists in order to relieve Nancy of kitchen duty) arriving and a phone call from Carson asking for Chantal/Freddie if Nancy can grab the laundry bags from the guests’ rooms and that the spare key is in the register at the front (of course guarded by a puzzle — I’d even accept a mini fox and geese, as one of the big problems with that puzzle in the vanilla game is that it goes on way too long.

While snooping in the desk, Nancy finds evidence that Chantal might have been guilty of criminal neglect — a few things around the lodge are listed as “fixed” and totally safe when really they still need some maintenance — and wonders how she should tell Carson and if she should wait until she has more evidence. Before she goes out for the day, Not-Lupe mentions to Nancy “in confidence” that she overheard Lou fighting with Freddie before dinner, calling it a “lover’s quarrel”.

After lunch and talking with all the suspects again, Nancy goes to grab the laundry with the master key and snoops in everyone’s rooms, finding various clues and suspicious things: Bill’s journal detailing how Chantal is running the place into the ground and needs to be replaced, along with a few lodge magazines; Not-Lupe’s gloves with suspicious specks of things on them (Nancy takes a sample of it in a Kleenex or something); Lou’s heavy suitcase that has a case with imprints of bones in it; Ollie’s has maintenance books that also detail how to take things apart and maintenance notes that say he saw the wolf around but didn’t have his gun; Freddie’s only thing of interest is a little dinosaur pin on her dresser.

Nancy takes the opportunity to snoop in Chantal’s normal room and finds that the things that were listed in the documents in the front desk really were fixed; Ollie reported to Chantal that things that he fixed were un-fixed by the time he went back to them the next day — most of the time suffering damage as well, such as the sauna that injured the guests that are suing Chantal. Nancy calls her father with the news, and Carson says to save those documents so that he can come get them tomorrow, and to see if she can find any clues to who might have done it.

After dinner Nancy talks to Lou, who confesses that he and Freddie started dating a few days ago after meeting online last semester in a dinosaur enthusiast forum — hence his decision to come to the lodge, as Freddie said there were cool bones here. He was originally going to steal a few small ones and thought no one would notice if he replaced them with resin-cast replicas, but Freddie caught him and they had a fight which ended with Lou deciding not to steal, and Freddie saying that she could help him make replicas for him to take home and keep in his house.

Nancy asks why he’s telling her, and Lou says that Ollie seems to get along with Nancy well, and he’d like Nancy to calm Ollie down if Ollie discovers that he’s dating Freddie. Nancy asks Lou about the wolf, and Lou says that some of the stuff could be a wolf — he’s seen one around the lodge once or twice — but he hasn’t really been paying attention to anything except the bones and Freddie (who he’s looking forward to visiting once he can).

When talking with Bill, he offhandedly mentions that he used to be a handyman — the sink in his room started acting up, but he fixed it easily because he thinks that Ollie has enough to do without doing this easy fix. Bill says that this would never have happened when Chantal’s father was running the Lodge and accuses Chantal of preferring to spend long “business trips” in the city to actually paying attention to the Lodge — he says she should just live in the city and hire a manager with experience who actually cares. Nancy asks Bill about the wolf, and he says if anyone could be haunted by wolves, he’d believe it was Chantal.

Nancy, it should be noted, during her explorations around the lodge, sees a few pawprints and some chewed-on debris, but otherwise hasn’t seen the wolf in person. Just traces and tracks.

Not-Lupe and Ollie both dodge Nancy’s questions – Ollie’s busy as everything seems to be breaking at once, and snaps at Nancy that without Chantal around, he’s the only person keeping the lodge afloat, and he’d be better off without the stress of this job. When Nancy asks him about the wolf, Ollie says that the last thing they need is some idiot tourist being attacked by a wolf, and so he refuses to believe that there’s a wolf around the area.

Not-Lupe is at her normal place at the window (though there’s a chair there because no one stands all day), and when Nancy asks about the wolf, says that that’s why she’s there — she heard the rumor about the wolf and wanted to see it, but that her visit’s been very disappointing — just a junky lodge with incompetent staff and no wolves anywhere. Her hobby is visiting winter lodges, and this one just Isn’t up to snuff.

Nancy tries to pry deeper, but Not-Lupe shuts her down and goes to bed; Nancy investigates the living room as everyone leaves for bed and finds crinkled up under the couch a magazine cutout about the Premier Lodge Group, a company that owns winter lodges all over Canada and the United States, and their plans to build a group of lodges in Alberta as soon as a few “minor inconveniences” with location are solved.

The day ends with Carson calling; Nancy tells him about all the suspects (Carson confirms Lou’s story by having talked to Freddie), the magazine, Ollie wanting to quit, etc. Carson promises to do some research on Premier Lodge Group and tells Nancy to send him a picture of the stuff she found on Lupe’s gloves. Nancy does so, and that’s the end of Day 2.

Day 3 opens again with Carson’s phone call, informing Nancy that he’ll be there in the early evening — he’s having a contact of his look at the photo Nancy sent, but he’s pretty sure it won’t be good news.

Premier Lodge Group was investigated a few years ago for sabotage to their competitors but ultimately nothing came out of it, and Carson suspects that people were paid off to keep quiet about it. Carson says that he’s looked into Ollie (since Carson suspected him the most) and apparently Ollie always grouches about quitting when he’s stressed but has been there for 20 years and is as loyal as they come, so Nancy says she’ll focus on Not-Lupe and Bill — the two lodge-hoppers who seem dissatisfied with the lodge.

Both Not-Lupe and Bill are gone when Nancy gets downstairs, and Lou (who’s planning on leaving that night to go to Edmonton) says that they both got a sack lunch from the kitchen and left early in the morning to go explore outside. He tells Nancy she can borrow his snowshoes and says that they both headed out (independently) in the direction of Skookum Ridge.

When Nancy gets up to the Ridge, she spots the “wolf” — really a Siberian Husky, like Carson thought, who seems very well trained. When the dog comes up to Nancy, a gunshot ripples through the air and nearly hits the dog, who would have gone running off had Nancy not grabbed her collar and yelled not to shoot. Nancy sees Bill across the ridge and waves him over, explaining that it’s a dog, not a wolf. The dog (whose name is something way better than Isis — literally anything else would do) is suspicious of Bill at first, which convinces Nancy that it’s not Bill’s — the only suspect left is Not-Lupe.

When she tells Bill what she knows about Not-Lupe, Bill admits to having seen her before at a lodge that went out of business due to mysterious accidents, but thought it was a coincidence before digging deeper in the magazines he brought and finding Not-Lupe in the back of a small photo of Premier Lodge Administrative Staff — he was worried about keeping it safe and knowing that there would be no cleaning staff until at least the next day, crumpled it up and put it under the couch he normally sits by.

A happy, friendly dog in tow, Nancy and Bill head back to the lodge only to find Ollie and Lou standing outside looking worried. They tell Nancy that they both went outside because they heard a loud noise, only to find the door locked behind them — and every other door locked as well. After realizing that Not-Lupe wouldn’t open the doors for them, Ollie went to get an axe for the door, only to have a note appear on the door’s window that if they forced their way in, the whole Lodge would be burned to the ground in an instant.

Carson calls then, saying that he’s a few minutes away, but that his friend got back to him — Not-Lupe’s gloves were covered in residue from explosives. Bill takes Nancy’s phone and begins to fill Carson in on who they think Not-Lupe is working for and who she is. Nancy asks Lou and Ollie to hoist her up to her own window, which she keeps unlocked, and crawls in, creeping downstairs to the main room to try to find how Not-Lupe will burn the lodge and stop her.

Nancy confronts Not-Lupe, who confirms her identity as a saboteur for the Premier Lodge Group, saying that with the bad press around the lodge Chantal would have already had to sell — but she’s going to go one step further and cause an ‘incident’, blowing up the lodge with fuses hidden around its ground floor — Chantal’s father won’t spend the money to rebuild the lodge, and the only proof that is against her is the word of two American kids, an old man, and a lodge-hopper with a very incriminating diary that would be found soon enough. She tells Nancy that she can either try to catch her or try to save the lodge and runs out the back, intent on escaping as she pushes the button to arm the explosives.

Nancy yells out the window for them to catch Not-Lupe, who’s got to be headed out to the main road, tossing the cushion of the seat Lupe usually sat in so that her dog can catch her scent, then has the final timed puzzle be switching off each detonator (which would be in each of the places where the suspects usually were, with the exception of Ollie’s whose is in the front desk).

As soon as Nancy disarms them, Bill calls out to her that Carson just called — Lou and the dog tracked Lupe to the main road, and Bill called Carson to let him know. Carson’s car stops Not-Lupe (Carson brought a policeman on a hunch), and the day is saved. Premier Lodge is snagged in a major lawsuit by Chantal’s father and other lodge owners who have had the same thing happen to them, and Chantal hires Bill as co-manager to ensure there’s always someone there to manage the lodge and for his wealth of knowledge of what makes a good lodge and good experience for guests.

The game ends with Nancy writing her letter to Hannah (so that Hannah doesn’t worry about them), and with her dad’s praise for a job well done.

I realize that this is a monumental fix; it’s a brand-new game made out of the skeleton of the old one. I also realize that there are a million and one ways to re-write this game; this one takes the idea of sabotage, one of the most frequent inciting incidents in the Nancy Drew world, and just makes it a little bigger.

No terrorism required.

[saint-patrice]

In light of this post, about different types of ways you may feel about your favourite hockey players, getting an awful lot more notes than expected, I thought it would be fun to have a more detailed look into what kind of responses people were giving! I accidentally deleted the damn thing a few months ago and it took me a while to find it again, but on the plus side it accrued a lot more notes during that time - I have responses from 150 people, covering 119 different hockeys! This is pretty long, so all the good stuff is below the cut :)

So, as I said, there were responses from 150 different people (thank you all) - 119 individual names were mentioned for a total of 429 answers, accounting for 25 NHL teams. I’m going to link the Google Sheet at the end of the post, but first I thought I’d go through some of it :)

There is obviously going to be some bias towards the teams I am about on my blog since that’s where the post originated from, but with that many responses, the results are pretty varied. Anyway,

First are some of the most common players assigned to option one, which, as per the post, was “he’s perfect and i will not hear otherwise. i look at him like he hung the moon, because quite frankly, he probably did. he is the lord’s perfect creation and i would happily die defending his honor.” 

As you can see Jamie Benn is the pretty clear winner, and very satisfyingly so, as he has the same number of votes as his jersey number. From what I’ve seen, Stars fans are very passionate about their captain and I love that! I don’t think there’s really any surprise appearances on here, although I wasn’t expecting Crosby’s name to crop up this much, maybe that’s just because I’m not necessarily a Pens fan. These are just the most common answers. People’s opinions were far more varied on this than the other option; on a quick count, I tallied 75 individual players being named for this one! As a result, most players that were mentioned in this category only appeared once or twice, like Ben Bishop or Seth Jones (both good choices). There does appear to be a considerable bias towards Canadians, with (if I’m right) 10 appearing on this graph. The rest of the players are European, so not much love for the Americans…interesting.

Category 2: “this little bastard creature. how dare he. how dare he make me love him. he’s a gremlin that’s crawled up from the depths of hell and i hate him with all my heart even though i love him. he’s the literal worst man alive.”

 People were much more in agreement on this option - even as I was typing up the answers it was clear that TK and Seguin were almost unanimous across hockeyblr. It doesn’t seem to matter which team you support, you probably hold a little bit of rage for one of them anyway. 

I think Nolan Patrick making a pretty even appearance on both lists is interesting, and I can’t say that EJ or Jimmy Vesey were names I expected to see mentioned here. Matthew Tkachuk’s Friendship Tour runs rife even on Tumblr, it would appear. Most people probably would have predicted a lot of these names for this one.

(This post is from a fair few months ago, and from a quick scroll through the tags it does appear that most mentions of AMatthews are from before the allegations surfaced in September. Just something to note.)

This is where things get interesting - I noticed some players were appearing numerous times for both categories, so I thought I’d pick out some of the most common ones, and see how opinions were split. Of the 38 times Travis Konecny was mentioned, only 2 people thought he belonged to category 1 (represented by the green bar), so I hope those people are out there living their truths. Seguin showed a similar pattern, whilst Barzal, Patrick, and Tom Wilson had opinions split close to 50/50. Surprisingly, Marchand was deemed more “perfect” than “gremlin” but that may be the result of this post being circulated a fair amount among Bruins blogs. That being said, and we’ll get onto it in a second, it does appear that hockey fans on Tumblr were fairly evenly represented in this, so maybe not.

This is a summary of how the number of players mentioned were distributed by team. There’s some more info in the Google Sheet about how many players represented each team - e.g. the Capitals, despite only making up 7% of answers, had the most players mentioned at 14! This chart is interesting, and in my experience a reasonable portrayal of hockeyblr, although a few teams are probably a little under-represented. That being said, it is probably more reflective of hockeyblr on the whole rather than on a team-by-team basis. Players who tend to be pretty popular, or at least subversive, regardless of your allegiance - Konecny, Seguin, Marner - have definitely influenced this.

The Hurricanes, Red Wings, Kings, and Lighting have been omitted from the above chart as their players were only named once or twice, and so amounted to 0% in the grand scheme of things. No players from Ducks, Oilers, Panthers, Canadiens, Senators, and Winnipeg were mentioned at all. The Ducks and Senators weren’t really too shocking, but I did expect to see a player or two from the others in there. I would assume this is a result of those fanbases not being all that big on here. 

That’s all I’m going to get into here, but the whole workbook can be found of Google Sheets through this link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cUFz4eSM_j-Ipjz7lhsAkaXqpw5M_08NcYiWBM1Zxec/edit?usp=sharing

It has all of the tables I made the graphs/charts from, as well as the whole list of the responses, some of which gave me a good laugh. And like I said, there’s some info on how teams were portrayed which might be of interest. It’s certainly not an exhibition on how you should be presenting your data, but it gets the point across :)

Thank you again for the awesome response to that dumbass post, and thank you to anyone who has read this far! I spent way too long on this so I really really appreciate it. That being said, it was good fun, so please feel free to let me know if you enjoyed reading this :^)

💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗

[dontbesoevil]

So you want to improve your French and like to learn about things?

Good news for you, French Youtube has a very large number of really good channels of what we call “vulgarisation” (popularisation in English, but it isn’t used as much as the French word really).

I’ll divide them in broad categories and there are more.

Science:

So you like medicine, but also History? Well I have the perfect channel for you. Asclépios is a real life doctor who also likes to do videos about the history of medicine. You can start by this video on the Radium girls for example. Note that most, but not all of his videos have French subs.

There was a channel called “La statistique expliquée à mon chat”, but following disagreement (like big ones) between the illustrator/animator and the statistician doing them it stopped producing content. The statistician, one of the few Belgians on this list, started his own channel. Some of the old videos have been reuploaded and then he also produces other videos which obviously don’t look as good because he is no artist, but still interesting videos about statistics applied to every day situations and the world around us on Chat sceptique.

One of the big French Youtube channel is Dirty Biology. He does, as the title says, mainly biology-related stuff (he did study it and started and stopped a phD in it). His videos are really well-done and thought provoking and I cannot recommend them enough. The videos used to be 5 to 10 min, now it’s more 10 to 20 minutes. He did a recent video in Svalbard about climate change, but also a video about scientific publishing, or the fact that we all have royal blood. Seriously watch it. Most if not all videos have subs in French and Spanish. Some have subs in English, but it’s a hit and miss.

Asking any French person about their favourite science show as a kid and they will answer C’est pas socier. The US have Bill Nye, we have Fred et Jamy. Fred decided with a team a couple of years ago to start a website (with the associated YT channel) to do an updated version of C’est pas sorcier called l’Esprit Sorcier. You can show this to your kids, show this in class. It is well-made and interesting, and really made to be easy to understand. Each show lasts for 25 min and has a YT version and a website interactive version (with the videos shorter). I have linked their show on quantum computers for example. There are sadly no subs.

So I talk about it below, but my favourite channel ever is Arte and they produce a lot of very good cultural and documentary-style. But more recently, they have started a Youtube channel with French Youtubers to talk about interesting topics, called Le Vortex. They do it by season and in season 1, they have among other Dirty Biology (see above), Scilabus and Passé Sauvage (see below) and Pause Process. They talked on agriculture and its development from an archaeological, anthropological, and scientific point of view, but also internet from a more scientific point of view, and also transhumanism because why not, you know. I highly recommend checking all of their videos and apart from the live, they almost all have French subs. The second season has been filmed, but hasn’t been posted yet.

So as mentioned above, Scilabus is part of le Vortex, but she also has her own channel. She is French, but lives in Canada, in Québec where she is a researcher. She takes questions you might ask yourself like Why is there so much air in your crisps packet? or Why does cardboard have undulations? or Is marathon that hard? and just answers them. Some videos have subs, not all, but all are interesting.

And the final science channel is Zeste de Science, ZdS is a channel powered by the CNRS (Conseil National de Recherche Scientifique), basically the body that funds scientific research in France. It is quite neat and they have a couple of different series. The main one is videos of around 5 min where they present a topic like how to model crowds or how to make a little thing of plastic dance disco. It’s entirely based on research produced by CNRS researchers, but in an easy to understand format. They have recently started a series where they present current research projects as if they were action films and it’s very funny. The videos have subs, but not all of them.

History:

French Youtube has a lot of history channel, the biggest of which is Nota Bene. He does a lot of videos with a preference for stories on the WW, medieval kings and leaders around the world and their stupid or epic deaths, but also more recently partnerships with French regions to promote French heritage. He has a lot of videos and several series you can start by (like recently a series on the historical inspirations in Game of Thrones). Just go and have a look to what interests you, there is a lot. Some have subs in several languages, some only in French, it depends. He has also done a series with Arte (keur keur, i love them) on history and video games which I highly recommend. The series is also available in German and with English, Polish, and Spanish subs because Arte. His wife and him have organised a summer festival with Youtubers (both those doing history, and others doing completely different topics) to come and do presentations about historical topics. They are all filmed and posted on his bonus channel. Note that they don’t have subs and the quality differs with some being really good and some I stopped after a few minutes.

Do you like Goodnight stories for Rebel Girls? Well AudeGG a French comedian has a channel where she presents the life of famous women past and present in Virago. The videos are 2-3 minutes long generally and from all around the globe. You can start by the first one on famous French revolutionary Olympe de Gouges. (She has also recently done a partnership with the French tv archives on the history important laws for the rights of women that is also super interesting.) They all have French subs.

Another one of the big History channel is C’est une autre histoire. Manon started her videos when she was still a phD student, she is now Doctor in History (contemporary and ancient, she looked at the representation of Athena in the 19th century if I remember correctly, super interesting stuff). She has videos where she talks about a mythological character and how we represent them (les relookings mythologiques), where she takes a painting and explains what it represents in mythology (or the Bible for a few of them) so that when you see three ladies with an apple each, you know it’s the Three Graces (Tu vois le tableau), where she visits cities and presents nice less known places (Les villes aux détails most of them with Eng subs as well / inspired by Axolot, see below). She recently started short animated videos. Most of her videos have subs in French and in other languages. She also did a vlog during her last year of phD so if you’re thinking of doing a phD, that’s a good series to watch where she talks about the process and all.

We move to the other side of the Atlantic to visit our cousins, the Québecois with history lecturer, Laurent Turcot and his L’Histoire nous le dira. There are lot of videos about European medieval history as well as more modern Canadian and Quebec history. It’s really interesting. There are also a few videos about sex and gender throughout history (the most recent ones were on witches and vaginal art e.g.). He also has a series of videos on the French Revolution (with subs in Portuguese because why not. Sadly no French subs ). In terms of subs, it varies, some have them, some don’t.

To present the next one, I have to plug another one first. This is the Youtube channel for a tv show by the best tv broadcaster in the world (no I do not take criticisms), Arte. Arte is a French-German public broadcaster that has the best programmes and among those, a show that has made a lot of people including myself want to study politics and international relations, Le Dessous des Cartes. The show are only 12 min long and will present a country or an issue using a map. There are only two shows available on the channel at the moment, but type any geopolitical topic or country or area + Le dessous des cartes and you’ll find a show uploaded on Youtube (like “arctique + dessous des cartes” or “religion + dessous des cartes” or “chine + dessous des cartes”). This is a must see.

Anyway so inspired by this, the small channel, L’Histoire par les cartes was created and it does what it says. There are not a lot of videos, they don’t have subs, they are 5-10 min long, but if you’re like me and enjoy a good map, this is neat little channel.

See Le Vortex above, highly recommend, they have both history and science videos.

I mentioned Passé Sauvage above because she was part of Le Vortex, but she also has a channel where she talks about archaeology (her degrees are in it), anthropology, and history. Her videos are of differing quality technically, but the content is always really interesting. For example, that one on Is democracy the best system? She is developing a new project for 2020 called Odyssée sauvage which I’m really excited about and in which she will travel to Greece to compare archaeological vestiges to Greek mythology. Some vids have subs, the majority don’t sadly.

Social Sciences/Humanities:

Manon Bril (from C’est une autre histoire, see above) has a channel with her former university where she presents, one video per month, the conclusion of a peer-reviewed journal articles in social sciences and humanities in an easy to digest format. It’s more serious than some of the others, but really interesting. It’s on Mondes Sociaux.

Do you like linguistics? I love linguistics personally and this channel is the best. It’s called Linguisticae and Monté explains topics as diverse as what was the first language spoken on Earth, why do we say maman and papa in every language, or why the Académie Française is bad. The videos go from 5 min (the mum/dad one), to 20 min (the first language on earth), to 1h30 for the one l’Académie Française). He also did a really good 50 min documentary on the history and the language of Esperanto which I highly recommend (I linked the part 1 because the doc cut in parts as subs in several languages (except English), but there is also a 50 min version, but it’s only available with subs in Esperanto). Or two long videos on Tolkien’s elf languages and GoT’s languages. He has a lot of videos so I’d advise going through and see what interests you.

That one is about economics because we think we know, but we don’t. In Stupid Economics, they take topics that are in the news and explain how the economics behind it works. They recently did a video on the fine the EU gave to Google and even had a follow-up with someone from the Commission to answer people’s questions. They have videos on the economy of attention, Bitcoin, or CETA. The length varies from 3 to 15 min depending on the type of videos. They are all very well-explained and relevant to the world around us. They tend to have subs, but it depends. The older videos have subs, it depends.

Art/Music:

That first channel is more a “check those two videos” because that’s the only thing posted on this channel, but Louvre Ravioli has posted two interesting videos, each on one painting with detailed explanations on what is represented.

NART is channel on art (chocking I know) where she has several series of videos. The first one is called “3 coups de pinceaux” in which she presents a painter in around 4 min so that you know about their style, story and all and you can recognise them. At the end of each episode she does a quiz where you have to recognise which of the four paintings is by the painter of the day. The latest one was on Schiele for exemple. She has a lot of videos on Art + something. Like Art and Manga or is make-up art. She also has a few videos presenting art exhibitions. She studied contemporary art and started her channel by a 3-part series on contemporary art for those of us who need an explanation which I remember finding really interesting. Some vids have subs (even sometimes Eng subs, but not French), but not all.

There are a few music channels on French vulgarisateurs side. You can find them here on the Mediapason channel. The only one I follow is the very neat channel called Scherzando which talks about medieval music. But also how it still is relevant today. Like the Beatles and the Renaissance or how Georges Brassens was maybe a troubadour. The content of the channel is diverse and it’s all very interesting! Some videos have subs, but not all.

Other:

One of the most famous French Youtuber of that category (although he does other things) is Axolot. Patrick Baud loves the strange and the weird. He has series on people or stories that have a strange atmosphere surrounding them for 6-10 min. He has one of the best voices around. Seriously, you will want to listen to it for hours. He also has a series called “étranges escales” where he goes to a city and shows you a different side to it and other places to visit (15-20 min). He published recently a really interesting video on people who “hunt” for planets and how we discover(ed) exoplanets and it’s just so good, highly recommend (30 min).

That isn’t so much about explaining stuff, but I feel like I should still mention it. Le J-Terre is a monthly news live show and debate about climate issues. It is a group effort by the whole French-speaking European community (so French peeps, but also Swiss and Belgian) to really talk about climate change. There are no subs, but it is really interesting. If those topics interest you, everyone involved in this has their channel plugged so you can find them and their all really interesting (Partager, c’est sympa did a series of videos at the COP24 that I highly recommend with French and English subs).

One of the participants to the J-Terre is Professeur Feuillage, made by married couple Mathieu Duméry (a journalist) and Lénie Cherino (a comedian) where they play a professor and his assistant and present (with a lock of dick jokes, innuendoes, and dildos so careful who you share it with) issues related to climate change like Internet pollution, deforestation, or cute things that are actually destroying the environment. Lénie is actually going to take a bigger part in the channel and it will change a bit, but it’s the very beginning of that, so not sure what it’ll look like. The older videos have subs, not the newest ones sadly.

That one isn’t really popularisation per se, but I want to include it here. Vivre Avec is Margot’s channel where they talk about their life with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. Recently it has turned a bit more to their plants and their rabbits, but the core of the channel is centred around disability. What is EDS?, what are certain things that people say that really they shouldn’t (the latest video is about people being like “Your life is horrible, it really puts things in perspective” :////). They are videos about symptoms, mobility aids, etc. as well as talking to medicine and nursing students about how to treat patients. All of their videos have French subs.

There are obviously more channels, but those are the ones I follow. If you check the “Channels” tab of most of them, they all have other great recommendations if that isn’t enough for you. Please feel free to add more if you want and come and talk to me about them because I love channels where I can learn stuff.

[gnetophyte]

im wondering a lot about the american tendency to read american racial politics into international media- i know a girl talking a lot on instagram about mulan as an “asian story” and her point, which i agree with, was that white americans should not be the creative teams behind a project like mulan. but would chinese americans or asian americans who have no familial/cultural/diasporic ties to china be different or better? n america we’ve started to dissolve a wiiiiiide variety of diasporic cultures and ethnic groups into something called “asian american” which gets shorthanded as “asian” but i’m not sure that construction holds up very well when taken out of the american context. 

i guess im a little hesitant to believe that mulan is “asian,” especially in the way that americans understand asianness. like is there some sort of common cultural thread linking people from siberia to people from korea to people from afghanistan to people from sri lanka? i’m hesitant to accept that “asian” exists as a racial/ethnic category in asia bc like... everyone there /is/ asian ykwim. as USians we don’t think of ourselves as having distinctive shared cultural ties to mexico and canada, but that’s also a continental identity, and i’m sure someone from the (fucking enormous) continent of asia could make a claim about pan-americanness that would puzzle a lot of us. 

i think it’s tough bc i’m operating from conversations on americans reading an americanized blackness into a wide variety of west african countries despite the fact that almost 100% of the population is “black” (ie has darker skin and curlier hair than many europeans) and therefore it’s not very useful or sensitive to name that as a common uniting factor for people. but it gets harder because asia is a place and therefore “asian” exists both as a racial category in america and a linguistically accurate demonym for people from the entire continent of asia (which, again, contains more than half the world’s population). 

i know this all sorta sounds nitpicky and idk maybe it is but i guess i’m just curious as to how americans inherently have a cultural subjectivity that is unable to see or consume anything that doesn’t approximate itself, and all the little things that get lost in translation during that process w regards to “representation,” identification, and diaspora. and i honestly probably should not be speaking on any of this tbh it’s nunna my business bc it’s not like i’m chinese which ig would give me the necessary authority to comment on this whole ouroborous anyways (same could be said for the girl who initially posted on instagram and got me thinking abt this bc she is also white).

and like for the record it’s pretty apparent that the mulan remake was dead in the water for a lot of reasons- my guess is that the execs wanted to market to both chinese audiences (or maybe HK/chinese international audiences if the movie gets banned) and US american audiences who are going to want vastly vastly different things from a mulan movie lol. the choice to use an all-white creative team was a horrible one- even if we don’t care about authenticity or representation from a normative standpoint, which I do, they completely missed an opportunity to market this movie as “the first of its kind” by having a chinese-american creative team and get a bunch of clickbaity articles from buzzfeed about it and justify the existence of a mulan remake in the first place which no one needed because the 1998 movie is fun and has striking + visually distinct animation which marvel-style CGI can’t hope to top. i’m fs not arguing that the creative team was well chosen or that we shouldn’t worry about behind-the-scenes rep

just- the audience interactions for an american movie based on a chinese legend that had a pretty large cultural impact in america that was probably felt deeply by chinese-americans, reproduced by an american studio with express permission from the chinese govt with white american producers/directors/creatives and chinese international actors.... it’s dizzying! lots to unpack lots to unpack for sure

[cindylouwho-2]

RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, June 28 2020

Welcome to my latest summary of recent ecommerce news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & Etsy! This covers articles, podcasts, videos and infographics I came across since the late May report, although some may be older than that.

I am currently working on Etsy search testing and a few new blog posts and pages for my website, so it may be a few more weeks before I get a new report out. In the meantime, if you have an questions, comments or suggestions, please contact me here or on my website.  

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES 

Ecommerce sales are way up, but so are many costs, and delays in shipping are part of the problem. “...many of our merchants start preparing mid-year for peak-season volume, holidays. We’ve seen many merchants hitting and even exceeding their normal Black Friday and Cyber Monday volumes consistently through April, forcing them to adapt quickly for greater capacity.” UPS is charging high-volume customers a surcharge based on how much more they are shipping compared to normal times, and also for an increase in oversized packages. 

Mail delivery is still slow in many countries. Canada Post hit an all-time delivery record with 2.1 million parcels on May 19, but may finally be getting caught up. [article in French] Shipping between countries can also be substantially delayed, in part due to the lack of air traffic right now. USPS is using sea transport for packages to some European countries. And USPS rates are going up for international shipping in July, due to the new Universal Postal Union deal. "Anyone who is a bulk shipper, your rates are going up".

A reminder that the US economy isn't suddenly going to stabilize in the fall; it’s likely to crash. The US is now officially in a recession. Many people are not going to have money for a lot of discretionary spending. Furthermore, some categories of items will likely drop in price due to company closures, supply chain issues and bankruptcies. That will increase competition at the same time there are fewer buyers for many types of items. Ecommerce sales in the US are projected to rise 18% this year, but it won’t be enough to make up for the loss of brick & mortar retail sales. “The apparel and accessories category is typically the second-largest in e-commerce, for example, but will only grow 8.6% as consumers shift spending away from discretionary, non-essential purchases.”  Retail in the US is expected to be down more than 10% in 2020.

ETSY NEWS 

Etsy has released an addition to the iOS app that will allow shoppers to use augmented reality to see wall art on their home’s walls. The Verge was critical of how long it took for Etsy to catch up with the competition, and the fact that it is not available for Android yet. TechCrunch went into more detail. 

As mentioned last time, you can now add short, no-audio videos to your listings. Etsy is so big on this, they are offering listing credits and ad credits to sellers who upload 5 or more videos by July 6. As always, make sure you read the legal policies before you participate in this offer. 

The Etsy Design Awards are back, with submissions due by July 15th. Note that they are only open to 38 countries, for some reason. There is a forum discussion thread with tips, and a podcast [audio & transcript] with previous winners.

If you sell any items for kids, you will find this trending items article from Etsy useful. Searches including “kid,” “child,” or “baby” didn’t go up as much in April as one might have expected, given the pandemic shopping bump, but puzzles were popular. They include some search terms: for example, there was a “250% YoY increase in searches on Etsy containing “jump rope” in April. Also, “while school may look different this fall, we’re already seeing an increase for school-related searches compared to the same time last year.”

Face mask seller ZhenLinen was interviewed on NPR [text and audio] about mask selling, and was even asked about the offsite ads fees near the end. They sold 31,000 masks while their event-supply business was in pandemic limbo; most of those sales were through Etsy. The good news articles about mask sales, & suggesting Etsy as a source of masks, are continuing, although some do mention slow delivery times and even undelivered orders. By the way, if any mask sellers are looking for new places to sell, Facebook finally caught up and is now allowing mask sales, ads and other promotions. 

According to analysis of Etsy’s API data, May 2020 was Etsy’s best month ever. Remember that the API data misses things like sales of multiples, so it is not the most accurate source, but I don’t have any reason to doubt the statement is true. 

Etsy stock went over $100 for the first time, before dropping as the rest of the market went down. 

You have probably already seen Etsy’s statement on race issues after the recent murder in the US. “That’s why today we are announcing donations of $500,000 to the Equal Justice Initiative and $500,000 to Borealis Philanthropy’s Black-Led Movement Fund, as well as matching employee donations. We encourage our community to join us in supporting these important organizations.  Etsy is built on a belief that communities have the power to change the status quo. Change is hard-fought, and we are committed to this fight.“

If you have your real name on your Etsy account, don’t attract any attention from the police. 

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES 

If you don’t really understand what algorithms are and how they work for search engines, you will want to get caught up here. Key to understanding: “An algorithm is not a formula.”

This is a bit advanced, but it’s a good explanation of how to figure out searcher intent in Google results, and then fulfill it with new content. [video, transcript, and downloadable form]

Linking from one page on your website to another can be an important part of SEO. It can also help you get more page views, if you link to new pages from your most popular pages. Creating internal site links on the same page through a table of contents [advanced, coding info] can even get you more links in Google search results. 

Speed on mobile devices is also a big part of SEO as well as conversions. “a 0.1 second improvement in site speed resulted in Retail conversions increases of 8.4% and average order value increases of 9.2%.”

Bing made changes to its backlink tool, including the ability to see your competition’s backlinks. The option is part of Bing’s Webmaster tools, & allows you to analyze “similar sites”. Their Webmaster Tools now can also analyze your site for SEO errors. 

A former Google employee is starting a new search engine, called Neeva. 

Some SEOs recommend removing “low-quality” pages from your site to improve your overall rankings, but low-quality doesn’t necessarily mean pages that few people visit [text & video]. And short posts are not necessarily “low-quality”. If your page is mostly duplicate content, it is like low quality, but just repeating a few lines on each page is not duplicate content. 

Google missed a few episodes of its Google search news YouTube post during the pandemic, but they were back on May 26 with an update. They’ve also finally released their webspam report for 2019. “we observed that more than 25 Billion pages we discover each day are spammy.”

Advanced content [video with multi-language subtitles, & text summary in English]: Google, JavaScript, & links. 

Shopify sites have built-in blogs,and those blogs can help you get sales through SEO. And while we are on Shopify SEO, here is some advice on fixing technical SEO issues on Shopify sites. [the second is advanced content unless you know some coding]

While having an author page isn’t a requirement on any news/blog site, it might be a good idea anyway [text and video]. Content that is useful for readers is ultimately good for your site’s SEO. 

Here is a history of Google’s PageRank, and what it still does for ranking. 

Did the Google May core update really mess up organic search relevance? Some people think so. [I had noticed the Wikipedia drop but thought it was just for a particular search.] There may be more ranking updates underway right now. 

Google plans on introducing user experience as part of the ranking algorithm, although it won’t happen before next year, and we will get 6 months warning. Search Engine Land lists the following elements: “whether the page loads quickly, if it’s mobile-friendly, runs on HTTPS, the presence of intrusive ads and if content jumps around as the page loads.” They add a bunch of technical advice, and the tools to follow up on it. 

Do you find SEO confusing? Don’t worry - even the pros working for big companies make huge errors. 

(CONTENT) MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA (includes blogging & emails) 

Updated infographic with the common social media image sizes used today. (Several of these get published yearly, because there are always changes.)

Is blogging still relevant? [TL;DR - yes] And if you want to write more interactive posts, here are some tools for that. 

Video app TikTok made a lot of money in April, but is seeing competition from a new short video app called Zynn, which allows users to make money by watching videos and bringing in new users. However, Zynn has already been removed from Google Play store amid accusations of content theft. Instagram has a challenger called “Reels”, and even YouTube wants some of that TikTok traffic, so they are introducing 15 second videos. Meanwhile, TikTok is coming under closer scrutiny for its invasive tracking. 

Every social network apparently needs to have their own version of Stories these days, so Pinterest has introduced a new version of Story Pins in the US. “Unlike Stories on other platforms, which are often self-focused snippets from someone’s life, Pinterest Stories Pins are designed as clickable content focused on sharing ideas. For example, Story Pins could offer a step-by-step guide to cooking a recipe or creating a craft project. A Story Pin could also offer ideas around how to reorganize your home office, keeping the kids entertained, beauty tutorials and more.”

Google appears to be imitating Pinterest with their new release, called “Keen”. You add items yourself but Google then attempts to find more things you are interested in, using AI. 

If you are looking for some new tools to help with Instagram, Social Media Today compiled a list of 5 recent ones. They include image processing, templates, and analytics. 

Twitter is beta-testing the ability to tweet sound files directly from the platform, instead of embedding links to other sites. The article notes that these may be more difficult to moderate than text tweets would be. 

Two of the three parts of this article cover local businesses, but the middle part has some promotional ideas that mostly involve content marketing & social media. Nothing groundbreaking, but a decent list if you are looking for new free ways to advertise.

ONLINE ADVERTISING (SEARCH ENGINES, SOCIAL MEDIA, & OTHERS) 

Semi-advanced - how to improve your Google Ads optimization score. 

GCLID is short for “Google Click Identifier” to help track ads and conversions. You can learn more here. [Understanding this is useful for both your own ad campaigns and understanding other ads, such as the Etsy Offsite Ads program.)

Money coming in from social media video ads has increased from the lows in April. Facebook ads have improved the most. 

New advertisers on Instagram will not necessarily have to link their accounts to Facebook any more. It may be linked to a campaign to “stop hate for profit” that calls for people to stop buying Facebook & Instagram ads during July, and which has attracted several big players such as Unilever and Verizon. Some companies are leaving all social media ads, or are extending the Facebook boycott until the end of the year. But as the first article points out, Zuckerberg’s complete control of voting means he can’t be turfed by a board just to protect profit, so a short boycott may not be the best way to get change. 

Facebook published a new explanation of how ads work on the platform. 

STATS, DATA, OTHER TRACKING 

For people who are new to Google Analytics: here are some things you should be tracking, as well as these, and some tips on finding source info for SEO work. If you want to improve your customers’ experience with the site, check out these tips. [There is some crossover between the 4 articles, but I think that those of you trying to learn more detailed examples of how GA works will find everything useful.]

What is a “session” in Google Analytics? This article includes screenshots & tips on changing their length. 

You can get great keyword data from the Google Search Console - here’s how. 

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS 

Online shopping has received a huge boost from the pandemic lockdowns, and big online marketplaces are now competing for new small businesses to fill the growing demand. Walmart outsold eBay in May, for the first time ever. Things are slowing down a bit, though: “buy-online-pick-up-in-store (BOPIS) had begun to “plateau.” BOPIS growth in May was 195% year over year, which was down from its April peak of more than 200%.”

Amazon is being criticized for allowing many prohibited items to be sold on the site, even through “fulfilled by Amazon”, so the items are stored in its warehouses. “Graham did not respond directly to many of our specific questions, including how many of the banned items that The Markup found had been sold, why the company had not noticed some of them for months, why some were listed as Amazon’s Choice, and why many were stored in Amazon’s warehouses for shipment. He did not respond at all to questions about why Amazon itself had offered banned items for sale. Most of the banned listings we reported to Amazon have been removed, although at least three have popped back up.” [emphasis added]

Amazon is now offering multi-channel fulfillment in the US; you don’t even need to use Fulfillment by Amazon to sign up. They’ve also introduced lines of credit for sellers, through a partnership with Goldman Sachs. 

eBay is rallying sellers to object to a proposed Louisiana law that would force marketplace sites to verify the identities of higher-volume sellers in the state. The law was passed anyway, and takes effect July 1. Here are the highlights of the new law.

Now-fired eBay employees harassed and stalked the EcommerceBytes owner and her husband for months after eBay’s CEO at the time said eBay needed to “take down” the site & its owner.

Walmart now has ThredUp as one of its third-party sellers on the Walmart website. They sell second-hand clothing and accessories for women & kids, often famous labels. Sales are all online but buyers will be able to return things to Walmart stores. 

Walmart has also partnered with Shopify, allowing small businesses to list directly on Walmart’s website through Shopify. This appears to be a limited initiative, as they only plan on including 1200 Shopify sellers by the end of 2020. Most analysts think this is a plan to compete with Amazon more directly. 

In addition to its existing website, Target is now offering items on Instagram Checkout. 

Shopify has been getting great media coverage lately, including this article suggesting them as an alternative to Amazon third-party selling, once the new “Shop” app gets some traction. 

BigCommerce has introduced drag-and-drop design tools for its website builder. 

Square has begun using rolling reserves to reduce its risk with some sellers. “In one instance, Legal Knock, a company that builds websites for law firms, told the Times that it never had a customer demand a refund for their work and yet Square kept $4,000 in reserve in May. Sean Weber, the owner, said he had trouble contacting the company and wasn't satisfied with its explanation. He even said Square blocked him on Twitter.”

Upcoming PayPal changes for US users include seller protection for some digital items, and not necessarily requiring buyers to return items to win a significantly not as described case. Remember that many PayPal changes start with the US and then expand to other countries; Canadian changes are here. 

BUSINESS & CONSUMER STUDIES, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE 

When thinking about customer returns, remember that a lower-than-average return rate is not necessarily your top goal. “You may ask, “why would a merchant want to increase returns?” It’s because they’re using returns as a growth driver. They’ve figured out, for their respective businesses, that a higher rate of returns actually nets out to an increase in sales and repeat purchasing. So much so, that the overall uptick in business far outweighs the increased costs of more frequent returns.”

Consumers are reading reviews more than ever, but half of this study’s respondents said that “‘too many companies’ are creating fake reviews online.”

Many people are tired of the “things are different” ads that have predominated, & want to see more ads showing people getting back to normal. “The U.S., U.K. and the Netherlands are primed for a jump in fashion purchases, with significant percentages of consumers in those countries planning clothing purchases in the next 30 days. The finding suggests that fashion marketers may increase their marketing efforts to reach consumers who are ready to buy apparel as lockdowns are lifted.”

We don’t know what the holiday shopping season will look like this year, so ecommerce businesses should be planning for many different scenarios. 

Here’s an interesting overview of how some searches changed in the first few months of the pandemic. [infographic] And some of the shopping changes people made, especially Gen Z, may be permanent. “...younger consumers are shifting their habits faster than their older counterparts.” That report also states that “33% of these consumers have increased their online spending, for a net increase of 6%, versus 23% of consumers in older generations, or a net increase of 1%.”

Here’s more on the second-hand clothing trend that is hitting its boom years. “According to the report, secondhand goods are expected to make up 17% of a person’s share of closet space by 2029, up from just 3% in 2009.” Gen Z is a big user of Depop, which has a lot of altered and enhanced vintage clothing available. 

MISCELLANEOUS 

This article has inspired me to completely redo my website’s About page. Not yet, of course, but some day soon…

Speaking of websites, here’s a good list of dos & don’ts for a contact form.

eBay may be probing your computer when you visit, and that is not always legal. 

Free Zoom accounts can’t set up encrypted calls/meetings, because “the firm wants to keep this feature away from free users to work with law enforcement in case of the app’s misuse.”

Finally in privacy news, Google is being sued for still tracking you in various ways when you use Chrome’s incognito mode. 

[janiedean]

ah well, enough’s enough.

so, I noticed that tumblr used @gamoralives who of course has preventively blocked me is going around publishing SCREENCAPS of my replies to that op about the holocaust but not of my actual replies because of course not and I was trying to reblog it from @galactic-jewce-box who in turn was reblogging it from @jewish-privilege but ALL THREE OF THEM HAVE BLOCKED ME OF COURSE SINCE I CANNOT TAG THEM, from which we can ABSOLUTELY NOTICE how strong is their spine since they can’t even talk to me properly.

okay then, I know that this post is not gonna get screencapped as a whole but since y’all are a bunch of immature assholes who think they can get away with slandering people behind their backs, spread misinformation and be honestly disgusting people because first they accuse ME of holocaust denial and then

 deny that categories other than jewish and roma people have died in it

completely ignore that queer people died in it

ignore that disabled died in it

ignore that the pacific front had another genocide going on that had equal if not higher numbers of dead people

have suddenly decided that wwii and the holocaust are two separated things when before they weren’t

spread misinformation about auschwitz works

complain about polish ppl not fighting the nazis enough and then literally spit on the ones who did by going like IF A HANDFUL OF POLISH GENTILES DIED IT DOESN’T MATTER guess what you completely fucking asshole those people were political prisoners and I have absolutely no qualms calling you an asshole by this point so they died to fight the nazis but I guess that’s not good enough for YOU ALL FUCKING AMERICANS WHO HAVEN’T EVER SET A FOOT IN EUROPE HAVE YOU

I’m going at it. bye.

so, what my pals had to say about me.

THIS is what gamoralives screenshotted:

of course, she didn’t, like, LINK TO EITHER OF MY OPS, one and two in which I said a lot of things, INCLUDING:

like no one is denying that jewish people were the the most targeted category and no one is even dreaming of it and no one is denying that everyone had responsibilities in the jewish ethnic cleansing but the ‘blame the polish at all costs’ mentality I’m seeing in some comments on this post is honestly baffling and not really what brings us to a constructive discussion on the topic.

but of course y’all could not, like, directly engage with me on my op. nooooo. YOU SCREENSHOTTED THE REPLIES TO MY OP BY PEOPLE WHO WERE AGREEING WITH ME AND THEN GO AROUND SAYING I’M ANTISEMITE. GOD YOU’RE FUCKING COWARDS.

but never mind that.

so, what else does my pal, my friend gamoralives (WHO NEVER ONCE TOUCHED THE TOPIC DIRECTLY WITH ME lmao) have to say about me?

OOOOH, IT DISGUSTS YOU?

let’s see what disgusts me instead.

this is one of the OPs that got the screenshot from the OP of that post which we all know was yours like shut up don’t even try to deny it is:

that’s what some pal of yours had to say:

THEN YOU GO AND SAY THIS:

like YOU GODDAMNED IDIOTS YOU REALLY THINK Y’ALL CAN SPIN THIS AGREEING WITH ‘HOLOCAUST AND THE WWII BELONG TO ONE GROUP ONLY’ AND THEN YOU DO A 180° AND SAY THAT WWII AND THE HOLOCAUST ARE TWO SEPARATED THINGS????????????

LIKE???????

ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS????

YOU SAID THAT WWII ***AND*** THE HOLOCAUST ARE PROPERTY OF JUST JEWISH PEOPLE AND ROMANI AND THEN YOU GO AND CLAIM THAT WWII IS NOT THE HOLOCAUST?

LIKE??????

but it’s not even the worst because honestly I still have fucking vomit in my mouth from this:

and then you do this:

YOU GODDAMNED - I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT TO CALL YOU, I HONESTLY HAVE EXHAUSTED THE WORDS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, BUT SINCE YOU’RE SO EXPERT IN ANYTHING WWII, PLEASE LET ME FUCKING C/P YOU A THING YOU CAN FIND ON THE FUCKING AUSCHWITZ WEBSITE MUSEUM PAGE which you’d know if you actually set foot in there (spoilers: my antisemite ass did and I actually went to krakow 40% for the rest and 60% because I’ve been wanting to visit since I was fucking eight because I started reading up about concentration camps and studying wwii when I was in elementary school because I was interested and I never stopped, differently from you who most likely only learned how to *research* now by c/p-ing together information that doesn’t count the other side but oKAY THEN):

Gas chamber I

Auschwitz I, Crematorium I and the first gas chamber

This object is preserved in an original state to a large degree. Crematorium I operated from August 1940 in a prewar ammunition bunker adapted for its new function. The largest room was a morgue, which was changed into a provisional gas chamber. There were three furnaces for burning corpses in crematorium I, ordered by the camp administration from the Topf and Söhne company, which installed them.

When the gas chambers in Birkenau were going into operation, the camp authorities transferred the mass killing operation there and gradually phased out the first gas chamber. In July 1943, after the completion of the Birkenau crematoria, the burning of corpses in crematorium I ended. The furnaces and chimney were dismantled, and the holes in the roof used for introducing Zyklon B were closed. Two of the three furnaces and the chimney were reconstructed (from original parts), and several of the holes in the roof of the gas chamber were reopened.

Outside the boundaries of the Museum, the railroad siding and unloading platform (the so-called Judenramp or "old ramp") is commemorated. Transports of Jews deported for killing, and also of Roma and prisoners of other nationalities, arrived here from 1942-1944.

YOU GODDAMNED FUCKING ASSHOLE, YOU ARE SAYING THAT *AUSCHWITZ AND BIRKENAU WERE DIFFERENT CAMPS AND THAT NO ONE DIED SYSTEMATICALLY IN AUSCHWITZ BUT THEY DID IN BIRKENAU WHEN BIRKENAU WAS BUILT WHEN THEY DIDN’T HAVE SPACE IN AUSCHWITZ ANYMORE TO KILL PEOPLE *INCLUDING FUCKING POLISH POLITICAL PRISONERS WHO WERE THE FIRST CATEGORY IN THERE FOR TWO FUCKING YEARS* AND THEN *I* AM THE ONE DOING HISTORICAL REVISIONISM??? ARE YOU FOR FUCKING REAL??

MISCONCEPTION?????

MISCONCEPTION???????

and *I* m the revisionis according to you???????

and you actually don’t have the decency to realize you’re wrong and like drop this conversation and shut the fuck up already?

nooooooo trash talk me and say to pre-eventively block because why the fuck not?

here, you want pictures because you don’t trust the website?

I FUCKING TOOK THEM WHEN I WENT. HAVE YOU? SINCE YOU’RE FUCKING ***AMERICAN*** I DOUBT IT AND TBH YOU BEING AMERICAN IN THIS CASE TRUMPS WHATEVER ELSE YOU ARE BECAUSE AMERICANS TALKING ABOUT WWII AS IF THEY LIVED IT WHEN THEY DON’T HAVE A RELATIVE THAT FOUGHT IN IT CAN, AS FAR AS I’M CONCERNED, SHUT THE HELL UP ALREADY, SIT BACK AND LEARN FROM US PEOPLE WHO LIVE WHERE IT WAS ACTUALLY FOUGHT.

anyway, this is the gas chamber + ovens in auschwitz 1. I was inside it. it wasn’t nice. I still wanna vomit if I think about it. sure as hell I wouldn’t be using it to prove a point about fandom if I were you.

that’s the ovens:

BUT NONE OF THAT EXISTED IN AUSCHWITZ 1????????

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME????

then again, have a few other choice things that I took pictures of while I was having my merry stroll around the place while trying to not throw up in my mouth:

LOOK AT HOW MANY CATEGORIES ARE LISTED IN THAT HANDY, PRETTY CHART, HMMMMMM? I even put the high-res picture in case you wanna look at it in depth :D

that’s the monument for FRENCH PATRIOTS OF WAR BUT I GUESS THOSE don’t count either. aaaah and wait a moment I went into the barracks and took pictures of the explanations and look at what I have for you:

just in case you can’t bother to open it: that’s about the execution of polish citizens and the quote of the nazi commander in the white tag is:

‘'if I wanted to put up a poster for every seven poles who were shot the polish forests wouldn't be enough to produce the paper for such notices'.

UHM. A HANDFUL OF POLISH GOYIM, @gamoralives? god, you’re such a blatant, spineless hypocrite I can’t even.

ah, but wait, I’m not done:

I think that one’s large enough you can read it yourself.

like, wow, and I am the revisionist.

I’d say kindly shut the fuck up just based on that, but hey, then you went and reblogged this piece of shit post which has been making me almost vomit my tea all over again:

POOR

DEFENSELESS

EUROPEANS IN NAZI OCCUPIED COUNTRIES

for WILLINGLY HANDING THEIR JEWS OVER TO GERMANS?????????????????? MOST EUROPEANS WERE GLAD?????????

@tikkunolamorgtfo I’M TAGGING YOU BECAUSE APPARENTLY YOU HAVEN’T BLOCKED ME YET, BUT YOU KNOW WHAT? FUCK. YOU.

NAZIS FORCIBLY INVADED MOST OF THIS GODDAMNED FUCKING CONTINENT. THE FRENCH CERTAINLY DIDN’T WANT GERMANS ON THEIR SOIL. THE POLISH DIDN’T AS WELL AND YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT GIVEN POLAND’S HISTORY WITH BOTH THEM AND THE RUSSIANS. THE SLOVENES, HUNGARIANS, CZECHS AND SERBS SURE AS FUCKING HELL DIDN’T ASK FOR IT EITHER, NOR THE NETHERLANDS WHICH WERE NEUTRAL AND NOR THE DANISH NOR BELGIUM AND YOU GODDAMNED LYING ASSHOLE, if you go to the copenhagen jewish museum there’s an entire part of it just dedicated to how the danish rallied and tried to send off to sweden as many jewish people as they could.

but no, you’re here saying that we’re all happy that the nazis/russians/americans/whoever else occupied our damned nations and did whatever the fuck they wanted just because we wanted to get rid of the jewish people?

well I’m going to tell you a story since y’all are so sure I can’t talk about wwii because I’m neither jewish nor roma but never mind. one or two. to you, gamoralives and all the goddamned assholes on that thread who didn’t even have the guts to engage with me directly because you know you’re wrong. and since I’m from italy, THE LAND OF THE DOUBLE-CROSSING PPL DURING WARS, let me just tell you a few things I can say as someone who’s studied this shit for twenty years.

1) hitler thought mussolini was his role model and shit. guess what, fascism initially targeted some categories, which were either killed or sent off to ‘confino’ which was basically ‘we’re sending you to a small town in the middle of nowhere where everyone knows you don’t like the regime’. who got sent to confino? political adversaries, gay men, prostitutes and trans people. and while sad to say ghetto is an originally italian word so we have our bad history of antisemitism as well, guess what, there were no laws against jewish people until ‘38 when mussolini officially allied with hitler and had to get on with the plan, and actually ALL THE NEOFASCISTS IN ITALY WHO JUSTIFY HIM SAY THAT ‘HEY HE WAS GOOD BUT THEN HE MADE THE MISTAKE OF LISTENING TO HITLER AND DOING THE RACIAL LAWS’, but you wouldn’t know that, would you? while europe has never not been antisemite BUT actually at the beginning of the 20th century things had been going better until hitler showed up, NO ONE WAS FUCKING THINKING ABOUT GENOCID-ING ANYONE IN THOSE TERMS. but okay.

2) the italian government seeing how the tide was turning in 1943 decided to change sides and go with the americans instead after deposing mussolini - fair enough, except that THEY DIDN’T WARN ANYONE LESS OF ALL THE ITALIAN ARMY which resulted in all the italian soldiers stationed in places not under allied control to end up deported to concentration camps and so on, except that then it gets better because italy got split in two with americans south of salerno and the germans north of it which meant we ended up in a civil war where partisans fought nazis in the north and americans tried to advance from the south and hmm

wow, just the russians whose total death toll was TWENTY MILLION did better than us but never mind that, SINCE YOU DIDN’T BOTHER TO READ MY OP, LET ME REMIND YOU THAT THE GERMANS WENT AROUND KILLING CIVILIANS RANDOMLY INCLUDING 130 CHILDREN AT ONCE FOR THE ENTIRETY OF THE CIVIL WAR AND THAT THE ALLIED FRENCH ARMY POST-CASSINO RAPED AN AMOUNT OF MOST LIKELY 7K PEOPLE CAUSING A RIDICULOUSLY HIGH NUMBER OF SUICIDES ESPECIALLY IN BETWEEN WOMEN, but if you’d fucking bother, never mind:

After the armistice with the Allies, some 650,000 members of the Italian armed forces who refused to side with the occupying Germans were interned in concentration and labour camps. Of these, around 50,000 died while imprisoned or while under transportation. A further 29,000 died in armed struggles against the Germans while resisting capture immediately following the armistice

how bad, but:

marzabotto massacre (700+ dead)

fosse ardeatine massacre

sant’anna di stazzema massacre (130 children including A TWENTY-DAYS OLD)

or you could go on the WHOLE WIKIPEDIA PAGE ABOUT WWII massacres here where idk I’m opening a few pages at random of stuff happened in PLACES THAT THE NAZIS OCCUPIED:

Kisielin massacre was a massacre of Polish worshipers which took place in the Volhynian village of Kisielin (Second Polish Republicuntil 1939), now Kysylyn, located in the Volyn Oblast, Ukraine. It took place on Sunday, July 11, 1943, when units of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), supported by local Ukrainian peasants, surrounded Poles who had gathered for a ceremony at a local Roman-Catholic church. Around 60 to 90 persons or more, men, women and children – were ordered to take off their clothes and were then massacred by machine gun. The wounded were killed with weapons such as axes and knives. Those who survived (around 200 by some accounts) escaped to the presbytery and barricaded themselves for eleven hours.

The Kragujevac massacre was the mass murder of between 2,778 and 2,794 mostly Serb men and boys in Kragujevac by Germansoldiers on 21 October 1941. It occurred in the German-occupied territory of Serbia during World War II, and came in reprisal for insurgent attacks in the Gornji Milanovac district that resulted in the deaths of 10 German soldiers and the wounding of 26 others. The number of hostages to be shot was calculated as a ratio of 100 hostages executed for every German soldier killed and 50 hostages executed for every German soldier wounded, a formula devised by Adolf Hitler with the intent of suppressing anti-Nazi resistance in Eastern Europe. (3k deaths total)

The Kraljevo massacre was the mass murder of approximately 2,000 residents of the central Serbian city of Kraljevo by the Wehrmacht between 15 and 20 October 1941, during World War II. The massacre came in reprisal for a joint Partisan–Chetnik attack on a German garrison in which 10 German soldiers were killed and 14 wounded. The number of hostages to be shot was calculated based on a ratio of 100 hostages executed for every German soldier killed and 50 hostages executed for every German soldier wounded, a formula devised by Adolf Hitler with the intent of suppressing anti-Nazi resistance in Eastern Europe.

In World War II, in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, the Lidice massacre was a complete destruction of the village of Lidice, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, now in the Czech Republic, in June 1942 on orders from Adolf Hitler and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.In reprisal for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in the late spring of 1942, all 173 males over 15 years of age from the village were executed on 10 June 1942. Another 11 men who were not in the village were arrested and executed soon afterwards, along with several others already under arrest. The 184 women and 88 children were deported to concentration camps; a few children considered racially suitable for Germanisation were handed over to SS families and the rest were sent to the Chełmno extermination camp where they were gassed to death. The Associated Press, quoting German radio received in New York, said: "All male grownups of the town were shot, while the women were placed in a concentration camp, and the children were entrusted to appropriate educational institutions." About 340 people from Lidice died because of the German reprisal (192 men, 60 women and 88 children) and after the war ended, only 153 women and 17 children returned.

The Maillé Massacre refers to the murder on 25 August 1944 of 124 of the 500 residents of the commune of Maillé in the department of the Indre-et-Loire. Following an ambush a few days before and in reprisals against activities of the French Resistance, Second Lieutenant Gustav Schlüter and his men organized the massacre and burnt the village. Forty-eight children were among the dead. The SS unit believed to be responsible for the massacre is the SS-Feldersatzbataillon 17 of 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division Götz von Berlichingen (Lieb, 2007). In contrast to Oradour-sur-Glane, the village was rebuilt after the war to its pre-war state (Delahousse, 2008).

The Muczne massacre of 16 August 1944 was the massacre of Polish civilians committed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UIA) in village Muczne located in Bieszczady County in Poland.Among the Poles were mainly refugees after the repression of the population in Volhynia and retreating in front of - 70 Poles were murdered. They were residents of nearby villages such as foresters, priests and children. Members of the UPA murdered Poles with axes, pitchforks and scythes.In place of the murder in 2010 the memorial and a wooden cross was erected.

The Palikrowy massacre was a war crime committed by 4th police SS-regiment made up of Ukrainian soldiers of the SS-Galizien who were removed from the SS-Galizien at the time of the massacre and placed under German police command, Ukrainian SVK ("Self-defence", Ukrainian: Samoobronni Kuszczowi Widdiły) forces and Ukrainian Insurgent Army on Poles in the village of Palikrowy (since 1945 Palykorovy), which took place on 12 March 1944. A total of 385 Poles were killed. Palikrowy was an ethnically mixed village, with 70% Polish population. In 1944, the population was about 1880, with about 360 houses. The action in Palikrowy was coordinated with the attack on nearby Pidkamin including the monastery in Pidkamin, where some of inhabitants from Palikrowy were hiding during the massacre of Poles in Volhynia. All the inhabitants of Palikrowy were gathered on a meadow near village. The Ukrainian inhabitants of the village were released. Then the Poles were killed by two heavy machine guns. Only a few wounded people survived. Polish houses were burned down and hiding Polish civilians were murdered, and their property stolen.

or, SINCE WE’RE DISCUSSING THE POLISH: The massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia (Polish: rzeź wołyńska, literally: Volhynian slaughter; Ukrainian: Волинська трагедія, Volyn tragedy), was an ethnic cleansing (some polish scientiests think that was a genocide) carried out in Nazi German-occupied Poland by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the UPA) against Poles in the area of Volhynia, Polesia, Lublin region and Eastern Galicia beginning in 1943 and lasting up to 1945. The peak of the genocide took place in July and August 1943. Most of the victims were women and children. UPA's methods were particularly brutal, with many of the victims being tortured and mutilated, and resulted in 40,000–60,000 Polish deaths in Volhynia and 30,000–40,000 in Eastern Galicia, with the other regions for the total about 100,000.

The Janowa Dolina massacre took place on 23 April 1943 in the village of Janowa Dolina, (now Bazaltove, Ukraine) during occupation of Poland in World War II. Before the Nazi-Soviet invasion of the Polish Second Republic, Janowa Dolina was a model settlement built in the Kostopol County of the Wołyń Voivodeship by workers of the Polish State Basalt Quarry. The town was inhabited by 2,500 people. Its name, which translates as the "Jan's Valley" in Polish, came from the Polish king Jan Kazimierz, who reportedly hunted in the Volhynian forests, and after hunting — rested on the shore of the Horyń (Horyn) River. The town was destroyed during World War II by Ukrainian nationalists who murdered most of its Polish population including women and children

The massacre of Uus street was committed by German forces and local collaborators on 30 August 1941 in Tallinn.German forces occupied Tallinn on 28 August 1941 after the Soviet evacuation of Tallinn. The German occupation forces included a local Omakaitse militia. Einsatzgruppe Acommanded by Franz Walter Stahlecker closely followed the German front units, actively recruiting local nationalists and antisemitic groups to instigate pogroms against the local Jewish population.

The Huta Pieniacka massacre was a massacre of the Polish inhabitants of the village Huta Pieniacka, located in modern-day Ukraine, which took place on February 28, 1944. Estimates of the number of victims range from 500, to 1,200. Polish and Ukrainian historians disagree over the responsibility for the Huta Pienacka massacre. According to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, the action was committed by the 14th subunit of the '1st Ukrainian' Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS. Polish witnesses testified that the orders were given by German officers. According to Ukrainian sources, it was committed by the German police battalions. According to witness accounts and scholarly publications, SS Galizien were accompanied by a paramilitary unit of Ukrainian nationalists under Włodzimierz (Vladimir) Czerniawski's command, including members of the UPA and inhabitants of local villages who intended to seize property found in the households of the murdered.

I’m not going ahead because this post is already too long but I’d really like to ask tumblr user @tikkunolamorgtfo if they think that ALL THE PEOPLE WHO DIED AS A RESULT OF WWII HAPPENING IN THE AFOREMENTIONED INSTANCES WOULD HAVE SIGNED FOR IT IN EXCHANGE FOR HAVING ALL THE JEWISH POPULATION REMOVED.

LIKE.

ARE YOU *SERIOUSLY* IMPLYING THAT ALL OF THE ABOVE WAS A THING EUROPEAN CIVILIANS FROM OCCUPIED NATIONS WERE OKAY WITH BECAUSE IN EXCHANGE THEY COULD SEND JEWISH PEOPLE TO DEATH???? BECAUSE THAT’S LIKE, FUCKING DISGUSTING, AND YOU’RE HONESTLY OVERREACHING LIKE NOTHING ELSE HERE. but nah, sure thing, everyone was so antisemite they totally would have died as well because hey, at least the category we hate more than we love ourselves gets to die, right?

you fucking asshole, of course in an occupied country people will collaborate with the forces occupying it in order to survive and to not get killed especially if you have a family, but assuming that we all accepted it and actually wanted it to happen is disgusting, not true, a slap in the face of everyone who died fighting the nazis and it can only come from someone who has no fucking clue of the vast consequences wwii had on everyone in this fucking thrice-darned continent. 

also, y’all demeaning the polish deaths in auschwitz/during their occupation in WWII is fucking insulting af because sorry but:

first you say the polish weren’t doing enough to fight against the nazis (even i they also were specifically targeted but y’all keep on ignoring that)

then you ignore that most polish people who died in concentration camps (YES IN AUSCHWITZ AND BIRKENAU TOO YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES) WERE POLITICAL FUCKING PRISONERS

POLITICAL PRISONERS

WHICH MEANS THEY WERE EITHER COMMUNIST OR SOCIALIST OR ANTI-NAZI OR ONE OR MORE OF THEM

WHICH MEANS *THEY DIED BECAUSE THEY WERE ANTI-NAZI* 

WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANTED POLISH PEOPLE TO DO

AND YOU *DARE* SPITTING ON THOSE DEATHS SAYING THAT IT WAS A HANDFUL????

let me c/p it for you:

The number of Polish dead are estimated to number between 5.6 and 5.8 million according to the Institute of National Remembrance(2009). Documentation remains fragmentary, but today scholars of independent Poland believe that 1.8 to 1.9 million Polish civilians (non-Jews) and 3 million jews were victims of German Occupation policies and the war for a total of just under 5 million dead.

FIVE/FIVE-AND A HALF MILLION PEOPLE.

AND YOU CALL IT FUCKING HANDFUL?

NO ONE, LIKE LITERALLY NO ONE TRIED TO SAY THE JEWISH WEREN’T THE MAIN VICTIMS/TARGETS OF THE HOLOCAUST/WWII.

BUT YOU ARE SAYING THE ABOVE DOESN’T MATTER AND YOU’RE PROCEEDING TO INSULT THE MEMORY OF EVERYONE WHO FUCKING DIED THANKS TO THE NAZIS IN WWII and I haven’t even touched the russian war crimes but nvm that. honestly? HONESTLY?

AND I AM THE HISTORICAL REVISIONIST THAT YOUR FUCKING FRIENDS WON’T EVEN REBLOG FROM DIRECTLY AND BLOCK BEFORE SHE CAN DEFEND HERSELF BECAUSE DEEP DOWN THEY KNOW THEY’RE SPROUTING BULLSHIT?

HAHAHAHAHAHA.jpeg.

like. NO ONE like NO ONE IS EVER DENYING IT and fyi you’re talking to someone who has more than once defended the existence of israel in front of people who say it should be obliterated exactly because I think its *existence* is the least we owe jewish people for the european history of antisemitism that we have on our shoulders, and if you want the receipts I even did it on this hellsite once, HERE if you want to see how fucking antisemite I am.

but you and your friends are purposefully downplaying about everything that’s not what you want, and on top of that you are excluding from your holocaust victim list:

THIS IS A FUCKING OFFICIAL-ISH LIST OF HOLOCAUST VICTIMS.

all these categories were targeted under the holocaust.

that’s historical facts.

you cannot go and say that someone stating the facts is doing revisionism when the only people doing any such thing are you and your fucking friends.

ALSO, since y’all are absolutely denying the existence of the pacific front, I will remind you kindly a few things:

unit 731 existed;

the japanese made twice the victims compared to the nazist;

japanese war crimes have zero to envy the nazi war crimes tbqh;

and since y’all are so fond of doing math to prove that the polish were shitty and that they were, like, WORSE THAN ANY OTHER OCCUPIED NATION (spoilers: lmao) and to demean the fact that even with that they still have more than a quarter of the names in the just among the nations (ps: in krakow’s history of wwii museum [or the schindler factory now I don’t recall] there are two computers with a huge af database of names. on the left you have the people who helped the jewish people somehow, on the right you have the collaborationists and you can read their life story. SOUNDS TO ME LIKE THEY ARE AWARE SOME OF THEM WERE ASSHOLES), and since y’all are a bunch of hypocrites who use real life tragedies to make a fandom point and insult idek how many people in the meantime and are also a number of things I’ll say at the end, let me do some basic math for you and I’ll also show you that reading the war in black and white is lost effort:

see that chart above?

SEE THE NUMBERS?

okay then.

jewish people: six million.

roma people: between 130k and 5k.

serbians: between 300k people and 600k people. THEY EVEN CRANK THAT TOP FIVE. WOW, AMRITE?

now. let’s take the lowest one and say that the serbians killed were 300k people.

THE NANKING MASSACRE ONLY - THAT ONE ONLY - HAD A DEATH TOLL OF 300K PEOPLE.

which means that the japanese killed in one single occasion/war crime/however you call it as many serbians as the nazis did in the course of the entire fucking war, or half the number if you take the 600k figure. but wait a moment, who, during the whole nanking affair, saved 250k people?

A FUCKING GERMAN BUSINESSMAN NAMED JOHN RABE WHO WAS ACTUALLY IN THE NAZI PARTY AND STILL SAVED THAT MANY PEOPLE TO THE POINT THAT WHEN AFTER THE WAR HE FELL INTO DISGRACE AND HE COULDN’T EAT, PEOPLE FROM NANKING SENT HIM FOOD AND RALLIED UP MONEY FOR HIM AND GUESS WHAT AFTER HE DIED HE WAS EVENTUALLY BURIED THERE RATHER THAN IN GERMANY.

like.

as I said in my first op which of course you didn’t fucking bother to link, WWII and the holocaust and the asian genocide AND everything that made it up including the pacific front that y’all just don’t really want to acknowledge, is the most fucking mucked up ethical situation in existence because again, not counting the targeted categories of the mass genocide(s) and even with that we can discuss because as we said some polish people were collaborators, the russians persecuted jewish people themselves and so on, EVERYONE ON EVERY SIDE COMMITTED ETHICAL ATROCITIES AND WHILE OF COURSE THE ALLIES EVENTUALLY WERE IN THE RIGHT POSITION THEY CERTAINLY DIDN’T SHY FROM DOING EXTREMELY SHITTY THINGS AND I’M SAYING BRITISH, AMERICANS, RUSSIANS AND EVERYONE INVOLVED AND THE WESTERN BETRAYAL ISN’T EVEN HALF OF IT. and wwii is world war two because it involved the entire fucking planet, so trying to tell people that *TWO* CATEGORIES OWN IT AND NO ONE ELSE CAN TALK ABOUT IT IS A) DEMEANING EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED DURING IT, B) FACTUALLY INCORRECT.

ALSO, y’all are still glossing over the fact that - NOT EVEN COUNTING THE POLITICAL PRISONERS DISCOURSE because I know that getting you to agree that communists, socialist and prisoners of war could be a targeted category is wasting time - SPECIFIC TARGETED VICTIMS OF THE ****HOLOCAUST**** WERE:

disabled people because they were disabled (and most of those either were killed straight or were used for medical experiments and none of those survived) so thanks for being ableist fucks and forgetting 270k people;

gay people/queer people because they were fucking gay/queer and guess what MOST OF THE SURVIVED ONES GOT ARRESTED LATER BECAUSE BEING GAY WAS STILL A CRIME ANYWAY so hey thanks for forgetting those 15k people as well, I’m sure you love the smell of homophobia in the morning;

polish + serbians + slavic people FOR BEING SLAVIC and that chart isn’t counting the hungarians/czechs as well so like if we take it with the highest value we can say you’re forgetting four million people tops and HERE in europe it’d be considered as pretty damn racist because yes you can be racist against slavic people;

the poor jehova’s witnesses obviously deserved to die there because they like to press your intercom button to tell you about our lord and savior jesus christ I guess, but nvm it was enough of them they had their purple little triangle in auschwitz, the place where PEOPLE DIDN’T DIE;

we’re obviously not gonna touch the poor spanish revolutionaries who were from a place with a huuuuuuhhhhh fascist dictatorship? ah well, 7k is really not that much, right?

idk what you want to do with the data about russians pows/civilians which if we take the highest count as in 4.5 + 3.3 makes for a whopping 7,8 million people that makes a little more than 1/4 of the total 20 million ussr casualties on a total of 80 million total which means that one fucking fourth of ALL wwii casualties were russians, but hey, that’s math for you.

the entire point is that YOU CANNOT RECLAIM OWNERSHIP OF A HISTORICAL EVEN WHERE THAT MANY PEOPLE DIED AND THINGS WERE ETHICALLY MUCKED ON BOTH SIDES AND SIMPLIFYING THINGS IS NOT A THING YOU CAN OR SHOULD DO OUT OF INTELLECTUAL HONESTY and like... first y’all say wwii and the holocaust are one thing, then that they’re separate, THEN YOUR FUCKING PAL GAMORALIVES HAS THE GALL TO SAY THAT SHIT ABOUT AUSCHWITZ AND BIRKENAU WHICH IS LITERALLY THE FIRST THING YOU LEARN WHEN YOU OPEN A FUCKING BOOK ABOUT AUSCHWITZ AND YOU DON’T EVEN CALL HER OUT ON *THAT* BULLSHIT, BUT THEN YOU GO AROUND SAYING THAT WE’RE REVISIONISTS???

BECAUSE WE SAID THE FACTUAL TRUTH IE THAT A BUNCH OF DIFFERENT CATEGORIES DIED BECAUSE OF NAZI CRIMES?

like, especially if you’re american and your grandfather didn’t risk losing a limb or getting ptsd in this damned war: don’t. and tbh if you’re american and willingly ignore the pacific front when the usa basically shouldered most of that side of the war by themselves out of all the allied coalition idek what you learn in school but I’m fucking worried about your educational system.

but sure go around saying that that I’m an *antisemite* just because I told you the actual historical facts while you demean around, idk, 70 million people deaths with your arguments contradicting themselves and @gamoralives goes around sprouting factual bullshit about how auschwitz works (because excuse me that’s factual bullshit period) and y’all do it after having blocked me preventively (okay, the tumblr user I tagged hasn’t yet but I’m sure it’s a short time coming) and haven’t engaged with me directly once because I have an inkling that having my original OPs on their blog would have made them look like the assholes they are. totes makes sense. next time I run into my former ***self-declared fascist*** classmates who called me a jew-abiding commie when I was nine I’ll tell them that according to you I agree with them. jfc.

and fyi, I never, never, NEVER in my entire life read anything by a jewish wwii survivor or a jewish wwii historian or anyone jewish discussing wwii/writing about wwii/making movies about wwii where the message was your message. the message usually was ‘we were the main targeted party but other people were with us as well and we can only hope it never happens again if everyone knows about it and talks about it’, and I can assure you I read wwii fiction, nonfiction and such on made by people of every damned background including memorials of camps survivors.

I mean, you ever read this is a man?

written by italian jewish chemist-then-writer primo levi who survived auschwitz and later killed himself out of survivor’s guilt?

I mean, if I were you I’d consider reading this shit and then avoiding saying things that go directly against what actual auschwitz survivors had to say about the entire thing while automatically having a greater understanding of how human nature works than any of us in this discussion, but what have you, you have the infused truth given to you and no one else around here has and you’re all, constantly, treating world war two as if it happened in a social context that’s, guess what, the usa’s.

it. was. not. deal with it and for the love of fucking everything at least if you want to call me an antisemite do it to my fucking face and not vagueblogging about me and only c/p-ing comments and not, like, THE ENTIRE OP.

but hey, we all know that if you knew you were in the right you would let your followers read what I actually said in the first place.

but honestly, honestly, I’m fucking appalled that I had to write all of this crap down and that we’re fucking comparing AUSCHWITZ CAMPS BECAUSE Y’ALL WANT TO MAKE A POINT ABOUT A DUMBASS *FICTIONAL FANFIC THAT WASN’T EVEN WRITTEN YET* AND YOU’RE DOING THIS OVER SHIP FANDOM DRAMA.

I mean, it seems to me that discussing this shit over fucking fandom drama is tasteless and honestly insulting af but whatever, you have the incensed truth of it.

please come at me and tell me how wrong I am.

to my face, thank you. btw: it’s rich of you to assume that poland in wwii was the template for how every other country behaved especially bc poland has a specific history that’s not shared by most other european countries, but reading your posts one starts thinking that according to you most of wwii got fought in poland while everyone else was chilling back and sending targeted categories to concentration camps while sipping a few margaritas and then all of a sudden the americans decided to drop the h bomb on the japanese BECAUSE THEY FELT LIKE IT (I mean you didn’t say that but knowing how tumblr talks about wwii I have a feeling it’s where it’s headed) and then it was all over but let me tell you, it’s so wrong and simplicistic and misinformed and misleading that I don’t think the level of a-historicism in all of your posts - and your friends’s which I haven’t shared because otherwise I’d have been here until tomorrow - is so mind-boggling it’s not quantifiable.

cheers. ps: technically I could report you for slandering me because that’s just about what you did. think about that. and no, you couldn’t report me for the contrary because differently from you I never said anything that wasn’t true or sourced and most of all I never once said jewish people weren’t the most targeted group.

have fun, I guess, if you read this far.

ah, btw, just because you’re demeaning consequences of wwii on civilians: my grandmother didn’t fight in it and wasn’t part of any targeted category, but they were starving so much during the war (and they were in the american side of italy good for them) that for the following sixty years up until she died she wouldn’t waste a drop of food, she wouldn’t spend a cent that wasn’t absolutely necessary and wouldn’t go to the doctor’s because IT WASN’T AS BAD AS THE WAR and every time anyone told her to take a rest she’d say that WE WEREN’T IN THE WAR SO WE COULDN’T UNDERSTAND and it ended with all of her kids having... issues that more or less go back to that and her approach on life made sure that she spent her old age suffering for shit she could have helped but wouldn’t because THE WAR and she died after one year of real fucking bad conditions BECAUSE SHE ENDED UP IN THOSE CONDITIONS BECAUSE OF HER ISSUES THAT WENT BACK TO FUCKING WWII and if it was like that for her try imagine people who fought in it or survived it or their descendants and come tell me to my face again that no one else suffered because of the fucking second world war.

sincerely, go fuck yourself. all of you. and I hope you feel half-ashamed that you went as far as this but I have a feeling y’all are so self-centered you wouldn’t get it.

ps: I’m done with this discourse from this point on but like if y’all think I’m letting you shit talk me behind my back you can forget it. :)